by Craig Taylor
In an area like Tower Hamlets, your household is Bengali, your hospital nurse, doctor, comes from a Bangladeshi background. Minicab drivers have a Bangladeshi background. It’s now Bangladesh in Britain round the East London Mosque, the restaurants are all from a Bangladeshi background. Bus drivers are from a Bangladeshi background. Stallholders in markets are from a Bangladeshi background. You’re living in Little Bangladesh. The same in Southall with India. Same in parts of Brixton with black people.
Now it could be argued, what’s wrong with it? Let a thousand cultures bloom. But what I find is that what ultimately happens is those people within those communities who we seek to honour and protect – in other words women, minorities, young teenagers born and raised in this country – are then forced to adhere to a collective notion of belonging to those communities that are culturally anchored in Pakistan or Bangladesh rather than have a strong, vibrant, individual identity here in a liberal democracy. So what happens is those women, thirty, forty years here in Britain, still don’t speak English. Those women who experience, say, domestic violence or other difficulties at home, don’t have the cultural confidence with which to speak to the local police or the social services. Those women don’t work, so the rate of unemployment is much higher than your average white working-class English woman in this country. So in the name of trying to honour these communities and just let them be, you know, we’re allowing male, middle-class, religiously defined men to control their women and to control the younger folk. I think there’s something going wrong there that needs openly addressing.
There should be no expectation that schools and teachers will recruit interpreters for young kids who are arriving or for parents at parents’ evenings. That would send a strong message that when you’re here you learn the language of the land: English.
I think it can also be encouraged to change by the council housing structure that we have. You come to Britain and you expect the state – rightly – to accommodate people who don’t have housing. I see nothing wrong with that. It’s a noble aim and should continue. But that then does not mean that you’re entitled to stay within two square miles in Tower Hamlets when there are empty houses, say, in Ilford further east or in northern cities or in and around the Home Counties. What’s wrong with Milton Keynes? What’s wrong with Luton? There are communities there. There are people there. In other words, we are allowing these clusters to build up simply because someone says, I want to be housed in Tower Hamlets next to my relative or next to a given butcher’s shop or next to a community centre or an old people’s home. Give people homes, by all means – that’s a noble tradition and that speaks volumes about us here in this country – but not at the expense of damaging the fabric of people’s lives, people’s outlooks, the next generation.
I go into schools where kids speak to one another in languages other than English. That’s where we are. You can accuse me of social engineering but in the absence of doing that, you know, by default it’s the worst form of social engineering that’s going on now, if you see what I mean – of exclusion, of 50 per cent of that population not working or women not speaking English, of children growing up with identity crises and then ultimately religious extremism and terrorism.
Don’t tell me this is integration. Don’t tell me this is what multiculturalism means. That’s not what it was set out to mean. It’s a noble aim and it was genuinely about how all the cultures enmesh and get along together. But something went wrong somewhere and we’re living separately and apart.
ABUL AZAD
Social worker
He escorts me around Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel and explains its history of social reform and its current programmes. He volunteered here for two years and then, in 2001, started on one of the Hall’s projects, Surma, which supports elderly Bangladeshi people in the community, some of whom trail him as we walk, smiling and peppering him with questions.
Around 35 per cent of the Tower Hamlets population is of Bangladeshi origin – perhaps as many as 70,000 people – and a lot of the older generation of Bangladeshis encounter language barriers. They are having problems and difficulties in every step of their life, because benefit issues and lifestyle issues can be complex. They encounter paperwork they don’t understand, which leads to billing problems. So I help Bangladeshi people complete their benefit claim forms, I translate and interpret the letters given to them from various agencies and authorities, and help them navigate what to do next.
Bangladeshis started coming after the Second World War. Bangladesh is a member of the Commonwealth and so the UK government recruited Bangladeshis to come as labourers, to rebuild their homes and highways and Underground, then their shipping industry and also the trains, British Rail. When they arrived this country needed them, and they contributed to rebuilding the UK after the war. They worked sixty or seventy hours a week to earn money to send some back home again or to buy some land or build some houses, thinking they would go back for ever. That was their ambition when they arrived here. They came as a sort of economic migrant, worked hard in this country, and they wanted to earn their livelihood and then go back.
Since they brought their families here, their ideas of return have faded. They don’t want to go back. They want to stay here because they’ve got friends here and with the system and the law – they find those things awkward when they go back to Bangladesh. Everybody wants to live in Tower Hamlets and Brick Lane because they feel at home; everywhere shops and restaurants are full of Bangladeshis. They feel safer and they can communicate, they feel better living with fellow people like them. I think mixing is very important, because if you’re coming to a country to earn your livelihood or living for a long time, you should know the culture of the whole country. To be a Roman you have to act like a Roman, or if you’re in Canada you have to act like a Canadian.
But the barriers are language skills and education, and they do not have these things. For them there are things that prevent them moving easily around London, including poverty. Most of them never worked in a high-profile job in the UK. They used to be labourers and they’re treated as very low people. They are not rich. If you want to travel, if you want to learn something, you need money. If you want to go to the cinema, tickets are £20, you get me? If you want to go out eating it costs you money and they have to look after their families. They have to look after their ancestors in Bangladesh, and they’ve got limited income. So that is another thing. With the older people here we have two projects – one that consists mostly of white people and another that consists mostly of Bangladeshi people. The white group, most of them have got private pensions, they’ve got additional income or they’ve got bank savings. Only a few in our Bangladeshi group have got private pensions; most did not save for their retirement life. When they got older they didn’t worry, because in our culture people think that when you’re old the family will look after you.
I say to them sometimes they are isolating themselves. That is absolutely not a good thing to happen to generation after generation, because it is never good to be isolated from the mainstream. You are abandoned, you get me? If the minicab is Bengali, grocery shop is Bengali, everywhere is Bengali – so that means you are reducing your opportunities to learn more in your environment.
You are making yourself isolated, why don’t you mix with the other people and things? Their answer is, well, my life is nearly ending. I am in the sunset period of my life. So there’s no point to learn more. This is their answer because they are very old and they think they will not live much longer. And therefore they lose interest in mixing. They find it very comfortable to stay with what they know. I ask them, you have to come out from that mentality so you will be able to learn.
In my project, we’ve organized some joint outings together, like to the seaside at Brighton or safari park or Kew Gardens, and we’ve tried to mix and diversify them. When the Bangladeshis go in the bus they sit near the other Bangladeshis. The white people sit with white people. At Kew Gardens we went to
see a lovely greenhouse environment. You’ve got palm trees, papayas, bananas. The Bangladeshis liked that. The white people also went but didn’t stay long because they went to the aquarium. The Bangladeshis went to the aquarium too. They just didn’t go together. Some mix because they can share ideas and be understood. For others it’s hard. If you are not sharing with each other, talking with each other, what do you have? The older generation are not as in tune as the new generation are. They are not very much interested to know other cultures, to learn more about other people’s interests. Older people say they aren’t always interested to learn more. Younger generations, newer generations, are very much interested. They want to know the other people’s culture, what you eat, all the things, certainly.
I want to be part of it. I want to keep my own culture in mind. I want my children to mix with the people here. I want them to learn the systems of the modern world but I don’t want them to forget their culture. It’s divided. London is a place of divided belongings.
NICOLA OWEN
Teacher
We meet at 7 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, in Greenwich. When she arrives she looks so young I wonder for a moment if she is a student. She hasn’t lived in Greenwich herself for many years, but already misses an older Greenwich, one with a woman in the market who just sold vintage bottles, tins emblazoned with the royals and images of Tower Bridge.
My first school was in south-east London. I had two days before any kids came on, two days just with the staff. My department had just moved office and there was dust all over everything. The women in my department were just bitching and moaning about all this dust being everywhere and I was like, okay, I’ll go and get a cloth and then we’ll clean it up … And they said, oh, it’s not our job to clean up the dust – Premises will come and clean it up. I realized that day why a lot of these schools are failing and the people in them have either been pushed to the point of not caring by overwork or weren’t suited for it in the first place.
That first school was all girls, all girls from south-east London. A lot of Muslim girls because obviously that’s the kind of family that desperately don’t want their kids educated with boys. I think it was pretty much 50/50 white and non-whites. There were sixty-three languages spoken. I realized like twenty-five minutes into the lesson that one child didn’t speak hardly any English at all. So I said, right, don’t bother trying to do any of this, can you just write me something about yourself. Just a paragraph about you in English. Okay, she did that. And when I looked at it at the end of the day she’d written something about growing up in China and not knowing who her mum and dad were and then someone coming to her house one day and telling her that she had a mummy in Englishland and being put on a plane to Englishland and now living in Englishland with her mummy and her twin sister that she never knew existed.
We’ve had a kid bring a machete into school. Had a kid get stabbed in the vestibule. We have a knife arch pretty regularly: the police bring it down and put it at the front gates and the kids have to come through. But the kids just text each other first and go, there’s a knife arch. Then all the black kids make a point of being twenty minutes late for school and they come in and they’re like, yeah, yeah, I’m late because like there’s a knife arch, so I couldn’t come in.
There’s a gang who wear one glove. That’s their little gang sign and if it’s on the right hand that shows they’re evil, you know, ‘I’m itchin’ for a fight because then if I shoot someone with my gun hand they won’t have any prints,’ whereas on the left hand it means I’m not doing anything bad, I’m just moochin’ about, being in a gang. So I take their gloves off. I say, I’ll have your glove now. Just that one glove. And I call it a ‘club’, which they hate. ‘It’s not a club, miss.’ Okay, all right. I had clubs when I was at school, too. They hate that. Because I think we glamorize gang culture when we say, oh, gangs are really dangerous, don’t be in a gang. I think we run the risk of making it sound really cool and exciting. So I like to rip the piss a little bit.
Once a kid didn’t do her homework and I was shouting at her about it. She said something about having to pick up her little brothers and sisters from school. I said, well, okay, that’s a big responsibility and I know that must take a lot of your time, but you still need to do your homework. She was like, okay, okay. She was a very sweet girl, a lovely Muslim girl, and I went to the year office just to say, by the way, this kid is de facto caring for her siblings. I didn’t know if they knew. And they said, yes, we do know. Her mother died last year and she’s the oldest of ten or eleven kids. She’d taken on all the mother’s responsibilities, including more traditional wifely responsibilities, and so they thought that not only was she caring for the children but effectively being raped by her father. I’m like, of course she hasn’t done her homework. You know, why would you?
I can remember some pretty horrendous disasters. Like in my first ever observations, where your tutor from Teach First comes and observes you. He came and observed me in the first or second week, and one of the kids was eating a lolly. I said, Lily, you need to put the lolly away. No, ain’t doing it! Ain’t doing nuffink, can’t make me. I tried all these things, didn’t know what to do, nothing worked. She had it in her hands at one point and I walked past and just snatched it out of her hand, at which point she just exploded and ran out. I was teaching in random huts near the bins in the playground, because there weren’t enough classrooms, which was not pleasant in the summer when the smell drifted across the playground. So she ran out of this hut and started running around it and there’s enough windows that all the rest of the kids were like zhoom!, watching her. Outside, she got her fingernails that were like these talons and scratched the side of her face and came back in and said, Miss, look what you done to me – I’m gonna sue. She’d drawn blood. My tutor’s sitting in the back going, how are you going to deal with this? And I was like, fuck, that’s it. That’s the end of my teaching career. I’ve been in it a week and a half and I’m going to be sued. But just then some lovely very sweet girl in the front went, ‘No you didn’t. We all saw you scratch it.’ And I thought, I love you, child, you can have an A. So I said, no, you scratched it yourself. You need to just go outside, Lily, and wait and then you can come in when you’re calm. And she did.
The most demoralizing thing is that, five times a day, you stand in front of thirty people who don’t listen to you and just sit and chat amongst themselves and you just have to keep doing it and doing it and doing it. I remember quite early in that week, after the lesson, going into the cupboard where we kept textbooks because I was so sure I was going to cry. And obviously you can’t let kids see you crying, that’s just the worst thing in the history of the world. I just sat in this dark cupboard going, it’s okay, it’s okay. They’re just children, it’s fine. It’s like training animals, you only have to punish them five or six times before they realize that you mean it, and then they’re like, right, I’ll put my phone away now because otherwise you’re going to take it and I believe you’re going to take it and I believe you won’t give it back to me. Also, you learn not to take it personally. They’re so funny and they’re so sweet. Even when they’re shit to you they do apologize.
Sometimes it’s really depressing. You see them in Year 7 and the little boys are just so cute, they’re these tiny little kids and they’ve got their ties all done up beautifully, like top button, and their uniforms are a bit too big for them but they’re really sweet and they’re putting their hand up all the time and they’re really excited. Maybe one in ten will stay like that. We’ve got some hugely successful black children and they’ve worked really hard and they’ve done really well and they’re going to go off to university and become doctors and lawyers and stuff. But most of them just fall off. You can see them tussling with, I want to be clever and I want to do well, but actually I also want to be cool and I want to be liked and I want to say funny things. It’s pretty heartbreaking.
Soon, the tie goes lower and lower and the knot g
ets bigger. The badder they are, the lower and bigger it is. I don’t know how they tie them so big. Honestly, they’re about the size of my hand. We have a rule in our school, you should be able to see three stripes on the tie and so they spend hours trying to get it as short as possible with still three stripes.
I’ve got a new tutor group this year, they’re very very little because my old ones went off last year, after me filling out about twenty-five applications for plumbing and carpentry courses. I’ve got the bottom set again, even though they promised me that after my horrendous time with my last bottom set they would give me a top one. But they’re like, oh, but you did it so well! Have another bunch of crazies. Anyway, I tie their ties for them as they go out in the morning, make it smaller and push it up and do their top button up and send them on their way. My A-level class are hanging outside going, Miss, you know they’re just gonna untie it when they get to the end of the corridor – what are you bothering for?
Well, because, if people keep on saying to them, be smart, you can be smart, you can learn … I don’t know. Some sort of symbolism, I guess, about forcing them to be good. I don’t make the knots too small, because I have to balance it out. I don’t want them to be murdered.
Most other countries in the world have some sort of education for civics. A country that doesn’t teach its kids about government or politics or sociology, that’s mad. Finally it was introduced here in 2002 by Bernard Crick, who thought that it would combat apathy and disengagement from society and all that kind of stuff. So it’s a bit of crime and law, a bit of politics and political organizations, a bit of society and sociology and social change. If you’ve done a unit on politics, you’re meant to then go out and engage with local politicians, and if you do a unit on the environment you’re meant to do some recycling campaigning at school or something. The kids love that bit because they feel like they’re actually doing something. I was doing multiculturalism quite early on and I was talking about the BNP and the kids said, how can they justify their position? I said, let’s just ring them and ask. This was quite a nice Year 10 class, I think, so about fifteen students. I put my phone on speaker-phone and rang the BNP Campaign Line and this poor woman on the end said to us, oh, you’re asking me what is Britishness? The learning objective was what does it mean to be British, and we were talking about how the BNP define it as being white and how that’s clearly wrong because we came from a million different places anyway in the first place. When the woman on the phone answered she said, someone who obviously was born in Britain and their family is all from Britain. My kids on the speaker-phone said, okay, how long do you have to have been in Britain for? Four generations? Five generations? And this woman said, a really long time, yeah, yeah. The kids said, how would you test if someone had been here long enough? The woman responded, oh, you just know, don’t you? This veiled racist response. It got to the point when one of kids asked, so would you genetically test people? Would you look for their DNA to see if they were properly white enough?
