Way down in the hole

Now I’ve heard it all! The Tories quoting the Wire as their authority in arguing that British society is “broken” is just fabulous. Just where has Chris Grayling been if he thinks that anywhere in the UK approximates to life (and death) in the projects in West Baltimore? He has of course missed the whole point of the show whose central point is that the so called “War on Drugs” is corrupting and defiling US inner cities from the top to the bottom. Sadly this is a thesis that the Tories are unlikely to put their name to. Actually the Wire is a more sensible metaphor for where the Tories might take us if/when they come to power. If they continue to push their selfish and privatised view of society on us and increase even further the gap between those who have and those who have not then something like the Hobbesian world of Baltimore with its war of all against all could come to pass. Lets keep this devil way down in the hole

Giles Fraser on this morning's Thought for the Day (Today Radio 4) commented on the Catholic church's rather silly condemnation of social networking sites like Facebook and My Space. He introduced an interesting distinction between what he called "thick" communities and "thin" communities. Noting that the type of community prioritised in the Church and government's thinking is "thick" community - highly homogenous and exclusive "congregations"- he explicitly compared these to a rural village communiuty with a pub and a church where the village worships together. He saw cities as places with a thinner notion of community but where a much wider and more diverse population could still fit in, find their place and feel at home. Quite rightly he highlighted the need for both types of interaction with virtual communities and social networking sites being vital as part of the thinner type of interaction especially for those who feel excluded or who seek to interact with others in ways that do not centre on geograhical space or "neighbourhood" but rather on other facets of people's identities.

As Libby Brooks said in last weeks Guardian (1/6/09): “It is hard to decide what to object to most in the draft welfare reform bill. Perhaps it should be the clause allowing for the abolition of the fundamental state safety net of income support, or the privatisation of back-to-work services that will benefit only shareholders. Maybe it's the requirement that single parents with children as young as three should be available for "work-related activity" or face sanctions, with the adequacy of childcare provision to be judged by a jobcentre adviser. Others might choose the piloting of "work for your benefits" schemes, which will undercut the minimum wage, offering as little as £1.73 an hour to claimants who have been unemployed for more than two years.”
Brooks is right that this is an appalling attack on what remains of the benefits system at precisely a time when there are less and less jobs to bully claimants into. One might have thought that the Labour Party would still have some residual pride in its creation of the welfare state. However its attacks on legal aid and welfare benefits betray New Labour as a very different kind of animal to the traditional Labour Party of the 20th Century. Now that the architect of the draft Bill, James Purnell, has left the Department of Work and Pensions under such unhappy circumstances, we might have hoped that his successor Yvette Cooper might find more useful things to do with her time. No such luck – there is really no difference between Blairites and Brownites in their shared desire to destroy (or reform as they tend to call it) key elements of the welfare state.

So here we have Nick Griffin using the old nostalgia about community to bolster his racist arguments (interview with the Independent 14/6/09). More worrying still he happily quotes Kate Gavron's book the New East End in support of these views. This confirms my earlier arguments that this book with its nostalgic and communitarian perspective would do nothing but give ammunition for racists (see previous posts):
"Historically, in the 1970s I spent a lot of time in the old east end with the old community, and it was a wonderful place: poor, rough and ready but extraordinarily hospitable and really good people with an identity of their own, most of those people, some of them are still there, and according to that book, the new east end by Katy Gavron, there's an enormous amount of really bitter hostility in the old white east end towards mass immigration they don't even vote for us. They're so alienated by the process they simply don't bother".

Yes the Poison Dwarf has gone! Hazel Blears the so-called "Minister for Communities" has resigned and with characteristic chutzpah has attempted to project her resignation as an attack on Brown rather than the abject and embarrassing reaction to her expenses involvement that it really is. She says that she wants to return to political activity and community work in the Salford area. God help the people of Salford who have enough problems as it is

With tomorrow's elections and the feared success for the BNP it is worth thinking about how we might really get to grips with the underlying causes of racism. New Labour has for far too long colluded with Migration Watch and the the Red Top newspapers to blame racist attitudes on immigrants or immigration (Blame the victim - it is always popular!). This is of course because they refuse to take the radical steps to attack poverty and inequality which are the real predictors of racist attitudes. The rise in racism and support for the BNP mirrors the degree to which the Labour party and the wider labour movement has neglected or even betrayed its base by promoting inequality at both extremes of the spectrum - rich and poor. In a brilliant letter to the Guardian in January (5/1/09) Professor Peter Latchford shows how the terms in which we talk about racism often set it out in ways that actually "perpetuate the divisions between groups of people." We tend to "focus on semantic niceties, rather than on the deep rooted fundamentals". The rest of his letter bears being quoted in full:
"We do know this: that being poor is a better predictor of negative attitudes to other groups - including other races - than is being white (or black, or Asian). We know that people who feel unable to influence things in their area are more likely to feel resentful towards people they see as being different from themselves. We know that people who live among, and have friends from, different backgrounds are more likely to feel that society is cohesive. There may well be an issue with the disempowered, isolated and impoverished white working class and their attitudes to immigration, race and integration. But the facts are clear: the cause of the issue is not whiteness, or even immigration - the real challenge to a cohesive society is disempowerment, isolation and impoverishment as experienced by any ethnic group.
To describe the issue as "white working class" may be a necessarily emotive media and political device, but it runs the risk of perpetuating one key myth: the myth that breakdowns in cohesion result principally from differences between races."

Not only is this bang on the money but notice he has said such an important thing without any recourse to the blancmange term "community". Whereas alot of the communitarians (Young, Putnam etc) who love nothing better than to blame the victim would have used the word community in at least two conflicting ways here: the geographical sense - for the "areas" in which people live and the population group ("backgrounds") that they are defined as coming from.

It is worth noting again that community is a word that is seldom used to describe middle class areas or population groups. It is usually used as a subtle way of "othering" particular groups. Frida Pinto the star of Slumdog Millionaires makes this quite clear when talking about her native Mumbai society. "We don't call them slums we call them communities" she says.

Paul Cotterill has drawn the following quote to my attention:
‘As a political term,community - like freedom, equality and democracy - tends to mean what politicians want it to mean. ‘The community’ is invoked like a muse, to provide political cover, to imply democratic legitimacy, and to sweeten the pill….For socialists, the lack of a clear meaning for the term community is more than semantic. The confusion creates a barrier to devising policies which are in line with our values.’
Very nicely put, but you might be suprised by whom. ……big drum roll……..
Yes,it’s Hazel Blears (2003) Communities in Control: Public services and local socialism (London; Fabian Society).
Thanks Paul!
So why has she and her Department come out with such unadulterated rubbish about "community cohesion" since this quote was written? As she says the terms provides political cover. The cover provided by the term is impossible for New Labour to resist as it allows them to get away with facile discussions that avoid any real challenge at the level of class or inequality. New Labour has become little more than the Mandelson view (which is little different from Thatcherism) that the political and other elites getting filthy rich at the top is a good thing and that any attempt to rein in their wealth is a threat to "enterprise" and thus to us all. This is rubbish as the recent book Spirit Level shows brilliantly.

I'm with Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai (Observer 30/5/09) on this one:
"the elites have become predators, self-serving and only turning to people when they need them. We can never all be equal, but we can ensure that we do not allow excessive poverty or wealth. Inequality breeds insecurity"