Poverty Safari, page 6
It’s one of those difficult areas of public policy, where a line must be drawn and the line inadvertently reveals our moral confusion as a society.
Oddly, however, the media was a bit less interested in this. It simply wasn’t riveting or glamorous enough. Either that, or it just didn’t hit their radar. Perhaps it was because so many people in media fall into the ABC1 demographic and are less likely to be affected by changes to benefits. But can you imagine the furore in newsrooms up and down the country, had an affluent and socially respectable couple, like the Platts, been forced to endure the same kind of indignity? I mean, if a self-imposed £60 fine was enough to mobilise the entire UK press to their cause – even though they voluntarily broke the rules – then imagine the outrage something akin to a rape clause would provoke if it was going to affect the unimpeachable ABC1 demographic? The big difference between the Platts and the women subject to the rape clause, or people on benefits generally, is that one group is more likely to speak up. Not only speak up, but more likely to possess the knowledge, resources and agency to make their voice heard and, crucially, for that voice to be taken seriously. The court system is full of people being hit with fines, disposal orders and custodial sentences every single day but only a select number of cases receive prominence in the news. Even fewer receive generous coverage.
Now let me say that I’m aware some may disagree that these two cases are connected. Some may even think it vulgar that I have chosen to contrast them in this way. But equivalences like this are precisely how many of us arrive at our opinions. What I’ve just done is what people generally do when they turn on the news; observing complicated matters from a distance, we rush to conclusions about the nature of society and our place within it. These conclusions become the basis of new beliefs whether they are true or false. Every day we turn on our televisions or pick up our newspapers and we make the exact same sort of leap I just made here: we decide that some other group is always being privileged above our own. That this group benefits from a slew of unseen advantages we can’t quite put our finger on but are certain they exist. We feel like the people who make the news – and the rules – are either too removed from the reality of our lives to accurately portray them, or worse, that they are deliberately misrepresenting us as part of some broader conspiracy. We draw conclusions about why and how this happens and these conclusions become the windows through which we see the world.
Sometimes we’re wrong, sometimes we aren’t. But what if the conclusions you drew led to a belief that there was no point in participating at all? What if you decided that the political process, at every level, was designed to exclude you? Political apathy is a trait often associated with the lower classes but we rarely examine why. If we ever do examine it, we blame the poor for being disinterested or narrowminded. Apathy in many communities might have something to do with people drawing equivalences like I just did, from a cascade of news that appears to suggest different rules apply to different types of people. On the day women were legally obliged to provide proof of their rape to claim benefit designed to ease the burden of in-work poverty on their children, the national news was dominated by a family who felt hard done by because they were fined £60 for taking their daughter to Florida. I’m not saying both parties do not have the right to feel equally aggrieved at their respective circumstances, but surely one deserves more prominence than the other in the public mind?
This is the other ‘deficit’ we rarely talk about or acknowledge. The deficit in our respective experiences when we come from lower class or higher class backgrounds. The deficit in how that experience is represented, reported and discussed. This deficit, which appears to be widening, has led to a culture that leaves many people feeling excluded, isolated or misrepresented and, therefore, adversarial or apathetic towards it. And it’s often based on people living in run-down social conditions, with little money, in stressed-out, violent communities, turning on the television and making observations like the one I just made about the Platts. It’s the belief that the system is rigged against you and that all attempts to resist or challenge it are futile. That the decisions that affect your life are being taken by a bunch of other people somewhere else, who are deliberately trying to conceal things from you. A belief that you are excluded from taking part in the conversation about your own life. This belief is deeply held by people in many communities and there is a very good reason for it: it’s true.
6
No Mean City
NEWS AND CULTURE, generally, are two domains where we can see clearly how social inequality expresses itself. Another realm where this deficit in our experience of society can be found is in the respective living standards of the social classes. This is not to say that everyone is entitled to equally high quality housing or that all social housing is inferior to all private housing. It’s simply acknowledging another area where we can see a clear gulf between the haves and have-nots. It’s important to acknowledge these wherever they are found because they may explain why people from certain social backgrounds often think, feel and behave differently. Understanding how things like living conditions impact our respective long term attitudes and outcomes in life is key to grappling with the finer points of social inequality. Finer points that are often contested because they get lost in translation when we try to communicate across the widening ravine of class divides.
You don’t have to be a professor of architecture to notice the historic gulf between the classes when it comes to housing quality; in Glasgow, high-rise social housing is synonymous with deprivation. Like many of the stereotypes surrounding deprived communities, the notion that high-rises are unpleasant places to live is not untrue but is slightly unfair: many examples of thriving high-rise communities exist and not all tower blocks are dangerous, drug-ridden, or crime-infested. Even the monstrosities that gave rise to the gritty stereotype weren’t all bad. But enough of them were – or still are – bad enough that their reputation, fair or not, precedes them.
Like many hapless eras of human endeavour, it’s easy to look back in hindsight and sneer at those who naively approved a building programme that would come to symbolise urban decay and social dereliction: the idea of stacking poor people vertically, which probably seemed rather clever in the mid-20th century, when decades of population growth, fuelled by consecutive industrial revolutions, was the curtain raiser to a new rotating cast of social problems that would characterise poverty for decades to come.
In the grip of economic expansion at the end of the 19th century, with so many material spoils to pursue – and plenty of work available – it would have been hard for some to foresee (or care about) the sociocultural blowback lurking on the hazy, smoke-filled horizon as western civilisation bellowed, burned and steamed its way confidently into the 20th century. This period of economic growth led to the creation of the modern world and remains unparalleled in human history. It was the first time living standards and wages had risen consistently and mass production, made possible by manufacturing machinery, wrought changes on industry as well as the emerging global economy. But nowhere was this change more tangible than in the lives of ordinary working people, which were fundamentally transformed by technology.
This phase of growth, fuelled by imperial adventure, over-reached and inevitably slowed. As the British Empire receded from every corner of the globe after the First World War, the unforeseen social consequences of such rapid population growth began to find expression, not only in an economic depression, but more ominously, in the social conditions, health and behaviour of the lower classes.
In Glasgow, the Second City of the Empire, successful industrial suburbs like the Gorbals, where native and immigrant populations had exploded in the 19th century, became culturally strained, diseased and unliveable. Workers, growing tired of the poor living standards and atrocious working conditions, began to organise and forced concessions from government that became the basis of human rights in areas like employment and housing. These included a reduction in the working week as well as the first Housing Act, in 1919, guaranteeing the basic living standards we now take for granted like electricity, running water and flushing toilets.
Despite these advances, by the 1930s the descent of the Gorbals into deprivation continued and the area soon became a by-word for violence: often referred to as the most dangerous place in the UK. Britain’s social housing stock had been hastily fashioned to meet rising demand and in Glasgow, it wasn’t long before the homes, then providing accommodation to roughly 500,000 people, became untenable. Families of five, six and more were often crammed into single rooms on street after street of run-down tenement housing.
A range of solutions were proposed. One involved the design and creation of ‘housing schemes’: residential areas built on the city’s outer rim that made use of wide-open space away from the inner city. These would help to ease the burden on areas like the Gorbals, which were now dangerously overcrowded. These housing schemes would utilise the extra space and, as well as rehousing families in modern accommodation, would also provide leisure space. However, these plans were interrupted by the Second World War and not resumed for many years. The government’s ‘after war’ programme pledged to build 50,000 new homes per year in a bid to clear the slums. But unlike the housing schemes like Pollok, Easterhouse and Castlemilk, which lay on the outskirts of Glasgow, back in the city, ground space was scarce and this presented a challenge for planners.
In the ’50s, high-rise social housing, imported from continental Europe, was touted as the solution for these inner city urban areas and by the ’60s, high-flying architects like Sir Basil Spence were parachuted in to redesign the slums. ‘When you’re crammed for space’, said one news reporter, ‘you have to build high’, the footage appearing in the 1993 documentary High Rise and Fall. As the film vividly illustrates, build high is exactly what they did. Iconic multi-storey structures rose from the ashes of the slums, a fitting tribute to the skyward ambitions of the city’s people. But, while the housing schemes appeared, at least initially, to be a success, to the horror of politicians and residents alike, within 18 months locals had renamed the Queen Elizabeth tower blocks Alcatraz, Barlinnie and Carstairs – two being violent prisons and the other a Scottish hospital for the criminally insane.
Many of the tower blocks, despite their early promise, came to be regarded by locals as dirty, dangerous and undesirable places to live. As well as structural problems that created dampness, and windows that were known for blowing in during high winds, drug dealers lurked on the periphery, looking for new economic opportunities to exploit. As traditional industries like steel and coal were wound down, unemployment rose and many people became idle and demoralised. The undeniable failure of tower block housing in this part of the city – and others like it – was devastating, not only for local officials but more so for residents, who had just moved out of slums to start their new lives in the ‘skyscrapers’ of the future.
These multi-storey ‘gardens in the sky’ and the socialist principles they embodied were not only grand but also earnest and ambitious attempts to substantially raise the standard of living for working class people; going as far as integrating the rich and storied history of the local community into the contours of the architecture itself. Spence, designer of the infamous Queen Elizabeth high-rises that became the ground zero of the horrendous stereotype, envisioned that the three towers, side-by-side, would give the majestic appearance of tall ships in full sail.
It’s a lovely idea, but as one resident, referring to the maritime motif, observed: ‘The only way you got that impression was if you walked over to Richmond Park’ – a green space easily a mile from the tower blocks. It’s quite absurd to think that this potentially awe-inspiring tribute to European utopianism, which seamlessly consummated the union of high art and social need, only cohered when viewed from a distance. A far less pretentious way of saying this is simply that the flats made more sense the further away from them you got – which created a dilemma for the people living there. There was something about the way Spence perceived the community that was fatally flawed. Something about the assumptions he made about what working class people wanted and needed that no amount of technical skill, artistic flair or noble intentions could correct. A lack of consultation with the community itself, about their needs and aspirations, and a design phase riddled with well-meaning but privileged assumptions, meant that within 20 years many of these cutting-edge structures were either being torn down, scheduled for demolition or superficially modified to give a less brutal appearance. And in communities like the Gorbals, gathering excitedly to watch their history being razed to the ground has not only become a tradition, but an expectation. One which endures to this very day.
High-rise housing in the Gorbals was a humbling and costly lesson in urban regeneration and the cultural legacy for these missteps still casts a long shadow on the city. Thousands of families, already struggling to make ends meet, were placed under so much strain that it altered them physically, psychologically and emotionally. What was left of the local economy adapted to supply the community’s mutating demands; off licences, pubs, chip shops, licensed bingo halls, bookmakers and, latterly, drug dealers, provided temporary relief from the grim reality of deindustrialisation. But these seemingly harmless activities soon became vices that would later find expression as public health epidemics. In such oppressive and downtrodden social conditions, people began to distrust public institutions and the various authority figures, like police and social workers, despatched to mop up the rising tide of social problems.
Meanwhile, in the more troubled pockets of these challenged communities, people hid themselves away in a dark underbelly and attempted to raise children while descending into sordid lives of alcoholism and substance misuse.
One of those children was called Sandra Gallagher. My mother.
7
Nineteen Eighty-Four
MY MUM AND DAD met at a rehearsal studio in Glasgow in the summer of 1983. My dad, 19 years old, was an aspiring musician with hopes of getting signed to a record label. One evening, after a practice, another band member’s girlfriend showed up with one of her pals. My dad and she hit it off. Not long after, they decided to go camping together on the Isle of Arran. Before their weekend of teenage love was over, they ran out of money and had to abandon the campsite without paying. In some ways, it is quite a romantic story, in others, an ominous sign of things to come.
Not long after they were back on the mainland, my mum took my dad to meet her family in the Gorbals. The night began as you would expect; a warm welcome, friendly banter and food and drink aplenty. But tension began to fill the air as the booze started to flow and it wasn’t long until a fight broke out between my mother and her mother. My dad, who was also living in an alcoholic home in Pollok, was accustomed to the tropes of a wet household. But something about my mum’s family was different. There was an extra element of unpredictability and danger at play here. The boundaries of what was and wasn’t appropriate were not as well defined. Before the night was through, a massive fight erupted, so bad that on that night my dad decided he was going to end the relationship with my mother.
But the day he decided to tell her it was over, she revealed she was pregnant. The following April, I was born. They called me Darren because ‘Arran’ was, apparently, a bit too ‘American sounding’. My mother lived with us until I was about ten. During that decade, she left a life-altering trail of carnage in her wake; each year her behaviour was more bizarre and unpredictable than the next.
One sunny afternoon in Pollok, not long before she left, I arrived with a couple of friends in tow, to find many of the contents of our home laid out in the front garden, incinerated.
I can’t recall what explanation I offered my friends, though I suspect none was required. They already had some insight into how we lived. When you live in a troubled home, life spills out onto the street. Eventually you become closed off to the dysfunction, perhaps to spare yourself feelings of shame or embarrassment. You adjust to the fact that people in the community know your business and are probably judging you. Privacy becomes another elusive luxury beyond the reach of people like you.
Dignity was for the fancy people.
Pretending you’re not poor is one thing. All you need to pull that off is a couple of credit cards, a catalogue and a deep delusional streak. It also helps your street credibility if you keep that big blue crate of European Union stew you’ve been donated well out of view if you have visitors round. But concealing family dysfunction is much trickier. For one, the dysfunction may be out of your control; a parent or sibling, for example. Second, the dysfunction may be imperceptible to you and therefore hard to hide. Dysfunction, like poverty, can lead to disfigurements which are visible to everyone but you. Turns out, when you are living in dysfunction, it doesn’t occur to you that this is the case.
By the time it becomes apparent that your life isn’t normal, it’s too late to keep up the pretence. Concerned neighbours hear your troubles through the walls. Teachers, doctors, social workers and mental health professionals are aware of your ongoing situation. But for every person showing concern or offering support, there’s another waiting to exploit the vulnerability. Just like the inmates in the prison cafeteria who’ll slash each other over toast, if only to stave off more violence further down the line, I was forced either to confront or submit to the predators in my midst; the dysfunction at home, mainly around my mother, as well as the obvious fact we were poor, was something I had to account for when I was at school. On a few occasions I arrived there after dressing myself and became the butt of playground teasing. One morning, I remember my dad having to leave work to come to the school with a proper outfit for me. God knows what I was wearing. There were other occasions when I’d be sitting at the reception of nursery or school, well after the end of the school day, waiting for someone to come and pick me up.
