When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (18 page)

For most tenants, there was only one issue – security. Seven years earlier, when Mr Sutherland came to North Peckham, there was the occasional mugging. Now fear of burglary and attack was a constant preoccupation; most of the danger was perceived as coming from squatters within the estate. Some of the squatters, he said, were very violent, unpleasant people. ‘Why,' I asked, ‘didn't the council reassign tenancies fast, so that squatters didn't get the opportunity to move in?' He laughed. Many tenants, 70 per cent of whom receive some form of housing benefit, owe large arrears and do a midnight flit. Squatters can be in within half an hour; sometimes they pay the departing tenant for the key. Many councillors are sympathetic to the squatters – some were darkly suspected by officers of handing out addresses of vacant homes. The council itself has to go by the book, obtaining repossession orders through the courts. Two months is a minimum for that process. ‘We can't just employ heavies to throw them out,' said Mr Sutherland.

The council has few sanctions against defaulting tenants, whose attitude often is that if they are evicted they can only go somewhere better: it has an obligation under the Homeless Persons Act to house most of those who are likely to be evicted. A family can be thrown out in the morning and in a new council property by the afternoon. It could perhaps be argued that some of them were intentionally homeless because they ‘wilfully' refused to pay rent, but that might mean the break-up of a family and taking children into care, which – social considerations aside – would cost Southwark more than letting the family live rent-free.

Mr Sutherland did not entirely share the Alice Coleman thesis. North Peckham, he said, could be a pleasant place to live if you could hand-pick the tenants, but there were some families whose poor behaviour infected the rest. The theory was that you tried to put such a family amongst ‘good' families, hoping that they would improve through the example of their neighbours. In reality, the ‘good' families gave up. For a while they might tidy up the rubbish chutes and even sweep and wash the walkways, but battling against such odds eventually proved too much. The ‘trendy' view, said Mr Sutherland, is that it is all down to the environment – ‘some, I'm afraid, would not respond.'

But I did visit some homes in which after a few minutes I forgot the surrounding problems. Mrs Kemi Ogunleye from Nigeria had an immaculate home, decorated with artificial flowers and religious texts. Above the living-room door a gold-on-red notice proclaimed: ‘Christ is the head of this house, the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation.' She had recently apprehended a gang of four- to six-year-olds who had burgled her home. They had been spotted on the walkways wearing stolen hair slides, but the money and more valuable jewellery they took was never recovered. It was her fourth burglary, and she now kept an Alsatian. Someone had been taking it for a walk when the children broke in, which, she said, was fortunate, ‘because the dog might have killed them.' Mrs Ogunleye never allowed her two daughters out except to go somewhere specific like choir practice or the dramatic society. She blamed lack of parental discipline for the vandalism and crime – mum and dad at the pub while children roamed the walkways. ‘Children will boast to you, “We're under age, they can't jail us,”' she said.

Mrs ‘Jones' is a bus driver's wife. Sitting in her sunny kitchen, with its microwave oven, pine furniture and wine bottles on the side, one might have been in a private housing development in Wimbledon. She and her husband had brought up two children on the estate, one of whom is now a shipping clerk and the other a secretary. She believed that the reason why young people hadn't got jobs was because half of them didn't want them. I met a man with a longish criminal record who is permanently in work, and has changed jobs frequently, proving they are available. However, it is certainly harder for black people to get employment. At first, like Mrs ‘Smith', Mrs Jones had considered herself to be extremely lucky to have a North Peckham home. But, by the time I met her, she would have moved if she could have found a suitable alternative. ‘If we could pick this flat up and move it elsewhere, we would,' she said wistfully. ‘As people move out, those who take their place are not half so nice. They don't care how they live, and they cause the noise and the dirt. Even the “problem” families are getting fussy and don't want to move here.' There had been an attempt to encourage people like art students and schoolteachers to move into North Peckham. In one case I heard of, one of several young women sharing a flat was severely raped, and after psychiatric treatment was recuperating with her parents. Her flatmates had fled. Mrs Jones had been burgled once and ‘mugged' once. A well-dressed man had stopped her near her front door to ask directions. He had snatched her necklace, leaving a small bruise at the nape of her neck. Now when Mrs Jones goes out, she wears no jewellery and leaves her bag behind. When the flat is empty, the family hide their valuables, leaving a few pounds and some ornaments out in the hope that intruders will not ransack the flat.

Life had a permanently nostalgic quality for many people I met. Two middle-aged school cleaners looked back to before they were rehoused as if to a golden age. They remembered helping drive cattle to a local butcher's shop, and watching a blacksmith at work. ‘I'm sorry now we didn't buy our houses. Only needed £100 for a deposit, but we hadn't got £100.' (Needless to say that if they had, they would now be sitting on small fortunes.) Out of twenty-five flats in their block, four had recently been burgled. Said one: ‘I don't think a woman is safe on the streets at night. When I was a child, I never heard of anyone being attacked. I think we was more happy then. We used to go singing and skipping along the streets. The most crime was when a girl got in the family way. I have walked home from Piccadilly of a night time.' Children, they believed inevitably, no longer respect their parents. Both women, now in their late fifties, said they would still never answer their own mothers back. Punishments had lost their potency. When they were children, being sent to bed early was being sent to a room with a bed and a chair and nothing else. ‘Now, it's like being sent to Curry's,' said one. Again, inevitably, they raised the question of race: ‘I'm not against foreigners. Don't get me wrong. But when I was a child, the only coloured man you saw was an Indian selling ties door to door. You'd say “first luck” when you saw him,' said one. They added that they didn't think people of their age would ever get used to immigrants, and complained that ‘we're not allowed to sing half our nursery rhymes now.' One said: ‘I have two boys in the Navy. When they go to other people's countries, they have to abide by their rules.' A probation officer told me that one reason why Liberals were doing well in places like Bermondsey was because locals believed Labour was too much on the side of black people, espousing unpopular schemes like the renaming of streets after African nationalists.

That same day I was with another Southwark probation officer, Rod Gillespie, an ex-guardsman and ex-hotelier who was brought up in one of the streets demolished to make way for the North Peckham estate. He devoted much of his spare time to a boxing club off the Old Kent Road, and believed strongly that boxing can save kids from a life of crime. After fifteen years – eleven as a probation officer and four as a volunteer – on the front line, he argued that communities like North Peckham and Gloucester Grove were only kept stable by a class of people despised and dismissed on the political right as agents of the ‘nanny state'. These are the housing officers, the inner-city schoolteachers, the DHSS officials, the social workers, the beat policemen and the probation officers, who act as a ‘buffer' between the anger and frustration of the jobless, the badly housed and the hopeless and the wider society. He said: ‘Some argue “sack the lot, and it won't make a blind bit of difference,” but these people soak up the frustration, and without them the anger would come spilling over.' He feared that as conditions in the inner city continue to deteriorate, more of the better ‘buffers' will take themselves off to more congenial jobs. Eventually, the dispossessed will take it out on society more directly. Of all the theories as to why the present government not only survives, but appears to thrive with three million unemployed, Mr Gillespie's seemed as plausible as any. The British are slow to complain; by the time someone goes to a housing office he is probably pretty angry. When he reaches for a hammer to smash the head of the official on the other side of a desk, he has reached a state of blind fury, not with the individual, but with all the impersonal forces the official appears to represent and against which he feels utterly impotent. A riot is a collective spilling of that cathartic anger.

Father Austin Smith, a Catholic priest who lives in the heart of Liverpool 8 and for ten years was a chaplain at Walton Prison, said: ‘To the people a riot is ecstatic – mysticism on the margins of society. For the first time the “enemy” is in his sights, all lined up with its riot shields. They are no longer whispering about their frustrations.' Politicians pile into the riot zones in their limousines, telling the people, ‘violence will get you nowhere', their very presence denying the truth of their words. Some very unpleasant people will get to the top during a riot – he was later acquitted on appeal – but it is not they who cause the riot. As hopelessness increases, and the riots enhance the status of extremists, the ‘buffer' – which includes parents – has progressively less with which to negotiate, and negotiation in any case becomes less relevant.

This translates for the youth into a lack of trust in and respect for anyone in authority. According to a Southwark youth worker, ‘The youth have lost confidence both in the institutions and in themselves. They assume now that they are not going to get a job, and so don't try in the first place.' A young female colleague said she herself had ‘lost all oomph' between mock exams and O level. ‘Everyone got rebellious, starting asking what they were staying on at school for,' she said. Both of them worked for the Southwark Unemployment Youth Project, an organization that presumed its customers would never work, so concentrated on the individual's personal development. Youth work, as the Inner London Education Authority which sponsors the Southwark project recognizes, is no longer a question of providing table tennis and snooker. ‘The kids stay in bed all morning,' said one of the workers, ‘getting up at about one o'clock, and the night is the focus of everything that happens.' Seen through these workers' eyes, the Tebbitite refusal to make the connection between unemployment and crime is simply wilful. ‘Crime is going on everywhere,' they said, ‘it is a question of economics. When you take someone's possessions, you're imposing a tax on them.' Others described this redistribution as a ‘yuppie tax', which is somewhat romantic, since most of the victims of Peckham crime are at least as impoverished as the thieves.

Why, I asked them, had there been no uprising? It was like living in an earthquake zone, they replied, people get used to the shocks. Yet they were bitter about gentrification and luxury new developments in docklands. The words ‘wine bar' when lobbed into such a conversation have about the same effect as a hand grenade. Yuppies, they said, appeared to find it trendy to live on the fringes of working-class districts, so long as they did not have to suffer from working-class evils like crime. ‘You hear them say, “Oh it's really not too bad, not too many black people and it's pretty well policed, and the houses are not too bad.”' As jacuzzis are installed in working-class blocks of flats, extended families are broken up and crammed onto the shoddy estates. The shops move out to places like Lewisham and Croydon.

Drug-taking, they agreed, was getting ever worse, and some youth organizations were frightened of opening their doors because it was almost impossible to keep the pushers out. Cocaine made people feel super-fit. (They added that ‘many of the youth are now very physical, pumping iron and doing martial arts.') They said: ‘Five pounds will get you out of your brain,' and they said the pushers were replacing soft drugs with hard drugs to increase their profits. What about the police? ‘We treat them with acute suspicion,' said a white worker. It's outright war,' said a black colleague. They accused the police at best of being heavy-handed and insensitive; at worst, of being corrupt, taking backhanders to allow after-hours drinking, and even feeding confiscated drugs back on to the street. ‘You know when there is going to be a bust,' according to one worker, ‘because certain people are not on the street. They've been tipped off.'

A minority of residents on estates like North Peckham pose a twin threat to society – rampant crime on the one hand and potential civil disorder on the other – which leaves the police in a dilemma. Increasingly, concern with wider disorder is reducing the time, resources and attention given to crime. In some areas, 30 per cent of police training is dedicated to riot tactics and keeping the peace. A police chief's priority is to prevent riots on his territory, and the solving of routine crime is receiving less and less of his force's attention. In many areas the uniformed police will spend no more than ten minutes at the scene of a burglary, and even where there are substantial clues – a description of the thief by a neighbour or a footprint on a window sill – it is very unlikely that the CID will follow up. A householder's best chance of his burglary being ‘solved' is if the thief is caught red-handed elsewhere, and asks for his earlier offences to be ‘taken into consideration'. The police are far more likely to be seen in clusters outside football grounds, late at night in city centres or in shopping streets than singly or in pairs in residential areas. A senior policeman said: ‘When it comes to a breakdown in society, we have got to worry first about public order.' The onus now is on the householders themselves to protect their property, just as it was before there was a police force.