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- Special Report: The Dispossessed
- Londoners have adopted Vincent and are helping him on his way
- Mayor’s millionaire poverty adviser takes a journey of discovery
- London’s huge response to the dispossessed
- Politicians who avoid the poorest areas must show moral courage
- What should be done? Have your say
On 12 October 1843, The Times ran an editorial lamenting the bitter paradox that “within the most courtly precincts of the richest city of GOD's earth, there may be found, night after night, winter after winter … FAMINE, FILTH AND DISEASE.”
This week's campaign in the Evening Standard on London's dispossessed has identified precisely the same pathology, more than 160 years later. How is it that the greatest city on the planet, this thriving republic of prosperity, culture and vitality, is still home to the most dreadful poverty?
Though a Londoner all my life, I have read David Cohen's reports and often felt that he is describing another country, another city. Communal paupers' graves, malnutrition that reminds doctors of sub-Saharan Africa, indigence of a depth that it is an imaginative struggle to comprehend: it is shaming to realise that so much extreme poverty survives, cheek-by-withered-jowl, with the most fabulous wealth creation.
How can it be, in 2010, that more than 40 per cent of London's children live below the poverty line?
How can there still be 18-year-olds — like Vincent Maduabueke, whose predicament has moved so many readers — put off higher education because they cannot afford the £19 UCAS application form?
As Peter Ackroyd has written, London's poor have always been “a city within the city”. In 1889, Charles Booth published his famous “poverty map” of the capital, in which areas of dark blue and black marked the most deprived neighbourhoods. He could do the same today. And it is tempting to say that nothing much has changed since Friedrich Engels wrote that “the more that Londoners are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbours and selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs”.
But that is a counsel of despair. Why do these pockets of extreme poverty survive? The Standard's campaign has made clear that, if the symptoms are often economic, the causes are usually cultural. In a city packed full of children for whom global travel is commonplace, there are still youngsters who have never taken the Tube. There is the 21-year-old single mother in Southwark for whom a visit to the silver towers of Canary Wharf is almost unimaginable. The horizons of these Londoners are appallingly narrow.
The flipside of this is the way in which the busy majority lives: we spend extraordinary sums of money segregating ourselves, living in the better streets, finding places for our children at good schools, occasionally buying The Big Issue to assuage our guilt.
“If you want to live in New York,” says a character in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, “you've got to insulate, insulate, insulate”, meaning “insulate yourself from those people”. London is the same. As any estate agent or head teacher will tell you, the city's middle and upper working classes devote extraordinary energy to “insulation”. What is left, at the very bottom of the social pile, are the people described in this week's Standard.
Politicians know this. There are more immediate votes in keeping the very poor out of the way — medicated, ghettoised, dependent on benefits — than in the hard, expensive work of solving the problem at root.
Yet a city that tries to shunt its very poor into sidings where they can be forgotten will ultimately pay a huge price: in crime, the welfare bill and quality of life. In the end, the rust of extreme poverty eats into every soul.
Too often, the treatment prescribed by politicians lacks the sophistication required to deal with a deep-seated cultural disease. None should doubt the sincerity of Gordon Brown's desire to end poverty. But his strategy has relied too narrowly upon tax credits and a belief in the saving power of work. The Prime Minister is right that a job brings dignity and self-worth as well as an income. But — as the case studies in this week's Standard have shown — the bureaucracy of the system is often much too complex for the people who need it most, the forms too daunting for those with limited literacy or none at all. Targets and Government pledges are irrelevant to those who cannot read them.
In the four years since he became Tory leader, David Cameron has shown commendable and consistent interest in what he calls the “broken society”. The best thing about this slogan is what annoys the PM about it most: that it lumps us all together. In Cameron's world-view, our society will be “broken” as long as such squalor and indignity is prevalent. He dares to makes us all responsible.
“We used to say that a rising economic tide lifts all boats,” he declared in November 2005. “Well, that obviously isn't true … The real solution is to recognise that for some people in our country, and for many more around the world, the bottom rungs of the ladder to prosperity are broken.”
Cameron speaks of “economic empowerment”, ushering the poor out of the twilight of inter-generational unemployment towards something approaching true citizenship.
All of which is fine. But by his deeds shall we know him. What the most deprived need from politicians is what they are least inclined to give: which is sustained attention.
To make the very poor believe that they can be more than benefit claimants, that they can aspire to something other than lone parenthood, that someone will help them fill in forms and cope with interviews, that the whole of the city is theirs, rather than just a damp, lonely hutch on a crime-ridden estate — this is the unglamorous work of decades, requiring not only good intentions but unbreakable political stamina.
Let us be in no doubt: it is a tall order “to make these dry bones live” in Charles Booth's resonant phrase. But imagine the alternative. Fifteen years hence, the Standard returns to the subject and finds that nothing has changed. How will we explain that?
Reader views (8)
The simple answer is there are ever growing numbers of people in London (and the world as a whole) meaning that the pie (what there is left of it that isn't paying interest on debt) is spread ever thinner.
- Madmax, London, UK, 08/03/2010 11:10
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Giving people handouts and "treats" - as though they were pets - is not the answer. London (and the UK) has always been socially mobile for those who have brains, energy, enterprise and determination. Not to mention the capacity for hard work. Giving money to people is insulting and makes them dependant. Don't these people have any pride that they accept things without working for them?
- Janina, London UK, 05/03/2010 16:03
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London has ALWAYS been a city of extremes. Most cities are- can you imagine a boring, dull, flattened out place where everyone is mediocre? London have never been like that. And I don't understand - do recent arrivals to London really expect to have everything that people who have lived here for generations to have? If you emigrate, without skills or education, you must surely expect to be bottom of the pile? it is character and enterprise that tells in the end. This sickening "campaign" by the Evening Standard is totally misplaced. How about a sympathy drive for the elderly, white poor who have lived here all their lives, have worked in low paid jobs and end up being despised and ignored?
- Singer, London UK, 05/03/2010 14:58
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I think the main cause of poverty is the loss of the unskiled jobs they used to do.
I'm a retired third generation London Transport worker, and when I think of (just in transport) the jobs like railman, ticket collector,and bus conductor. Thease jobs are just some that are no longer avaiable to people like my antecedents who were from wat was/is known as the lower class.
- Gerry, Chatham KENT, 05/03/2010 14:58
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"There is the 21-year-old single mother in Southwark for whom a visit to the silver towers of Canary Wharf is almost unimaginable." Probably unachievable too as she might be turned away at one of the gates by the rent-a-cops there. Ever since they changed their uniform, I have been amazed that the police do not charge them with impersonation of such. I have little doubt that a foreign tourist would think they were real policemen and women, not just minimum wage bossyboots. It's also scarey because the wrong types would obviously be drawn by the appeal of this uniform.
Oh, and by the way, where does M D'A get the idea that London is the 'greatest city on the planet'? By no means is that dirty, expensive, dangerous and aggressive place the world's greatest.
- David Short, Tunis, Tunisia, 05/03/2010 14:24
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'Give a man a fish he eats for the day. Teach a man to fish and eats for life', so the saying goes. I too was affected by the feature on the dispossessed, but I don't share the Standards analysis of the issue. I think the poor will always be with us, and I don't think it is reasonable, or practical to 'guilt trip' the better off into a false sense of obligation. In reality people tend to be poor for any number of reasons and it doesn't help to lump them together generically. In that sense, the state, or society, cannot solve the problem of hardship by itself. Neither will throwing money at the so-called disadvantaged, or lavishing them with endless welfare benefits. We can help on the other hand, by offering the less well off, access to the same opportunities and education that most of us take for granted. That way they can take true control of their lives, the rest is up to the individual.
- Patrick, London, 05/03/2010 14:15
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Poverty of CARE is rife in our country, not poverty of THINGS.
Quality of MUMMY, not Quantity of MONEY should be our focus.
- Darius, London, 05/03/2010 12:51
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How can it be, in 2010, that more than 40 per cent of London's children live below the poverty line?
Because we've imported poor people into the UK in their millions over the last couple of decades so is it any surprise that their children are born into poverty.
Still in most cases it's not real poverty is it, particularly if you're getting nearly 40k worth of State benefits.
- Mark, South East London, 05/03/2010 12:44
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