by A. N. Wilson
This roller-coaster economy, in which the flat or house in which a Londoner lives becomes his or her chief asset, has produced the peculiar mixture of angst and idleness that characterizes modern London. Everyone worries, if they are a property owner, that they can’t afford their mortgage. Yet they know that if they can only hold on to paid employment of some kind, their little nest egg will make them feel rich. The studio flat bought for £23,000 in 1978 was worth £122,000 in 1999; the terraced house bought for £350,000 in 1997 is worth over £1 million in 2004. Those who can’t assemble enough money to put down a deposit for a flat or a house merely look around for some other means of getting a roof over their heads. Council-owned accommodation is of enormously varied quality, some grotty, some perfectly all right. If you are never going to be able to earn enough to become a mortgage slave, why save? Earn, or get hold of, enough to pay the essentials and spend the rest.
If you walk about London any part of London, rich or poor on a weekday in 2003, the immediate thing to strike you is that most of the population are not really working. Many of them are shopping. Many are sitting around in cafés or bars. In post offices there are long queues. Less than a tenth of the people in the queue are waiting to post a parcel. Most are queuing for money which they draw out. An old-fashioned person noting the extraordinary idleness of Londoners might very well be shocked, and would hark back in a spirit of nostalgia to the time when the docks employed tens of thousands of toiling stevedores, lightermen, ferrymen, and dockers; when all over London small factories and businesses required the actual physical labor of those with the skill to make motors, pianos, candlesticks, watches, shirts, or vinegar.
In fact, all the fastest-growing London-based businesses in the last twenty years of the twentieth century were posited on the sociological fact that work, as understood by our ancestors, was now very largely unnecessary. Sandwich bars, record shops, cheap but fashionable clothes shops, bars, restaurants, hotels, private art galleries, nightclubs for the young and the very young—these were the things that made entrepreneurs rich in the period 1965–2003. These and the trade in illegal drugs, which were used by a majority of Londoners under the age of twenty.
When the Swinging Sixties began the economy of London, seeming to rely on its docks and manufacturing, looked as if it were in terminal decline. When long haired drug-taking pop musicians made recordings at Abbey Road in St. John’s Wood, it might have seemed to the diehards as if they were the last nail in civilization’s coffin. Perhaps they were, but the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, while making themselves immensely rich, also stimulated the economy more than a hundred factories of Old Cockney Tyme making coffee essence or boot blacking. The London working classes produced a galaxy of figures in the 1960s destined to stimulate the economy in comparable ways with film, music, fashion, or chic: the photographer David Bailey, from East Ham, Terence Stamp, Michael Caine, all the Rolling Stones, all the Who, Adam Faith, Helen Shapiro, and countless others. It was noted that when the Beatles appeared on the balcony of Liverpool Town Hall after the world premiere of A Hard Day’s Night in 1964, they did not stay for the reception given by their friendly fellow scousers but returned instantly to London, which had made them and where all their best recordings were done.4
The something-for-nothing approach, which appeared to enrich shareholders and slickers, could hardly fail to infect those nominally opposed to capitalism, for you cannot touch pitch and not be tarred. The perky leader of the Greater London Council introduced a “low fare initiative,” Just the Ticket and Fares Fair, forcing London Transport to cut their costs and yet providing no obvious means to pay for such munificence. During the operation of Fares Fair in 1982, there was a 6 percent drop in cars during the rush hour. There were many who saw the GLC leader, Ken Livingstone, as something of a hero. But London politics had, at least since Victorian times, always been riven with party interests and mixed motives. It is hard to see Livingstone in his GLC manifestation, with his desire to abolish the ancient mayoralty and corporation of the City, as a great benefactor to London. Compare the houses, flats, and parks (including Hampstead Heath—administered by the Corporation of London) with the filthy, rundown, and ill-funded equivalents administered either by the GLC or the boroughs.
The Greater London Council came into being in 1965. The London Government Act of 1963 extended the jurisdiction of the old London County Council but created, if anything, more muddle than existed before—with, for example, transport policy in the control of at least three often opposing powers. The boroughs took charge of road maintenance; the GLC was responsible for parking policy; but for larger trunk roads in and around the capital the Department of Transport in central government retained responsibility. In housing, there were comparable bureaucratic entanglements, with boroughs and central government vying with the GLC to blame one another for the appalling design and inadequate provision of housing. Conservatives were pleased to point out that the GLC and Labour boroughs wasted money and charged higher rates than Tory boroughs. The GLC wanted to put money into subsidizing fringe theater and ephemeral fashion projects, while offering no contribution of note to the capital’s opera houses or orchestras. The Victorian Conservatives under Lord Salisbury had delighted in the prospect of the boroughs being at loggerheads with a liberal LCC. By the 1980s, the Labour Party was supposedly in the grip of “extremists.” The Limehouse Declaration, issued from the East End residence of a former Labour Foreign Secretary, David Owen, formed the Social Democratic Party. It was initially attractive to those who felt that the Labour Party was turning Trotskyite, and Livingstone, always a showman more than a substantial political figure, allowed the Conservatives to represent him as the extremist. With very little fuss, Mrs. Thatcher’s government abolished the GLC altogether, and County Hall, that architectural embodiment of London’s civic hopes, was put up for sale. The advertisements called it “London’s most exciting real estate opportunity.”
The Conservatives and the Socialists in both central and local government signally failed to provide London with efficient government. In the Thatcher era the largest and richest city in Europe contained, in such boroughs as Tower Hamlets, some of the poorest urban areas. The problem of homelessness spilled onto the streets, so that Lasdun’s brutalist structure of theaters and walkways on the South Bank became “Cardboard City,” a shantytown. This almost Peruvian spectacle was in easy sight of the childish production-line modernist structures in the City, where the slickers were making their bonuses of £1 million a year.
Poverty on the scale which London had known in the early years of the twentieth century did not return. But the gap between rich and poor grew larger, leaving more reason, and some would think justification, for the unemployable, ill-educated poor to believe that the only natural reaction to their plight was crime. Many—through whose fault it is perhaps vain to speculate—found themselves in a “poverty trap,” where the mental work they might find would pay less than the benefit they would receive for being unemployed. Some would blame this on the dependency culture created by a too-liberal system of state welfare, others by a failure of imagination by governments and employers to find young people suitable occupations or employment. A generation was growing up who had known nothing of the system of apprenticeship, in an economy that was no longer dependent either on manufacturing industry or, much, upon manual labor. Those children, born on the modernist council estates of Tottenham, Catford, or Staines, sent to badly run comprehensive schools and offered no hope or encouragement of work, were not poor as those in a Victorian workhouse, nor as those on the Jarrow Hunger March were poor. But at least the poor of an earlier age could hope for the narcotic of manual labor, rather than being lured into the narcotics for sale on the London street, such as crack cocaine and heroin, substances that once tried could be hard to put down; and once adopted as a habit might require the habit of violent crime to sustain.
A good number of people caught by the poverty trap were those of white parentage. But
it was only to be expected, given the socioeconomic structure of London in this period, that a high proportion of those who found themselves out of work and drifting into crime should have been black.
Much of the cheap journalism and neo-Fascist propaganda which dwells on this phenomenon draws the easy conclusion that young black males have a natural propensity to violent crime. Do not the statistics speak for themselves? Are not the majority of street crimes, the majority of muggings, committed by young males of Afro-Caribbean or African extraction, chiefly the former? To attribute a racial cause to the criminality of young London blacks is a little like suggesting that Filipino women have a racially inbuilt obsession with domestic drudgery, which draws them to badly paid work in European hotels, or that Thai children recruited into prostitution to service sex tourists are innately lascivious. By contrast, it could be seen that all these young people are the products of economic and political situations over which they have no control. London has been a useful place to observe the late-twentieth-century phenomenon of racial mixing and migration. Much of what has happened there has challenged stereotypical prejudice.
14
LONDON COSMOPOLIS
I am writing this in the afternoon of a typical London day. I deposit my daughter at school with her Mexican classroom assistant and her friends whose parents are, to name but seven, Italian, African American, Japanese, Chinese, Palestinian, German, and Indian. Having left my daughter at school, where the janitor is an Ethiopian, I return home to let in a Sikh furniture upholsterer. (He and his father have worked up such a successful business in Kentish Town that they have managed to build a fine family house in the hills of the Punjab.) Saying hello to my Brazilian cleaning lady, I make for the local Italian café for breakfast, then on the British Library where two African women and a Cypriot check my pass, and where a variety of excellent and helpful library clerks man the Issue and Return desk. Today, they consist of two West Indians, an Italian, and several different African nationalities as well as white English. A Malaysian cuts my hair. Then I have lunch at the Travellers’ Club, where my meal is brought to me by a friendly Bulgarian, my wine by a Frenchwoman, and my coffee by an Egyptian. I go home on a Tube train driven by a Trinidadian, buy my copy of the evening paper from a Pakistani corner shop, pick up my dry cleaning from the Irish family who run Paradise Dry Cleaning, Park Way, and buy my bottle of hooch from the Irish man and woman who run the local off-license. I pop into the local bookshop, run by refugees from Hitler’s Vienna and their son, say hello to some neighbors—one white Zimbabwean, another American married to a Greek—and I go home. Bogdan, a Polish carpenter, comes to discuss rebuilding some shelves that were put up in our kitchen by a cowboy English builder. Since we have a baby-sitter tonight, my wife and I then debate whether to eat at our local Italian or Indian restaurant or whether to go a little farther afield and try a new Russian place that sounds interesting.
Every single person I have met today is a Londoner, and I do not feel that they are foreign to the city any more than I am myself, having migrated here like thousands before me from a provincial boyhood.
In April 1968, a former Conservative Health Minister, J. Enoch Powell, made a speech in Birmingham that was to reverberate through the later decades of the twentieth century in Britain. He called for an immediate end to the flow of immigrants into the United Kingdom and proposed a policy of “re-emigration” to the countries of the British Commonwealth whence the immigrants had come—the Caribbean, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, as well as a variety of African countries. He said that to allow fifty thousand immigrants and their dependents each year into Britain was mad: “It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” And, with an allusion to the Cumaean Sibyl in the sixth book of the Aeneid, he said that he saw the Tiber foaming with much blood.
Within days, the leader of the Conservative Party, Edward Heath, had sacked Powell from the shadow cabinet and Enoch had become a working-class hero among such unlikely figures as the Communist dockers. On April 23, St. George’s Day, these patriots, who had all but ruined the London docks by their persistent strikes and outlandish pay demands, decided that the real reason for the ending of over nine hundred years of successful trading in the port was immigration. In St. Katherine’s Dock, two thousand men went on strike and marched on Westminster brandishing banners to tell the world that Enoch was right. When they reached the Commons, they swarmed into the central lobby, where a mustachioed buffoon by the name of Sir Gerald Nabarro MP (a good old English name) received rousing cheers for telling them of his support for Enoch’s views.
Yet it is now the twenty-first century and the Tiber, by which one can only assume Powell meant the Thames, is not foaming with blood. Panic, largely based on the color of the new immigrants’ skin, has characterized British responses to demographic change in the last fifty years of London’s history. When SS Windrush docked at Tilbury on June 22, 1948, and 492 individuals from the Caribbean stepped onto British soil (most of them to settle in Brixton, south London), a spokesman for the Colonial Office said, “This unorganized rush is a disaster. We knew nothing about it.” By the mid-fifties Caribbean immigrants were coming into London at the rate of about a thousand a year, but only about a third settled in the capital. There were around twenty thousand in the mid-fifties and by 1961 nearly a hundred thousand had entered Britain. Inevitably, there was some racist response, most notably in Notting Hill, where in the hot summer of 1958, crowds of up to seven hundred “Teddy boys” and a few older Fascist diehards had attacked the black people living in poor lodging houses of north Kensington.
In 1981, on April 10–12, there were riots in Brixton when young black people clashed with police after what was perceived as clumsy policing and the crowd believed, falsely, that a police officer had stabbed a youth. The looting and burning that followed were hardly comparable with the Gordon Riots, but the disturbances were enough to cause serious alarm. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Robert Runcie, who had been at Oxford in the Conservative Club with the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, annoyed her by suggesting that these riots were not merely racial in flavor but reflected a sense of frustration among young people in a deprived inner-city area where prospects of employment were low.
In September 1985 there were more disturbances in Brixton when Mrs. Cherry Groce was shot by the police using a Smith & Wesson .38. The damage done was estimated at £3 million. A week later, in a hideous housing estate at Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, north London (a housing development that had won prizes for the Haringey Architects Department that designed it in 1971, but that was now barely habitable), the police raided a suspected criminal’s home. Mrs. Cynthia Jarrett suffered a fatal heart attack during the police search, and fires broke out all over the development. A much loved local police constable named Blakelock was attacked by an angry mob. He died after being stabbed more than forty times with knives and machetes. Someone was heard calling for him to be beheaded.
At ten-thirty P.M. on Thursday, April 22, 1993, an eighteen-year-old black boy, Stephen Lawrence, was murdered on the corner of Well Hall Road and Dickson Road, Eltham. He had apparently been killed by a gang of five or six white youths and the motive for the murder appeared to be racial. A black friend was also injured. Stephen had been a studious, peaceable young man, hoping to study architecture. His parents achieved national, indeed international, renown for the persistence with which they attempted to pursue justice on his behalf. No one was prosecuted for his murder, and in all the subsequent inquiries the Metropolitan Police went through a perhaps overdue spell of self-reproach for its “institutional racism.”
None of these things—the Notting Hill riots, the Brixton riots, the disturbances on the Broadwater Farm Estate, or the murder of Stephen Lawrence—is to be taken lightly. Yet the very fact that these incidents are rehearsed in the annals of London history is surely itself significant. The truth is that for the most part London has not foamed with blood or crackled with flames.
It has been largely peaceable. The racism, institutional or otherwise, of the white population has not been comparable with that of the Ku Klux Klan, and most prophecies of disaster have been unfounded.
But mass immigration has undoubtedly changed London’s character and it has created problems. Enoch Powell himself, when he was Health Minister, described the National Health Service as “the envy of the world.” He also, at that stage of his career, liked the idea of identifying the British and Roman empires. It pleased him, as a classical scholar, to think of the inhabitants of Nigeria or Jamaica or Pakistan being able to say “Civis Romanus sum.” It also pleased him, when he was a health minister with a shortage, even in those days, of doctors and nurses and hospital orderlies and cleaners, to import these from the former dominions and colonies.
It would be true to say that the National Health hospitals in London, the buses, and the Underground trains would all have ceased to operate decades ago were it not for the willingness of immigrant workers and their descendants to work for low wages. Here, however, the immigrant groups divide very much along lines of national origin and economic circumstance. Among the Chinese, the Indians and Pakistanis, the African Asians, and many of the West Africans, especially Ghanaians and Nigerians, there has been a large measure of success in worldly, economic terms. These have followed the pattern set by previous immigrant groups, the Jews of the 1930s or late Victorian era, the Huguenots of the early eighteenth century: they arrived in poverty, but they have made a success of some business or another and thereby enriched not only themselves but London itself.
The case has been otherwise among Afro-Caribbean families. Many of them came to work in such poorly paid jobs as nurses, bus conductors, cleaners. Their immigration coincided with a period when the postwar boom was over and unemployment was rising. This was especially so in London. Partly because of world trade, partly because of the decline in national fortune, the London docks began to close; their demise was, as we have said, greatly hastened by the short-sighted wage demands of the all-white dockers. East India Dock, which closed in 1967, St. Katherine’s, and finally London Dock simply could not compete with Rotterdam or Dunkirk. (A mere 10.5 million tons of cargo was handled by the Port of London in the year 2000, a fraction of what passed through in its heyday.) London’s manufacturing industry, in common with that of the nation as a whole, began to be drastically reduced, to the point where it would effectually evaporate.
