Has anyone noticed … that what we used to call the working class has shrunk? Not merely because, as surveys tell us, so many now think of themselves as ‘middle class’, but because something called the respectable working class has almost died out. What sociologists used to call the working class does not now usually work at all, but is sustained by the welfare state.
—Simon Heffer1
Mrs Parry is a woman battered by events that were outside her control. I met her in the centre of Ashington, a 27,000-strong community about seventeen miles north of Newcastle. It was the world’s biggest mining village until the local pit closed in 1986, just a year after the defeat of the Miners’ Strike. Thousands were thrown out of work; the community has never recovered.
When I asked Mrs Parry what impact the pit’s closure had on the community, she interrupted me before I had even finished the question. ‘We died!’ she responded with a combination of grief and conviction. ‘Once all the mines closed, all the community had gone. It’s just been a big depression ever since, just struggling to survive, that’s all.’ Both her father and her then-husband were miners. They split up the year he lost his job. ‘We owed not just our livelihoods, but our lives to the pits as well. My dad retired, and then he died. My marriage broke up.’
Before the 1840s, Ashington was a tiny hamlet. It became an effectively purpose-built town when coal was discovered. Irish farm workers fleeing the Potato Famine came to the town to work down the pits, as did farm workers from Norfolk, lead miners from Cumberland and tin miners from Cornwall. Six hundred and sixty-five cottages were built in eleven long rows to house them. As the town thrived, working men’s clubs sprang up alongside schools, post offices, churches and a police station. Coal had brought the community to life.
Take away the heart of a community and it will wilt and begin to die. ‘The community just disintegrated,’ says Mrs Parry. ‘There was just nothing left for nobody. They tried to fetch various works up to the industrial estate, but every one’s just left after two or three years. Loads and loads of men over forty-five never worked again, because they were too old.’
When the jobs disappeared, families began to fall apart. I asked her about the impact on working men’s self-esteem when they were thrown out of their jobs. ‘It was tremendous! There were a lot of divorces after the pit closed. They’d been together for twenty, thirty years. They just split up because the men weren’t useful hanging around the house with nothing to do. Nowhere to go! I mean there was nothing. And we’re losing all our social clubs now because the money wasn’t there, and the older generation that kept it going is dying off.’
I ask her what jobs there are for young people. ‘There’s nothing! There’s nothing! My son’s twenty-four now and he joined the Army because there was nothing. His dream was to be a barman, and he went to the college, and he did silver service and all the training that’s around for barmen. And he got jobs, but then they laid him off: “Oh, we haven’t got enough work, we haven’t got work”.’
Before the Army, the only option for her son was to join the ranks of Britain’s burgeoning hire-and-fire, temporary workforce with its insecure terms and conditions. ‘He tried the factories, but that was no good because a lot of the factories round here—you’re put in by somebody else. Agencies! And it meant that he could be working for two weeks solid, and then not work for six weeks. Just had to wait until he got a phone call.’
She has two daughters. One works in Asda, the other is a teenage girl who is expecting her first child. ‘It wasn’t really a shock,’ she said. ‘I keep trying to think—it’s my first grandson she’s having! But I just can’t get as excited as I was about the girl [her other daughter’s child], and I’ve been wanting a grandson for years, for years …’
She was in no doubt about who was to blame for trashing her community. ‘We’ve just been totally abandoned. Maggie Thatcher put the knife in and they just left us to bleed to death.’
Her voice started to break. ‘Teenagers, I mean young people and teenagers at the time when Tony Blair got in, they were dancing and cheering in the street, and that broke my heart.’ Her eyes were now welling up. ‘Because they were so disillusioned! I mean we all thought—“Oh, he’ll do us the world of good” … No, no. He didn’t do nothing for nobody. I don’t think he did anything even in Durham, where he comes from. So it’s just been one big lie, one repeated lie after another.’
Further down the road I found Robert, a middle-aged man sitting alone on a bench, staring miserably into the distance. ‘I’ve been on long-term sick for years,’ he told me. ‘Jobs are bad up here.’ For thirteen years he worked in an opencast mine until it closed a couple of decades ago. ‘I was on the dole for a long time and, as I say, I come down with long-term sick and I haven’t worked since. Even my son—he’s a joiner and a kitchen-fitter—he got made redundant a year and a half ago. He can’t even get work, and he’s got a trade! They’re offering him jobs like Asda, you know, just really badly paid jobs. He’s got three kids, he can’t afford those jobs. It’s not worth his while there, to take a low-paid job.’
Those I met who had jobs felt lucky, but anxious and insecure. Rachel is a woman in her twenties: her dad was a builder, her grandfather was a miner. ‘It’s hard for jobs around here!’ she said. ‘There’s very little going at the minute. I suppose people work up at Main Street. I know lots of people, my friends, work in Newcastle.’ Many people she knows are out of work. ‘I’m not even saying people who don’t have skills or qualifications. People that do have the qualifications and skills, there’s just no jobs to put them into.’
Rachel works for Northumberland County Council, the biggest employer in the county. Just weeks before I spoke to her, the council had announced that one in seven workers could face the sack. ‘We have been briefed that there’s a chance there’ll be job cuts in our offices, and I suppose the offices we work with as well. So I know that we’re very closely watching what happens with that.’ She fears for the future. ‘I think that because there’s not the jobs at the moment, the fact that they’re definitely planning to cut at least one person from our office and possibly more is a worry.’
I asked her if she had noticed things like drugs and crime in her local community. ‘I would say that over the years it seems to get a little bit worse here,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what that’s to do with, personally. Possibly, possibly, I think that the lack of jobs made people find other ways, I suppose, to spend time doing something or to make money.’
Twenty-four-year-old John Ashburn and nineteen-year-old Anna agreed. I asked if Ashington was a nice place to grow up. ‘No, it’s full of drugs,’ replied John without hesitation. Why did they think drugs were such a problem? ‘Because there’s nowt to do here, so that’s why people just think “Oh, I’ll just take some drugs to get high and that”, because it’s something to do,’ said Anna.
Anna lives by herself and is out of work. ‘I’ve always wanted to work in a hospital, but you’ve got to have loads of skills to work there, and I don’t have those skills, so …’ John does at least have a job as a factory supervisor, but he has to commute to his workplace in Scotland. ‘I drive up every day … Travelling three hours a day each way. And then twelve-hour shifts when you get there … I do my shift then drive back here again. You just have to stay awake constantly—I sleep at the weekend.’
Wandering around Ashington during the day, it was difficult not to notice a number of young mothers. But were they anything like the popular stereotype of the Vicky Pollard-style chav teenage mum? I spoke to nineteen-year-old Emma, out with her ten-month-old child. She had also brought up a four-year-old, from her partner’s previous relationship—‘in case you thought I had him really young!’ Her partner works four nights a week as a milkman in neighbouring Morpeth. Emma was, herself, determined to work as soon as possible. ‘I do plan to go back to work. Definitely. I’d go back now but he’s too young. My ma says that when he’s about eighteen months, she’s going to watch him for us and I’ll go back to work.’ She was particularly keen to get back to work because ‘it’ll be giving me a break’.
It would be wrong of me to portray Ashington as some sort of post-apocalyptic hellhole or as a society in total meltdown. The town centre is studded with shops like Argos, Curry’s, Carphone Warehouse and Gregg’s bakery. There’s a real community spirit in the air. People are warm towards one another—as they were towards me, a stranger asking them intrusive questions. Communities like Ashington were devastated by the whirlwind of de-industrialization unleashed by Thatcherism, but people do their best to adjust and get on with their lives, even in the toughest of circumstances.
Father Ian Jackson has been the local Catholic priest in Ashington since 2002. ‘It’s a very warm, caring kind of community. People really look out for each other,’ he told me. ‘I think it was hit badly with the closure of the mines—there’s very little work for people, so it’s quite deprived in a lot of ways. But the people, I always find, are very, very caring and very generous.’ A number of Filipinos have moved in to the area and, although he says there was hostility towards them to begin with, ‘that’s all died a death’.
But Father Jackson could not help but notice the terrible impact the lack of jobs has had on Ashington’s young. ‘For a lot of the younger people, you feel that most of them want to move on and move out, to get out of the town really, because there’s nothing for them here! The main industry, I would probably say—you’re looking at the big Asda that’s just been built, and the hospital … I think the young people would say: “What is there for me apart from working in a shop?” ’
The resulting despair was a major cause of anti-social behaviour.
I sometimes feel—and I’m not criticizing or knocking young people, I don’t mean this as it sounds—that among the younger generations, because maybe they’ve got no prospects, there’s a ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude. Things like litter, and things like that. I see them walking past here, there’s bins attached to the lamp posts, but they just throw everything over the wall. And if you say anything, you get a lot of aggression straight away.
A nearby pub that was recently closed because of drugs was a particular source of anti-social behaviour. ‘I remember after midnight Mass at Christmas, it was Christmas morning—about half past five—and I was out here, sweeping up the glass and everything before people came to Mass in the morning. Bottles, just smashed—thrown all over the wall, litter everywhere.’
It’s not just Britain’s former pit villages that have been devastated by the collapse of industry. The Longbridge plant in Birmingham was once the biggest industrial complex in the world. It sustained the local community throughout the twentieth century. But when carmakers MG Rover collapsed in 2005, more than 6,000 workers were thrown on to the dole queue. Although Chinese automobile company Nanjing bought up the remaining assets, fewer than 200 people have jobs.
The collapse of Rover has had a similar impact on the local community as the closure of the mines had on Ashington. At Longbridge (which, according to the ChavTowns website, is home to ‘Council Housed Antisocial Vermin … More chavs hang round here than there are whore chavettes hanging at the dole line’), there are a number of boarded-up houses just next to the train station. Several middle-aged men were out and about on a Wednesday mid-afternoon. In neighbouring Northfield, where many of the Longbridge workers lived (and described by ChavTowns as full of ‘the arse drippings of society’ and ‘toothless tattoed chav mums’), the rather grand-looking Old Mill pub has been abandoned, its windows smashed and its walls covered in graffiti. On the ground surrounding it were discarded scratch cards.
Don is the manager of the Greenlands Select Social Club in Longbridge. He describes a community with its heart ripped out. ‘An awful lot of people went to the wall when the plant closed,’ he says. The Social Club itself took quite a hit. ‘The takings went down about £3,000 a week. Because they used to come in at lunchtime as well as the evenings … You don’t see as many people out. I mean, you used to get sixty to a hundred in the club in the evening. You don’t get twenty now.’
Two women in the newsagents vividly described to me what had happened to the local community. ‘The young men—you see them at the school. When we had our children, we never saw a man about, you know. But they’re at the school picking the kids up,’ says one. ‘It’s because a lot of the women, the wives, can get cleaning jobs and that, so the men are picking up the kids, looking after the kids,’ adds the other. ‘I don’t live round this area, and I was away for seventeen years. But when I came back to work here, I couldn’t believe the difference in the area from them years. There seems such a lot of young unemployed and young girls with babies.’
Gaynor works at the nearby pharmacy. Her husband was one of the thousands of Longbridge workers who lost their jobs back in 2005. I asked her how she’d felt when he received his redundancy notice.
Just the shock, really, because they had said that it wasn’t closing, and then my other half was one of the ones that got kept on. But he never got called back to work, and apparently on the Friday his manager was just about to ring all the staff up, and Land Rover pulled out of the contract that they’d got. And then we just got up on Saturday morning, and the postman came, and your redundancy notice was on your mat … When it happened, all the lads were over on Cofton Park, and they just got told: ‘Rover’s shut, go and get your belongings’—and finished. And that was it: it was just fast. There wasn’t even any ‘you’ve got two weeks’, or ‘you’ve got a month’; it was just: ‘We’re shut now, get your stuff, get out, lock the gates.’
To begin with, her feeling was ‘How am I going to cope?’ Five years on, her husband is still out of work.
There’s just nothing about. It’s desolate round here: nothing at all … I increased my hours slightly, but the worst thing is, because I only do part-time, when he went to the Job Centre, he got told: ‘Tell your wife to pack in her job, because you’re going to be better off.’ Because I refused and increased my hours, and because my money went up that little bit, my tax credits come down to go with it, and he’s not entitled to any dole money because of the income that he earned from Rover—so he’s never got a penny of dole money—never got a penny. We never got one thing. Nothing.
They were told of a funded scheme to help former Rover workers retrain. ‘He went in, and because he likes computers, he wanted to do a Microsoft course and was told, “No, it’s too expensive”. And yet people were doing the gas-fitting course, which cost over £2,000, and the electrical fitting course, which cost over £2,000. His cost £3,000 and he was told “no”.’ Being without work for so long has had a devastating impact on his self-esteem. ‘It’s horrible. Because he writes off and half the places don’t bother coming back to you, but we’ll phone and we’ll arrange interviews; he’ll phone places up and say: “Oh, I’ll come and work for you for a week for free, if you think it’s alright then take me on.” And it just feels like you’re knocking your head against brick walls.’
For some of those who lost their jobs, the desperation has been too much. ‘We’ve lost a few friends, who’ve committed suicide. Ex-Rover workers. All this crap that they’ve got the help and whatever. It’s a load of rubbish. A load of rubbish! They’ve had nothing! … All this they’re saying—there’s all this money in holding. It’s not been paid out to them at all.’ Payouts of between £5,000 and £6,000 were promised to sacked workers from the Employee Trust Fund but, as legal wrangles continue, workers have not been paid a penny. According to Gemma Cartwright, the chair of the Rover Community Action Trust: ‘There have been house repossessions and family break-ups over this.’2
One of Gaynor’s great fears is for the children growing up in the community, ‘because there’s nothing round here at the moment. I mean, you’ve got all the buildings going on, but they’re so slow—I’d have thought they’d be a lot quicker going up. You’ve just got empty land everywhere.’
It’s true that there are cranes and men at work in the surrounding areas. Attached to a fence is a sign: ‘Longbridge West: Sustainable Community, 10,000 new jobs, new homes, local amenities, public open spaces, design and build opportunities’. Another sign is a bit more vague: ‘Up to 10,000 jobs’, it claims.
But, in the five years since the Longbridge closure, there has been desperately little work for the men. Many of those lucky enough to find a job have had to accept lower-paid, service sector work. I talked to Mary Lynch who has worked at a local supermarket for eight years. ‘We’ve had a few of the Longbridge workers come and work there and have a career change, so it’s been nice getting to know those people and meeting them and that.’ It has meant a substantial hit to their pay packet. ‘They were disappointed about the level of pay,’ she said. ‘Obviously the pay wasn’t as good as it was at Longbridge, so they’ve found that a bit disappointing. Because they were on good pay in Longbridge, and supermarket workers don’t get the same level of pay. But in the main, they were grateful to have a job.’
There are a lot of similar themes in Ashington and Longbridge. There is the same sense of despair and pessimism about the future. There are the same stories about the shattering effects locally of the collapse of industrial Britain, and its role in issues as disparate as relationship breakdown, anti-social behaviour, drugs and teenage pregnancy. In both communities there is a lack of good, secure jobs and plenty of people out of work through no fault of their own. It would clearly be absurd to blame the local people for the almost inevitable problems caused by the crippling events that have befallen their communities.
But tell that to the politicians. At the centre of the Conservative Party’s election campaign in 2010 was the idea of ‘Broken Britain’: the belief that, as Tory leader David Cameron phrased it, Britain had fallen into a ‘social recession’. When two young boys from disturbed backgrounds were indefinitely detained for torturing two younger victims in another mining village, Edlington, Cameron seized on the case as evidence. The case could not be dismissed as an ‘isolated incident of evil,’ he argued. A whole range of issues were identified as part of the Tory narrative, such as ‘family breakdown, welfare dependency, failing schools, crime, and the problems that we see in too many of our communities’.
Cameron did not identify the collapse of industry as having any role in these kinds of social problems. ‘Why is our society broken?’ he asked rhetorically. His own answer to this would have surprised the people of Ashington and Longbridge: ‘Because government got too big, did too much and undermined responsibility.’ That the economies of communities like Ashington and Longbridge, right across the country, have been obliterated is apparently irrelevant. The chilly winds of the free market are ignored; it is the overbearing state that has taken away people’s sense of responsibility. And now, they are told, people in these communities must start to take individual responsibility for what has happened to them.
The social problems that undoubtedly affect many working-class communities have come to define the ‘chav’ caricature. Teenagers pushing strollers, yobs, feckless adults: this is what chavs are for many people. The media, popular entertainment and the political establishment have gone out of their way to convince us that these are moral issues, an indiscipline that needs to be rectified. In blaming the victims, the real reasons behind social problems like drugs, crime and anti-social behaviour have been intentionally obscured. Symptoms have been confused with causes. The communities that suffer most are the biggest victims of the class war unleashed by Thatcherism.
When commentators talk in dehumanizing terms about the ‘underclass’, they are lumping together those sections of the working class that took the brunt of the wrenching social and economic changes of the last three decades. After all, the working class has never been homogeneous. There have always been different groups within it, not all of whom have sat comfortably together: the skilled and the unskilled, those who once lived in slums and those in quality housing, the unemployed and the employed; the poor and the relatively prosperous, the Northern and the Southern, the English, the Welsh and the Scottish. But there’s no denying that many of the modern divisions within working-class Britain were forged by the neoliberal economic project of the last thirty years.
Ashington and Longbridge are far from being exceptional. ‘The old industrial heartlands have never recovered,’ says the Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott. ‘One way of looking at it, which is entirely spurious, is to look at claimant-count unemployment, which has come down to an extent. But once you unpack that, you find that a lot of those jobs have tended to be part-time, in distribution, and haven’t been as well paid as the jobs that were lost.’ Claimant count only measures the numbers receiving Jobseeker’s Allowance. But that is just a part of the total. According to the government’s Labour Force Survey, less than half of those lacking but wanting a job were officially classed as unemployed even before the recession hit.
Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is among those on the right who have denounced New Labour for ‘accepting as a fact of life the eight million who are economically inactive’, out of a total of thirty-eight million people of working age. The figure actually includes millions who are ‘economically inactive’ for good reasons, including students, carers and some retired people. Yet Cameron was right to point out that there are large numbers of people without jobs who don’t show up in the official unemployment statistics. But, again, he failed to identify the real culprit: the industrial collapse that was first unleashed by Thatcherism. ‘If you go to beyond the M4 corridor then labour market participation will be 80 per cent,’ says Larry Elliott. ‘If you go to parts of the old industrial heartlands it’s 55 per cent, or 60 per cent at most. So you’ve got far fewer people working in those areas, and the jobs they’re working in tend to be much more insecure, much less highly paid.’
Soon after David Cameron came to power in 2010, he started selling the idea that people are out of work due to their personal inadequacies: a sentiment which is, of course, one of the pillars of the chav caricature. The prime minister pledged a crackdown on welfare ‘fraud and error’, declaring that it cost the taxpayer £5.2 billion. But he had cunningly combined the cost of fraud committed by welfare recipients (just £1 billion a year) with that of errors on the part of officials (amounting to the far more considerable sum of £4.2 billion a year). In doing so, he ensured that a much bigger headline figure associated with benefit fraud was lodged in the popular imagination.
Of course, protesting that benefit fraud is exaggerated does not mean denying its occurrence. But it is often need, rather than dishonesty, that drives it.
For example, a compelling study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that many claimants taking undeclared cash-in-hand jobs did so to pay for food or heating, or pay back debt. ‘People in deprived areas are resorting to informal work because they are trying to support, feed and clothe their families,’ said report author Aaron Barbour. ‘They are hard-working, ordinary people trying to survive day by day.’3 Indeed, the report revealed widespread fear among unemployed private tenants that if they worked formally they would lose their housing benefit, plunging them yet further into poverty. Above all, those interviewed expressed a strong desire to get formal paid work and leave benefits, or ‘go legit’, as soon as possible.
Given the poverty levels at which many benefits are set, it’s hardly surprising that some ‘play the system’. Jobseeker’s Allowance, for example, ranks among the lowest of any unemployment benefits in Western Europe. If, as in other European countries, it had been linked with earnings since 1979, people without work would receive £110 per week. Because it is pegged to inflation, it was worth just £65.45 a week in 2010. For those unable to find secure employment, life on benefits is a constant struggle to stay afloat. Can we be surprised if a minority of claimants—particularly those with children—top up the meagre amount they receive from the state with a few hours of paid work on the side?
The ‘welfare scrounger’ label is not just attached to those claiming benefits while taking on informal work. People claiming incapacity benefits have long been in the firing line of newspaper pundits and politicians of all major parties, who suspected that hundreds of thousands of people were skiving off despite being able-bodied. The numbers of such incapacity benefit claimants explains, in large part, the disparity between the official unemployment statistics and the economic activity levels that Larry Elliott refers to.
Looking at the figures, the critics appear to have a point. Go back to 1963 and there were less than half a million claiming incapacity benefit. Yet by 2009 the figure was around 2.6 million, far higher than the number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance even in the midst of recession. It is self-evident that society has become considerably healthier in those forty-six years, thanks to advances in medical sciences and improvements in diet and lifestyle. The number of men with long-standing illnesses that limit their capabilities has decreased significantly, from 17.4 per cent to 15.5 per cent.4 So how can we possibly explain the jump in incapacity benefit claimants?
The first point is that the number of claimants shot up under the Tory governments of 1979 to 1997. A particularly steep increase took place in the aftermath of the early 1990s recession, adding around 800,000 claimants by the time Prime Minister John Major was voted out of office. It is now generally accepted that incapacity benefit was used to cloak the unemployment figures. ‘Over the years IB was, to some degree, used as a way of slightly getting out of the unemployment figures and not being overly honest,’ admitted Conservative Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan-Smith. ‘Conservatives and Labour have signed up to that.’5
Incapacity benefit recipients are indeed concentrated in the old, industrial areas of the North, Scotland and Wales. In areas of Southern England outside of the capital, on the other hand, the levels are much lower. In a groundbreaking study based on hundreds of interviews, labour market experts Dr Christina Beatty and Professor Steve Fothergill put two contradictory explanations to the test: that claimants did have genuine health problems, and that the concentration of claimants in old industrial areas showed that the main underlying cause was a lack of work. ‘The long economic recovery from the mid 1990s onward helped plug the gap, but never completely,’ they argued. ‘In these circumstances there have never been quite enough jobs—especially reasonably well-paid jobs—to go around. With a continuing imbalance in the local labour market, with the local demand for labour still running behind the potential local labour supply, it was therefore inevitable that some individuals would be squeezed out.’
To begin with, claimants were former industrial workers who had been thrown out of work, like the ex-miner I spoke to in Ashington. Many did have health problems because of their line of work, and could use them to claim incapacity benefits that paid more than unemployment benefits. After all, the collapse of industry wiped out local jobs in these areas, and this was before low-paid service sector and public services jobs started to fill the vacuum to some degree. In the 1990s, between a third and a half of incapacity benefit claimants had been made redundant from their last job. But, as time has passed, some of these have found another job after a while; or they have passed on to the state pension.
So who are today’s incapacity benefit claimants? Beatty and Fothergill discovered that they were ‘typically the poorly qualified, low-skill manual worker in poor health, whose alternative would at best be unrewarding work or close to the national minimum wage.’ That means the type of person claiming incapacity benefit is different than it was even a decade ago, even though the headline figure has remained fairly constant. The researchers looked at the example of Barrow-in-Furness in North West England: a former shipbuilding town hit by industrial collapse. Incapacity benefit claimants in the 1990s were largely laid-off skilled shipyard workers, but now they were low-skill, poorly qualified workers who had dropped out of their last job because of ill-health, and were ‘now disenchanted with the idea of ever returning to work’.
In an area with a ‘surplus of labour’, there was less of an incentive for employers to keep on staff with poor health by, for example, giving them lesser duties. Once they had been made redundant, workers with poor health were at a disadvantage because employers could always hire healthier people. Overwhelmingly, people on incapacity benefit lack any qualifications whatsoever. We know that these days there are far fewer manual job opportunities for these sorts of workers, and if they are physically impaired in some way, there are even less. The researchers’ conclusion was that ‘the UK’s very high incapacity claimant numbers are an issue of jobs and of health.’6
Glasgow is a particularly striking example of how the de-industrialization of Britain has left continuing—but disguised—mass unemployment in its wake. The city houses more incapacity benefit claimants than any other local authority. The number of people claiming some form of disability benefits peaked in 1995 at one in five of the working population, or almost three times the UK level. A group of Glasgow University and Glasgow City Council experts looked at how the number of recipients increased during the 1980s, and concluded: ‘The main reason for the huge growth in sickness benefit claims was the city’s rapid de-industrialization.’ The number of manufacturing jobs in 1991 had collapsed to just a third of the 1971 figure. Staggeringly, Glasgow rose from 208th to tenth place among local authorities for economic inactivity levels in the decade following 1981.
The situation improved in the noughties as the number of disability benefit claimants dropped from three times to double the national rate. The key finding was that this decline was, above all, down to a ‘strengthening labour market’. No wonder the study dismissed government claims that: ‘The problem is not a lack of jobs.’7 The fact that a considerable number of incapacity benefit claimants are those without work in post-industrial Britain does not mean we should disregard the health issues involved. As both New Labour and, following the 2010 general election, the Conservative-led government began clamping down on claimants even as the recession stripped jobs out of the economy, the Citizens Advice Bureau exposed the scandal of clearly unwell people having their benefits taken away. Over 20,000 benefit claimants got in touch with them after a new, stringent test found them ‘able to work’. Terminally ill patients, people with advanced forms of Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis, suffering from mental illness or awaiting open heart surgery, were registered as capable of returning to work. One woman had her benefits cut after she missed an assessment appointment—because she was in hospital having chemotherapy for stomach cancer.8
Of course there are people who play the system and falsely claim benefits. Right-wing tabloids relish hunting down the most outrageous examples of such fraud. But this small minority is in no way representative of the majority of people out of work. The latest figures available (for 2006/07) reveal that just 6,756 people were successfully prosecuted for benefit fraud. Professor Robert MacDonald has spent years investigating the impact of wrenching economic changes on working-class communities, along with research partner Jane Marsh. I asked him if he thought there was such a thing as an underclass. ‘Short answer—no! … Better, more accurate and truthful terms and theories than “the underclass” can and should be used to describe the situations of those typically called this. “Processes of economic marginalization” is the best we came up with instead.’ MacDonald is convinced that the notion of ‘welfare dependency’ is
an overblown issue … Or it is a big problem, in the sense that this is a very powerful and popular idea that obscures the fuller story. No doubt there are households that have ‘given up’ and resigned themselves to and found ways to get by with a life on benefits. I haven’t, however, been able to locate any such households yet, in all the tramping round the estates we’ve done over the past years, despite being told the neighbourhoods we research are awash with such cultures of welfare dependency.
Like other experts in the field, MacDonald links unemployment to a lack of jobs—something that might sound obvious, but in the current political climate is anything but. His research focused on ‘how relatively well-paid, relatively secure, relatively well-skilled working-class jobs have declined in this economic restructuring and been replaced by low-skilled, low-paid and insecure non-manual (and manual) jobs.’ He lives in Teesside, now among the poorest areas in the country. This process was ‘exactly matched in time and explained by this process of de-industrialization’, he says.
What this has meant for poorer working-class people is an insecure working life, ‘made up out of scraps of “poor work” interspersed with time on benefits. This was the reality for those in our studies, across genders and age groups. One doesn’t hear much about this—just about “benefit dependency” and so on.’ A common misconception is that the number of people on benefits is a static figure. In reality, many claimants are moving in and out of poorly paid insecure work. Take unemployed people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, which, having not kept pace with the rise in earnings, is worth just £65.45 a week. According to the Office for National Statistics, for example, since 1999 around half of the men and a third of the women making a new claim last did so less than six months previously. This makes the idea of a benefit-addicted underclass even more of a nonsense: an unemployed person is more likely to have moved in and out of work.
The reality is that there are simply not enough jobs to go around. In late 2010, there were nearly 2.5 million people officially without work—and that doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of people the government wants to drive off incapacity benefits. Yet there were less than half a million vacancies in the entire country, according to the government’s own figures. That did not stop Iain Duncan Smith making an example out of Merthyr, a Welsh town particularly badly hit by de-industrialization and suffering from high levels of unemployment. The local population had become ‘static’, he suggested, and they should get ‘on a bus’ to Cardiff to look for work. His argument was torpedoed when it was revealed that there were nine jobseekers for every job in the Welsh capital.9
From an employer’s perspective, stripping benefits from hundreds of thousands of people living in ‘disguised’ unemployment would be profitable, to say the least. It would mean even more people competing for low-paid jobs, allowing employers to push down wages even further. Unless the number of jobs miraculously increased at the same time, it would mean driving other workers out of employment. Business might prosper, but for benefit claimant and low-paid worker alike, benefits crackdowns risk forcing them further into poverty.
Above all, unemployment is a class issue. It is a fate you are far more likely to face if you are working class than if you are middle class. In May 2009—about a year into the recession—the unemployment rate for people in professional occupations was just 1.3 per cent, and was not much higher for managers and senior officials. But for skilled workers, it was 8.1 per cent; for sales and customer service workers, it was 10.5; and for workers in unskilled, ‘elementary’ occupations, it was 13.7 per cent, or over ten times higher than for professionals.10
Government cuts are inevitably going to drive hundreds of thousands more working-class people into the nightmare of unemployment. The old industrial areas were hammered by the recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s: it is they, again, who will suffer the most. As the factories and mines closed, it was the public sector that, in large part, moved to fill the vacuum. As the Conservative-led government’s ideological war on the state gathers pace, rising numbers of unemployed ex-public sector workers will inevitably push demand down, hitting the private sector too. On top of that, significant swathes of the private sector depend on state contracts that are now being ripped up. At the end of 2010, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development estimated that the government’s cuts programme would force 1.6 million people into unemployment—and most job losses would be in the private sector.
You don’t need to be jobless to be poor in modern Britain. Poverty is generally defined as households with less than 60 per cent of the nation’s median income after housing costs are deducted. Less than five million people lived in poverty on the eve of the Thatcher counter-revolution, or less than one in ten of the population. Today, poverty affects 13.5 million people, or more than one in five. If you are a single adult without children, that means living on less than £115 a week after housing costs are deducted. For a couple with two young children, it is less than £279 a week. There are only four EU countries with higher rates of poverty.
Politicians and media commentators argue for work as the route out of poverty, but in low-pay Britain, having a job is no guarantee of living comfortably. The majority of people living in poverty actually have a job. While there are three million families in which no one works living in poverty, there are another 3.5 million working families below the poverty line. Poverty affects huge numbers of people because, like unemployment, it is not a static figure: there is a broader group of people who move in and out of it over the course of their lifetimes.
When New Labour was in office, it introduced reforms that attempted to tackle the scandal of working poverty. But it did so within the framework of neoliberal economics—that is, allowing the market to run amok. A leading union-backed Labour MP, John McDonnell, sums up the government’s approach thus: ‘We will introduce tax credits, and we will redistribute wealth, but we’ll make sure what we’ll do is force you into work where it’s low paid, with the lowest minimum wage you could possibly think of. In that way, you then become the guilty person if you can’t afford to dig yourself out of poverty. There’s a Victorian, patronizing attitude towards working people.’
The minimum wage is a case in point. When it was introduced in 1999—in the teeth of Tory and business opposition—it made a genuine difference to hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers. After all, it was perfectly legal, not so long ago, to pay a worker £1.50 an hour. But the rate was set at the lowest possible level. In 2010, it was just £5.80 an hour if you were aged twenty-two or above. Even worse, it was discriminatory against the young. Workers aged between eighteen and twenty-one were stuck on £4.83, up from £3.57 for the under-eighteens.
Clearly, these are not wages that anyone could live on comfortably. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a salary of £14,400 is the minimum a single person needs for an acceptable standard of living (never mind if you have kids). If you work a thirty-five-hour week, that works out as £7.93 an hour, or over £2 an hour more than the minimum wage. Yet as the recession hit, the already low minimum wage was held back to below-inflation rises.
Tax credits were the second pillar of New Labour’s approach to low pay. Workers on low incomes were given the right to have their pay packet topped up with the Working Tax Credit and, if applicable, the Child Tax Credit. But as a means-tested system, it is bureaucratic and many eligible people do not claim for money they are entitled to. According to Citizens Advice, around £6.2 billion of tax credits go unpaid every year—with up to £10.5 billion of means-tested benefits in total unclaimed. This includes four out of every five low-paid workers without children, who are missing out on tax credits worth at least £38 a week. This ‘benefit evasion’ dwarfs the amount lost through benefit fraud—a fact that is completely absent in the debate around cracking down on so-called welfare scroungers.
Another major flaw with the tax credits system is that it is prone to overpaying people. That might not sound too bad: after all, so what if the state puts a bit too much into the bank accounts of low-paid workers? The problem is that the state catches up and demands the money back. ‘The income goes up and down, and tax credits are annualized so people can have very big lumps of money, and then suddenly they get a letter saying they owe £7,000,’ says Labour’s Clare Short. Fiona Weir, chief executive of single parent charity Gingerbread, says that the fear of debt among the people she represents can be so strong that ‘we come across people who won’t apply for a Working Tax Credit, which could give them a lot more money, because they are so scared of an overpayment and then not being able to pay the debt once they get into it.’
Tax credits are a lifeline for many low-paid workers. But, perversely, they make low pay economically viable and create disincentives for employers to do anything about it. After all, why pay your workers more if the state will top up their wages? As the Guardians’s Larry Elliott puts it, tax credits are ‘essentially the state subsidizing poverty wages’.
‘Of course it’s all about making work pay, even rotten work, low-paid work,’ argues Clare Short, ‘but that was their instrument of redistribution, and it’s totally defective if you’re trying in the long term to build a more equal society, because it props up inequality.’ Inequality did not grow under New Labour as fast as it did under Thatcher: but the huge gap between rich and poor that had opened in the 1980s was not reduced. After thirteen years of New Labour government, Britain remained one of the most unequal societies in the Western world—and tax credits and the minimum wage did not change this. Indeed, two-thirds of all the increase in income in the noughties went into the bank accounts of the top 10 per cent of the population.
One of many snide accusations against the poor is that they ruin themselves by spending their money on frivolous and luxury items. The reality could not be further from the truth. Chris Tapp, debt expert and director of Credit Action, reveals that his organization rarely has to educate low-paid people when it comes to budgeting. ‘People at the bottom end of the income spectrum are better at managing their money day-to-day than people at the top end, because they absolutely need to be,’ he explains. ‘If you’ve got only a very limited amount of money coming in every week, and you’ve got to pay your bills, buy the food and feed the kids off that, then you have to be darn good at managing that.’ Poorer people are much more concerned with spending wisely than wealthy ones are, he says.
We have seen how prejudices about poverty and unemployment converge in the image of the council estate. After all, not for nothing is it often suggested that ‘chav’ is an acronym for ‘Council Housed And Violent’. ‘Play word association with the term “council estate”,’ wrote Lynsey Hanley, who grew up on one in Birmingham, in her groundbreaking book Estates. ‘Estates mean alcoholism, drug addiction, relentless petty stupidity, a kind of stir-craziness induced by chronic poverty and the human mind caged by the rigid bars of class and learned incuriosity.’11
That is not to say that after three decades of social engineering, only one social type lives in council estates. ‘I think it’s quite difficult to generalize about social tenants, or indeed council housing, because there is a big variety,’ says housing charity Shelter’s Mark Thomas.
What you see in one area of the country is not the same as what you see in another area, and I think a lot of the media debate tends to be around quite crude stereotypes of council estates. Someone goes off and they find a photo of a council estate, normally it looks fairly grotty, and people conjure up a mental image in their minds. Actually, partly because of the right-to-buy, often a lot of what people might call ‘council estates’ are quite mixed in terms of tenure, in any case.
In other words, what were once solid council estates may today include homeowners, private renters as well as council tenants. Thomas is keen to emphasize the different groups of people that can be found in council estates.
You’ve got people who are retired, you’ve got people who are disabled, you’ve got people who are absolutely working, and doing their level best to support themselves, you’ve got people living in some very affluent areas, in places that you probably wouldn’t call estates at all. Let’s remember that some council housing is in fact street properties, it doesn’t all consist of the archetypal estate. You’ve got other people who actually are living in not such nice areas. But the public debate is often conducted in quite a crude way.
It is fashionable among Conservative politicians and right-wing commentators to talk of council housing promoting ‘dependency’ among its tenants, but Thomas fiercely rejects this. ‘It’s sometimes suggested that social housing is somehow a cause of deprivation, it’s actually pushing people into poverty and reinforcing dependency. We wouldn’t see it like that. We would see it as a vital safety net that actually provides people with an affordable, stable base from which they can actually go on and prosper, and build up other aspects of their life, without which it’s going to be very, very difficult for them to do so.’
On the face of it, the failure of recent governments to build affordable housing looks inexplicable to the point of madness. The number of houses built in 2010 was the lowest since 1922—with the obvious exception of World War II. Before Thatcher came to power, there were never fewer than 75,000 council dwellings built in any year; in 1999, the number was a disgracefully inadequate eighty-four.
For the last thirty years, the dominant mantra has been that ‘the market knows best’, but the state’s retreat from meeting the nation’s housing needs in favour of market forces has shown how absurd this quasi-religious belief can be. Aside from the millions who are spending years of their lives on waiting lists, the number of people in temporary accommodation soared by a stunning 135 per cent between 2001 and 2008. And the government might not be spending much on social housing, but instead it spends £21 billion a year on housing benefit, much of which ends up subsidizing private landlords.
With the housing crisis worsening year by year, and with accommodation so central to people’s lives, why did a Labour government leave the whole policy to go to rot? I asked Hazel Blears, whose former department when in the Cabinet included responsibility for housing. She accepted that New Labour had failed to build sufficient capacity—but with caveats. ‘I think that there needed to be a housing programme. I’ve never been entirely convinced that it should be a council house building programme. I think we brought into Government quite big prejudices against local authorities across the field of policy. And in some ways, quite rightly. Because some of them were rubbish. And you wouldn’t have trusted them to wash the pots, let alone run a community.’
Blears argues that local authorities did improve, but the fundamental distrust that New Labour had towards them meant they did everything possible to bypass them.
I think what the Labour government did was, in its early days, create a series of parallel tracks almost to get around local authorities—whether that was in further education, or housing, or the NHS Foundation Trusts—all that kind of thing was kind of like, not quite trusting the local authorities. Not in a political way: but actually the capacity to deliver. So we had housing associations, we had Arms Length Management Organizations [semi-independent housing bodies], we had stock transfers—we did anything to get control out of the local authorities …
The union-backed Labour MP John McDonnell contested this reasoning. ‘Local authorities couldn’t “be trusted to wash the pots” because for twenty years they were undermined in terms of the powers that they had and the resources that they had. So who in their right mind would become a councillor when all you were there for was rationing services and saying “no” to everyone?’ He argues that Labour could have returned the powers to local government that Thatcher took away. I fit was felt that the process would take too long, then the government could have channelled its energies into reinvigorating co-operative housing.
Blears suggests another reason: there simply was no one in government with enough interest in housing. ‘There wasn’t a big housing character,’ she says. ‘Maybe our government needed a kind of housing person whose passion it was to do housing. I don’t think that we did, if I think back, in terms of characters.’ Blears herself can measure the effects of New Labour’s neglect of housing in her own Salford constituency. ‘In terms of increasing stock and supply of affordable housing: yes, we should have done a lot, lot more, because it had really quite damaging social effects. I’ve got 16,000 on the waiting list.’
Under the Conservative-led government, this crisis will get more severe. Just months after coming to power, David Cameron called for the scrapping of lifetime council tenancy agreements. Instead, only the most needy would be eligible for five-year or, at most, ten-year agreements. If it was decided that their conditions had improved sufficiently, they could be turfed out of their homes and made to rent privately. Council estates would become nothing more than transit camps for the deprived. A government whose signature policy was building a ‘Big Society’ was unveiling plans that would further undermine the cohesion of working-class communities across the country.
As well as leading to social ‘cleansing’ and unprecedented segregation, some policies will end up throwing people on to the streets. In the first Budget following the 2010 general election, the government announced plans to slash housing benefits. They were right to complain that the amount spent on these benefits had rocketed over the years, but refrained from pointing out that this was because of the evergrowing crisis of affordable social housing. Cutting the level of rent eligible for housing benefits has the effect of reducing the number of properties poorer people can afford to live in, forcing them either to find somewhere cheaper or face homelessness.
Combined with plans to cap benefits to workless families at a maximum of £500 per week, low-income people face eviction from relatively richer areas, forcing them into effective ghettos. According to estimates by London councils, as many as 82,000 households—or a quarter of a million people—were at risk of losing their homes or being forced to move. This would be the biggest population movement in Britain since World War II. ‘I have been in housing for thirty years and I have never seen anything like this in terms of projected population movements,’ said one senior London housing official. ‘London is going to be a bit like Paris, with the poor living on the periphery. In many boroughs in inner London in three or four years there will be no poor people living in the private rented sector … it is like something from the nineteenth century.’12
But it wasn’t just the government’s opponents who saw social cleansing at the heart of these plans. One unnamed Conservative minister compared the policy to the Highland Clearances—the late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century evictions of small farmers from the Scottish Highlands—claiming that it would lead to an exodus of Labour voters from London. Indeed, Shaun Bailey, a former Conservative candidate who was defeated in Hammersmith at the 2010 general election, had argued that the Tories would struggle to win inner-city seats ‘because Labour has filled them with poor people’. Such was the outrage over the government’s all-too-clear agenda that even London’s mayor, the Conservative Boris Johnson, came out publicly to say that he would not accept ‘Kosovo-style social cleansing’ of the capital.13
Taken together, this is a toxic brew. Large numbers of people without secure work; low-paid work that fails to give people a comfortable existence; some of the highest levels of poverty in Western Europe; and millions left without affordable housing. In some of the poorest working-class communities in Britain, each of these crises is felt still more acutely. With all the misery, frustration and hopelessness that accompany them, is it any wonder if other social problems arise?
Imagine being a poor working-class youth in Britain today. Like one in three children, you will have grown up in poverty, lacking many of the things others take for granted: toys, days out, holidays, good food. You spent your childhood in a shabby, overcrowded house or flat, with little if any space to do your own thing. Your parents—or parent—may have done their best, but they have had to deal with the stress of lacking enough money to get by, either working in a monotonous low-paid job or having no job whatsoever.
There are few, if any, decent local jobs for you to look forward to. Indeed, one in four young people are ‘Neets’ at some stage: that is, sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds who are ‘not in education, employment or training’. And, of course, the disappearance of industrial apprenticeships has left few options for many young working-class men. ‘It is well established that industrial restructuring has played a significant part in the restructuring of working-class youth transitions to adulthood,’ says Professor Robert MacDonald. With so little hope for so many young people, how can anyone be surprised at the prevalence of anti-social behaviour in many deprived, working-class communities?
Of course this a problem that can easily be exaggerated. ‘You hear, “Oh, they’re all hoodies”—but they’re not!’ a retired Birmingham patternmaker told me. ‘I used to hang around with a gang of lads. I used to wear a three-quarter-length coat. Winklepickers and jeans you could hardly get into. I was called a ruffian. We survived! And I’m sure this generation will grow up and the next generation will have something different that people will be moaning about. No, I don’t think they’re a bad lot really. You might get one or two, but then again you always did!’
MacDonald agrees that it is ‘an age-old theme’. As he sees it, ‘swathes of ordinary, working-class young people get branded, corralled, herded, moved on, labelled as “trouble” simply for passing their evening leisure time in unremarkable, un-troublesome friendship groups on the streets. This street-corner society was the dominant form of leisure for ordinary working-class young people in our studies. Wasn’t it ever thus? Was for me!’
And yet the approach of politicians and the media has been to encourage fear and loathing of working-class youth, making no attempt to understand the root causes of anti-social behaviour where it occurs. Of course, that does not stop the bad behaviour of a small minority being a nuisance—or worse—for other members of the community. But, as Ashington showed, all too often it can be a cry of despair: of anguish at the lack of a future, and a feeling that there is nothing to lose.
Boredom is undoubtedly another factor. Unfettered free markets have been allowed to dismantle our local communities, bit by bit. Places where young people—and the rest of that community, for that matter—could congregate have been disappearing. According to the government’s Valuation Office Agency, the number of sports and social clubs fell by 55 per cent in the thirteen years of New Labour rule. Post offices were down by 39 per cent; swimming pools by 21 per cent; pubs by 7 per cent; and public libraries by 6 per cent. The sorts of things that have flourished in their place hardly foster a sense of community, or give young people something to do. Betting shops and casinos went up by 39 per cent and 27 per cent respectively, for example. Little wonder young people have been forced to create their own entertain-ment—or that a minority have resorted to anti-social behaviour out of boredom, despair, or both.
Nothing sums up the blight of anti-social behaviour in the minds of many than teenage gangs wearing hoodies and loitering menacingly on street corners. But, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found, gangs can be about teenagers grouping together for protection, looking out for each other, and even avoiding trouble. Looking at gang culture in six areas, researchers discovered a strong link between territorial behaviour and poorer communities. Getting involved with a gang provided some young people with fun, excitement and support they otherwise lacked. Furthermore, the charity revealed ‘connections between poor housing conditions and often difficult family backgrounds, and territoriality. Territorial behaviour appeared for some to be a product of deprivation, a lack of opportunities and attractive activities, limited aspirations and an expression of identity.’ Additionally, gangs ‘could be understood as a coping mechanism for young people living in poverty’.14
It is common to hear right-wing commentators and politicians blame bad parenting for anti-social behaviour among working-class youth. Simon Heffer, one of the country’s leading right-wing columnists, put it to me that we need to be ‘punishing—and I mean punishing quite severely—bad parenting. I mean, you’ve got cases of children growing up engaging in criminality who are below the age of criminal responsibility. Lock up their parents! Put the children into care, and have them make sure the children are properly brought up and educated in care.’
Contrary to this view, successive reports by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have found that in reality, parents often play a hugely positive role in tough working-class areas. ‘There is a widespread view that anti-social behaviour by young people can simply be blamed on bad parenting,’ observed Peter Seaman, the co-author of one report. ‘Yet the parents we interviewed described sophisticated strategies to minimize their children’s exposure to danger and to guard them against temptations to go off the rails.’15
Gangs can provide a form of the solidarity that has leaked out of increasingly fragmented working-class communities. To soaring numbers of young people with bleak prospects, gangs can give life meaning, structure, and reward. No wonder they have appealed to some working-class children who have grown up in poverty and have a lack of faith in their future. Indeed, as one investigation put it, they provide an opportunity for ‘career advancement’ through risk-taking and criminal activity—very often the only kind of success young people believe is available to them. Because of ‘the current heavy emphasis in schools on academic success’, some young people looked ‘elsewhere for validation’.16
Yet the New Labour era saw a crackdown on the symptoms, rather than the causes, of anti-social behaviour. The former government’s approach—such as issuing thousands of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, or ASBOs—served to magnify the problem in people’s minds and criminalized the young people responsible, without helping in any way to turn their lives around. And to our shame, there are more young people behind bars in England and Wales than anywhere else in Western Europe. The numbers of young people aged between ten and seventeen with a custodial sentence trebled between 1991 and 2006. But prison most certainly does not rehabilitate: some three-quarters of young people re-offend after release.
New Labour’s approach to crime as a whole was authoritarian, disregarding the main root cause: poverty. Before he became Labour leader, the rising star that was Tony Blair won plaudits by committing to a policy of ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. But, as Blair’s political secretary John McTernan has admitted, New Labour’s strategy ended up as ‘tough on crime, tough on criminals’.17 Between 1993 and 2010, England and Wales’s prison population nearly doubled, from 44,500 to around 85,000.
What is startling about these figures is that the prison population was spiralling out of control even as crime itself was falling. During the 2010 general election, the Tories put allegedly soaring crime rates at the forefront of their ‘Broken Britain’ narrative. Their figures were a myth. According to the British Crime Survey, crime fell from 18.5 million offences in 1993 to 10.7 million by 2009. This success was not achieved because more people were thrown into prison, as many New Labour politicians would have us believe. Indeed, a secret government memo leaked when Labour was in power in 2006 suggested that ‘80 per cent of [the] recent decrease in crime [is] due to economic factors …’18 Or, consider a 2005 study by the Crime and Society Foundation which argued that escalating murder rates in the 1980s were the legacy of recession and mass unemployment. Indeed, as the economic boom that began in the early 1990s took off, crime rates fell right across the Western world. Even the Conservative-led coalition that took power after the 2010 general election accepted a link between crime and underlying economic factors.
People have got more scared of crime even as the actual levels have gone down, but this has everything to do with sensationalist journalism and inflammatory rhetoric on the part of politicians. Nonetheless, it is important to bear in mind that your risk of becoming a victim of crime depends a great deal on your class. The British Crime Survey shows that working-class people are significantly more likely to suffer from crime than middle-class people. Working-class people are often reproached for being authoritarian when it comes to law-and-order issues—but of course you are more likely to worry if the risk of crime looms larger in your community.
There is little doubt that at the root of much crime in Britain is the illegal drugs industry. When many people think of council estates, they imagine a dirty stairwell littered with hypodermic needles. The truth is that people of all classes have experimented with drugs at some stage in their lives. Millions of teenagers, working class and middle class, have smoked a joint; and a very considerable percentage of young people have swallowed an ecstasy tablet on a night out. ‘Looking at the available evidence, in terms of teenagers and young people, there is not an obvious link amongst that group between socio-economic status and levels of drug and alcohol misuse,’ says Martin Barnes, chief executive of drugs charity DrugScope. Indeed, cocaine has a long-established reputation as the middle-class drug of choice. A House of Commons Select Committee report recently denounced the fact that ‘it seems to have become more socially acceptable and seen as a “safe”, middle-class drug’.19
But when it comes to problematic drug use, the differences are striking. ‘The government Advisory Panel on the Misuse of Drugs published a report a couple of years ago, and it concluded that when you look at levels of drug misuse with older age groups, there was a very clear link with areas of deprivation and unemployment,’ says Martin Barnes. This was particularly striking when you looked at working-class communities devastated by economic crisis. ‘The experience in some communities in the 1990s was that in those areas that were hit quite hard by unemployment, particularly young people’s unemployment, we did see levels of drug misuse increase, not just heroin.’
Barnes is careful to say that, of course, other factors come into play, not least the rise of rampant consumerism in the 1980s and the greater availability of drugs. But he was in no doubt that people often made the leap from being a bit experimental with drugs to full-blown, problematic drug use, either through despair or as a coping mechanism.
You can see why drugs have strengthened their grip over some of the communities that never recovered from the battering they got under Thatcherism. The tragedy of hard drugs is most visible in Britain’s crippled mining villages. ‘I honestly think that there wouldn’t have been half the drug addicts and stuff like that if the mines hadn’t closed,’ former Nottinghamshire miner Adrian Gilfoyle told me.
A few years ago, Labour MP John Mann launched an inquiry into heroin use in the former mining community of Bassetlaw. It concluded that a health crisis comparable to a smallpox epidemic was raging in the heart of some of Britain’s former coalfields. ‘People growing up in the coalfields lack the sense of identity afforded to their parents and grandparents who were part of a stable and prosperous mining industry,’ the report said. ‘The strongest substance used in these communities was beer, and stable employment allowed most a good standard of living.’ With the collapse of the mining industry, ‘there is a need to escape’, and heroin in these areas was associated with a need to ‘get away from it all’. ‘Mining villages are Trainspotting without the glamour,’ was its dismal conclusion.20
Modern Conservatives blame many of these social problems on the excessive growth of the state. But they also favour another explanation: the breakdown of the traditional family. Single-parent families in particular have found themselves in the firing line. The working-class single mum is, after all, one of the most reviled ‘chav’ icons. Fiona Weir, of single parents’ charity Gingerbread, enumerates some of the notions associated with the people she represents: ‘ “scroungers”, “spongers”, “lazy”, “doesn’t want to work”, “happy on benefits”—that group of adjectives. It’s very pervasive and it’s very directly relevant to a lot of the welfare reform debates that are playing out.’
To get to the heart of these stereotypes, Gingerbread conducted a wide-ranging study into the lives of single parents in modern Britain. ‘What we found bore no relationship to the stereotype in the majority of the cases,’ she says. ‘And what came through is an extraordinary, palpable sense of anger about the stereotyping.’ You would not think it from the way they are popularly portrayed, but 57 per cent of single parents actually have a job.
Rebecca is a young, confident single mother with two kids who lives on a Birmingham estate. She is lucky because she has a job she can juggle with being the sole carer of her children. She points to her eight-year-old daughter. ‘The job I chose is a teaching assistant, which fits in around them. We’re at the same school, so all the holidays we have together. I chose my job purposefully to fit around the children, and then my other one’s at senior school, and her holidays are obviously the same, so work is fantastic for me. But I know that other single mums struggle because when you have the six-week summer holiday and Easter, and whatever else, and you have to find someone to look after your kids.’
Despite the difficulties involved, most single parents want to work. According to the 2010 British Social Attitudes survey, 84 per cent of unemployed single parents want to either get a job or to study. But single parents face attack whatever they do. ‘We get a phrase used a lot by single parents, which is “damned if I do, damned if I don’t”,’ says Weir. ‘Because if you’re on benefits you’re somehow seen as a lazy scrounger, but if you go out to work, you’re somehow seen as neglecting your kids and not knowing where they are while they run around wild.’ It is not shiftlessness keeping many single parents from working, but a number of barriers that are difficult to overcome: like having a job compatible with single-handedly raising a kid, and affordable, accessible childcare. As Weir argues, stigmatizing single parents undermines their self-confidence and does nothing to help them get a job.
The Tories often argue that family structure is one of the major deciding factors in whether a child does well at school and in later life. They are on a factual collision course with a recent study by the Children’s Society, which showed that conflict in the family has ten times more of an impact on a child’s upbringing. ‘The evidence base shows that most children from single-parent families turn out fine,’ says Fiona Weir. ‘There are poorer outcomes for a significant minority, but when you analyse them, they correlate very, very clearly with things like poverty and conflict. And you get similarly poor outcomes in children from couple families that have similar levels of poverty and conflict.’
When people think of single mothers, it is often teenage girls that spring to mind. But in reality, only one in fifty single mothers are under eighteen. The average age for a single parent is thirty-six, and over half had the children while married. Even so, there is no denying that Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Western Europe. It is also impossible to deny the class dimension of this issue. Although the numbers overall are low, teenagers from manual backgrounds are eight times more likely to become mothers than those from a professional background. The regions that top the teenage pregnancy tables are those areas where industry was destroyed and low-paid service sector jobs have filled the vacuum. Why?
If doctor-turned-author Max Pemberton, writing in the Daily Telegraph, is to be believed, it is because for ‘children from working-class families, where aspiration is considered middle class, choices in life consist of becoming a celebrity, working in a shop or becoming a mum. The Holy Grail is ready access to a council flat and state benefits, which is precisely what having a baby gives you.’21 As Fiona Weir points out, this unpleasant populist caricature of the crafty, benefit-seeking teenage mum is a myth. ‘We come into contact with thousands of single parents but somehow we just don’t meet ones who fit this stereotype. How we are managing to avoid them, I don’t know. As for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, they can’t get the keys to a council house at that age. They either live at home or they go into supported accommodation.’
Middle-class teenagers are certainly less likely to fall pregnant in the first place, but they are also significantly more likely to have an abortion.22 I chatted to a few middle-class young women, some of whom had had a termination as teenagers. Their reason for not wanting a child now was the same: fear of the impact it would have on their career at such an early stage. But if you live in an area of high unemployment and with only unappealing, low-paid jobs on offer, why wait for motherhood? ‘In some cases there will be an element of people who don’t see a lot of routes for themselves in terms of what they can do with their life,’ says Fiona Weir. ‘They might be looking for a sense of role, and purpose, and meaning, and wanting to be useful and to matter.’
One recent, detailed study showed that teenage pregnancy can bring with it many positives, particularly for young people from poorer backgrounds. ‘Our research makes it clear that young parenthood can make sense and be valued and even provide an impetus for teenage mothers and fathers to strive to provide a better life for their children,’ said Dr Claire Alexander, one of the report’s authors.23 Indeed, having a child can actually be empowering. As another study put it: ‘Particularly amongst those who come from disadvantaged groups, for whom there may be little perceived reward for delaying parenthood, early motherhood can provide the opportunity to attain self-respect and adult status.’24
We have seen that some of the things people associate with ‘chavs’ have a basis in reality. There are some alienated, angry young people out there who take out some of their frustrations in anti-social ways. Things like crime and drug addiction are more common in working-class areas than in the average middle-class suburb. A working-class teenager is considerably more likely to give birth than her middle-class peer. But the reality is rather different from the vicious generalizations and victim-blaming that accompanies chav-hate. Poverty, unemployment and a housing crisis provide fertile ground for a range of social problems. These are working-class communities that took the brunt of a class war first unleashed by Thatcher three decades ago. Indeed, it would be far more startling if life had gone on, much like before, even as the pillars of the community collapsed one by one.
Proclaiming that people are responsible for their situation makes it easier to oppose the social reforms that would otherwise be necessary to help them. But such demonization does not stand up to scrutiny. People born into poor, working-class communities do not deserve their fate, nor have they contributed to it. As the industries that sustained their lives disappeared, the once-tight bonds holding many working-class communities together unravelled at a breathtaking pace. Those living there could once look forward to respected, relatively well-paid jobs. Their lives had structure. Today, large swathes of communities are haunted by despair, frustration and boredom. Without real economic recovery, the social diseases that accompany hopelessness have flourished.
It would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of the Tories. After all, New Labour left manufacturing to wilt, too. At the end of their rule, they toyed with the beginnings of an industrial strategy to encourage a revival, but it was too little and, for them, far, far too late. Britain did not suffer the same ruinous level of unemployment as in the 1980s and 1990s, even as the economy went into free fall following the 2008 financial crash. But all too often it was part-time and low-paid service sector jobs that filled the vacuum, and they could not resucitate the communities worst hit by the Thatcherite experiment in the 1980s. This is why many of New Labour’s policies amounted to sticking plasters in communities ravaged by the Tories under their eighteen-year rule—plasters that are now being torn off, the wounds still bleeding underneath.
It is not surprising that so many working-class people felt alienated from Labour. They felt it was no longer fighting on their side. Some succumbed to apathy—but not all. Deprived of a narrative to explain what was happening to their lives, some began to grope for other logics. It was not the wealthy victors of Thatcher’s class war who found themselves on the sharp end. The frustrations and anger of millions of working-class people were channelled into a backlash against immigrants.