I love my bad neighbours
Danny Kruger lives next door to the so-called ‘Asbo family’, and reports that in many ways they are an example to us all ‘Eleven kids hell family!’ yodelled the Sunday People. ‘Nightmare family running riot in streets of the stars,’ slavered the Daily Mail. ‘Beware the new terror on your doorstep,’ said the Sunday Telegraph, more reflectively.
I wasn’t aware I lived in a street of the stars — apparently Geri Halliwell is nearby — but I certainly live among a lot of journalists. Writers from two of the above papers have houses up the road. As for me, I’ve lived next door to the 11 kids hell family for the past year. They do indeed have many children. According to the mum, Louise, quoted in the People, ‘We get through 24 toilet rolls a week. That’s a lot of arseholes.’ But Louise thinks the real arseholes live in the street around her. She told the People: ‘At first I liked it here but we haven’t been made to feel very welcome. I think people don’t like us because we are in a council house. It seems if you weren’t born with a silver spoon you are not good enough. The problem is they are all snobs. They are a bunch of curtain-twitching busybodies.’ It is fair to say that Louise and her family are rather off-putting. She spends most of these warm days sitting smoking fags and cursing the kids in the front garden, which until last week was also occupied by a derelict fridge, abandoned toys and bags of nondescript junk. The younger children race up and down the road on a high-pitched electric scooter; they also have a motorised wheelchair which barrels lethally along the pavement. There have been some instances of minor vandalism of cars in the street. A German Shepherd and a Staffordshire bull terrier are tethered all night in the back garden, and they bark a lot.
But that’s it. My impression of Louise is of a rather harassed but basically very nice wife and mother, with too many kids and not enough space. ‘What some are calling the Asbo family’ (Daily Mail), others (I and the people on the other side of them) call perfectly pleasant neighbours. Indeed, the family are interesting for the simple reason that they live together, all in one big house. They are a real ‘traditional’ family, of the type beloved of conservatives — not a ‘blended’ family, not a single-parent family, not a family of many and absent fathers. Mr and Mrs have been married for over 20 years. To put it bluntly, they did not, as they so easily might have done, abort some of those 11 kids; they bore them, reared them in their fashion, and plainly love them. The children play in the street because they like to be close to home, and because Louise likes to keep them near. Her favourite admonition — ‘Stop fucking swearing!’ — at least conveys a moral principle. She is a good parent.
Whereas our fellow residents are hardly good neighbours. Our street is in the up-andcoming, tenuously named ‘North Kensington’. The district hangs desperately on to the bottom of Notting Hill, disdaining association with Kensal Rise to the north, shuddering at Wormwood Scrubs to the east. Apart from the odd council house like Louise’s, the road is inhabited by media types, working in the press and the nearby BBC at White City. It is a hive of bourgeois liberals.
Bourgeois liberals have two strong political attitudes. One is a belief — practised more in the abstract, as we have found — in social freedom. One should not ‘judge’. ‘Respectability’ is an obnoxious principle. People should be allowed to do what they like — especially people of different ethnic origins (Louise’s husband is black). What this means in practice is a callous indifference to the predicament of others. Some of my neighbours are so afraid of ‘judging’ Louise and her family that they ignore them in public. In their ‘tolerance’, they literally cross the road to avoid walking past their house.
The other attitude is a strong faith in the power and privileges of the state. Just as it is the government’s responsibility, not Louise’s and her husband’s, to provide the family with education, housing and an income, so it is the government’s responsibility, not the neighbours’, to enjoin good behaviour on them. So instead of going round and knocking on the door, they call the council to get them kicked out, and call the police to try and get an Asbo (anti-social behaviour order) pinned on them.
Between these attitudes — social liberalism and faith in the state — the natural habits of neighbourliness are withering, starved of the sap of social interaction. Just now Tony Blair is making a fetish of ‘respect’. Yet his government has loaded the tax and benefit system with incentives against family stability. A recent Centre for Policy Studies report showed that the average two-parent household pays £7,600 a year into the Treasury (tax paid minus benefits received), while the same parents, living apart but earning the same amounts, receive £400 from the Treasury (benefits received minus tax paid): an £8,000 subsidy to separate or not get together in the first place. On the other side of the pernicious equation, the government has vastly expanded the reach of its police powers, creating a new criminal offence for every day it has been in office. The government encourages parents to break up, then hammers their children for the consequences. Asbos, the capstone of the coercive architecture, are now issued at a rate of 65 a week (double the rate last year, the government boasts). Nearly half of them are breached by their recipients, and they are fast becoming a badge of honour among the antisocial fraternity. Not surprisingly, anti-social behaviour continues to rise.
Against these debilitating influences, Louise is to be congratulated for keeping her family together and representing, in her messy way, the virtues of community. Her house, unlike the neighbours’, is the centre of a large, impossibly complex network of kin and acquaintance. Last week when the council, at Louise’s request, sent a dump truck to remove the rubbish from her front garden, it turned out the driver was an old friend of hers. In that front garden, junkyard or not, people of all ages congregate to chat and have a cup of tea. (Such is the volume of traffic that one of the neighbours called the police to report Louise for drug-dealing, which is nonsense.) Meanwhile, all the publicity has had two effects. One is that Louise has received the humiliating attention of the dregs of the media. She has been invited to appear on TV’s Wife Swap, presumably to change places with a nice Home Counties mummy. A Sunday paper wants to pay her to go topless (‘After 11 kids, that really would be antisocial behaviour’, she told me). She has rejected both offers.
The other effect is more encouraging: the street is talking to itself at last. We have engaged a professional mediator. Tania Coke was a management consultant who had had enough of due diligence and corporate downsizes. She spent last weekend knocking on the neighbours’ doors and asking what, precisely, their problem is; and talking to Louise about what she might do about it. All right, it’s a somewhat artificial way of communicating, and it’s too early to say that harmony is restored, but it’s beginning to feel as if we have a neighbourhood. Which I’m glad about, because I’m moving to Notting Hill and I want to sell the house.
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