When I was at university a friend who was studying sociology read aloud a couple of sentences from the book he was reading. They made us laugh at the time and have stuck with me in the 25 years since. They were from ‘The History Man,’ Malcolm Bradbury’s satire on trendy academia, and the passage concerned the different attitudes displayed by a middle-class couple towards the homeless people squatting across the road. Barbara Kirk takes them soup and blankets. Howard Kirk, a sociology lecturer at a new south coast university, counts them.
Marx made the same point in the famous lines from his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in 1845 when he wrote: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ This summarises the problem I have with much of politics on the left. Too many socialists are more like sociologists, providing analysis and commentary on the problems of the world, but lacking any practical programme to fix them. Counting people is wrong, if your sums don’t add up to practical change. That’s why I admire someone like Louise Casey so much, whose fearless focus on practical change, through the rough sleepers’ initiative, and the respect programme to tackle anti-social behaviour, has done more to improve the lives of people in Britain than dozens of ministers who’ve come and gone over the past 13 years.
I fear that much of the current debate about race and class is more sociological than practical. When we bandy around phrases like ‘white working class’ or, worse, ‘neets,’ we use a lexicon alien to the people we seek to describe or help. I have never met a member of the ‘white working class’ who would describe themselves as such, so why do politicians and journalists use the phrase?
One of the most ambitious programmes the Labour government ran was the New Deal for Communities (NDC). It was a multi-million pound ten-year programme aimed at 39 areas such as Braunstone in Leicester, the Whitehawk estate in Brighton, the Preston Road area of Hull, the Kensington district of Liverpool and Clapham Park in south London. The aim was that within 20 years ‘no-one is disadvantaged by where they live.’ Whitehall, with its love of TLAs, calls this an ABI – an area-based initiative. Because of the nature of the estates or neighbourhoods, it largely benefitted the ‘white-working class’ without the phrase being uttered. The same is true of Sure Start, the Decent Homes repair programme, Building Schools for the Future, and a host of other laudable, but unsung, government programmes.
I visited about 25 of the 39 NDC areas and saw a range of effective and practical projects, from food co-ops to adult literacy programmes, all directed by local people serving on boards. In the areas where elections to the boards took place the turnout was sometimes higher than for the council. By targeting a neighbourhood, rather than a sociological class, the programme won the support of local people. People identify with where they live, not the labels slapped on them by the political class.
John Denham was at a south coast university at exactly the time Bradbury set his novel, but he studied chemistry, not sociology. His speech on race equality yesterday made the important point that inequality and disadvantage in modern society cannot be simply ascribed to racism. Different ethnic groups, for example, children of Indian or Chinese origin, are outstripping their white counterparts in exam results, which in a few years will determine their incomes and status. Denham makes the point, quite rightly, that overt racism is less of a problem than it was even a decade ago. He wasn’t foolish enough to say it isn’t an issue anymore, but that our response needs to be better targeted and nuanced. For example, the REACH project aims to provide young black boys with role models drawn from the ranks of successful African and African-Carribean British men. At the launch event a couple of years ago we were introduced to a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, a barrister, a teacher, an accountant, a company director, a probation officer and other black professionals who were giving their time to mentor and inspire young black boys.
It is true that casual racism in British mainstream culture has all but disappeared. You can hear racist lines in Fawlty Towers or Yes, Minister which no contemporary writer would even consider. The kinds of racist words and concepts that were prevalent when I was at school in the 1970s are no longer acceptable, thank heavens. Looking back, racist and anti-semitic attitudes of that decade owed much to the days of empire and the second world war, which were well within the memory of most adults. I can remember the infamous atlases with great swathes of the world in red, and the book Little Black Sambo on the school library. There was a book which had lists of the names for male, female and young animals (dog, bitch, puppy, that sort of thing). It included ‘negro’ ‘negress’ and ‘picaninny’ – included in the list of animals. It is almost beyond belief, yet this was only 30-odd years ago. Every time some reactionary rails against ‘political correctness’ in the education system, we should remember what it used to be like, when the teachers could call their pupils racist names in class, and the National Front were selling papers outside the school gates. Just watch reruns of Please, Sir! if you weren’t there at the time.
If Labour is serious about tackling disadvantage it must be done in practical and targeted ways. We need a proper understanding of why some places prosper whilst others languish, just as some ethnic groups succeed whilst others struggle. John Denham’s speech provided a useful shift of emphasis and tone. But to make a difference we need to see some action. As William Blake said: ‘he who would do good must do so in minute particulars.’ There’s a time to do the counting, but then comes the time to provide the soup and blankets.