I wrote about the PattonHall Estate back in March. It is on my way to the weekly shop and on a whim, I dropped in off duty last weekend to take a look round and see how things were 10 years on. This is a place that we wrested back out of the hands of the “Evil Poor” by the direct use of an informal Police and Community partnership.
It is safe to say that the estate is still in the safe hands of the Tenants Association. I saw lots of neat gardens, washing hung out to dry, hardly a piece of litter, happy laughing kids playing out, people washing their cars. There were many reliable visual indicators of a thriving community. The Housing Association has even built some sheltered accomodation for the elderly where the low rise single occupancy rat nests used to be. It felt like what it was, a good place to live, bring up children and grow old with dignity but without fear.
Two miles up the road is where the “Evil Poor” roost. Now I don’t say that everybody who is poor is evil or that all evil people are poor. When I say “Evil Poor” I mean the multi generational families of wasters, self sundered from the worlds of work, education, law or personal responsibility. I mean the people who have entirely bought into a life of chaos, violence and crime. All Police bloggers end up writing about them and we all know them and their works. There festering on the edge of town is the Cannonrail Estate, bodged together using cheapest available material in the early 1970′s by an ambitious council. They have never been able to fill it and half of it has been knocked down and turfed over these past 10 years. What remains are warrens of boxy “modern terraces” built using a cheap yellow brick that has stained badly.You can see the original idea, modern dwellings, open spaces, play areas, shops, library, community centre, it was all there.
I went there for a look as well.
Nobody was washing their cars here, they have had them up on blocks, for years. No kids playing out, just the odd skinny abandoned devil dog trotting up and down looking for trouble.There were rotting disposable nappies in gardens and in the street. Every windy corner was a-rattle with empty lager cans and fag buts. Dog shit, broken bottles and deep motorbike and car tyre tracks disfigured the dying, untended and unused football pitches. These were Euro funded and opened with such pride and hope just a few years ago. Every aparatus on the childrens’ playground was bent, broken and useless. Every tile in the happy happy mosaic installed at the opening has been lovingly chipped, broken and destroyed. Nothing stays good on Cannonrail. The council had given everybody new wooden garden fences last year and within a month they were ripped apart and useless. Nobody living there gives a flying one. They didn’t care about the old broken fences in the first place.
Every time a tenant moves on, you need a fumigation crew and a complete redecoration at minimum. Every third house is “tinned up” to prevent the locals getting in to strip out anything left of value. It doesn’t have to be like that, it’s not the place, it’s not the poverty or the local schools, there are jobs. there are so many social workers to help you, but no, in the end it is the people. In Cannonrail is concentrated the most rapacious of the “Evil Poor” and all they can do is destroy and spoil everything around them. Its not a minority of anti social trouble makers causing the problems here because damn near every resident is anti-social. Maybe I am demonising them and their children. Well, that’s what I do to demons.
There are the shops, an off-licence and a general store, each festooned with after-market security additions, razor wire, steel doors, cameras, security lights and the like. The shopkeepers always look on edge. Outside, burnt out bins and more of the detritus of living the “Evil Poor” life, a broken child’s bike abandoned, pizza boxes, crushed cigarette packets and half a dozen black bin bags weeping dirty cheap kiddies clothes.
There is a Community Centre that, if anything, is more forbidingly spikey than the shops. Nobody from the Community goes there but it gives the social workers somewhere to hide from their clients during the day. The saddest thing there is the shell of the little branch library, closed, tiles stripped from the roof and still lying broken in the high weeds around. It never stood a chance.
These are the places of the people that we are talking about. These are the homes they return to after a day or a night spent ruining yours. This is where they swagger and brag of the beatings and robbings. This is where the drugs go. This is the pathology. This is where the Evil Poor live. Even when the sun is cracking the paving stones, this is the darkness at the edge of town.
Its All About Choices
I found your blog on MSN Search. Nice writing. I will check back to read more.
Eric Hundin
Spot On, a perfect description of the scum we try in vain to police- wait for the inevetable ignorant bleeding hearts to chime in.
Don’t Give Up Everyone! Things will change- I Hope
Another excellent post.
There will be very few bobbies who will not be familiar with an area such as this on their own patch. Here in Grimsville there are several locations that fit the bill, some larger than others. It is these locations where I spend most of my time sorting out the lives of those unwilling or incapable of doing it themselves. Dealing with their claims of “threats” or “harassment”. How I chuckle when dealing an allegation of “threats” made by someone with a plentiful record of convictions for violence of varying degrees. I bite my tongue, do my job and move on.
Whilst tinkering with the Sat Nav on one of our vehicles the other day I discovered that due to the frequency of visits to one of these areas, I could locate any street in the area just by pressing the “history” button and looking through “recent entries” without having to ask for a location, such is volume of calls from this particular area.
You do come across real victims living in these areas though, usually middle aged or retired people who have lived on the estate their whole lives and who are now surrounded. They do their best to make their homes look nice however the trappings they work (or worked) so hard for are like a magnet to the local scum who break-in and steal their belongings, or damage their car or smash the windows on their house. These victims are unable to move because they bought their homes long ago and can’t afford to move on. They come home from work (because they actually do work) close their doors and lock them down.
I go home to my cosy house in a relatively quiet place across town, and I realise how lucky I am.
I too know places like that, if it were not for the innocents trapped there, I would cheerfully fence them in, and then tell the RAF that one of the bombing ranges had moved….
ANOTHER great post!
I agree. I grew up on one of these estates. My folks, who were both resolutely blue collar, fell on hard times (caused in no small measure by my dads tacit refusal to work for longer than six months at a time, not to mention his appalling skills as a commercial burglar), and we moved into the town crap hole when I was about 7.
It wasn’t all bad, of course. So sure, a woman was stabbed to death two doors away (I thought it pretty macabre walking to school, seeing a uniformed officer at the end of her pathway and the bloody hand prints still on the walls). The local kids were for the most part good fun – we all wanted to be out of our houses, and as the architects had designed it to be an utter rabbit warren way back in the 60s, it was brilliant for playing war in. I played in smashed in garages, squats and joined in with the other boys when we chucked dog-shit at the windows of “mad Tony”.
Things got a *bit* different once I passed my 11 plus. All of a sudden, I was the sole kid from the estate who wore the fancy blazer and went to the *posh* school. I thank God for the chance that school gave me to gain a good education. Despite my dads occasional brushes with the law, my folks were good people and worked hard to give me a sense of moral purpose and set me on the right path. Their relatively moral stance wasn’t always appreciated. One kid went as far as to steal a railway detonator and strap it to our window, detonating it while my folks and I watched “Yes Minister”.
Anyway, long story short, after university, and joining the police, the place just wasn’t the shame, Of course, most of the residents had *always* been on the fiddle from the social, but it wasn’t until I’d done a few months that I realised that so many of them were obviously on Heroin. The happy-go-lucky, rough-diamond atmosphere had been replaced with shark-eyed criminality and hatred.
When did loveable rogues become nasty, merciless bastards ? Or were they always like that and I was too young to know any better ?
My Beat was a conglomeration of council estates edged by a nice residential area. 99.9% of the jobs I was given involved the council estates. I was there for 5 years and I think I probably attended no more than 4 calls to the nice bit – and even then it was only usually for a suspicious person in the area.
I felt sorry for the people who lived in the bad part, through personal circumstances, divorced, redundant, can’t get a good job etc, but I had no sympathy for the others who did nothing but cause damage, attack people deal drugs and steal anything that was not bolted down.
Evil Poor, Scum, Sh*ts, Scrotes, call them what you want. These are the ones that cause all the problems and turn a council estate into a sink estate.
Why are they the way they are? The main answer is ‘because the criminal justice system allows it.’
“It’s all about choices”, your caption under the photo says. How true. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. You can lead the “evil poor” to no end of services and types of help to change their lifestyle but you can’t make them take it.
Well done though to Rural D/Sgt for making all the good choices. That sounds patronising, sorry. I don’t mean it to be, honest.
The evil poor are the footsoldiers of nulabor though. There would be no need for social workers etc etc otherwise
Like Rural D/Sgt, I grew up on a sink council estate (mine was in South London), although my parents were decent, law-abiding people. They realised that education was the only way out, so I did the 11+, went to the local grammar school and wore the bottle-green blazer that marked us out to the local bullies and caused us to go to the gym and learn to look after ourselves.
Money being tight and university grants being insufficient, I left school and joined the Job. During the following years I put myself through university, then had children and put them through it too. I was medically retired through injury but retrained and pay my way.
They pulled my estate down in the late 70s (thank God), but all they did was demolish the old slums and built some new ones. Most people there now were there when I was a kid, still thieving, scrounging and on drugs. It’s a state of mind.
Rural D/Sgt wrote “When did loveable rogues become nasty, merciless bastards ? Or were they always like that and I was too young to know any better ?”
Rise of hard drugs in the UK? I know that heroin used to be prescribed on the NHS until 1968 and there was a rise in usage through the 60s. Before that I assume that the drug of choice would have been alcohol. New waves of drugs – cocaine, amphetamines, crack, have subsequently arrived. Or perhaps I do a disservice to the D/Sgt? (I extrapolate from the demise of grammar schools in the 70s.)
Rural D/Sgt “When did loveable rogues become nasty, merciless bastards ? Or were they always like that and I was too young to know any better ?”
I don’t think so. There’s a truly nihilistic viciousness about some of the crimes seen today.
Excellent post, by the way. I’ve linked to it (and the one on ‘Sheepdogs and Wolves’), and I hope it gets a much wider audience. It really deserves one, to balance out the (sometimes unfair, sometimes not) critcism of the police.
Very good post NJ.
The bit that really gets me annoyed is that these people, these whole families have never worked; 3 generations as you say. How is this allowed to happen?
I grew up with kids from families like where not one person worked, they were good, law-abiding people, not the evil poor, but they went on foreign holidays twice a year. I couldn’t work it out; my Dad worked hard and all we could manage was a week in a caravan (which was great by the way!).
I am fortunate to have a good job now (am I fortunate? I’ve worked bloody hard to get it…) but I have many friends who struggle by on minimum wage, and they really do struggle, yet people with no inclination to work or pay rent etc seem to get on without a care in the world.
It just aint fair.
Fascinating piece of writing – please keep it up!
Just out of curiosity…
What proportion of our population are the Evil Poor? Has anyone got an idea?
I guess it’s not 100% even among the Pik… errr … travelling community.
Is it, even today, as much as 1% of the population (that would be 600,000 across the UK)?
Given that the majority of the Evil Poor spend at least some time in gaol in any given decade, it probably can’t be vastly more than a million.
So we probably outnumber them 59 to 1.
But I would bet they use up about 50% of Police resources and probably more than a quarter of the resources of the Ambulance Service, Social Security and – of course – Probation.
The trouble is that, almost certainly, the Evil Poor aren’t on the Electoral Roll and don’t answer surveys (not even the British Crime Survey!) … so we can’t estimate the truth. [1]
An invisible black hole … probably small, but draining an unimaginably vast share of our resources.
Hoddy
[1] Unless some clever person could merge the Social Security records with the crime records – that sort of meta analysis might give you a good figure.
I grew up somewhere much like the reclaimed estate but in a fairly rural setting in the Welsh hills. About 5 miles away from the now quite pleasent town/villagea brand new spanking council estate that was created (no more than 5 years ago now, perhaps less).
Brand spanking new, shining, good facilities, playground, village green, shops, regular bus services into the big town for those with jobs. It was the local council’s pride and joy and hailed as a model low-income / benefits estate. I went back there about a year ago (a bit less actually) and now it’s a horrible, grotty place. Park full of needles and abandoned beer cans + teenagers fighting on a saturday night, playground unsafe due to broken glass and yet more needles, bus stops destroyed (some literally down to the metal frame), shops boarded up at worst and behind metal shutters at best, buses not running due to being repeatedly smashed up, the police pretty much permenantly there for every shift (still have some mates back there who joined the service).
I guess i’m saying that no matter what you give these scum they just won’t take advantage of it to turn their lives around. Lets face it – the way the CJS and society is set up right now, they’re got no reason to either.
You’ve been to the Britannia Estate I take it ?
Nice one – I’m coming up to the thrty year mark and have policed an industrial town in the north with a number of estates such as described here for most of that time. Back in the 1980′s, the new Channel 4 produced a documentary called ‘The Estate’ about one of our ‘low income’ housing estates. I remember I was on lates and we were given permission to watch it in the interests of ‘understanding our communities’. So we all settled down to what we thought would be a load of apologists and do-gooders making excuses for ‘low lifes’ and dead beats. Well, its probably the funniest thing I’ve seen in years. It showed a load of white trash, destroying their neighbourhood in the way you described, stealing, robbing and acting anti-socially for no particular reason other than because they could. There was the usual collection of no hopers, fickle single parents out of control kids etc. but the producer to his credit showed them for what they were. He did it in such a comical way it literally made us belly laugh, but the piece de resistance, was when he showed a hard working black family who were also devotedly religious, who had made a fantastic home for themselves in the midst of all this chaos. The only problem was that at any one time, at least one member of the family had to stay at home to ward off the jackals that unfortunately for them they had to live cheek by jowl with. If they turned their backs for one moment and left the property unattended, the local ‘tea leafs’ (which was basically everyone) would descend on the place like a plague of locusts and strip the joint! In the end the decent family did what all decent families inevitably do – left ‘em to it and moved out. Since then they’ve been throwing tax payers money at the place and its still a dump.
Shallow thinking NJ – but then your incestuous little group of narrow-minded whingers would agree with you, wouldn’t they? But my posts will be ignored by you and your “chums” who seem to know everything about nothing. But then the Evil Poor are born that way aye? And all you well-heeled “respectable folks” were born that way too. Gawd bless genetics – as Adolf would have said if he hadn’t topped himself. Stealing, robbing, trashing, wasting tax-payers money,needles, rubbish, beer cans – well there is no reason for this DREADFULLY AWFUL and INEXPLICABLE behaviour so let’s gas em. I mean to say – how can we cope with these people? We could arm ourselves and shoot them, we could nuke them, we could lock them all up and throw away the keys – we could sterilise them forcibly, we could publically humiliate them or even organise public floggings and hangings. Then of course there’s the diffilcult option……
Kate,
I hope you never have to meet any of them.
“We could arm ourselves and shoot them, we could nuke them, we could lock them all up and throw away the keys – we could sterilise them forcibly, we could publically humiliate them or even organise public floggings and hangings. Then of course there’s the diffilcult option……”
Ignore them?
So many ‘we’ words in that statement and so few people actually really care to make any changes to their lives (themselves included). Kate, are you volunteering to go to that area and appeal to their better nature, in person? To help them clear up their mess?
What DO we do with people that really don’t care themselves about changing?
We can only offer to help them to help themselves out of their predicament, but what if they wear their predicament like badges on their chest. What if they revel in it?
What then?
Kate
We should build a nice high glass-topped wall around places like that…and then throw you and people like you right into the middle of ‘em to be forgotten about.
Kate,
You are so determined to make your point that it hurts. It’s not about genetics or eugenics or any Stopesian solutions but well done for shoehorning Hitler and Gas Chambers into the same post. The diffilcult (sic) option what would that be?
Kate,
Here’s an offer for you… spend a month living in one of these places, consider what it would be like to think you will always live in one of these places, then post your thoughts.
Ben
Kate
In the old days, you lot shipped them out here to Sydney. The voyage was nasty, their terms were long, they were worked hard, flogged mercilessly for further infractions and then paroled after 7 years of hard, hard grind. Life as a prisoner was decidely unpleasant.
Funnily enough, most turned out ok after that little experience and many became solid citizens. I presume that after 7 terrible years of being a convict, none (bar the stupidest) wanted to go through it again – being honest was a much better option.
Ponder that.
Interesting blog, NightJack.
Have you read any articles by Theodore Dalrymple? He writes on this very subject, and is always a good read. In particular, his book “Life at the Bottom” (more a collection of essays than a book) addresses this topic exactly.
If you’ve read his works, I’d be very happy to hear your opinion of them, since you’d be looking at it from a slightly different perspective. If you haven’t, I think you would find them very interesting – I can provide a link if you want.
And for Kate (lest I be lumped with those who ignore her post), the implied root cause is a cultural, not a genetic one. A culture of helplessness, dependency, and resentment. As to how they got that way, the answer may very well be that same welfare state which is supposed to alleviate their condition.
Please keep posting Kate, you’re a star.
Part of the problem for me is that one of the effects of Thatcherism was to lose us what might be called the “aspirational working class”. I mean this in a very specific sense, that is to say, people whose aspirations are to better themselves, while remaining part of the working class. I’m not talking about the way out of the working class into the middle class via education – that’s something else entirely – I mean people who could count on a blue collar job in a factory or down a mine and could expect that hard graft and nothing else would see their wages gradually rise as they occupied more senior roles. Nowadays, not only are there fewer jobs, but the low paid ones, such as in call centres, tend to be dead end, or else rely on having to sit exams and get the letters after your name. That bridge is gone, so those who are evil and poor will join the evil poor now they can’t look forward to becoming a bullying foreman in middle age. It’s not the whole story, but it’s a big part of it.
I HAVE BEEN BARRED – LOL this means I have struck a nasty nasty chord….
Oh Nightjack – you disappoint me…. bless
Kate,
My blog, my rules. I won’t be arguing the toss about it. Not so much barred as selectively deleted.
“Tough on Trolling. Tough on the causes of Trolling”
Does the sty make the pig or the pig the sty? I think all coppers know the answer to this one.
One of the worst areas of criminality in my area consists of an 80′s estate comprising small two or three bedroom houses with a little patch of grass to the front and a driveway, and a little patch of grass to the rear, the whole estate backing onto a park. The town centre is a 15-20 minute walk away, and open green fields are about 10 minutes walk away. Local amenities are good, as are the local schools. Unemployment is very low – if you don’t want to serve burgers or carry bricks, the area is thick with logistics hubs, where Poles who have no English to speak of, can pick up jobs overnight as warehouse pickers (not having a go at Poles incidentally – never met a Pole I didn’t like).
In fact, exactly like the estate where I live, 30 miles away (I don’t live where I work because, irony of ironies, I couldn’t possibly afford to). But everyone where I live either owns or privately rents their properties, so it actually matters to us what happens in our environment.
In fact, why don’t we all aspire to the life of the lumpenproletatriat. No job. No worries. Spend your whole day as cheerful as legal and illegal drugs can make you. If someone irritates you, punch them in the face. If you feel none too well, the Police will have a doctor to you in a couple of hours (though others may wait days to see their GP). Why worry about the consequences of your actions at all..?
Fresh from my guffawing at the little video clip on Copperfield’s blog, I get ““Tough on Trolling. Tough on the causes of Trolling”. Great stuff but now Kate feels vindicated and is probably smouldering away as martyrs are wont to do.
I teach in a high school that er… serves the sort of estate you describe, and from the point of view of someone not in the Police, would like to say that every word is true. The Sunday Times once did a piece on our catchment area, and interviewed a number of “Our Young People”. I suspect Kate was one of the interviewers. They overwhelmingly felt that these were dear good children if only they’d had the breaks. Well Social Services, the Welfare State,Youth Workers, schools, voluntary organisations and do-gooders alike have given them nothing but restorative breaks to try and make up for their lousy gang-led community, cultural and spiritual impoverishment and disgusting parents since the day they born. They had plenty of breaks and pissed them up against the wall.
Two of the boys interviewed were in my form. Both are now in prison, but even at 13, they had broken into the house of an elderly lady who lived alone on that estate – that in itself should be a crime – and had killed her cat in front of her and urinated over her, her carpets and furniture. The offence itself was in legal terms, minor, and they roared with contempt at the non-sentence.
The point I am taking a long time to come to is that that offence was one of many. I have heard that there is a three-offences and then you’re nicked thing for young offenders, but these lads did that sort of thing on a weekly basis for years and never seemed to be punished. Only when they got into drugs and were caught nicking cars to fund it did they really get punished. And yet a car owner is inconvenienced but insured when his car is nicked. That old woman and thousands like her have their quality of life destroyed and it doesn’t seem to count.
Carrots have signaly failed. making it nice for them in the hpe that a new sty will make better pigs out of them has not worked. Stick time.
I think Jacob C has put his finger on the root of the problem:
Back in the 1980’s, the new Channel 4 produced a documentary called ‘The Estate’ about one of our ‘low income’ housing estates… It showed a load of white trash, destroying their neighbourhood in the way you described, stealing, robbing and acting anti-socially for no particular reason other than because they could. There was the usual collection of no hopers, fickle single parents out of control kids etc. but the producer to his credit showed them for what they were. He did it in such a comical way it literally made us belly laugh, but the piece de resistance, was when he showed a hard working black family who were also devotedly religious, who had made a fantastic home for themselves in the midst of all this chaos. The only problem was that at any one time, at least one member of the family had to stay at home to ward off the jackals that unfortunately for them they had to live cheek by jowl with.
===
We have to replace white trash with “hard working black families” — indeed, what other kind of black family is there? White trash, or stale pale scum as we anti-racists also know them, are responsible for a vastly disproportionate amount of violent and acquisitive crime, from mugging to gang rape. But they’re not only a plague to the rest of society: they’re shooting and stabbing each other at such rates that they have a dedicated police unit in London called Operation Steradent. I congratulate Jacob C for having the courage to name and shame them as he did. Many other serving coppers must wish they could do the same.
I have a question for Kate: in the scenario described by Lilyofthefield (@32), the 13 year-olds who broke into the elderly lady’s house, killed her cat and urinated on her and her possessions, etc: what would YOU do? How should they be treated/punished?
There is a type of argument which we could call the appeal to radical evil.
There are various questions which we can ask about the actions of some person or group of people. One of these is: “what is the cause of these actions?” And there are various possible responses to this question. The appeal to radical evil is one of these possible responses. It says: “the explanation is that these people are evil”. Since what is to be explained here is some set of acts judged to be “bad” in some sense, to explain them by appeal to the “evil” character of the actor is to say, more or less, that this actor does evil because they are evil.
What is it to be evil? Whether or not this holds as some ultimate metaphysical truth, as far as the practical concerns of a police officer are concerned, to be evil is to do evil. To be evil without ever committing any evil acts is a pretty abstract proposition when our main concern is policing.
If those are evil who act in evil ways, and if evil acts are to explained by appeal to the evil of the actor, this amounts to a somewhat paltry response to the question, “what is the cause of these actions?” It amounts to saying- more or less- that the cause of these actions is that the actors act in this way. To appeal to radical evil is thus- effectively- to avoid explanation. It is a refusal to explain something, dressed up as an explanation.
Sometimes those who make this argument do it more or less self-consciously. People do this in particular when talking about the holocaust, and they often justify themselves by appealing to the idea that “to explain is to justify”. With something as abhorrent as the holocaust, to suggest that there is any possible way of rationally explaining it in terms of real causes would be to remove the absoluteness of our claims against the perpetrators. To suggest that these people did these horrible acts for determinate, explicable reasons, is to imply that others too could equally have performed these acts if under the same conditions. In this case, the avoidance of explanation through the appeal to radical evil seems itself driven by a moral imperative: the imperative- because of the absolute abhorrence of the crime- not to allow these people the benefit of our considering them as rationally acting human beings.
Something similar is going on here. The despair of the police officer faced with the recalcitrance of human scum; faced with the impossibility of maintaining law and order in a place that seems to have fallen out of the bottom of society and into a sub-human world. This despair is- perhaps- a realistic assessment of the impossibility of really bringing the law to a place which seems so irretrievably lawless. This despair says “there is nothing we can do for this place, for these people”. And, in response to the question of why, it says that the reason is that these people are inherently lawless: that they are evil, and in doing so- as we have seen- it refuses real explanation. This inherent lawlessness, this radical evil is the explanatory form that the helplessness of the police officer takes when faced with such a situation. What is peculiar about it is that it takes this helplessness to be an objective characteristic of the object of explanation- by reifying this helplessness as the “evil” of the actors- rather than grasping it really as a practical problem in which the police officer too- in her very helplessness- is implicated.
Jez @ 35
Eh? Why not just punish lawbreaking with a firm enough punishment that they think twice before doing it again?
I think you’re talking out of your ar*e.
Jez @ 35
Interesting point that falls apart if, despite the paltriness of the explanation “they are evil” the explanation is infact “they are evil.” Seeking an explanation in the hope that that would provide a cure or treatment in such circumstances is analogous to re-assembling a smashed bottle of lemonade. The bottle is broken the contents are spilled, the explanation is that somebody dropped it onto a hard surface. There is no cure in the explanation.
There is a curious fallacy that if only we could understand or explain why people are evil, it would help us make them better people. It can help us avoid making more perhaps but experience leads me to conclude that it is of very limited help in dealing with the problem in being.
For the “Evil Poor” the reasons have been set out in legion reports, studies and research projects. There have been many, many interventions from both the liberal and the authoritarian palette and yet the problem persists. If there was a simple or effective intervention, it would have been done already and it would have worked. There have been so many attempts to treat this as a practical problem that one might conclude that there is infact no solution, just a reality to be dealt with.
Perhaps NightJack was not interested in “How did we get here” but more in “Why are we still here after 100+ years of Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology and Social Reform?”
@Jez A very wordy way of saying the cops feel helpless to deal and they have decided that the evil poor commit crime because they are “radical evil”. Your conclusion is that there are rational reasons for why the evil poor are the way they are and that the cops are, in their helplessness, part of the question.
Actually as I read the coppers’ blogs I think that the police have identified a lot of the underlying problem. A system that should exist as a safety net being exploited. A cycle of young motherhood, unemployment, a lack of empathy, low expectations, poor results in schools, the lure of drugs, both legal and illegal, as escapes – both mentally and monetarily. A legal system that doesnt deter early enough and yet is still so blunt that it allows its wards to suicide. The police are not there to deal with the underlying causes, they are there to provide law and order – but as NJ and others have noted – Britain’s police are involved in policing by consent. (thank god, none of us wish to live in a police state).
I also think you havent understood the banality of evil. I am reminded of the famous Stanford psychology experiment (students acting as guards and warders), people can do evil acts simply because it is the done thing. The horrible kids probably were not born that way, but they exist in a society where such depravity is the norm. True sociopathic evil is (fortunately for us) very rare, but with the evil poor, their social norms are not ours.
The evil poor are evl because their societal norms are not ours. How do we shift their societal norms? Well fatgit says legal punishment. Others want to cut off the welfare state. Bish is right – there are no easy answers.
I think the biggest problem with this subject is that many of the posters have very valid points which don’t sit well with each other. For instance, how do you tell whether someone is evil? Probably only by the things they do. So logically, if someone does something evil, they are evil. But I have to say, over the years I’ve met many, many people who do evil things, although they are not themselves particularly evil. I have – thank God – met very few genuinely evil people (funnily enough, one of them was a police officer with whom I actively tried to avoid working because he frightened me so much, and I am no shrinking violet).
I truly believe that socialisation is a major cause of people doing bad things. I also truly believe that it is everyone’s right not to have to be victims of such people. Now here’s the rub. Prison doesn’t work. What it does is keeps offenders off the street so they can’t offend – until, of course, they get let out again. So, lock them up and they come out worse. Don’t lock them up, and we all suffer. Throw into this mix such factors as family breakdown, benefits dependency, alcohol and drug abuse, lack of respect – a heady mixture indeed. If we don’t address the problem, it will only get worse, as it has done over the past few decades. But long-term solutions are needed, and no government is interested in doing something that will cost a lot of money and reap rewards only in 20 years’ time.
I know the problems. I also know that none of the suggested solutions work. I wish I had a solution.
Well we can say one thing that did work and that has been shamefully dropped – note that both Ginger and Rural D/Sgt say they grew up in estates but went to Grammar schools. The traditional way up in the 50s and 60s. Back in those days the public schools were being squeezed out of Oxbridge and public schools were for the not so bright. Thanks to four decades of “progressive” (idiotic leftwing crap) public schools now account for a majority of entrants to Oxbridge. I listen to that hypocritical (ex GS) Roy Hattersley claim that comprehensive education has led to all these new university students, but in the competition for top places, the state sector has lagged. The left always claim that the 11+ left those who failed feeling like losers, but in places without good schools now everyone feels like a loser*.
*Academic research has shown in Kent that grammar schools increase chances for the poor and bright, without damaging achievement of any other category.
The problem with the liberal self-appointed elite regarding comprehensive schooling is that they aren’t living in the real world. Sure, they will tell you that comps are a good idea – but their children probably go to an independent school or to a super-duper comp in an affluent area. I bet they don’t get sent to an inner-city sink school. Harriet Harman, for instance, used to bang on about her son going to a state school. What she carefully avoided mentioning was that far from attending the nasty local comp (and it was nasty), he went to a selective school 12 miles away. Now, I have no problem with parents doing the best they can for their children – most of us do that. What I DO take issue with is the “do as I say, not as I do” attitude.
We have suffered from many years from the non-competitive, “everyone one is a winner” attitude that stifles endeavour and competition, makes failure just as good as victory and does no-one any good, by working to the lowest common denominator. Life isn’t like that. It is massively important not to classify children who fail an 11+ -type test as failures, but it’s no good throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
National Service, tougher sentences, grammar schools… as an amusing mixed metaphor I read a while back put it, ‘the same grab bag of litanies is taken out of the cupboard and aired’.
Wonderful blog. We have the same situation in the US. Why has it grown worse over the years? The answer is, of course, government. We subsidize poverty and a basic law of economics is that what you subsidize (reward) increases and what you tax (punish) decreases. One tax on poverty is having to find a way to feed, clothe, and educate that child you brought into the world yourself rather than having the government force taxpayers to support you and your child.
We can all thank the folks who believe you can throw money at people and transform them. The welfare system only encourages dependency, robs people of their humanity and dignity, and turns them into expensive but ungrateful pets.
I often wonder what the kids think when strangers show up bearing Christmas presents. Do they look at their parents and wonder why the people who brought them into the world don’t provide such things for them? No doubt they lose any respect for Dad, if he is around. It doesn’t help the family situation much, but it does make the strangers feel good about themselves.
We have devised a perverse system that demeans and degrades people and makes them believe they do not have to bear the responsibilities of life. No wonder each new generation becomes less civilized.
I go on Section 18 searches at some of these estates and at stupid O’Clock in the morning I see a toddler running around drinking Coke from a bottle with dirt tracks up the hall and stair well walls, holes in most of the doors. An uncared for garden in full bloom with carrier bags and detritus. I’m sure a great many of you can think of similar homes.
I often catch myself thinking: “What chance has he/she got of making something of their life with such an upbringing.”
Those of you with long service will probably have seen familial patterns repeating like fractals. Jim in the cells was that child 15 years ago and his mum/dad were like that X years before that…
That is what saddens me about the ‘Evil Poor’- those who don’t have the vision to see beyond their lifestyle, to something better, a different way. How does society help such people acquire such vision or break the chains?
“Where no one asks any questions
Or looks too long in your face
In the darkness on the edge of town”
Good title, NJ – just catching up on old posts.
Once lived in a nice area of the West Midlands years ago, Labour built a Council Estate and shipped the rough of the rough in along with several decent famillies. The area went down, filth everywhere, poor schools now, and listening to bragging about how they were one the dole, picking up more benefits than my husband and I earned and paid for tax on, this after they had their 4 pints a night.
Thankfull, like others I upsticks, and moved, and then emigrated. I visit the area yearly, and breaks my heart my elderly parents are stuck there amonst the scum.
We have to look at the way the liberal elite took over and the pathetic ideas of women in social and schools took control.
Britain needs to get back to its roots, and needs to get rid of the liberals and their weak, ineffective, pathetic ideas.
We’ve had this problem in America in places like DC and Detroit. Let’s not forget New Orleans. Katrina helped to dislodge a whole bowl full of turds. Anyway, we’ve dealt with it before and the solution is really straightforward:
1) cut off the welfare and the social workers and the wasting of funds. It doesn’t do any good and it costs money
2) punish criminals with real jail time or execution. The point is to get them out of circulation for as long as possible.
3) let victims arm themselves and fight back. This helps to get more criminals out of circulation with a minimum of government expense.
If you pay people to live off the dole, abuse drugs and commit crime, they will continue to do it so long as you support them. Rewarding this behavior is counterproductive.
Instead, punish people who commit crimes. Real punishments that can be counted in decades with no time off for good behavior. If the jails are too full, administer justice on the streets and turn a blind eye when others to it. The shits will get the message real quick and learn to stay in line.
[...] When people realise just how much of the tax they pay is going to the estates on the edge of town, those hearts of darkness, those ghettoes populated by people who have been encouraged into long-term worklessness, [...]
[...] Action today. The golden 20 seconds are still available as a podcast if you hurry. My words (From Darkness at The Edge of Town) were read in the style of a vindictive Uriah Heep which is sort of appropriate to the Dickensian [...]
Excellent post, thanks Nightjack, very interesting ! Jim W, also thx for posited solution.
Have been discussing a fairer society on Robert Peston’s blog on the BBC website. You would not believe some of the comments that people come up they don’t or won’t believe that such places/people exist at all.
Apparently I am like the Catherine Tate’s Aga Saga character. Ha ha if only they knew.
“Criticising is only using them as a whipping post for societies failures”
“They fail because they have no power over housing, education, immigration, the economy and the media”.
“Why pick on poor people, what harm have they done to you?”
“They have to do it to survive”.
I also used to live close to some high rise 1960′s council flats. They used to be inhabited by the underclass with all the usual associated benefits. Then the Tenants Association took control from the council. The undesirables were moved on and now anyone wanting to move in has to attend an interview with the management committee and pass the required checks. Now that place is free of litter, recycling bins are in place and it is a decent place.
My point really is the same, the power and support needs to be given to those with a functioning moral compass who want to help themselves, as opposed to professional helpers who don’t live in the area.
I live close to these people. They are scary and undesireable but nowhere near as scary and undesireable as the idiotic, ill informed, uneducated working class scum who write garbage like this. There are a lot more of them than the underclass.
Unemployment is built into the neo liberal economics that has goverened Britain for the last thirty years. Thirty years to develop an underclass that will never go away.
[...] We need her clothes and so Casster and I load her into his car and are soon in the local version of Cannonrail. It is 3.30am and hardly a devil dog is stirring as we walk into her flat. A single unshaded energy [...]
[...] the old Land Rover with the bosun lights and a prisoner cage in the back. It was my old beat the Cannonrail Estate, that blighted outlier of the division. Even today it is warren of dirty yellow brick terraces [...]
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
[...] respectable working class are defined by ‘lots of neat gardens, washing hung out to dry, hardly a piece [...]
[...] The respectable working class according to Night Jack are defined by ‘lots of neat gardens, washing hung out to dry, hardly a piece of litter, happy laughing kids playing out, people washing their cars’. The ‘evil poor’ on the other hand are: Kappa clad, drugged up, workshy, wasters swaggering through the town centre streets with a can of lager in the one hand and a bull mastiff on a string in the other. They aren’t out looking for a job or a chance in life let alone a wash. They are just looking to do you over, nick your stuff, sell you stolen stuff and drugs, take the next drugs and collect the next dole. The attendant girls aren’t much better, shrieking complicit harpies who will all end up looking grey and faded round the edges, kicking dirty nappies out of the way to feed the dog in the kitchen of their two bedroom basic box flat on the grim estate where everything has been broken if it can’t be stolen. [...]