The following about the UK might be of interest to Futureworkers:
GOOD BOOK:
Nick Davies
Dark Heart, The Shocking Truth about Hidden Britain
Chatto and Windus, London
ISBN 0 701 16351 8
£16.99 (hbk)
pp 306
Filed under 'fiction' in the large bookshop where I found it,
that is where this book may unfortunately remain for many
academics. Worse as far as they are concerned, it is written
by an investigative journalist without references,
bibliography, statistical tables or a single use of the word
'discourse'.
In its succession of human interest stories - following the
short career of a strangled 16 year old from playground to
street, finding evidence in the debris of a fatal housefire of
the thousands living by candlelight disconnected from
electricity they cannot afford, tracing the connections in the
lives of one family between crack cocaine and gangster
violence - there is no pretence at pseudo-scientific
objectivity. It is unashamedly partisan.
With its quotations from Booth and Mayhew, it follows in the
tradition of middle-class commentators on the conditions of
the poor and as such it will be condescendingly dismissed by
those who imagine that their supposed understanding of society
somehow makes them not 'middle class' themselves.
Moreover, the book is politically incorrect in admitting to
the epidemic of child abuse raging in many poor white
communities or that 'numerous young black people.. have
succumbed to a life that is infested with drugs and pimping
and crime' rather than joining 'well-meaning defenders of the
poor [who] mask the truth about what is happening [and] insist
on being positive'.
And yet, it is all here. Everything is sustained by ample
evidence. A complete picture of 'the hidden country of the
poor' is built up from individual witnesses, like the woman
driven from her home by hooded hordes of spitting youths
because she made a stand against their joy-riding and
burglary. Her story is then contrasted with that of the youths
themselves whose lives had been emptied of purpose to the
extent that 'the nearest they have to role models are junk
heroes from pulp fiction', living and acting like objects.
Beginning with the author's conversation with two twelve year-
old boys selling themselves outside a public toilet in
Nottingham, the book maps the wasteland of Britain today. At
its dark heart are the battered council housing estates of a
hundred cities but its borders encompass also the rural poor
of Sussex and Gloucester, abandoned mining areas and the ports
of forgotten fishing fleets.
The journey that the book takes the reader on is one that is
above all well written as the best of journalism. There is no
abstruse theoretical posturing, methodological apparatus or
other tortuous academicisms. Expert testimony comes from
outreach GPs, social and youth workers, teachers and others
who know at first hand what they are talking about.
Statistical support comes from reports for local councils,
civil servants, university departments of social
administration, national charities, international economic
surveys. Even though not listed in a formal bibliography, all
can be followed up for further information.
These statistics show remarkable agreement that the end of
full employment and the dismantling of the welfare state had
by the late 1990s reduced nearly 14 million men, women and
children, not merely to relative but to breadline poverty.
Many in this country of the poor are malnourished and
destitute. This absolute poverty is however relative to a
carnival of conspicuous consumption in the rest of British
society which has grown richer during the same period. This is
'poverty on a scale.. and of a kind that has never been seen
before'.
On the basis of these figures and the individual stories
illustrating them, Davies advances what is also too often
absent from academic texts, a simple and total explanation for
the human tragedy that he describes and for the ignorance of
it in the everyday life and perceptions of the majority of the
population. Simply, through ending progressive taxation and
selling shares in public utilities, 'the new wealth of the
rich was paid for entirely by the new poverty of the poor'.
This explains also damage worse even than the maelstrom of
emotional conflict and physical deprivation to which the poor
are subjected. Davies calls this spiritual damage and it is
symbolised by the closure of so many churches - 'as if the
church weren't interested in the people any more'. For this is
'a two-way relationship. A mainstream society that is losing
its humanity is willing to create a poor country.. as
deliberately as the great penal colony of Australia was
planned and created by politicians in London nearly two
centuries ago.. but the destruction which sweeps through this
undiscovered country then causes a new cycle of damage to the
affluent.'
The new middle-working class lives in disdain and fear of the
new poor 'underclass' into which accident or illness,
redundancy or the lack of sufficient qualifications and
connections can so easily pitch them. Thus human values are
replaced by economic ones, commercialising human relations and
reducing individuals to objectified commodities. So in
brothels and other torture chambers which are the 'perfect
symbol of exploitation', the rich directly and physically
exploit the poor, 'encapsulating the truth about their
relationship'.
This reality is overtly endorsed by theories that are now
politically mainstream and which blame the poor for their own
poverty. In particular, 'Labour thinking takes no account of
the damage which has been inflicted on the poor in the past
twenty years'. Indeed, the government explicitly endorses Mrs
Thatcher's achievements and shares the same ignorance of their
consequences, not realising for instance that 'To cut the
benefits of young people is like running a recruitment
campaign for the nation's drug networks'.
Consequently, as Davies concludes, 'There is no crusade
against poverty in Britain. No leading politician demands full
employment.. or insists that the wealth which was taken from
the poor should now be returned. There is only the immense
jabber of the powerful who are surrounded by the victims of
their affluence and who yet continue to know nothing of the
undiscovered country of the poor.'
This book is a counterblast against that immense jabbering. As
such it is a lesson to us all.
1,000 words end
