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Yes, in my backyard
Most illiterate six-year-olds can shriek `I'll have the law on you'.
Fine words butter no parsnips, as poor John Major used to say and as poor Tony Blair is beginning to discover. Talking about the miseries of the very poor, and threatening to demolish their high-rise hovels, is all very well, but it is neither radical nor practical enough. It is not enough just to pull down the ghettos. They must be broken up altogether. Nothing will be achieved by putting the unfortunate inhabitants back together into newer, better buildings, with newer, supposedly better services. That has been tried.
To rescue the underclass from their well-established cycles of despair, they must be dispersed, and they must be subjected to swamping, to use Margaret Thatcher's notorious expression, only swamping in reverse. The people who cannot cope must be rehoused, in small numbers, among large numbers of people who can, and who will not tolerate a tiny minority behaving destructively. Those without any social capital, to use the ghastly neologism, must be made to live among those who have a great deal.
I can easily imagine the howls of fury if such a thing were actually put forward. This is blatant social engineering , people would point out. And not in my backyard, they would say. I would reply that I do have it in my backyard, up to a point, and I think it could work much more widely. However much I and others on the political Right object to the incompetent dirigisme of state apparatchiks, most of us take a fairly good view of the charitable housing trusts that have grown up. They represent, to use the ghastly phrase again, social capital that we have built up freely for ourselves. Two such charities own properties on the communal garden in central London where I live, and offer very low-cost flats to people in difficulties.
One of these properties was bought recently by a trust set up by a Victorian philanthropist, which announced it was intending to house young people at low cost, including single mothers. This caused a great deal of consternation among us. Anxieties were expressed about loud music and light fingers and standards of behaviour generally; the garden depends on everyone observing strict conventions about noise and dogs and bicycles, and at one time we had all been upset by short-stay tenants playing loud rock music out of their back windows. Whatever next, we wondered. Used syringes among the syringa? Anxious phone calls were made to the charity that, it seemed, was about to destroy our middle-class urban idyll.
All these fears were groundless. Nothing has gone wrong. For the new tenants a great deal has gone right. They have a large and wonderful garden, with swings and climbing-frames for their children, and a place to have picnics and meet neighbours. But had something gone wrong, prevailing opinion here, and powerful, educated middle-class opinion too, would have put a stop to it. Loud noise, child abuse or neglect of the shrubs would have been dealt with in the time-honoured way, or (as New Labour would put it) by the expense of a little interest on the vast accumulated social capital of this well-established community. The place is crawling with doctors and lawyers and responsible citizens, and we have very good relations with the local police station.
This kind of mixing can work in more positive ways too. Where the other children in the garden frown on fast food and television, where their mothers expect them to practise the clarinet and go to bed by nine, less fortunate children find their own expectations rising. They will find they benefit too from the general networking and informal child-minding; if their mothers are out, they can always have tea and do their homework with someone else. However, these things are not always easy. Not long ago the younger children of our garden were terrorised by a bad boy, the kind you get on a sink estate, a hardened wild child who found it easy to bully the well-mannered children. The angry mothers in puffa jackets expostulated. The indignant fathers in designer loafers assembled, prepared to raise their paternal hands to the boy, but they were handicapped, of course, by the law; the most illiterate six-year-old these days knows how to shriek "don't you lay a finger on me or I'll have the law on you". It is hard to find a doctor or a lawyer who is prepared to flout the law, even in such a cause.
Fortunately the bully's family suddenly left. And so we were not forced, as were parents in a nearby communal garden, to have an evening parent patrol to try to protect the many from a few very aggressive children in "social housing", who terrorised the gardener and set off the communal fireworks before Guy Fawkes' Night. What became obvious to me is that in order to have the benefits of mixed housing - of the reverse swamping I'm advocating - we will have to tighten up the laws on noise and litter, and weaken the laws protecting nuisance-makers and delinquent children. At the moment there is virtually no redress from delinquent neighbours, beyond what social pressure can achieve. It should have been possible for our husbands to go and frighten that boy into leaving our children alone, if necessary with a raised hand or two. It should be possible to stop neighbours polluting a community with loud music or filthy litter, fast. Changing these laws alone might have a miraculous effect on community life, and on our willingness to have the less fortunate in our backyards.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, September 20, 1998
