THE LOWER DEPTHS
Richard Lovelace on
the spiritual poverty of the new slums
I HAVE travelled quite widely, perhaps to 80 countries: except where there is famine, the worst poverty is in England. I do not mean worst physically, of course, but worst spiritually, for our poor are deprived both of the pride of achievement in having survived another day, and of any hope of improvement. And our poor are far more numerous than those in comfortable cir- cumstances would like to suppose.
Recently I spent a couple of months as a doctor in the slums of Birmingham. They are very extensive, and appear to be spreading: streets with perfectly decent and spacious housing have been turned into slums, with boarded-up windows, graffiti, litter, potholes in the road, and unemployed young men standing on the corner looking malevolently at the world.
The first thing one notices is that the city is a visual inferno, from the litter swirling at one's feet to the Corbusierian tower blocks (all of whose entrance halls and lifts smell of urine) on the horizon, from the tangle of concrete flyovers above to the derelict factories below, from the patches of wasteground strewn with rubble, where scrubby bushes grow trailing tatters of filthy polythene, to the advertising hoard- ings enjoining the inhabitants to buy BMWs and avoid drugs. Many of the people on the street appear shrunken and prematurely aged, their health destroyed by poverty and a diet of pork pies and cigarettes, as they shuffle along in their jumble-sale clothes. Many are the dark little shops that sell dilapidated furniture and old clothing; those that sell food are
'Looks like another copycat murder, Sergeant.' eloquent testimony to the restricted tastes and pockets of the local residents. One striking feature of the landscape is that the worse the housing, the greater the number of satellite dishes that provide the junk food of the mind.
Alas, alas for England! In two months I did not meet one white patient who had been educated for longer than the mini- mum period prescribed by law, or who was encouraging his children to stay at school beyond the age of 16. No, not one; though I met several virtual illiterates illiterate, that is, after 11 years of compul- sory schooling. In this area, it was far more common for a man to go to prison than to university; and I met no one who showed the faintest understanding of the necessity for or advantages of education.
In case you imagine I am referring to an isolated pocket of the country, I should like to point out that 60 per cent of our people receive no formal education beyond the minimum. Let those who think, or once thought, that the teaching of gram- mar is a bourgeois tyranny imposed upon the working class, listen to the uneducated trying to express their emotions or frustra- tions in words other than expletives! Let them hear the broken fragments of sent- ences, the long silences during which pa- tients struggle to find the words that will not come because they are not there, let them see the jaws of patients drop open when a word of more than two syllables is Inadvertently used, and then let them prattle about the glories of untutored self-expression!
Often patients came with a vague sense of dissatisfaction with the whole of their lives. Intelligent yet inarticulate, it soon became clear they wanted more from their existence than their birthright of vile food, unskilled work (if any work at all), the pub, domestic violence and squalor, and an old age of increasing poverty. But they had no notion of how to escape it; at school they had been subject to all kinds of social pressures actively to prevent them from learning; their children would follow the same path to perdition.
What is the solution to all this human devastation? More taxes and more public expenditure? Perhaps, but the Japanese, with the highest standard of education in the world, have schools with 90 children to the class; countries with fewer doctors than we do have better health. I do not see how faith in mass public housing can survive even a brief acquaintence with what has been done in this direction in the past. The problem, if it is any one single problem, is cultural, and thus not amenable to simple rectification. Improvement, if it happens at all, will be a prolonged process, more the result of a change of heart than of policy. Those who talk of a more caring society often appear to mean by it a society with larger and better paid bureaucracies. As it happens, a model of improvement exists on the doorstep. I am referring, to immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. Their cultural level is altogether higher; they are polite, they do not tattoo them- selves from head to toe like Neanderthal tribesmen, they work hard, they aspire to something more than a video recorder on which to watch violent drivel. Above all they acknowledge an obligation to do the best they can for their children. They understand the worth, in more senses than one, of education, even when they are uneducated themselves.
They are not paragons of course: often the young women in their communities (and their communities are communities, not the euphemistic abstraction into which mental patients are being discharged from our asylums) are torn apart by a conflict between personal liberty and a strictly imposed cultural tradition, with dire con- sequences. And one notices not without a certain tremulation signs of sectarian and religious enthusiasm among them: painted slogans in favour of Khalistan, for exam- ple, or a butcher's shop more concerned with propagating an intolerant form of Islam, with displays of crude anti-Christian propaganda in the window, than with selling meat. But, taken all in all, they present the spectacle of people who re- quire only opportunity to advance them- selves, who will not always live in slums, and who will make a contribution to civilised life.
The young natives, by contrast, appear destined for a life of barbarism, or at least of pathetically reduced horizons. We seem to have bred half a nation of unemploy- ables, covetous and resentful, aware of rights but disdainful of opportunity, lazy yet discontented with the fruits of laziness, prickly but without pride or self-respect, philistine and contemptuous of what they do not know, politically radical, perhaps, but unwilling personally to change. I fear for the future.
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