When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (19 page)

Detective Chief Inspector Alec Ross, picked to run a pilot scheme in Southwark that will formalize the new policing priorities, said: ‘We have tried everything except standing on our heads to get people to look after their property. The vast majority may not actually invite burglars in, but they don't take the slightest precaution – they have inadequate locks and leave their windows open. They might just as well have a revolving sign outside. It is the same with handbags; they leave them open on shop counters and walk away. Even now, people are just not sufficiently aware how prevalent crime is.' Several times since the Second World War the Metropolitan Police have reorganized their resources to cope with the reality of being able to tackle only a decreasing proportion of crime committed. When Mr Ross's pilot scheme is complete, effort will be devoted according to a points system based on each crime's solvability. The value of the crime will be far less important when deciding whether to follow it up than the chances of catching the perpetrator. The practice, said Mr Ross, is similar to that employed by doctors during the Vietnam war, when some seriously injured victims were simply injected with morphine and left to die. With fewer police hours being ‘wasted' on hopeless cases, between six and seven hundred beat police will be freed to return to the streets, which accords with public priorities.

Mr Ross was cruelly blunt about policing areas like North Peckham where, he said, society had withdrawn its support for the police, inevitably abandoning the weak and innocent to the law of the jungle. ‘The police on their own will never win. If people will not report the crimes they see and are not prepared to come forward as witnesses, the police are unable to do anything. Even if a policeman is witness to a crime himself, he often can do little without the victim's cooperation. It is a gradual slide downhill. If you back away and back away, you'll get trodden on. If you want the benefits and privileges of belonging to a society, you've got to be willing to stand up and be counted.'

Once cooperation has been withdrawn, said Mr Ross, there is little point even in having policemen on patrol. You might as well have cardboard cut-outs, he said. Like dead men propped against the ramparts of the fort, they don't fool the people inside. Even policemen will eventually pick up their wages and look the other way; it is very difficult, said Mr Ross, to keep up the morale of officers when there is no public ‘thank you'. If the public are not for them, it is the same as being against them. ‘Once the police have lost consent, they have lost everything. The only other way is military-style policing, which is not acceptable in this country,' he added.

Non-cooperation takes two forms. There is the refusal of the criminals themselves and their associates to have anything to do with the police – Dr Ware, of the intensive care unit at King's College Hospital, said that even victims of internecine warfare who have been ‘nigh unto death' will not help the police – and the fear that silences the vast majority like Mrs ‘Smith'. I knew what Mr Ross was saying, and sympathize with the police predicament, but in the end society must have a responsibility to the Mrs Smiths which cannot be rationalized away. There is no neat divide between the control of crime and public order. Constant, unchecked criminality destabilizes communities like North Peckham, softening them up for riot and disorder. Mr Ross saw the inner cities in guerrilla terms; if left alone long enough, eventually the criminals have enough confidence to come out and fight in the open.

What, I asked him, had gone wrong? Was it Tebbit's ‘wickedness'? Alice Coleman's architecture? Thatcherism? Mr Ross had time for Professor Coleman, and acknowledged that both left and right perceptions of the roots of crime were important. But he added: ‘It is so much easier to destroy than to build. Politicians spend all their time tearing each other down; no one wants to build a blooming thing. People who should be leading are fighting one another. There's a terrible lack of someone standing up to say what has gone wrong.' He was scornful of the justice system. ‘The authorities have an abject terror of punishing anyone. They say that the inevitability of detection is the deterrent, but that means very little to the class of individual who is regularly committing crime. The first five or six times he is arrested he may not even go to court. He may be thoroughly amazed when he is finally dealt with,' he said. However, he added, the prisons are full of the wrong people. It is scarcely a punishment for inadequates, for whom ‘it is akin to heaven to have a warm, clean bed, clothing, three meals a day and be told what to do.' For many others, it is a relief to have their overwhelming responsibilities temporarily removed and everything looked after. A probation officer told me that most south London criminals he knew were quite prepared to spend one third of their adult lives locked up, so long as they were ‘someone' for the other two thirds – a name, a face, with a thick roll of banknotes in their back pockets. ‘You're not anyone,' he said, ‘unless you're hard, a Jack the lad.'

Increasingly, inner-city crime is committed to get money for drugs. Paul Hayes, who heads a team of probation officers in the New Kent Road, said that when he came to London in the late seventies, drug-taking had been confined to middle-class drop-outs – ‘left-over hippies and eternal students'. Now, he said, it was relatively usual for working-class kids to be using heroin. It was cheaper than it had been, and was smoked rather than injected. Unemployment, social dislocation and hopelessness made it an attractive option – ‘those may be clichés, but just because someone has said something forty-three times doesn't make it untrue.' Crime, he argued, was deeply affected by the prevailing social conditions. In the thirties in poverty-stricken places like Jarrow – often cited by those of the Tebbit tendency who believe there is more innate evil today than there was then – nearly everyone was out of work, and those with a job were very poor also. Now, not only is there more to steal but it is more accessible. An affluent lifestyle is being lived in front of people who have nothing; it is not hidden fifty or a hundred miles away. Someone on £28 a week supplementary benefit may live next door to someone earning over £200. Even in Liverpool, from where Mr Hayes comes, there are ‘flash' clubs and shops. If you're seventeen or eighteen and want ‘to pull a few birds', you've got to buy the right drinks and wear the right shirts. Crime is really the only source for that kind of income. The majority of people with whom probation officers deal would prefer, said Mr Hayes, to be in work than out of it, and there was still semi-skilled or unskilled work available. The black economy, he argued, was a subsidy for employers, rather than a fiddle for the workers, since in certain jobs an employer assumes workers are claiming benefit, and pays lower accordingly.

Mr Hayes was thoroughly cynical about what he considered to be the Conservative manipulation of the law and order issue. The rhetoric might be quite tough, but the policy was liberal. The ‘short sharp shock' introduced by William Whitelaw when he was Home Secretary, for example, had been meted out to young offenders since the war. Whitelaw had simply been pandering to the Conservative notion that life in borstal was soft. Leon Brittan announced that parole for violent sex and drug offenders would be restricted to the last few months of their sentences, thereby guaranteeing good ‘tough' headlines. At the same time he was making arrangements to let virtually everyone else out on parole. There was permanent juggling, said Mr Hayes, between the rhetoric and the reality.

If the government had the resources to build an airfield in the Falklands, it could easily run up a few more prisons, he said. If Conservatives genuinely believed that jailing more people for longer would reduce crime, it would be their duty to lock them up to fulfil the government's primary responsibility for the safety and well-being of society. ‘In reality it isn't done because it wouldn't work, and they know it,' he said.

What then would work? The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question has almost an answer for each dollar. My time in and around North Peckham taught me that none of them is mutually exclusive. The walkways must come down; people must be given homes and not prison blocks to live in; the police must be returned to the streets; teenagers must be instilled with purpose – there are jobs, at least in London; police chiefs must keep their itchy fingers away from their new military-style equipment. The danger lies in the ‘no go' mentality. American cities that have refurbished their downtown areas have wrought minor miracles: the same is beginning to be true in Liverpool. The city has to be for all its people: crumbling council properties only streets away from gentrification schemes are a recipe for social disaster. Dave Sutherland's nightmare of ‘welfare housing' would signal that Britain had abandoned the post-war drive towards equality of opportunity.

On my last day at North Peckham the sun was shining. As I left one front door to step onto a walkway, I ran into about ten kids playing on bicycles. ‘Watch out, Alan,' said a child, ‘you ran over the man's foot.' Two policemen were threading their way amiably between the children. It was a thoroughly reassuring scene. As in many other areas of life, we have, I suspect, a crucial last chance. In this case, getting it wrong means armoured cars, water cannon and tear gas increasingly deployed on the streets of our major cities, abandoning Mrs Smith to a world beyond the protection of law and order, and leaving tens of thousands of children to grow up in seriously impoverished communities.

In an estate agent's temporary office in Shad Thames, a few yards from where Dickens put Bill Sykes to death, there was a scale model in a glass case. It showed the Anchor Brewhouse, a late Victorian brewery immediately south of Tower Bridge, which – in the early summer of 1987 – was being converted into thirty apartments which ranged in price from £270,000 to £2,500,000. The flats were being sold as fast as they could be constructed – negotiations had opened on the most expensive one, which was not due for occupation for another fifteen months – and a minority of buyers were simply making an investment, never intending to live there, owning the flat only until it was finished and then selling it for a yet greater price. They were dealing in luxury apartment ‘futures'. Given that certain classes in London were flush with money, I could understand the prices. What did catch my attention was that the sales model itself had cost £12,000, which, in certain parts of the country I had lately been visiting, could have put an adequate (if small) roof over a family's head. The agent – I had declared myself as a scribbler rather than a purchaser – showed me a three-storey apartment at the top of what had been the brewery boiler house valued at one million pounds. It had three outside terraces, and from the top floor the Tower of London was exactly framed between the towers of Tower Bridge. A bed had been constructed on top of a head-high construction which housed the lift workings. You mounted it by means of a short ladder. Lying there, the future purchaser will have a panoramic view of some of the world's most celebrated buildings.

From a balcony on the other side, the near view was of feverish development beneath four giant red cranes. ‘It's going to be another Mayfair,' said the estate agent happily. Dust-covered navvies – shortly to sink several lunchtime pints in the Anchor Inn on Horselydown Lane – were constructing a mock Georgian square, which will include more highly priced flats, the inevitable wine bars, and a ‘grocery shop' to be run by Laura Blond, the small, dark-haired wife of publisher Anthony Blond. ‘Mrs Blond,' enthused that month's
Tatler
, ‘will prepare rillettes, terrines, quiches, odeons sculpted from ice and fascinia sculpted from root vegetables to sate local yuppies.' Husband and wife were pictured – he, modestly described by the
Tatler
as ‘the novelist, publisher, bon viveur and thinker', in what looked like a white grocer's coat and a back to front Martini apron – clasping a basket loaded with sandwiches and wine bottles. In the background were the cranes, the brew house and Tower Bridge.

Looking up from the splendours to be, I saw on the skyline some familiar structures – long, low barracks, the outlines of which cut through the summer haze that lay across south London. They were, I realized – consulting the agent about which way the Old Kent Road ran – my stamping ground of the previous few weeks, North Peckham, Gloucester Grove and their linked estates, London's ‘no go' territory. On long, hot summer evenings, sometime in the future, brew house tenants will be able to shift their sights from the Tower of London and watch the smoke rise over Peckham.

Even nearer to hand, perhaps taking a stroll before enjoying Mrs Blond's gourmet comestibles, our future tenants will find dozens of destitute people. Along the length of Tooley Street, which runs at right-angles to Tower Bridge Road, they lie every few yards, drunk on the steps of banks, on benches, on pavements – one youngish man with dark hair and heavy stubble, looking weak and exhausted, like a cholera victim close to death. The favourite spot is a tiny park between Tooley Street and Queen Elizabeth Street, over which a bust of Ernest Bevin, in waistcoat and open jacket – black, heavily streaked with green – presides. ‘The Dockers' KC', reads the plaque. ‘A forceful and inspiring leader of democratic principles, he gained a place in men's hearts few could equal.' Beneath him a dozen or so down-and-outs drank cheap cider; one, a massive woman, whose gargantuan breasts spilled over the top of her filthy blue dress, had a hand on a pushchair in which sat a small child. The rubbish basket had long since been overwhelmed by beer cans, wine and cider bottles. Smashed glass shimmered underfoot, like the first fall of snow. There could have been no more ironic juxtaposition than between Bevin and his aspirations for the British poor, and the human flotsam beneath his bronze gaze.

Many who are not homeless live in fairly wretched conditions in the Tower Bridge area. Southwark Council had to abandon a scheme to modernize (and make more secure) several large blocks on Tooley Street for lack of money. Neighbouring Lambeth Council took action that week to deter ‘yuppies' from buying converted flats in their borough. They passed a measure protecting large houses from conversion – one-bedroomed flats had been fetching £46,000; restricting the number of flats that could be carved out of one property; and requiring the provision of off-street parking if more than three flats were created. The divide between two Britains is far more clearly demarcated a few hundred yards from the Thames than it is by that notional boundary, the river Trent.

I asked the estate agent whether they had ‘political' problems, creating luxury so close to squalor, and bearing in mind that Southwark had a left-wing administration. Had anyone come marching by, demanding ‘Rich trash and yuppy scum out'? No, he replied. People understood they were creating homes out of what had been derelict industrial land – the brewery closed in 1968. We had moved to a flat on offer for £580,000 in a warehouse next to the brew house – two bedrooms, jacuzzi, balcony over the Thames, original brickwork and beams. He was anxious to know whether I thought the flats offered value for money. Bearing in mind the escalation of prices in my own suburban area, I answered truthfully, ‘Yes.' Since the world had been turned upside-down, such money for a luxury flat in a south London warehouse was certainly no crazier than £250,000 for a semi-detached in Richmond-upon-Thames or £45,000 for the top half of an LCC overspill house in Slough.

I found I had returned to a society that was flaunting wealth in a way the rich had considered unseemly in the post-war years. Greed (and with it peacock-like ostentation) had become acceptable. Before his disgrace, American arbitrageur Ivan Boesky told New York business students: ‘Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.' It was the saying of 1987. (‘Boesky' is surely destined for the dictionary alongside ‘Rachman' as eponymous words for the evils of the late twentieth century.) Such greed, however, had a philosophical/political underpinning in Reaganism and Thatcherism, dignified for public consumption as ‘supply-side economics'. By making vast sums, the rich generated economic activity, which eventually helped everyone, therefore one was performing a public service by becoming (or, in most British cases, already being) very rich and was quite entitled to feel good about it. Those less enamoured with the theory call it ‘trickle-down' economics, and are frequently cynical about how far the trickle reaches. Supply-siders consider that ‘trickle-downers' suffer from a further condition – ‘the politics of envy'.

The consequence of the new philosophy appeared to be the unabashed spending of money, and rewards for certain classes of people that so distorted the value system that they threatened social stability: while young nurses lived on ‘peanuts', the City of London's ‘Big Bang' had propelled a not particularly productive class of young person towards six-figure salaries; while a civil engineer might earn £15,000 a year, a foreign-currency dealer, without any formal qualifications, could earn ten times that much. These were not, as some of the defenders of these high salaries argued, special people like sports or pop stars, but people with quick wits and fairly readily acquired trading skills. The ease with which they made their money devalued it, not least in their own eyes, and commercial morality therefore declined. If money could be come by so easily, it could be no big deal, so cheating to obtain more was scarcely a crime, more a little bending of the rules. The days of ‘my word is my bond' – suspicious as people outside the City may have been of them at the time – now appeared as a lost age of high probity.

What seemed to have happened – rather as ‘bad' tenants on ‘no go' estates had influenced the good with their anti-social habits – was that the easy accumulation of wealth by the none-too-scrupulous had lowered the standards of those who had always had serious money. The children of people who once believed in
noblesse oblige
were now happy to get rotten drunk daily on champagne, to indulge in expensive drug abuse, and to flaunt their scorn of the less fortunate.

There were various straws in the wind shortly after I returned. Four ‘Hooray Henrys' exposed themselves as sybaritic, spoiled drones in a hilarious television programme entitled ‘The Fishing Party'. They gorged themselves on oysters and champagne beneath the chandeliers of an expensive London restaurant, and went aboard a fishing boat from which they shot seagulls, while crudely expounding their right-wing views of the world. One or two of them worked, but one of the others said bluntly: ‘Work and myself do not get along.' There were two reasons to get married – to have children, who would naturally be dispatched to boarding school as quickly as possible, and to have a chauffeuse when you were drunk. One said: ‘The loyalty of a dog is fantastic; no matter how many times you kick it, it will always be back. Dogs are more bloody useful than women.' They regarded the unemployed as a threat – ‘to security, to stability, to law and order' – and suggested that the armed forces might be concerned if Labour won the next election. They were in favour of capital punishment, even if there was the odd mistake, and one at least was prepared to carry it out himself. They were crude, talking of ‘stuffing hand grenades up arses', snobbish, boorish, and jingoistic – ‘the English, the English, the English are the best, so up with the English and down with the rest'. And one, at least, earned his money in the City in the commodities futures market – ‘selling something you haven't got in anticipation of buying it back cheaper. You never, of course, take delivery.'

At the same time, Rupert Deen, a man of similar ilk as the fishing party, was filmed by Yorkshire Television taking a bubble bath while his butler served him a Bloody Mary. He declared, ‘workers should work for the likes of myself. You shouldn't give women and workers the vote. Voting should be limited to people like myself. I don't even pretend to work, though some of my friends do.' Mr Deen's life was contrasted with that of a Yorkshire miner, who, asserted Mr Deen, should pay the government for the privilege of digging coal. Mr Deen guyed the part to some extent – he did work as an insurance underwriter – but the Russians, at least, took him at face value, and bought the programme to use as anti-British propaganda.

Olivia Channon, daughter of Cabinet minister Paul Channon and one of the many wealthy scions of the Guinness family, certainly wasn't hamming it up. In the summer of 1986 she was found dead from an overdose of heroin and alcohol in Christ Church, Oxford, on the night after finals. Her death revealed the existence of a smallish group of well-connected and very rich undergraduates – centred on the bizarre figure of the German Count Gottfried von Bismarck – who appeared to have no sense of responsibility to themselves or anyone else. I went to Oxford the following day. I found that members of the set seldom took part at the Oxford Union, in drama or university journalism – activities that their fathers' generation of the well-connected and well-heeled pursued ambitiously. ‘These are not,' said one activist undergraduate, ‘the baby Cabinet ministers. They are people you don't know. Their credo is: “we're rich, and we'll have what we want.” They represent a backlash against what people expect of students.' It was a male-dominated culture, centred on dining clubs, dedicated to drunkenness and upper-class yobbishness. Election to one club was marked by the smashing up of the new members' college rooms. A woman undergraduate who had recently attended a party on the fringes of the set, said: ‘It's fairly hideous upmarket hooliganism. I was shocked, shocked. There was a lot of cocaine on offer.' This set, said another student, revelled in illegality: ‘Anything that is the opposite of their upbringing is singled out for reverence. Their fascination with drugs is part and parcel of this. It is a point of honour to show a cynical lack of concern for the problematic aspects of contemporary life.' The
Sun
produced some fairly plausible figures showing that a fully participating Hooray Henry would need a tax-free income of £48,000 to maintain the sort of life led by the upper-class hooligans. The Dean of Christ Church, the Very Revd Eric Heaton, rolled his eyes, gripped his sherry, and said: ‘Brideshead! We're far too near London. Cambridge is jolly lucky to be out in the blasted fens.'

In London, a few months after Miss Channon's death, two enterprising teenagers joined forces to make serious money out of the prevailing hedonism. Jeremy Taylor, whose family owns the house featured in the television series ‘To the Manor Born', and Eddie Davenport, described by a friend as ‘dynamic social gatherings organizer and man about town', hit on the idea of running balls for the
jeunesse dorée
that were free of the oversight of the ‘wrinklies'. They hired the biggest venues in London, and publicized the balls through a magazine called the
Gatecrasher
, which was circulated in public schools – to ‘rich' young people, Mr Davenport emphasized when we met at the Fulham house that serves as their office. Charging between twelve and twenty pounds a ticket for up to two thousand teenagers a time – one ball grew into three balls on consecutive nights, so great was the demand – they grossed £500,000 in their first year of operation, of which £100,000 was profit. Their dances had such titles as the ‘Terror Ball' and ‘Chaos at Christmas', so no one could be under any illusion that mummies would be watching from little gilt chairs. Mr Taylor revealed the spirit of the enterprise in his
Gatecrasher
notes on the social year 1986: ‘All the Sloanes went on their yearly trip to the Badminton Horse Trials, many were disappointed when the bars closed in the afternoon, and the competition seemed to be to see how few horses you could see during the day, and how many pints of lager or gin and tonics you could drink.' After the ‘Midsummer Mayhem Ball', he reported, ‘most people flew off to their summer villas to tan themselves.'