Political Landscapes, Benefit Street, actual streets and imaginary friends.

A beautiful summer's morning in late June - imagine you are in a glider floating high above the English countryside. it is perfectly still and almost silent, apart from distant traffic noise and the whoosh of invisible air-currents streaming across the aircraft's slender blade-like wings. Look down, what might you see? This perhaps?

Here, surely, is the modern mind-map of England, a patchwork of pasture, ploughed fields and woodland, criss-crossed by roads and railways, connecting ancient villages and market towns to the sprawling suburbia of great industrial cities. Flying back from abroad, the chequerboard of green, brown and grey is now an archetypal symbol of homecoming, much as the white cliffs of Dover were to our seafaring ancestors.

Here is a different aerial map of the same area:

Whereas the first map is a screen-shot from Google map's 'satelite view', the second is produced by Open Data Communities, an arm of the UK government's Office of National Statistics. Both show an area of Nottinghamshire around Mansfield, the northern starting point of the A38. The second map does not represent the physical landscape but a social one; it is a map of deprivation, with purple signifying poverty . 

If you ever worked in the public sector, 'Indices of Multiple Deptivation' will be familiar, but most people may not be aware of their existence or how the measures are used. The smallest political unit in English local government is a 'ward' (funny how that hospitalises the entire population). There are 32,482 wards in the country. The Office of National Statistics has ranked them using a cocktail of measures concerning health, educational attainment, crime, income and so on.  This index is used, to lapse briefly into civil service policy wonk speak, 'to target funding to the areas which most need it'. 

Mansfield, where the local economy has been devastated over recent decades by the demise of traditional industries should have benefited from targeted funding. The deprivation map shows this- a small area just southeast of Mansfield town-centre is shaded dark purple - the 50th most deprived neighbourhood in the country.. Put another way, 99.998% of wards in England are better off than these few streets in Mansfield. After a brief pang of guilt concerning 'poverty tourism', curiosity overcame my ethical qualms and I decided begin my journey down the A38 here.

What was I expecting? Something reminiscent of The Wire perhaps. I have driven through the poverty stricken southern suburbs of LA and Miami, and once managed to get lost at dusk in a run down area of Tampa. Here poverty was overt - boarded up single storey wooden houses, trashed shops, groups of young black guys just hanging-out, a few unsmashed streets lights glimmering in the dusk, on empty lots - full of "the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolet's", as the song goes. The place oozed menace. 

By contrast, in Mansfield  deprivation is hidden. The housing is a mix of Victorian terraces and post-war council houses, a few unkempt, but  neat properties out-numbered the scruffy ones. There was litter, but no more so than in most urban areas. Some old mills looked abandoned, but others housed small businesses. The streets themselves were hardly pretty, and somewhat overshadowed by a concrete slab of an office block belonging to a BT technical unit. The area looked run-down rather than desperate. If understatement is one of our defining national traits, here, it seems we had managed to understate poverty. To mis-quote Roger Waters, "quiet deprivation is the English way".

The streets were empty when I arrived mid-morning. It was late January, clear, but chilly, hardly hanging about on  street corner weather. The more I wandered about, the more the the area's poverty did become more obvious. Not just the 'Second Hand City' warehouse, but the well signed 'Community Advice Shop' on the corner of Gladstone St which offered advice about benefits, debt management and health issues. Opposite was a place offering cash for old clothes by the kilogram. Other local businesses included two convenience stores, a takeaway, a hairdressers and a martial arts academy. The place did not seem to have a local pub. Maybe a few beers in front of the telly were all people could afford by way of socialising

I walked up the somewhat ironically named Recreation Street, skirted along the edge of  a 'green space' overlooking open countryside. There was still hardly a soul to be seen. The area mixed modernised terraces interspersed with council houses, some constructed pre-war - brick-built with a nod towards a municipal 'garden city' style - the remainder were more system-built, late 60s 'little boxes'. The place was within walking distance of the town-centre shops, yet close enough to fields for local kids to annoy nearby farmers by running riot, it was difficult for me to regard these streets as a bad place to grow up in; in fact, despite half a century having elapsed, it looked remarkably similar to the streets I grew up in.


However, though the estate felt familiar, the prospects for  people living in it had changed radically over the past 50 years. De-industrialisation has devastated towns like Mansfield, but unlike the poverty of inner cities, where concerns about immigration, policing, and multi-culturalism ensure urban social issues hit the news, the fate of impoverished English shire towns is largely ignored. Furthermore, all the dominating media narratives about poverty are urban based. 

As I wandered around the empty streets on the edge of Mansfield, Channel 4 had just broadcast the second episode of its documentary series 'Benefit Street'. Compared to the programme's instantly notorious James Turner Street in Birmingham, this area of Mansfield scored much worse in the 'Index of Deprivation' in the areas of employment, health, education and crime. 

Later, when I checked out the Channel 4 web-page for the programme it was difficult not to smile; due to the vagaries of 'ad feed' algorithms, an advert for the National Trust was juxtaposed right next to images of benefit dependency, you could hardly have imagined a better illustration of how we have simply accepted the reality of a divided Britain. 


As I walked back along Newgate Lane towards where I had parked the car, two teenage girls popped out of a terrace house across the street, they crossed the road in front of me and disappeared into a nearby newsagents. 

Startling as the Newsagent's sales pitch seems - 'Cheap Crisps, Cheap Sweets, Cheap Pop, Cheap Shop - especially sited next to a pawn-broker - the message is really just an extreme variant of  strap-lines of major supermarkets have adopted since the banking crash. Here we have a few of their recent adverts -

What the adverts show is just how well businesses have responded to the rhetoric of austerity. Gone are the days of aspirational, lifestyle marketing; its all about value for money, coping with a downturn in living standards, with your friendly neighbourhood multi-national there to lend a hand. Tesco's long-standing 'Every Little Helps' is a phrase of genius, it encapsulates perfectly that part of the British psyche that actually craves austerity - make-do-and mend, the 'Dunkirk' spirit and the ubiquitous, and infuriating 'Keep Calm and Carry-on'. 

The slogans of the supermarkets mirror political soundbites - 'hard-working families', more for less', 'a hand-up not a hand-out'. The malign effect of all of this is, as falling living standards affects ever more people, is not that we develop a empathy for the poorest people in the country; conversely we seem ever more willing to support cutting benefits and simply accept the villification of anyone unable to find work. 

Here's what the government has to say about the matter:

Capping benefits is a key part of our long-term economic plan so the economy delivers for people who work hard and play by the rules.

These encouraging figures show the cap is helping achieve exactly that. Since the cap was introduced, in almost 6,000 households that were affected by the policy someone has found a job.

Of course, what really matters are the stories behind the statistics: people moving into work, earning a pay packet and getting on in life.

That’s what capping benefits is all about: building stronger communities where everyone contributes, changing people’s lives for the better, and securing a brighter future for Britain.

http://sharethefacts.conservatives.com/ May 9th 2014

Do we really believe capping benefits changes people's lives for the better? What the political message intimates is that the government's dominant narrative has concentrated on driving a wedge between  'hardworking families' and claimants. We have witnessed a revival of good old fashioned Victorian attitudes corralling the poor into deserving and undeserving categories. The media have played up to this. Benefits Street, while purporting to be a serious attempt to make a 'fly-on-the-wall' about urban poverty, was received as 'reality T.V.' and consumed with a prurient outrage more usually associated with Big Brother or I'm a Celebrity, get me out here.

Even though I know all of this, despite having worked hard for decades to encourage generations of A level students to get media savvy, nevertheless, my immediate reaction to the two girls who popped into the newsagents was to pigeonhole them as  stereotypical 'claimants' straight out of Benefit Street.

This was not an altogether unreasonable reaction. The girls were aged about seventeen, both  dressed in hooded sports tops and tracky bottoms. They seemed thin and undernourished, and the way their hairstyle had been pulled back from their foreheads, 'shallot-style' into an odd topknot emphasised their gaunt appearance. The taller of the two carried a tiny infant, scarcely a month old, wrapped loosely in a crocheted blanket - 'single parent, teenage pregnancy, underachievement, multi-generational worklessness. benefit dependency - my feral 'tabloid' brain chipped in before I could stop it. What I was doing was fitting my experience to some off-the-shelf narrative, in truth I knew nothing about the two girls. They may have been babysitting for an older relative; they could have been students or apprentices on their day off, but that's not how they appeared, they looked like they were auditioning for Benefit Street, and that is how I had judged them.

I passed the local primary school.  The sign announced it was part of the Greenwood Dale  Academy group. The Department for Education's answer to 'underachieving' schools in poorer areas is to take them out of local democratic control and hand them over to semi-autonomous remote organisations with an agenda to 'transform' standards. I don' t know how this is panning out in practise, but one of the first tangible results was a three metre high security fence around the school which gave the appearance of a prison rather than a place of learning.

Overall, the fate of the communities of the Yorkshire Nottinghamshire coalfield has been one of decline and impoverishment since the pits closed. The history of the area around Mansfield, however, is complicated further. The miners strike of 1984/5 is remembered as a battle between Thatcher and Scargill. However the struggle was as much one within the Miner's Union as with the Government. Not all areas supported the strike and the regional unions were semi-autonomous; the local Nottinghamshire Miners Association had a long tradition of moderation. During the dispute only 20% of Nottinghamshire miners took industrial action. Following the end of the strike the Union of Democratic Miners broke from the national body and became independent. This did not save the Nottinghamshire collieries, they too were systematically closed in moves which saw employment in the mining industry fall from 187,000 in the mid 1980s to less than 2000 today, with the last two deep mines (in Nottinghamshire) due for closure next year. The mining communities of north Nottinghamshire have lost out twice: vilified by the left for not supporting the strike in the 1980s but subject all the same to whole scale destruction of the mining industry. The issues still run deep in the area. In the days the when Sheffield United and Mansfield Town were in the same football league the Yorkshire club's fans taunted the Mansfield fans with the chant "scabs, scabs". In truth the same economic devastation has been visited upon both communities.

I was mulling these issues over while eating sandwich sitting in a dilapidated 'social space' just off Newgate Lane. Some local planner must have decided in the mid 80s that creating a semi-circular grey-slabbed area screened with shrubs and placing three park benches with a few concrete spheres dotted about was the way to lift community spirit in the area. Anyway, at least there was somewhere to sit and consume a banana thoughtfully. 

As I chomped away, group of young women passed, some pushing buggies, others on their own. They returned a few minutes later with toddlers in tow. It must have been lunch time at a  local pre-school group. Two of the kids tried to climb on the spherical bollards. Their adventurous spirit was soon slapped down by anxious mums. The first gaggle was followed by older people, picking up grandchildren probably. There was much concerned fussing over fixing the kid's hats, coats and gloves.


A little while later two others paused in front of me. A child, aged about five was dressed-up as a fairy - silver leotard, clip on wings, a home-made white voile tutu. She waved her tin- foil wand at me and perched precariously on top of a bollard. "Are you flying?" her mum enquired. "am flyin t'moon," daughter intimated. "Really!" mum enthused, "what can you see?" The child gave me a hard look. "Ah see a foony moon-man." I grinned at mum, and she smiled back. The last I saw of the pair was as they reached the crossing further up the road . The feisty Tinkerbell finally conceded to wear her coat , but only slung over her shoulders like a cloak I suppose you have to be very careful if you are a fairy; wings must be very delicate.

At this point I realised what was going to be an issue for me in my sojourn through lost England. Part of me wanted to be clear, to be as objective as I could, to be a reporter. The difficulty is, I am not a journalist; it is my poetry that has been published in the past, and most of that consists of flashes of narrative, bits of fiction populated by people that only ever lived in my head. So, even though I had done my homework, read assiduously about the structure and constitution of the NUM written as a doctoral thesis by some PhD student at Nottingham University, pored over regional economic statistics, read an entire technical guide to the analysis of 'Super Output Areas', I still ended up thinking about a child dressed up in a fairy costume and her kindly mother. What was even worse - the two them were invented. At some point sitting on the bench munching my banana I had slipped from observation of the local  mothers and their kids, to making-up a story about it. It just happened. Somehow I will need to factor this into my 'journal'. No way is it going to be all reportage. However the 'voceti' about Gladstone Street turns out, I bet there will be a fairy in it somewhere.