Update – I of course take full responsibility for what I write, but I really need to avoid ever writing posts after midnight. This was one of many such mistakes:
Laurie Penny seems to be a well respected blogger in the Red blogosphere, yet this piece in Liberal Conspiracy slapped me so hard I decided to respond here.
She complains,
…what we need to talk about urgently is when, precisely, it became good form to treat people on low incomes as if they were an entirely different, morally deficient species of person. When did it become alright to call the poor ‘evil’?
Digital fingers (ha! I made an etymology joke!) are pointed in the direction of Orwell Prize winning Nightjack, specifically this post called, “http://nightjack.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/the-evil-poor/”
Of course, one could argue that “The Evil Poor” is simply a sensationalist modernisation of the “indolent poor” or the “undeserving poor”, as a name gifted to a subset of people catagorised as “poor” by people who do such things.
But let’s not quibble over semantics. Let’s quibble over perceptions of reality. See, unless I’m very much mistaken, what Nightjack has is actual experience of the reality on the ground.
Whose perception of reality are you going to trust? Now Nightjack will suffer from the same problem that all police officers have, which is that they see the very worst elements of society all the time, while normal people, especially middle class kids living in a theoretical bubble world of Marxist dialectics can live in blissful ignorance.
To my profound embarrassment I spent 7 years of my adult life in a horrible council estate where the reality of what life is like there slowly dawned on me. Illusions were shattered and my desire to ‘help’ these people was exposed for the ugly, futile, middle class guilt that it was.
Laurie writes:
I am a twenty-something trying to make it in the big, bad world of journalism
Now I know journalism has changed, but I would argue that romantising the poor and failing to report reality as you find it is not very good journalism.
What Nightjack writes reflects the reality of the world as I – and many, many others – have experienced.
I recommend Laurie starts by getting herself down to a council estate to discuss her political beliefs and opinions with the first gang of pissed teenagers she come across. Then she should go door to door, canvassing the opinions of residents who’ve got the misfortune to live anywhere near an off-licence and ask them what they think. I challenge her to listen to them rather than write off their opinions and feelings as a political irrelevance, or ‘brainwashing’ by the media. That’s what I thought at first. I thought my job was to figure out a way of turning these people around. I’m sincerely ashamed about that these days.
It’s not about ignoring poverty or pretending it doesn’t exist – it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. The difference is that the part of my brain that used to want to help, that wanted to be kind and generous and make a difference got bludgeoned to death after having, “FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING CUNT” shouted at me by a gang of chavs at a bus stop. Things like that tend to make an impression. Suddenly I ‘got it.’ It’s probably one of reasons I so rarely sound like a stereotypical Lib Dem, I expect. Except I don’t just want the police to go flying in to smash their faces in – I want real systemic changes to stop yet another generation growing up like this.
Orwell would not spin in his grave at Nightjack’s well deserved award. Nightjack, in contrast to Laurie, is observing the real world the way it really is and reporting it to us, in the very finest traditions of journalism. He does it with style and character and writes in the most absorbing and compelling way.
Laurie, has some skill as a writer – I especially liked, “I find a have a lot of month left over at the end of the money”, but her appeals to our charity ring hollow because, basically, and without wishing to seem too rude, and whilst wishing to avoid cliché, the way she reports the world is from the inside of her own head, not from reality. She should take a long, serious hard look at herself and ask what she really knows about council estates and real poverty and real disadvantage, and why she feels qualified to lecture anyone about what they should and shouldn’t do or should and shouldn’t care about.
Has the quality of socialist debate gone down, or has it always been like this? How was I ever impressed by rhetoric like this? The mind boggles.
BenSix said...
27 Apr 09 at 5:03 am
Ugh…and so, I find myself defending a Liberal Conspiracy article. Again. This isn’t how I envisaged my life turning out…
Anyhoo, your argument has one central premise, and I’m really not sure where you’ve got it from. You posit – “romantising the poor and failing to report reality as you find it is not very good journalism” – that th’article has a generalised, idealistic view of the urban poor. On what basis did you arrive at that judgement?
You also have no love for th’rhetoric…
…without demonstrating why it’s invalid, or of little worth. In fact, your own writing (for about the first time (maybe that’s why I’m pouncing upon it)) fails to evade some rhetorical manholes. For example…
…is an appeal to ridicule that’s premised on a strawman, which is quite ingenious. Your insistence that “she should…ask…why she feels qualified to lecture anyone about what they should and shouldn’t do” also falls down a bit on the self-awareness stakes (which doesn’t invalidate it; I just found it funny).
I agree with you on Nightjack, though. I might disagree with the sentiments occasionally, but he’s a damn fine writer.
Ben
Stu said...
27 Apr 09 at 6:56 am
Darn it Charlotte. I read that post, had exactly the same reaction, wrote a short post on it and scheduled it to be published around 9:30 this morning! Have you been spying on my drafts?
I’m still going to post it, damn you.
More to the point, yes I agree with you, Charlotte.
Jennie said...
27 Apr 09 at 7:14 am
Of course, your argument kind of falls down on the premise that Laurie IS the urban poor, living on less than I am as she tries to make it in journalism…
Stu said...
27 Apr 09 at 7:21 am
Jennie, that’s not the point. The point is that Laurie either didn’t read or didn’t understand the NightJack post!
He didn’t say ‘the poor are evil’, nor ‘there are no poor people’, which seems to be what Laurie is writing about. She’s almost misread half of NightJack’s post and then written a 1200 word diatribe on an unrelated subject. As I’ve already said on my…
DAMN IT!
Jennie said...
27 Apr 09 at 7:28 am
I only skimmed Laurie’s post, and didn’t read the NightJack one. What I am pointing to is that Charlotte can’t really complain about other people making assumptions when she makes pretty sweeping assumptions of her own.
In terms of the substantive point here, I am probably closer to Charlotte’s position than Laurie’s. It’s a shame, therefore, to see her scuppering herself by making uninformed assumptions.
Alix said...
27 Apr 09 at 8:03 am
I suspect you’d find, if you and NJ took a walk round that council estate, or any council estate, that he’d view the chavvy kids at the bus stop slightly differently to you, subject to context. I’m sorry, I know it’s not nice, but it’s not actually a sign of someone being steeped in evil if they tell you to fuck off.
Now, I reckon if Laurie had done a bit more reading (in particular there’s a post of NJ’s somewhere about the difference between a happy council estate and an unhappy one) she could justifiably have pointed out that NJ spends a huge amount of his time dealing with the “evil” end, and so is maybe a bit over-inclined to make assumptions about the non-evil end (who may appear superficially similar) as a result. She didn’t, but I’m with Jennie on this – I don’t think you’ve read NJ closely enough either. He’s not actually claiming that every kid who tells someone to fuck off is beyond redemption.
In the comment to Laurie’s piece, NJ differentiates between the evil poor he is talking about and another sort of problem: “It is not nastiness, not being a bit anti-social, not being hard to reach or hard to hear.” He recognises that another strata of disadvantage does exist which isn’t beyond saving. The problem, for him in particular, is separating them out. I think he’s trying, but I don’t think you are.
And, to echo Jennie, Laurie is the urban poor – she’s not making it up. London urban poor is a bit odd, since you can live right on top of disadvantage and still be within walking distance of the Angel, but you’re just as likely to get told to fuck off at bus stops there as anywhere else, and you’re just as likely to run across NJ’s “evil poor” as anywhere else.
I think really that, rather than demonstrating any sacred objective truths, which is what both of you would like to claim, this conversation just demonstrates that people react differently to poverty and evil. Laurie reacts with almost aggressive hope, you reacted with aggressive pessimism.
Andrew Hickey said...
27 Apr 09 at 8:32 am
I agree with Alix and Jennie on this one. Also, if you look at the comments on Laurie’s blog, where it was first posted, you see that her problem isn’t with the actual content of ‘Nightjack’s post, so much as the way he tars *all* the young urban poor with the same brush – her comments include:
“If you actually meant to make a distinction between the ‘evil’ poor and the ‘deserving’ poor (whoever they are), then you need to make it more explicitly and not make jokes at the expense of a large swathe of the public who are only going to be further damaged and alienated by language like yours, especially coming from someone in a position of law-enforcement.”
Which I think is fair enough. Another of her comments:
“Reading through the backlog of NJ’s blog, he does, elsewhere, make the distinction between what he calls ‘the evil poor’ and everyone else, and also concede that some people who are ‘evil’ aren’t even poor at all. I know that there are some people who grow up emulating a culture of criminal behaviour. I’d still question the moniker ‘evil’, but the caveats make the distinction sounder.
The trouble is that unless you draw that distinction EVERY SINGLE TIME, you are automatically feeding into a culture that believes that anyone earning less than £18 grand a year is automatically an evil knob. And that doesn’t make anybody’s day easier. Certainly not a police officer’s!”
I’ve never been a fan of the gangs of young, drunk, aggressive men who roam the streets, and I agree that those people are actually arseholes – and how much that arseholishness comes from them growing up poor, and how much is innate, is a question I don’t have an absolute answer to. But Laurie is right to say that *that particular post* makes it sound very much like *all* people on council estates are like that, which is definitely not the case…
Alix said...
27 Apr 09 at 9:06 am
Ah, fair enough. In that case I think it’s fair for Laurie to point out that the distinction isn’t made in that particular post of NJ’s. It is supposed to stand alone, after all, and was one of the prize-winning posts.
Blogging’s a right tricky sod, isn’t it.
CathElliott said...
27 Apr 09 at 9:15 am
Jennie, I’ve got to disagree with your statement that Laurie is the urban poor.
As she herself admits in her piece, she comes from a privileged background, and any time things start to get too tough for her she has the luxury of knowing daddy will come and bail her out.
She’s Oxford educated, has no student loan issues because she lived off an inheritance from her grandmother while she was studying, and unlike a significant number of her contemporaries, has the means to escape her conditions at any time she chooses.
I don’t say this because I hold any of it against Laurie, none of us can help what we’re born into and she’d have been mad not to use her inheritance when she needed it, but I do find the idea that somehow she represents the real authentic voice of the urban poor laughable.
Alix said...
27 Apr 09 at 9:29 am
Cath, I agree with all that, but for Charlotte’s purposes, Laurie’s background is irrelevant. Charlotte’s charge is that Laurie is romanticising poverty because she doesn’t know anything about it. She is suggesting that NJ has experienced the reality of living/working among urban poverty, and Laurie hasn’t. That’s clearly not true. Laurie has experienced it. She doesn’t have to claim – and isn’t claiming – to be an “authentic” voice for the urban poor in order to be able to justifiably report what she sees and what she thinks about it (any more than Orwell did in writing Down and Out). Charlotte might disagree with Laurie’s view, but she can’t dismiss it on the basis that Laurie doesn’t have experience of what she’s talking about.
Alix said...
27 Apr 09 at 9:32 am
Maybe it would be better to say “Laurie is part of urban poor society”.
Jennie said...
27 Apr 09 at 9:37 am
Cath: what Alix said.
Stu said...
27 Apr 09 at 9:41 am
I still think that whether or not people are poor is an entirely unrelated argument. Alix, you said “you’re just as likely to get told to fuck off at bus stops there as anywhere else, and you’re just as likely to run across NJ’s “evil poor” as anywhere else.”
The point that NightJack, and Charlotte, are making is not whether or not there is poverty – obviously there is. It’s that the people who NightJack calls the ‘evil poor’ exist.
Alix said...
27 Apr 09 at 9:56 am
Yeah, of course they do. And I do agree that Laurie’s LC article doesn’t draw the distinction. Nor (in the other direction) does Nightjack’s original post. But reading more widely around the writings of both, they clearly both understand that both the “evil poor” and the “perfectly ordinary non-evil poor” exist. Charlotte presumably does as well, but I can’t help thinking she’s set the bar for evil a little bit low if she thinks that being sworn at by kids is the last word in urban suffering.
Justin said...
27 Apr 09 at 10:37 am
‘On Notice: Laurie Penny’?
Get over yourself.
Charlotte Gore said...
27 Apr 09 at 11:19 am
Oh hell. Where to begin?
Do I think the poor are evil? No
Do I think that Nightjack thinks the poor are evil? No
Do I think it’s ever right to catagorise individuals into a collective blob and refer to it as ‘evil’? Er, no.
You know that not all council estates are bad, right? I’ve heard some are okay.
You know that not everyone living in these sorts of places is messed up, right? Yes
Was I aware that Laurie is poor herself (by choice, and could phone her dad up and be ’saved’ if she really wanted)? Yes. Earlier drafts of this post discussed that didn’t make the cut.
So this post wasn’t to prove that the poor were evil then? No. Yes. Er, no it wasn’t.
What was the point? That actually there’s a whole subculture that springs up when you have normalised lifelong benefits dependency centered around one geographic location, and everything getting vandalised or stolen is the least of the problems. There’s something profoundly fucked up about all this and it annoys me profoundly when people want to ignore the problem and absolve the individuals themselves of any blame for the sort of things they do, or attribute the blame to the rest of society for not caring enough.
Specifically to Alix, the ‘bus stop’ incident was from 4 fully grown adult male chavs. Perhaps this sort of thing is common in London but living on my own and having this happen right outside where I lived was terrifying. It wasn’t just ’some kids’, and obviously the context of having to walk past gangs like this on a daily basis… you know? I’m not even saying they’re ‘evil’.. I’m just saying that I can relate to what NJ talks about.
Andrew Hickey said...
27 Apr 09 at 11:25 am
“actually there’s a whole subculture that springs up when you have normalised lifelong benefits dependency centered around one geographic location, and everything getting vandalised or stolen is the least of the problems. There’s something profoundly fucked up about all this and it annoys me profoundly when people want to ignore the problem and absolve the individuals themselves of any blame for the sort of things they do, or attribute the blame to the rest of society for not caring enough.”
I think actually everyone, Laurie included, is in agreement about that, though she obviously disagrees with you about how to solve the problem… as to the existence and nature of the problem, it looks like you, Laurie and NightJack are all violently in agreement.
Charlotte Gore said...
27 Apr 09 at 11:43 am
“it looks like you, Laurie and NightJack are all violently in agreement.”
Group hug?
Charlotte Gore said...
27 Apr 09 at 11:44 am
Oh and I have William Shatner’s cover of “Common People” running through my head almost constantly since I woke up this morning. I really wish I’d never written this post.
BenSix said...
27 Apr 09 at 11:57 am
I think I can confidently say that you have all of our sympathy!
Laurie Penny said...
27 Apr 09 at 12:20 pm
Group hug?
*holds you gently*
As people have very kindly explained for me – my experience of poverty is somewhat odd. I talk in my post about my own privilege, and I’m quite happy to lay all my cards on the table in that respect.
However: I am also living in a house where most people don’t have any spare income at all after paying rent and bills – not even for food. Most of my money goes on buying food for my unemployed, mentally ill brother, his girlfriend and my disabled partner. After paying for this, I generally have about £65 to get me through any given week – which is a lot more than JSA, but doesn’t get you very far in London. I have also, in response to your challenge, spent time on council estates, living with my mother’s family on holidays. I can only conclude that I mustn’t have been to the right sort of council estates, since I found the people I hung out with there to be perfectly decent people who either worked hard to support their kids or were desperate for the opportunity to do so.
I’ll accept, tentatively, that the people that NightJack is talking about do exist, although I still object to anyone being labelled ‘evil’. The problem is that there are many, many fewer of them than the Heil and the Sun would have us believe. In her recent book ‘Unjust Rewards’, Polly Toynbee talks about a genuinely socially dysfunctional, ‘multiply disadvantaged’ element of the urban poor standing at something like 2%. This isn’t a new thing by any means. But the problem is that everyone else – including my family, including my brother and my partner – finds themselves tarred with the same brush.
Again, in response to your challenge, I *am* reporting reality as I find it. I fully admit that I tend to stumble about seeing the world through rose-tinted spectacles; it’s part of being a recovered-from-mental-illness evangelist, but I’m not sure that tentative optimism and a desire for fairness prevents me from being a good journalist. That said, I’m 22, and I still have a lot to learn.
Thank you very much for responding to my post in such depth. Lots to think about here.
Charlotte Gore said...
27 Apr 09 at 12:36 pm
Laurie, your response is far more civilised and cool headed than I deserve.
Jennie said...
27 Apr 09 at 1:16 pm
Charlotte: am I still OK for a lift on Thursday? And have you a CD player in the car?
>:D
* eyes Spaced Out: The Very Best of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy on the CD shelf and grins evilly *
Charlotte Gore said...
27 Apr 09 at 1:16 pm
Although, how does a 22 year old struggling writer end up with 3 dependent adults to look after?
It doesn’t sound like an especially brilliant arrangement for you.
Charlotte Gore said...
27 Apr 09 at 1:18 pm
Yes, you can still have a lift but I regret to inform you that I do not have anything as fancy as one of those newfangled CD players.
Cassettes, they’re the cutting edge of in car entertainment.
Jennie said...
27 Apr 09 at 1:22 pm
That’s fine, I can tape it
Andrew Hickey said...
27 Apr 09 at 1:22 pm
Jennie, make a tape of Doctor In Distress, Who Is The Doctor? and so on… then she’ll look back with fond nostalgia to the days of *Star Trek* music…
Jennie said...
27 Apr 09 at 1:26 pm
Bwahahahahahahaha a sci-fi torture mixtape! I LIKE it!
Andrew Hickey said...
27 Apr 09 at 1:30 pm
(I actually just bought the Trial box set and see it includes the Doctor In Distress video as an extra. I want at least five of my pounds back…)
Jennie said...
27 Apr 09 at 1:36 pm
(I got it for Christmas from lovely lovely Mr Matthewman, so it wasn’t my money which paid for the DiD vid)
Laurie Penny said...
27 Apr 09 at 1:36 pm
Not at all – you didn’t make any damning indictments, you made reasonable challenges. I too have Shatner’s ‘Common People’ in my head…
Partly the situation occurs because I know I’m lucky; I have a weird compulsion to try and look after people as much as I can, and I’m not alone in that, so I set up a self-supporting quasi-commune thing to take care of people I loved. That makes it sound very one-sided; but actually, these people do look after me, too, in lots of ways. We get by.
In my view, the thing to do with privilege is to view it as a gift, a gift that you don’t necessarily deserve, but you can’t send back, so you may as well use it and if possible share it around. Currently I’m working very hard in the hopes of one day earning enough money being a Famous Lady Journalist to be able to take my partner out to dinner and move us all to somewhere nicer and quieter without cockroaches. Also, I’d like to be able to afford to buy and take care of a puppy.:)
Tom James said...
27 Apr 09 at 10:29 pm
There are really two distinct problems here: there are people who are just poor but otherwise fairly decent.
Then there is the problem of what Nightjack (much deserving, from what little I’ve read already, of the Orwell) calls “the evil poor.”
The poverty of the first lot can be sorted out with straightforward progressive taxation. Cut taxes on the poor and increase taxes on the wealthy. Then give them decent public services, schools, hospitals, etc.
The second lot, the “genuinely socially dysfunctional, ‘multiply disadvantaged’ element of the urban poor” are a bigger problem.
There are two broad options with regard to this 2%:
1) Accept that there are always going to be some no-hopers and that there is very little that any state body can actively do to “help” them.
2) Accept that it is the function of a good society (read: *society*, as defined in the OED, and not the state) to provide a decent life for the citizenry and further accept the corollary of this that Something Must be Done.
Neither of these scenarios really appeals to me: 1 sounds really mean and nasty and 2 is OK but that Something Must be Done scares the bejeezus out of me.
But then problems wouldn’t be problems if there were easy solutions to them.
Matthew Huntbach said...
28 Apr 09 at 1:05 pm
It’s not about ignoring poverty or pretending it doesn’t exist – it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. The difference is that the part of my brain that used to want to help, that wanted to be kind and generous and make a difference got bludgeoned to death after having, “FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING CUNT” shouted at me by a gang of chavs at a bus stop. Things like that tend to make an impression. Suddenly I ‘got it.’ It’s probably one of reasons I so rarely sound like a stereotypical Lib Dem, I expect.
What makes you think that? I was a councillor for 12 years for such a council estate. I’m not unusual amongst LibDems in that. Abusive comments like this were not uncommon, and when canvassing it was pretty unpleasant to get this sort of thing and “you’re only in it for yourself” etc thrown at you when reality is you poured your life into defending these people, and the allowance from being a councillor is piddly compared to what one could earn for much less effort elsewhere and one’s day job career and/or family life going down the pan because one spent too much time being a councillor. But it helped having grown up on a similar estate, and knowing how things have deteriorated on these estates since, well about 1979. I knew the anger of the older people who’d seen things change and why this might lead them to the BNP. I also did experience huge gratitude from those I did help out.
All this is fundamental to why I have the politics I have. If I sometimes get angry at stupid assumptions, or even occasionally exercise the odd politically incorrect thought, it’s because of this.
Matthew Huntbach said...
30 Apr 09 at 10:33 am
OK, to talk about this issue. Yes, there always were bad people on council estates. No, they weren’t the majority, and I don’t think they are now. I do have quite a strong feeling from experience from experience and anecdotes that things have got worse, that the sort of seriously abusive and aggressive behaviour reported by someone like “Nightjack” has become more of a norm than the deviation it was. But I am aware also of the “golden age” phenomenon, so I wouldn’t like to say that’s for sure.
It’s interesting how each of us finds from our own viewpoint something to blame for this. Economic liberals blame the welfare state – cut their benefits and they’ll be forced to behave. Socialists blame poverty – give them more benefits and they’ll behave. If you’re my age, the problem is they’re “Thatcher’s children” – brought up in an era which celebrates aggressive promotion and stepping in others to pull ahead, the solution is more hippy peace and love. If you’re a bit older, the problem is all due to 1960s liberalism, get back to 1950s family values and the problem will be solved. If you’re a BNP supporter, well, we know what your diagnosis and cure is.
The funny thing is I think there’s something in all of these, it’s not an easy problem with an easy solution, and some of what we observe is the flip-side of other things we value.
The old council estates where everyone knew everyone else did keep the bad’uns under control with a social disapproval mechanism. The bad’uns felt shame and cleaned up their act, or at least tried a bit. But this was also terribly restricting. If you were an outsider or a bit different, the same sort of warm communal feeling that kept people behaving could be cold and oppressive.
For various reasons, everyone doesn’t know everyone else on the council estates these days. Maybe the big fear is that a tipping point gets reached where social disapproval works the other way round. It’s the good’uns who are made to feel wrong and out of place, and forced to try and keep their heads down. It’s those who are swaggering and aggressive and feel it a sign of weakness to show care for others, and a sign of being “gay” to show any sort of intellectual or aesthetic interest, who dominate and set the tone for everyone else.
It’s not all like this, there are a lot of great people on the council estates, doing their best, keeping little social groups going formal or informal, being good neighbours, wanting a future for their kids. But I know they do sometimes despair and drop out, and those getting the new allocations tend not be able to carry on doing these things.
Jennie said...
30 Apr 09 at 11:15 am
Bloody hell! Matthew made a comment I can find no fault with!
* faints *