25 years of the “urban jungle”
It’s a rare article about Hackney that makes me want to stand up and give the writer a standing ovation, but that’s pretty much what I did when I read this:
Hackney needs activists, not socialist revolutionaries (whom Mr Harrison rightly says adore picking at sores) and theorists, not just the very necessary agencies to make claimants more efficient at their sad profession. It needs busybodies, preferably among the deprived themselves.
It reminded me of something I wrote on my old blog in December last year, when I was making a faltering, contorted case for localism in the face of a indifferent, one-size-fits-all council:
If we can’t get our representatives to listen, we need to get angry on other people’s behalf as well as our own. Because if we don’t, we’re not just going to get rancid public toilets, we’re not going to get respite care for the people who need it, or make sure that members of our community don’t have to sleep rough because the council has failed them. And if we can’t do any of those things, how do we really imagine we’re going to improve life on those gang-ridden estates?
But whilst I was blogging towards the end of 2007, the first writer was making his case in The Times as long ago as 7th December 1983. The journalist was Richard North and you can find his article in the newspaper’s archive. It must have caused a stir because, as many as twelve years later, he mentioned the same article in an Independent piece:
I can remember, even in palmier days, I was excoriated by liberal types for writing in the Times that Hackney’s public spaces were in need of busybodies - middle class or not - who could assert that swiping little Jewish children wasn’t on.
Few would disagree with that; although I suspect that what he originally said would cause a stir, particularly now:
…the burly little goys in Clissold Park need to be cuffed and talked to when they insult the pale Hasidic families who go there on Sundays.
I don’t advocate cuffing anyone, but I certainly advocate putting the fear of damnation up any child who does that. Certainly, these days, it’s relatively rare to see a Orthodox Jewish family walking in that park, even though a large number of them live on or near its north eastern edge. It’s not the only depressing vision conjured up by North’s article. Indeed, a heavy sense of plus ça change weighs you down further with each paragraph. Any Hackney resident of today will soon spot these 25-year-old remarks are at least as relevant now as they were then.
Hackney is a place in which the vast majority of adults dare not speak to children, even when the children are inarticulately crying out to talk. The adult seems not to dare speak to the teenager, even though I have always found the glue sniffers, and even the illicit parker, glad to be spoken to.
And:
…beyond cruel petty officials and being broke, what most assails the hopeless minority in Hackney is our modern society in which only competence makes life manageable.
I am, of course, being highly selective. Some of North’s suggestions, and particularly his solutions, betray a tendency to wish his own pet ideas on other people’s difficulties. This one’s a gem:
The unemployed… need to boycott the canned drinks makers and the pubs and start brewing their own wine.
Home brewed wine? He clearly hasn’t tasted the stuff, even if it is a cut above Carlsberg Special Brew. Or how about this tour de force?
For many hopeless people… Permissiveness has broken their immediate family. Increasingly mobility has broken their wider world, robbing them of relatives. Planners have broken their communities. Teachers and welfare workers have robbed them of responsibility. The liberal creed has broken their will to self discipline.
So, on the one hand it’s not their fault but, on the other:
I have to accept that Hackney’s misery is in part the fault of its inhabitants, and in part of people like me who won’t do more about chivvying and informing them.
People like him? Yes, the middle class, or rather more gobsmackingly:
What a double pity that those who have always been good at poverty - the drop-out middle class, who go hippy at the drop of a hat - never taught the working class how to do it.
It’s the same old flaw: a middle class person comes to the conclusion that, despite the terrible state society is in, the poor could do more to help themselves and each other; but then can’t accept it could be done without middle-class involvement and - preferably - leadership. All whilst pointing out that (middle class) liberals knackered society in the first place.
It’s hardly any surprise, therefore, that liberals tend dismiss all elements of the argument as bollocks. Take a look over at Dave Hill’s London blog: it’s still going on today. Well-off liberal Dave has got rather froth-flecked by new City Hall Policy Director Anthony Browne in general, and about this Daily Mail article in particular. Fair play. Especially when confronted by this bit of circular logic:
If people don’t learn the difference between right and wrong, it is not just that they become anti-social. They don’t learn the fundamental lesson that there is only one person responsible for what they do — and that is themselves. Nothing is wrong, and nothing is anyone’s fault; it is always someone else’s. Don’t blame me for what I do; it’s society’s fault.
The logic as I read it is:
1) Some people haven’t been taught the difference between right and wrong.
2) They therefore have no idea that they are responsible for their own actions.
3) Even though they don’t know they are responsible for their own actions, it is wrong of them to blame other people. Including those people in society who didn’t teach them the difference between right and wrong.
And the people responsible for this moral vacuum? Yep, middle-class liberals:
This Left-wing moral neutrality comes from the best of intentions — wanting to sympathise with victims and other vulnerable people. If they do something anti-social, it is because anti-social things have been done to them — they are not at fault. And if you can’t judge someone for their actions, there can’t really be a right or wrong thing to do.
As I said earlier: plus ça bloody change. Theorists are theorists, whether they’re socialist or patrician Tory. And as Richard North rightly pointed out, Hackney needs fewer of them - even if he was, to a degree, one himself.
Sadly, in amongst all the moralistic finger pointing, the fact remains that - after 25 years - Hackney residents (and many other) are even more terrified of speaking to children, teenagers or - often - other adults. Which is a shame because, whoever you blame, it’s not government, or theorists, or socialist revolutionaries who have the power to solve the problem - it’s us.
If we dare.
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My dear fellow. I am NEVER “froth-flecked”!
Comment by DaveHill — 2nd August, 2008 @ 7:50 am
Not even when your cappuccino overfloweth?
Comment by Ben — 2nd August, 2008 @ 9:41 am