CCTV is a good thing.

[fol de rol]

From http://www.johannhari.com/:

The debate about civil liberites is being driven into a right-wing ditch
It is being distorted by paranoia about CCTV and an assumption state action always strangles liberty

A month ago, I was walking back to my flat in the East End, which sits on that strange fault-line between the mega-wealth of the City and the mega-concrete slabs of Whitechapel poverty. It was a little after midnight, and my i-Pod i–solation was suddenly interrupted by a hoarse yelling. It's not strange to hear yelling here – but this was a man shouting: "I'm going to batter you, you fucking tramp! You homeless bastard! I'm going to kill you!"

A well-suited, well-booted City-boy was waving his fist and spitting hate at a terrified homeless guy, who was sitting helpless on the floor. Then there emerged a classic East End scene: a Bangladeshi, a Pole and a few lads from Devon tried to restrain the City-thug, telling him in a Babel of languages to calm down. Like an idiot, I tried to reassure the homeless guy by telling him I'd called the police – which prompted him to get up and try to run away. The man chased after him and kicked him into the road, screaming again that he would kill "the fucking tramp." He fell hard into the road, shivering.

As the police siren shrieked up to us, the City-boy broke off and the homeless guy disappeared, staggering, up an alleyway. The attacker then announced to the police that he was the victim here: the homeless guy had attacked him.

In many circumstances, that would be the end of it. The victim had run off; there was nobody to show the attacker was lying. Except a police officer noticed there were two CCTV cameras nearby. When they were checked, it showed that this was indeed an unprovoked, vicious attack – and now the man is being prosecuted. He won't be able to keep on attacking the homeless.

This is a story that plays out, with mild variants, every day somewhere in Britain. Just to stick to the biggest headlines: the Ipswich Ripper was caught before he could murder even more young women because he was picked up on CCTV. The Soho nail-bomber was caught before he could blow up more black and gay people because he was captured on CCTV. A few days ago at the Old Bailey, a man who shot a pregnant 22 year old woman was banged up after being caught on camera.

In such cases, human liberty is enhanced by CCTV. There are women walking the streets of Ipswich and gay people walking down Old Compton Street today because CCTV caught somebody determined to kill them. When CCTV was introduced in a pilot scheme in Airdrie town centre in Scotland, over the following two years crime fell by 21 percent. Better still, a study by the journal Injury Prevention found that after CCTV is installed, significantly fewer people have to be admitted to hospital after being attacked, because the police get there much faster.

Yet there has been a strange, inchoate backlash against CCTV over the past few years. When listing the real erosions of human rights carried out by the current government – the complicity with US torture flights, the restrictions on free speech to appease religious fanaticism, or the shipping-back of refugees to their deaths – CCTV often gets lumped onto the end of the list. Every act by a democratic state now seems to gets reflexively opposed. There is a danger that the debate about civil liberties is being driven into a right wing ditch where liberty will actually be undermined further.

Increasingly, the mood among the intelligentsia is that the only threat to liberty comes from the state – and the only way to advance liberty is to immobilise the state. But in reality there are two sources of threats to your liberty. One is indeed a government that could try to control and repress you. But the other threat – just as real – is from other people. The women of Ipswich were not being attacked by the state and its tentacles; they were saved by it from being killed in even greater numbers.

This isn't about 'balancing' freedom against something else. It's about figuring out which mixture of state action and hands-off inaction will produce the greatest freedom in the real world.

This doesn't lend itself to grand, bombastic polemics by the likes of Henry Porter warning that we have morphed into 1984. Instead, it requires a cool case-by-case conversation. But the critics of CCTV offer surprisingly few rational arguments to engage with. They warn gravely that if you walk through Central London, you are picked up by nearly one thousand cameras. But you will only ever be picked up by a CCTV camera in a public place where you could be seen by a random stranger. Walking through Central London, anyone can see you – and tens of thousands do. This isn't an intrusion onto your privacy, because you aren't in a private place.

I am absolutely not saying that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. I am saying that these cameras are not in places where you hide: they are in public, where you are being seen by any number of people you will never know.

The critics are left to conjure the prospect of a future totalitarian government that could abuse the camera-systems. But if we had a totalitarian government, all sorts of things we need now would be menacing – not least the police force and the army. This is an argument against totalitarianism, not in favour of abolishing the police and army and CCTV just in case.

Of course beyond CCTV there are genuinely knotty debates, where the path to the greatest liberty isn't instantly clear. One has bubbled up again this weekend. The biggest abuse of civil liberties in Britain by far is the epidemic of unpunished rape, with 47,000 women being subjected every year. The setting up of a police DNA database in 2000 has helped to catch men who had raped thousands of women, and would have gone on to rape thousands more. So far, so good. Then on Saturday, several senior police officers suggested that school-children who show the indicators of potential future criminality should be entered into the DNA database.

Here, we all become instinctively uncomfortable. Already, young black men are wildly disproportionately represented in the database because they are arrested so much more; singling out 'problem' kids feels just as prejudicial. I believe the solution that would most enhance liberty is to enter all newborn babies onto the database. That way, nobody is singled out unfairly, and random-rapists will be much more swiftly caught – and therefore will be able to rape fewer women. A tiny infringement of liberty has to be weighed against a very large one: a swab for all, versus a rape for many. I admit this DNA dilemma forces a real and hefty debate, and there are reams of reasonable people on the other side. But you cannot simply dismiss the tough choice, screaming "Totalitarianism!"

Of course we must always be vigilant about state power going too far; I oppose the actions of the state for great slabs of the time. But there is one thing that immediately kills any attempt to find the best road to real liberty: the closed-circuit paranoia that assumes any extension of state power is a sign of incipient fascism. It's time to stop shrieking about a police state at every turn, and start looking calmly and questioningly into the camera lens.

Also:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/nov/07/comment.politics2

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/dec/16/comment.labour

So, where do we all stand?

[Neville Chamberlain]

I like the bit about "a few lads from Devon". It sounds like they all flew in up from Devon that very second just to help the tramp.

[Baxter]

I drive a Proch.

[biggytitbo]

That's just the old 'if it helps solve crime then it's worth it' argument, which is of course bollocks. There's lots of things that you could do that help prevent crime, like having surveillance cameras in the home, implanting everyone with chips or just putting the entire population in prison, but we don't do them because they measures are worse than the supposed benefits. The fact is, we have 20%+ of the worlds CCTV cameras in this country and we don't have any lower crime rates than comparable countries. CCTV hasn't made a massive difference and the original premise of them has, as always through function creep, massively expanded without any proper debate or consultation. What we have seen in 10 years of New Lab is common sense, civility and mutual respect replaced with fear, hostility, suspicion, and paranoia. All their surveillance apparatus does not solve the problems with society, it is part of the problem with society and we are now on a slippery slope where ever more unthinkable measures are been brought in because we're told with the flimsiest of reason that it will prevent crime or terrorism. Where does it end?

[Famous Mortimer]

Of course, having a welfare system that means "tramps" have somewhere to sleep, and making the lives of prostitutes safer so the murderer never got started in the first place, is too much for Johann Hari.

[olafr]

CCTV is a good thing.

Why? Are your camera and bathroom scales broken and recalling CCTV footage is the only way you can gauge your weight-loss on a daily basis?

What I do is stand in the garden at the same time every day and get a friend to draw around my shadow. The little Russian dolls of chalk outlines make it all so worthwhile. Eventually, the chalk lines will be all that's left!

[biggytitbo]

Of course, having a welfare system that means "tramps" have somewhere to sleep, and making the lives of prostitutes safer so the murderer never got started in the first place, is too much for Johann Hari.

Hari is one of these people who believes the state is there to protect the rich and the privileged from the peasants and the riff-raff. When in reality, if we have to have a state at all it should be there to protect the peasants from the rich, for it is them that have and always will do the most damage to society.

[chand]

That's just the old 'if it helps solve crime then it's worth it' argument, which is of course bollocks. There's lots of things that you could do that help prevent crime, like having surveillance cameras in the home, implanting everyone with chips or just putting the entire population in prison, but we don't do them because they measures are worse than the supposed benefits.

Well, the whole premise of his article is that this a measure which isn't worse than the supposed benefits. Surely even you can comprehend that there's a difference between a CCTV camera filming a busy street and 'putting the entire population in prison'?

Of course, having a welfare system that means "tramps" have somewhere to sleep, and making the lives of prostitutes safer so the murderer never got started in the first place, is too much for Johann Hari.

I'm not sure Hari would object to housing the homeless or making prostitutes' lives safer, would he?

[biggytitbo]

Well, the whole premise of his article is that this a measure which isn't worse than the supposed benefits. Surely even you can comprehend that there's a difference between a CCTV camera filming a busy street and 'putting the entire population in prison'?

But the problem is, putting a CCTV camera in busy public places was the original premise behind CCTV, but now we have 14 million of the bloody things and plans to use them in everything from council bins to lamp posts. You can't have a debate about CCTV without talking about the massive unregulated expansion and function creep from their original use.

[Famous Mortimer]

I'm not sure Hari would object to housing the homeless or making prostitutes' lives safer, would he?

He may not, but that particular solution to the crisis seems conspicuous by its absence from that article.

[fol de rol]

Hari is one of these people who believes the state is there to protect the rich and the privileged from the peasants and the riff-raff. When in reality, if we have to have a state at all it should be there to protect the peasants from the rich, for it is them that have and always will do the most damage to society.

Come on - Hari's attitude towards "the peasants and the riff-raff" is nothing like that at all. Give me a few minutes, and I'll link you to a load of relevant articles.

EDIT:There we go.

Spoiler alert

How Blair slashed homelessness - and nobody noticed
Lberals shouldn't totally despair of the Prime Minister

This is the summer of liberal discontent. As Tony Blair sunned himself with right-wing billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, the centre-left defenders of Blair back home were crumbling. After a decade of insisting that Blair is more progressive than he looks, decent liberals like the novelist Robert Harris and Neal Lawson, editor of the New Labour journal Renewal, are in despair.

They discovered that whenever they grasped for weapons to defend the Prime Minister's record, they found nothing but Sixties-bashing and increasingly deranged pronouncements from David Blunkett. Nobody can accuse Harris, Lawson or the thousands of disillusioned ex-Blairites across Britain of being closet Trots. This is a rebellion of the sane and the centrist.

There are days when I know exactly how they feel. I have a small file for whenever I feel that furious itch to burn my Labour membership card and vote Green. At the top of the file there are two words: Cardboard City.

The scores of homeless people huddled in boxes at the centre of one of the world's richest cities was an iconic image of Thatcherism. But how many people know that under the current government, the number of rough sleepers has been slashed by two thirds? Why isn't that considered an iconic component of the New Labour years?

In 1999 - the year Blair and Gordon Brown finally abandoned Tory spending plans - the Government began to plough £200m into lifting the poorest people in Britain off the streets. This whopping sum - more than some homeless charities were demanding - has made it possible to introduce a whole new approach to lifting people off the streets. The new Rough Sleepers Unit is in charge of Contact and Assessment Teams (CATs) for homeless people. It sounds jargon-heavy, but the reality is life-changing. Each individual is assigned a CATs worker who develops a detailed action plan for getting them into accommodation, dealing with their drug habit, and ultimately into work. They ring the hostels, they liaise with the GPs, they find them job training. Homeless people aren't on their own any more.

For many people on the streets, it is the first time in their lives that anybody has lavished this amount of care and attention on them. You remember all those figures about the "extra bureaucrats" employed by New Labour? This is what they do. Workers in CATs count as "pen pushers". Some pen. Some pushers.

And the extra cash for the homeless (raised by, yes, increased taxation, particularly on the middle class) buys even more than this. Once they are housed, the ex-homeless are given a Tenancy Sustainment Officer who helps to make sure they don't lose their new home. These officers have been so successful that the rate of tenancy breakdowns has fallen to just 3 per cent. And there's more: spending on social housing stock has increased by 250 per cent under New Labour. But how many of us know about these successes? In some cities, such as Birmingham, the number of people on the streets has been cut by 96 per cent.

Don't take the word of the government for these figures. Chris Holmes, the Director of Shelter, has welcomed these developments, explaining, "The numbers of people sleeping on the streets has reduced under this government, and every month people are moving off the streets and into accommodation. New work to support previously homeless people and enable them to stay in their homes is also extremely positive. The Government deserves credit for what has been achieved in such a short time-scale."

And the good news doesn't end there. The more I delved into how successful the Government has been with rough sleepers, the more I discovered that this has been made possible by a dense web of progressive policies that we never hear about. For example, a significant factor in lifting people off the streets has been the sensible - and almost entirely unreported - government decision to increase methadone and heroin prescription by more than 30 per cent. Rather than moralistically lecture opiate addicts and condemn them to a desperate life using unsafe, adulterated drugs bought on the streets, the Government has given them the drug their bodies desperately crave free through the NHS.

And what do you know - once they are given their opiates, they don't want to beg, burgle or prostitute themselves any more. They weren't living on the streets out of choice, as Tory ministers used preposterously to imply; they were doing it because they were using all their cash to feed their habit. The Government is slowly ending that cycle.

This, in turn, is only made possible by even more progressive moves. This extra prescription, for example, can only happen because there has been massive increased funding for the NHS. The Government's programmes to tackle youth unemployment, including the New Deal, have similarly had a knock-on effect. A quarter of homeless people are under 25 - so the near- eradication of youth unemployment under Blair to just 5,000 nationwide has led to fewer people hitting the streets.

And on and on it goes, a story of real, tangible progress. The British policy towards homelessness is being studied all over the world as a dazzling success story - everywhere, that is, except here at home. So no matter how disgusted I am by Tony Blair's policy on arms sales, his government's abuse of asylum-seekers or a dozen other awful acts, I am never tempted to dismiss him as basically a Tory. No Tory government would have done all this.

Of course there are still problems with homelessness. There will be 500 people on our streets tonight, and that's 500 too many. Some of them are there because of the Government's tendency towards cheap Blunkettry can counteract its benevolent side. The research shows that many rough sleepers tonight will be asylum- seekers cruelly denied benefits, and many others will be prisoners discharged for an overflowing penal system that is too pressured to provide proper rehousing services.

There remain - as the homelessness charity Crisis documented last month - 400,000 "hidden homeless" in Britain, who are not living on the streets but in temporary accommodation. These people are one crisis away from a cardboard box. The Government is now shifting its focus to them, and it brought down the number of families living in bed and breakfast last month by 5 per cent.

It is in the nature of progressive government that problems can be reduced but rarely ended. But that's no reason to argue - as some people do - that the "hidden homeless" in temporary accommodation negate the Government's achievements with rough sleepers. It's far better to be in a B&B than sleeping under a bridge.

The Government deliberately - and maddeningly - underplays its many good left-wing policies. This is because they are afraid of Britain's vicious and biased right-wing press - and because they underestimate the electorate's appetite for compassionate reform.

As a result of Blair's Trappist approach to his progressive policies, it is easier than it should be for liberals to want to make the Prime Minister himself homeless as soon as possible. Next time you feel the Blair-despair, find a homeless person - if you can - and tell him we've got a right-wing government.

The Independent - 21/08/2004

[close]

Spoiler alert

The stakes are too high to gamble with the lives of the weak and the poor
If you refuse to choose the lesser evil, you don't get salvation, you get Michael Howard

I feel the hunger too. The craving to protest vote against the accumulated grievances of the past seven years is intense. Remember the cramming of more people into our prisons than ever before, the end to the right to a jury trial, the endless arms sale to fetid regimes, Blair's praise for the mass slaughter in Chechnya, the very existence of David Blunkett? There, waiting for you, is the ultimate comfort vote: the Liberal Democrats. No blood, no odour, just an ethical glow.

So why won't I do it? With a low feeling in my gut, I have to acknowledge that splitting the left vote will let the Tories in through the middle. If you refuse to choose the lesser evil, you don't get salvation; you get Michael Howard. Don't believe those who say it can't happen: it happened throughout the 1980s, when a majority of people (56 per cent) voted for divided centre-left parties and Thatcher ruled supreme. If enough Labour voters haemorrhage away, if the left is divided enough, the Tories can grab this election with a minority of the vote. They did it for 18 howling years.

Yet most of my friends believe the stakes are so low and the differences so small they can afford to protest vote. They stampede away from Labour, suspecting - like the veteran leftie Tariq Ali - that it is "pure sentimentality" to believe there are "substantive differences between the parties".

John Lennon, at a time when most of the left thought Labour's leaders were a bankrupt band of sell-outs and charlatans, said: "The gap between the parties is far too narrow - but a lot of people live in that gap. It's the people I grew up with who will pay the price if you pretend there is no difference at all." I'm sticking with a Lennonist slogan for this election: Mind the Gap. Here are some of the policies that lie in the narrow space between Labour and Tory, the policies you are sliding on to the roulette table if you protest vote:

(1) The 1951 UN Convention on Refugees. Michael Howard's Britain would be the first democracy ever to withdraw from the Convention. For the first time since the Holocaust, Britain's policy would be openly to turn away people fleeing tyranny.

The BBC journalist Jeremy Vine recently asked David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, whether he would turn away Aung San Suu Kyi - the Burmese pro-democracy leader - if she sought asylum in Britain after the proposed Tory quota was full. He was forced to admit she would be sent back into the poisonous embrace of the Burmese junta.

The international consequences of this policy are devastating. If the fourth largest economy in the world pulls out of the Convention, the right-wingers in every nation will point to Britain and ask, "Why not us?" As one UN official recently told me, "If Britain withdraws, the other democracies will fall like dominoes. The international architecture for dealing with refugees will be dead within a decade." It is no exaggeration to say the future of the world's refugees hangs on this election.

(2) Increases in the minimum wage. Labour will increase the minimum wage by 9 per cent year-on-year. Michael Howard - who was describing it as "a terrible mistake" until a few short years ago - will freeze it at the current level. The difference of a few pounds an hour, which is what it would add up to, might seem like "sentimentality" if you live in Kensington, but it makes a great difference if you are living on the poverty line.

(3) The reforms from the MacPherson Report. As Home Secretary, Michael Howard refused to launch an inquiry into the failures of the Metropolitan Police and their handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Now, as Tory leader, he has campaigned against the recommendations of the MacPherson inquiry as "crazy political correctness". For example, it suggested the police should log the ethnicity of people they stop in the streets, to stop them harassing young black men. The Labour government agreed. Howard has called this "ludicrous".

The most powerful moment of the election was when Doreen Lawrence, Stephen's mother, challenged Howard for demonising the safeguards that prevent the police abusing black people. Howard was reduced to stammering, "I didn't know I was going to be asked about this." It was the lowest moment in a low campaign where Tory candidates blamed asylum-seekers for MRSA and the BNP leader accused Howard of "stealing our territory".

(4) Methadone prescription. This might sound like an odd or even trivial policy to include, but - like so many of Labour's silent progressive policies - it has massive ramifications. The Government has increased methadone prescription for opiate addicts by 40 per cent, and they are beginning to roll out heroin prescription for the most chronic users. The result? The number of people sleeping on our streets has fallen by two-thirds and burglary rates have plummeted, as they have in every country that chooses to help addicts rather than harangue them. Thousands of women and boys have been saved from selling their bodies for their next fix. The Tories will slash these prescriptions to pay for tax cuts and set these people on the road back to Cardboard City and crime, crime, crime.

There are dozens of small, day-to-day decisions like this where a Labour government will make a quietly progressive decision and the Tories will make a savagely reactionary one. Increased tax and spending, the Human Rights Act, SureStart centres for the poorest mums, redistributive tax credits for the poor, wind farms, Britain's place in Europe - they all hang in the Gap. Is it all "pure sentimentality"?

Go to www.tacticalvoter.net to find the main anti-Tory force in your constituency is; you might be lucky and find it is the Liberal Democrats. If you are in Brighton, you can vote Green - they stand a serious chance of winning. But if you live in a Labour vs Tory seat and you refuse to choose the lesser evil of Labour, the beneficiaries of these policies will pay the price.

If Iraq was your breaking point, ask, as Robin Cook does, why the British poor should be added to the long list of collateral damage from the war. If your grievances lie in other failures, then vote Labour on Thursday and join a pressure group on Friday - from Liberty to Greenpeace to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade - to lobby them for change. With Labour, there is a chance they will listen; with Michael Howard, you can be sure he will not.

When the stakes are this high, are you prepared to play dice with the Britain's addicts, ethnic minorities, our poorest workers and the world's refugees?

The Independent - 04/06/2005

[close]

Spoiler alert

Blunkett wants to go after the 'scroungers'. Why not start with the super-rich?
The mass tax avoidance of the rich is one of the great scandals of our time

Before it gets lost in the fog that shrouds the Westminster village, it's important to figure out what the British people said last Thursday. If you combine the Labour and Liberal Democrat votes, it's a landslide for the centre-left, with 59 per cent of the British public voting for parties they knew - according to polls - were committed to higher taxes, higher public spending and redistribution of wealth to the poorest. At every election since 1979, fat majorities have done the same.

Yet the leftish nature of the British people is persistently obscured by a series of distorting and undemocratic filters: the electoral system, a ludicrously biased press and the disproportionate influence of the rich in shaping our public debate. Don't let all this make you forget that this is not a conservative country.

Even now the Tory press is trying to spin the derisory dribble of 33 per cent of votes cast to the Conservatives as "a come back" and "a partial victory for Howard". In the real world, the right received fewer votes even than in the disastrous defeat of 1997. The low-tax, low-spending, spit-on-asylum-seekers rhetoric of the Tories has crashed and burned. If the Tory press lulls the party into believing they simply need to be more right-wing to win, so much the better for progressives.

But there's another group of people who have not yet realised that Britain is quietly left-leaning: the Labour government. As soon as he was whisked back to government, David Blunkett was briefing the News of the World about his determination to crack down on scroungers. "Back... with a vengeance! Blunkett's first task is to get workshy 1m jobs", it declared, in a story clearly provided by the new Works and Pension Secretary who pledged to "end the gravy train". Yet again, he was using the language of the right to attack the poor. Is this what you voted for?

There was a particularly nasty irony in Blunkett's decision to scramble to the popular press - on his first day back in power - with this announcement. There is a group of people in Britain who are indisputably riding a gravy train, bleeding money away from the Exchequer - fill in your own cliché here.

Who is this group? Certainly not the recipients of a paltry £55-a-week incapacity benefit. No, they are the super-rich operating within our borders, epitomised by the News of the World's owner, Rupert Murdoch. His company News International has paid no net corporation tax at all in this country for more than a decade, despite having profits topping £300m. That's nothing: not a penny. The firm could not operate without the complex and costly services provided by the British state - the police, roads and rubbish collection - but News International is determined to make everybody else pay for it. Now remind me: who mentioned freeloading?

The mass tax avoidance of the rich - totalling $860bn a year, according to the Tax Justice Network - is one of the great scandals of our time. A tiny elite has decided to unilaterally exempt itself from democratic taxation, and elected leaders across the world have rolled over and accepted it. The real estate tycoon, Leona Helmsley, famously declared in the 1980s that "only little people pay taxes" on her way to the slammer. At the time, this view was considered shocking; today, it is the raison d'être of the global elite, a morning prayer for the 1 per cent of the world's population who hold more than 57 per cent of the planet's wealth. They routinely wash their cash through a dozen tax havens, carefully ensuring that nothing goes towards the societies where their businesses operate. This is technically legal - but why do governments maintain such dysfunctional laws?

The world's tax havens now hold $11.5 trillion of assets - the equivalent to ten Britains. The rich have exploited the fact that political globalisation has not caught up with economic globalisation: their multinational businesses are always a skip and a jump ahead of national governments. A great deal of that money rightly belongs in this country, paying for schools and hospitals, but even more of it belongs in developing countries. In places like Argentina or Nigeria, the entire rich class has stashed their money off shore.

We're going to hear a lot about Africa over the next few months - but will we acknowledge our responsibility for this vacuum sucking tax money out of poor countries? As John Christensen, international coordinator of the Tax Justice Network, explains, "Britain has taken the lead in the creation of tax havens. Of the world's 72 major tax havens, 35 are linked to Britain. Many are crown dependencies such as Jersey. The City of London is also a major tax haven. For example, Mohamed Fayed negotiated the amount of tax he paid with the Inland Revenue. Could you imagine the man off the street being able to negotiate his taxes?"

The money that is being ring-fenced from democratic control is enough to pay for the UN Millennium Development Goals - to eradicate abject poverty in Africa - twelve times over. So will our government work with other democracies to dismantle the tax havens?

The tax avoidance industry chortles at the thought. They baldly state that this is impossible because many of them will find new ways to rig the system. One UK accountant told the press in 2003, "No matter what legislation is in place, the accountants and lawyers will find a way around it. Rules are rules, but rules are meant to be broken." Now re-read that sentence, and imagine it was spoken by a single mum on an estate talking about incapacity benefit. What would the News of the World say then?

Ah, governments reply with a shrug, but if we try to tax them, they will simply go elsewhere. Close our tax havens and a thousand more will open. Yes, it's true that national governments cannot act alone; but that is no excuse for failing to act. When it became clear that al-Qa'ida was receiving funding through tax havens, laws were passed across the world to freeze the funds. How much easier would it be to deal with organisations that aren't even secret - that have big shiny offices in every capital city in the world? If the political will is there, then the global rich can be swiftly tracked and reintegrated into the world's tax system. The French have already made proposals to this effect. Will we?

Even after the British electorate has made it very clear we want a more fair and equal society, our government is still giving the global rich a Get Out of Tax Free card. When it comes to the petty scams of the poor and weak, they declare that "nothing is off limits." When it comes to the massive tax avoidance of the rich, they feign paralysis. Congratulations on your re-election, Prime Minister. Now please don't mention Africa or incapacity benefit until you have dealt with the antisocial behaviour of the super-rich.

The Independent - 11/06/2005

[close]

Spoiler alert

The rebellion of Britain's hidden army of underpaid cleaners has finally begun
This is not merely a matter for your conscience. It affects your health, too

Welcome to a Tale of Two Cities. Over the past fortnight, the hymns to London have been endless and gorgeous - but few have acknowledged that this is a megalopolis with a dirty secret: we are not one city at all. There is Daytime London, which arrives at work at 9am to find its offices clean, its bins empty and its carpets cleansed. You know this world. Its inhabitants have an average wage topping £25 an hour. They go to theatres and movies and bars, and easyJet to every corner of Europe. They congratulate themselves daily on living in the most ethnically and socially mixed city on earth.

But there is another London that wakes in the night. It staggers on to the night bus at 4am to filter across hospitals, schools, and the temples of global finance and media to collect our rubbish and dispose of our crap. The average wage is under £5 an hour. The people who live in this other London do not go to theatres or cinemas or on holiday - they cannot afford it. They have been inhaled by London's economy from Africa, South America and every poor country in the world, and they see our self-congratulatory multiculturalism as a bitter joke. Thank you, thank you for letting us come here and skivvy for you 12 hours a day for less than a fiver an hour. How tolerant you are.

In February this year, something extraordinary happened: the London of the night began to rebel. Starting in Canary Wharf, a wave of cleaners' strikes across Britain has forced up the wages of some of the country's poorest people - and today, it hits the heart of our democracy: the Palace of Westminster.

Evrad Ouale is a 27-year-old from Ivory Coast who has cleaned in the House of Commons for four years. He lives in a dingy single room with his wife, and has not left the M25 area since he started the job. He scrambles for overtime, working 60 hours a week, but he admits that even when he is working ever conceivable hour, "You can barely live. It's horrible. We have no choice but to strike. We cannot continue like this".

The way they are treated in Parliament is a grim metaphor for the way most of Britain's 1.5 million cleaners live and work. Their designated area is a filthy Dickensian basement plagued by rats and the stench of the Palace's sewage. Unlike parliamentary researchers or security guards, they are banned from entering the lavishly subsidised House of Commons restaurant between noon and 3pm, as if they were part of an Untouchable caste. They are given 12 days' holiday - that's 12 - a year, and paid £4.85 an hour. If they were British citizens, they would be entitled to have their wages topped-up through the government's excellent Family Credit. But since almost all the cleaners are migrant workers, they are forced to live at rates everyone admits are way below the poverty line.

And within Parliament, the policy that has driven down the numbers and wages of cleaners over the past 20 years can be seen in all its fetid glory. The cleaners in the House of Lords are directly employed by the state, while responsibility for employing cleaners in the Commons has been contracted out to private companies who are paid a bulk fee to provide the service. The difference is a slap in the face: in the Lords, cleaners start at £7.89 an hour, receive a decent pension, and get 30 days' paid holiday a year - a package that seems utopian to their contracted-out neighbours in the next chamber.

Does anyone need a clearer illustration of what happens when cleaners are contracted out? Study after study has found that there are no "efficiency savings" contributed by the privateer middlemen. No: they simply slash the wages of the poorest people (or lay off swaths of cleaners) and pocket the difference.

This isn't merely a matter for your conscience. It affects your health, too. Since contracting-out began to tear through our public services in the early 1980s, the number of cleaners has nearly halved - and the rate of hospital infections has soared.

So it is time to learn how our cleaners are treated, in both the public and private sectors. The workers' rights organisation NoSweat interviewed a number of cleaners who toil in Canary Wharf - our little chunk of New York scraping the sky - in January. One typical African woman, Marcia, explained how her 12-hour day panned out: "We are not allowed lockers because we might steal something and hide it there. When we leave in the morning we are searched by security men. There are no women security officers."

Once she arrives at work, she is strictly forbidden from having any further contact with the outside world. She is not allowed to take in a mobile phone, and she is not allowed to use the phones there. "So, if the kids are sick, I can't ring home and check if they are OK. And once we start work, we are not allowed to rest. There is a supervisor or team leader behind you all the time. Apart from in the break time - 30 unpaid minutes - we cannot sit down". For all this, she receives a few hundred pounds a week to live in central London and raise her kids.

So should we simply despair? Are Britain's cleaners condemned to poverty wages, a level set solely by The Market and never to change? No. Until this year, many people argued that an industry like cleaning is impossible to unionise: staff turnover is a revolving door, the workers speak little English, the workforce is fragmented and demoralised. But the Transport and General Workers' Union (T&G) has proven that this is a myth. Within a few months of recruiting, nearly 80 per cent of workers for Emprise and Mitie - two of the main cleaning firms in Europe - were paid-up union members. Starting in the Canary Wharf complex, they began to demand a living wage at the towering sum of £6.70 an hour, along with decent holiday time, sick pay and working conditions.

And it worked. Barclays agreed to meet the demands, and now most companies in the Wharf have matched them. According to the T&G, only a shamed handful now refuse to pay a living wage - the Bank of America (annual profit: $2bn), Credit Suisse ($3.9bn) and Lehman Brothers ($672m).

The excuse offered by neo-liberals for paying poverty wages - that it drives companies abroad - is exposed as a sham: are banks going to fly in workers from Bangalore to empty their bins? And anybody who claims that there is no need for trade unions anymore should be dragged to speak to the Canary Wharf cleaners - and the cleaners still fighting for a living wage.

As the capital's cleaners begin to strike, I think it is time to end London's self-congratulation about our ethnic diversity. I love London and its spirit over the past fortnight, too. But while you are standing on carpets cleaned by hidden-away black and Asian people who earn a pittance for the privilege, please don't tell me this is a multicultural paradise.

The Independent - 21/07/2005

[close]

Spoiler alert

The reality of London's 'feral children'
Meet Camilla Batmenghelidh and the children who live in her shoe

Wealthy Londoners like to imagine we live in a class-free capital. This is a city where nobody is really poor, where if you're smart and hard-working in Peckham you can always clamber to the peaks of a semi in Dulwich and Chelsea – or at least that's what we tell ourselves as we buy another lock for the front door. Only this week, I heard a trio of toffs on 'Start the Week' blithely asserting that class is dead and if you're looking for inescapable London poverty, you have to delve into the pages of Dickens.

I would love to drag them to Kid's Company near Brixton. It's a charity providing hot meals and special classes for the poorest kids in this town – and it's one of the few places where refugees from London's tidal poverty can gather without somebody calling the police. At its centre is the impossibly calm Camilla Batmangelidh, its founder. In a purple headscarf and long tinsely ear-rings, she is a latter-day old Mother Hubbard, sitting in her shoe with her hundreds of children. "Most of the children who come here are suffering from malnutrition," she tells me, "and many of them have stunted growth because of trauma and stress in their lives. We get a lot of 15 year-olds who have never set foot in a secondary school. I'd love to see soembody tell them there's no poverty in London."

A teenage mum storms through, shouting in exhausted rage at her two year old. "She's living in a tiny damp room with three kids, we're getting her rehoused," Camilla says. An 18 year old lad wanders up needing help with his immigration forms: he has lived in this country since he was four, but his heroin- addicted mother never had him registered as a British citizen, so he has discovered he is an unperson, unable to use public services or claim housing. He would be on the streets if Camilla hadn't paid for a bedsit. She arranges to call him in an hour, but for now she has to run: there's a girl to take to the psychiatric hospital after she was raped on her estate by her father.

These children are routinely labelled as "pikeys" and "the ASBO generation" by the right. In cities with extreme and spiralling inequality, the residents always create dehumanising labels for the poor. In South America, they say the street children are like rats; here, we dub these kids "feral children" a term actually used by our own police chief, Sir Ian Blair, in a speech this week.

Camilla deals with the reality behind these labels every day. She introduces me to Anthony, a 15 year-old who has been described as a "demon child" in the local press. He attacked another kid with a hammer when he was eleven, and he was booted from children's home to children's home for years until he wound up here – where, after slow, painstaking work, Camilla discovered he had been sexually abused by his mother.

"Every child I've come across who is considered evil or out-of-control has a story like this. And look - now he's improved so much," she says. "When he arrived here, he was throwing chairs, screaming abuse, wouldn't sit down for even a minute. It would take four people to restrain him during one of his rages. Now he's learning maths, he's sitting his GCSEs, he's caring – that's what I live for. If they had locked him up and thrown away the key, they would have thrown away the abused child too."

It's very soothing to believe you are rich because you deserve it, and they are poor because they deserve it. It's also a cruel, cruel lie.

Evening Standard - 18/11/2005

[close]

Spoiler alert

Big Brother and how we failed a generation of working class kids
The children of the poor - the Chanelles and Brians - are ring-fenced away in warehouse schools

Gordon Brown should be watching Big Brother. Series after series, the jeered-at, sneered-at reality show dramatises the latent tensions and tribulations within our culture - on class, race, gender - better than any David Hare play or Ken Loach film. This year, the programme has shown in cool 24/7 vision one of the trickiest problems facing the British education system - and if Brown is going to achieve his shimmering goal of "helping everyone to become the best they can be", he will have to take it on.

The two most educationally-intriguing housemates, Chanelle Hayes and Brian Belo, were both 19 when they entered the house. They are the children of the schools system that Thatcher, Major and Blair built. Both have had grinding, bitter backgrounds: Chanelle's mother was a prostitute who was murdered by one of her "clients", and Brian's parents were too poor and distressed to care for him properly so they sent him into a succession of foster homes.

The press has picked out some of the most glaring gaps in Chanelle and Brian's knowledge and presented them as thick: Brian didn't know who Shakespeare was, and Chanelle seemed to think people could have kept dinosaurs as pets. But the reality is more complex - and more depressing. Actually, they are both unusually smart. In the intelligence tests given to all the housmates, they came up near the top, outperforming the average man-on-the-street by a skip, a leap and a jump. They have shown throughout the series that in addition to being kind, gentle, decent people, they have a sharp intuitive intelligence.

The problem isn't their intellect. It's that they have been almost entirely failed by the schools system and the wider culture. Not only have they not been given knowledge, they haven't been given aspirations. Both could make amazing contributions in their lives, but Chanelle has been encouraged to think her highest aspiration should be "to be exactly like Victoria Beckham", a tedious, talentless stick insect who brags she has never read a book.

Brian has lower ambitions still. He recently said: "I'd rather kill myself than watch a programme about politics." It reminded me of something the great war correspondent Martha Gellhorn once wrote: "People will often say, with pride: 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.'" Brian does care about those things, but he has not been equipped by the schools system or the culture - that's us - to see how they are connected to the arid thing he thinks of as "politics".

These aren't freak-show exceptions. I've recently been going to reunions for some of my schools (the joys of Facebook!) and finding out that too many of the clever, ambitious children and teenagers I knew have had their potential rolled up and packed away by a cultural climate that devalues and even derides intellectual success, along with the Thatcher-triggered collapse of social mobility. I can already see it happening with my oldest nephew who is just 9, growing up on a sink estate in the North: he is being discouraged by an anti-intellectual cultural cul-de-sac from developing his brain.

You can see this dynamic playing out in the Big Brother house too: the delightful 31 year old Greek housemate Gerry Steriopoulos loves learning and is always trying to teach the other hosuemates interesting things he knows, from Greek mythology to stories about the Second World War. He was initially bemused by the housemates' lack of curiosity about the world; then he was affronted when some of them started to call him "boring" and aggressively rejected new forms of knowledge as if they were an insult.

So what went wrong for Chanelle, Brian and so many of the people I was at primary school with? The biggest problem is class polarisation in our schools, which has created a swollen sub-culture of anti-aspirational, anti-intellectual playgrounds at the bottom. We call our system "comprehensive schooling", but except in a few isolated areas, it is not. The children of the wealthy are educated in successful schools that select by mortgage price, and they encourage their students to aim high. The children of the poor - the Chanelles and Brians - are ring-fenced away in warehouse schools, where the sheer concentration of kids from disadvantaged and troubled families creates a resentful culture that shuns learning. The dynamic that you see in the house - sneering at Gerry's intelligence, and encouraging Chanelle and Brian to supress theirs - happens on a grand scale in these schools.

One of the arguments for genuinely comprehensive schools - with a mixture of rich, middle-income and poor children - is that it prevents this culture from taking hold. Both my parents grew up in poverty and left school at 15, but the local schools they went to had all the local kids, of all backgrounds, so a ghetto mindset never set in. As a result they were encouraged to respect and revere learning, even if they (scandalously) couldn't afford to pursue it, and it stayed with them throughout their lives. Where there are genuinely comprehensive schools like this in Britain today, like in Grampian, they get the best overall results. Where the schools are most socially segregated, in Kent with its slew of grammar schools, the results are the worst, with the largest number of schools in special measures.

The reforms introduced by the Conservatives in the late 1980s then added another layer of injustice onto this socially segregated school system. They brought in financial rewards for the schools that got the highest league table results. This meant the schools with the richest children scoring the best marks received even more cash, and the schools with the poorest kids and the highest needs were given less money. In this bogus-comprehensive system, the government spent far less on the education of Brian and Chanelle than on two posh kids going to a leafy "comp" in Muswell Hill.

Labour has moved a few small steps in the right direction on the question of how money is distributed through the schools system, but on the even more urgent challenge of reintegrating our schools - making sure that poor children and rich children end up in the same classrooms, with the same ethos - they have done almost nothing. It was Labour backbench rebels who managed to smuggle into Tony Blair's final education bill the only nod in this direction: the option to allow councils to open up the catchment areas for the best schools to kids in poor areas, and select by lottery not mortgage. So far only Brighton has been brave enough to do it. The government should be going further - and considering bussing to ensure a proper social mix.

The way to help the next generation of Channelles and Brians to "be the best that they can be" is to make sure they are educated in genuinely comprehensive schools - not the cruel, poverty-filled parodies of them they are offered too often today.

The Independent - 02/08/2007

[close]

Spoiler alert

David Cameron's coming war on single mothers
The reality of turning to Wisconsin welfare reform

In September, David Cameron stood before the Tory Party conference, took out a lighter, and tried to set fire to the safety net that protects the British poor from splattering into extreme poverty.

Nobody noticed at the time: he only mentioned in a few throwaway lines that he wants to look westward and copy the Wisconisn model of welfare reform. These distant-sounding proposals might sound attractive at first, because they have latched onto a real problem. There are great swathes of British cities where everyone is jobless, often for life. In Liverpool and Glasgow, a quarter of the entire population is on out-of-work benefits – at a time of spurting economic growth. When unemployment benefit was designed, its creators never imagined that there would be hundreds of thousands of people who went onto them at 18 and only came off at the age of 65 when their pensions began.

I don't object to this for the bogus Tory reason that it is too expensive. All unemployment benefits combined cost less than 3 percent of public spending; we can afford it. No, I object because it is bad for the recipients. On my nephew's estate, I often ask his little friends – seven and eight year olds – what they want to do when they grow up. Most of them just shrug. Their parents and sometimes grandparents have never worked; they don't think they will either. Even in childhood, they have written themselves off.

To leave people in a workless rut for life isn't compassion. It's apathy. Work provides your life with a spine, a sense of purpose and a social space. Without it, you become lost and depressed. One study recently found that up to 60 percent of women on the worst and most chronically unemployed estates are on anti-depressants. Reorienting the welfare state so it helps people into work, rather than keeping them at poverty-level listlessness, is a good thing – and I'll talk in a minute about how Gordon Brown can do much more to get there.

The Wisconsin model has some flickers of a good programme to get people from welfare to work. But it is also packed with cruel measures that are designed to punish them for their "disfunction" – and that, in practice, push them further into poverty.

Let's look at what happens to you when you go into a benefits centre in Wisconsin to seek help. You will almost certainly be a woman with kids: 90 percent of the benefit claimants are. (Young single men are almost always ineligible). You will be assigned a Financial and Employment Planner, who will explain to you that being given a cheque in return for doing nothing is no longer an option. Instead, they will show you a 'ladder'. The top rung is your goal: unsubsidised employment in the private sector. The next rung is subsidised work in the private sector, or a community service job created to provide the unemployed with somthing constructive to do. You will be matched up with one of these jobs. If you fail to turn up, you will be progressively punished. For every hour you miss, you will be docked $5.15 from your benefits. If you don't turn up at all, you don't get anything.

Then they'll tell you that having kids makes no difference. Unless you have a baby that is less than three months old, you have to work full-time in whatever job they assign you, wherever they send you. Put your kids in daycare and get out there.

Then they explain the real kicker. There is a federal time limit for benefits. In your entire life, you can only ever claim two years' worth of government help. Every week you receive government subsidy, the clock is ticking. Once your two years are up, you won't get any help, ever again.

Professor Susan Hays at the University of Southern California has conducted the most detailed study of US welfare reform, and the effect it has had on these women. One typical recipient she interviewed was a thirty-year old single mother called Clara, who had a three year old girl and a nine-year old boy. She came to the benefits centre sobbing, saying that the job they were forcing her to take at the other side of town – spending hours either way on the bus – made it impossible to see her children. "I have to get them up at five in the morning, and they don't want to go. I yell at them. They don't deserve it. Please don't make me go back." She couldn't do it to her kids – so a few weeks later, she quit. The result was that she and her kids were immediately "sanctioned": no benefits at all for a month, and the clock was still ticking on her lifetime allocation.

Another was Shelia, also in her twenties. She was assigned to a job that required her to spend twelve hours a day away from her three-year old daughter. It broke her heart that when she got home, her daughter was calling her child-carer "mom". She quit too – and was cut off from benefits. These were not isolated horror stories. They were typical cases.

But the biggest victims of this welfare reform are only now becoming clear. The changes were introduced in the middle of an almost-unprecedented economic boom, when jobs were plenty. As the economy cools for those at the bottom under Bush, more and more women are hitting the wall of their two-year limit. They are suddenly left with nothing. Hayes found that around 10 to 15 percent of mothers were better off than if this law had never been passed, lifting themselves into real, non-poverty wage work. As for the rest, "One-half are sometimes without enough money to buy food. One-third have to cut the size of meals. Almost half find themselves unable to pay their rent or utility bills. Many more families are turning to locally funded services, food banks, churches, and other charities for aid. In some locales, homeless shelters and housing assistance programmes are closing their doors to new customers, [and] food banks are running out of food." When a full-blown recession comes, the effect of these reforms will be even more bitter. And that's the policy Cameron boasts about importing.

Some of the Republicans who introduced these reforms were quite open about wanting to punish single mothers, making it as tough for them as possible – to show the slags they should have chosen marriage. The Personal Responsibility Act that pushed through workfare begins: "Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children." The law goes on to list the "problems" emerging from single parenthood. It is an attempt to enforce family values through the deterrent effect: if you choose to have kids on your own, baby, it'll hurt.

It is now clear that a Cameron administration would mark a real assault on single parents, punishing them through the tax system and the benefits system. Gordon Brown needs to counter this dystopian vision not by defending the dead-end status quo, but by offering a centre-left approach for how to help the poor into work. A Cameroon assault on "scroungers" could have real populist appeal – which he needs to defang, now.

The roots for an alternative have been laid over the past ten years, through the New Deal and tax credits. They offer carrots as well as sticks. One friend of mine – a very depressed and demoralised guy who had never worked – was put on the New Deal and assigned a counsellor to help him find work. She took him and bought him a suit – something he'd never owned – and now he has a job (yes, a low-wage one) and his confidence is slowly growing. In turn, tax credits top up the wages of people at the bottom of the economic pile, making sure that work pays more than benefits. They have successfully brought the number of people in out-of-work benefits down from 5.7 million to 4.8 million. Yet Cameron scorns all these programmes as "waste". He wants 'On Yer Bike' with no stabilisers.

Brown, by contrast, needs to super-charge these programmes. It is reasonable to say that since we all use goods and services, we all have to contribute towards them. So require all the unemployed to take part in the New Deal with well-funded help, advice and training, with cut-offs for the very few who refuse. For the people who don't make it into work afterwards, assign them to community service programmes: 1.5 million people are an amazing resource for visiting the elderly, protecting our public spaces and more. (In time, they'll be glad to be jolted out of their rut too). And establish clear red lines around these programmes to prevent the Cameroon viciousness – most importantly, a stipulation that single parents don't have to take part until their kids are safely at primary school. And no time limits, punishing people simply for being poor.

This could be a real dividing line between the parties at the next election. While Labour wants to re-design the safety net for the poor, David Cameron wants it to vanish in smoke – and then sting the eyes of single mums.

The Independent - 11/11/2007

[close]

Spoiler alert

In defence of the chav
Britain's snobbery

Only a handful of privileged people will ever admit to themselves that they fear and hate poor people. It's a strange phenomenon: individuals consistently act to protect their own privilege and damn the poor, but they do not think about it in such naked terms. Instead, the privileged create subtle myths that suggest the poor are dirty and stupid and lazy, and therefore deserve their poverty.

Think I'm exaggerating? Let's take a look at The Little Book of Chavs, which I found on the counter of Borders this week. "Chavs" are, it explains, "imbeciles" who do jobs like hairdressing, cleaning, bar-work and being a security guard. They live on "Pot Noodles, cheap cider and McDonald's for Sunday lunch". The extremely popular website www.chavscum.co.uk tells us how to spot a chav: "Chavs have such a tribal dress code that you can spot one yards away! Now what makes the Chavs [sic] attire so funny is they think they are at the cutting edge of fashion... In reality they look like a bunch of pikeys!"

Of course, the people who read this book and website will insist they don't hate all poor people. Just all the ones who live on estates and talk about their mobiles and wear tracksuits. This category sounds suspiciously large to me. Indeed, whenever I hear the term chav, I hear naked and defensive class hate; it is a category that now embraces almost all white, working-class people below the age of 40. The lexicographer, Susie Dent, identifies the word as "just one of the many newly popular, blatantly classist labels that have become popular over the past year. Look at 'council house chic', which describes brands like Burberry and Kappa. Or 'the Croydon facelift', where a chav's hair is pulled back so tight it makes the skin taut".

These are words and phrases that make it possible for privileged people to laugh at and hate the poor without admitting to themselves that this is what they are doing. Indeed, one of the things about chavs that seems to anger middle-class people is their loudness and lack of "taste". "Why are chavs so in your face? Why can't they just shut up?" asks one website. They want their poor people to be passive, silent, unseen. They want them to be a kind of trainee middle class, humbly saving up to buy the same labels as decent Middle England folk. If they develop a value system of their own - or if they dare to intrude into middle-class space in any way - then they must be put in their place with this degrading and cruel label.

Many of my relatives do chav jobs: my grandmother cleaned toilets for a living. My dad is a bus driver. My nephews have "Chav names", according to ChavScum. When I hear the children of privilege ranting about chavs, I want to lock them on a council estate with three kids, no education and a hundred quid a week to see how they cope.

The extent to which the chav label hides real social problems can be seen if we look at the story of a young working-class woman who has been described as "the ultimate chav" - Jade Goody. Jade was ridiculed when she appeared on reality TV show Big Brother a few years ago because of her lack of general knowledge and apparent illiteracy. Nobody asked how she had become this way. When she was two, her father dumped her seriously disabled mother and ended up in prison. Jade did not go to school much because she insisted on staying at home to help her mother dress, eat and get around. For showing this degree of compassion in extremely tough circumstances, Jade is slapped down as a "moron".

For every chav, there is a story like this. Growing up on an estate in Britain has been an unusually tough experience over the past 20 years. Britain's biggest social problems - from poverty to addiction to unemployment - have been played out on chavs, and they have coped as best they can. The "underclass" routinely denounced by rich politicians and journalists is the direct product of the decades of Thatcherism that rolled out unemployment and slashed school budgets and provision for the poor across Britain. If one of their coping strategies is to fetishise a few silly fashion labels, isn't that forgivable? I don't hear anybody mocking the rich and middle classes for doing exactly the same thing - or is Nicole Farhi acceptable while Burberry is vulgar?

Not very far from the surface of talk about chavs is the idea that the poor are culturally - or even in some way genetically - deserving of their circumstances. Do you think people are poor because of lousy educational opportunities, wildly unequal social conditions and layer upon layer of middle-class privilege? Think again, say the prophets of chav-hate. ChavScum tells us the real reason: "Stupidity, alas, breeds stupidity." One poster on their message board explains, "They have no shame because they have no brains - it really is as simple as that." No need to worry about redistributing wealth or investing in schools; there is simply a genetic sub-race of stupid, crude chavs who will always eat crap and think crap and can be happily ignored. Sit back and enjoy your privilege - you deserve it. Even in polite liberal company, the white working class are routinely abused in shockingly vicious terms that aren't used about any other minority. How often have you heard people talk about "white trash"? I've even noticed a weird phenomenon where people try to justify their hatred of poor people by saying the poor are racist and homophobic. In fact, the Institute for Public Policy Research conducted extensive research in 1997 into the attitude towards other ethnic groups among British people. It found that the white working classes were - in many important respects - the least racist of all groups. They were more likely to have had sex with members of another ethnic group and more likely to "marry out" than anybody else. It's easy to blather about multiculturalism from a wine bar; on my sister's estate, these supposedly racist chavs are actually doing the real anti-racist work of falling in love with black and Asian people and producing a post-racist generation of "miscegenated" kids.

As for homophobia, who is the latest chav icon - the Queen of the council estates - but Nadia Alamada, Big Brother's transsexual winner? If you want to be a snob and sneer at white working-class people, fine, but please don't tell me you are doing it for anti-racist, pro-gay reasons.

The snobbery of the right is, as ever, even worse. One newspaper recently sent Petronella Wyatt - the talentless daughter of the late Lord Wyatt - to East Croydon to meet some chavs. This is a woman who quit Oxford University because the other students were "common", only to walk - after blatantly playing on her father's name and connections - into a string of high-paying jobs. Yet she feels perfectly entitled to mock the "laziness" and "vile food" of chavs. (Memo to Petronella: they can't afford to shop in the Fortnum & Mason's food hall.)

She reports with shock that chavs "take so long over one Big Mac". That's because they don't have any money or anywhere else to go, except back to their cramped houses. Didn't this occur to you, Petsy? Did you imagine they would just pop into Harvey Nicks for a few drinks and a spot of shopping that night?

Give me a chav over a snob any time.

The Independent - 04/11/2004

[close]

Also:

http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1057

http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1236

[chand]

He may not, but that particular solution to the crisis seems conspicuous by its absence from that article.

It's an article about CCTV as a tool for crime investigation, not about the solution to the complex problems of homelessness and prostitution.

[olafr]

I want CCTV in Hari's toilet. I want to make sure he's not hiding anything in there or doing anything untoward.

[Famous Mortimer]

It's an article about CCTV as a tool for crime investigation, not about the solution to the complex problems of homelessness and prostitution.

He says it's a good thing because it prevents crime, without pointing out a way you can prevent crime without needing CCTV on every street corner in the country. So it's either short-sighted or leaves it out deliberately.

[Neville Chamberlain]

Yes, but CCTV is good for spotting crimes we know nothing about.

[Uncle TechTip]

But the problem is, putting a CCTV camera in busy public places was the original premise behind CCTV, but now we have 14 million of the bloody things and plans to use them in everything from council bins to lamp posts

Stop spouting this lie, there are NOT 14 million CCTV cameras pointed at public spaces. A vast majority of those 14m, even if that number is not wildly inflated, will be on private property, which are nothing to do with you.

[Uncle TechTip]

I want CCTV in Hari's toilet. I want to make sure he's not hiding anything in there or doing anything untoward.

That's fucking stupid, how many public toilets do you use which have CCTV? Stop being so fucking stupid.

[Mary Hinge]

I want CCTV in Hari's toilet. I want to make sure he's not hiding anything in there or doing anything untoward.

That's fucking stupid, how many public toilets do you use which have CCTV? Stop being so fucking stupid.

I'm reasonably down with irony and the like


Are you sure about that?

[biggytitbo]

Stop spouting this lie, there are NOT 14 million CCTV cameras pointed at public spaces. A vast majority of those 14m, even if that number is not wildly inflated, will be on private property, which are nothing to do with you.

Well I didn't say there were 14 million pointing at public places. But if you have some exact figures as to how many are in public places, how many in private but pointed in public placed and how many are none of my business then please share. The fact remains there are a lot of the fuckers and they are endemic of a society that is ruled by fear, paranoia and suspicion.

[jaydee81]

Do the cameras on buses count?
Because personally I'd rather have a camera on a bus watching me looking out of the window, than be getting bum raped by some guys who'll never get brought to trial.

[biggytitbo]

Of course the unusual thing about CCTV, exisiting as it does purely to keep the public safe, is that it mysteriously switches itself off when really serious crimes happen like when Brazilian plumbers are exterminated in public, people blow up London buses or when the London Underground is attacked.

Odd that.

[jaydee81]

Of course the unusual thing about CCTV, exisiting as it does purely to keep the public safe, is that it mysteriously switches itself off when really serious crimes happen like when Brazilian plumbers are exterminated in public, people blow up London buses or when the London Underground is attacked.

Odd that.

I think bombs going off is liable to switch something off, yes.

[biggytitbo]

I think bombs going off is liable to switch something off, yes.

I know those damn terrorists are fiendish buggers but have they now developed special bombs that switch cctv cameras off before they even go off?

[Mary Hinge]

Odd that.

Not odd at all, most of them are totally useless for numerous reasons. For a start are there 14 million people watching them?* What is an effective ratio of people to cameras so that they are being guided to watch "suspicious" activity. Are they all actually on.

Insider secret here. I've worked in retail, half of our cameras were dummies and in five years we never got an image that would stand up in court. A lot of them are equivalent of the old Boots cardboard cut out assistant holding the basket. They are there to make you feel watched and therefore less likely to be naughty. There is a lot of waste of public money here.

*Why don't we wire them up to the internet (some already are) and let pensioners and the unemployed watch them and if they see anything they can call the cops. Active citizenship and entertainment in one. Its a Winner.

[biggytitbo]

Not odd at all, most of them are totally useless for numerous reasons. For a start are there 14 million people watching them?* What is an effective ratio of people to cameras so that they are being guided to watch "suspicious" activity. Are they all actually on.

Insider secret here. I've worked in retail, half of our cameras were dummies and in five years we never got an image that would stand up in court. A lot of them are equivalent of the old Boots cardboard cut out assistant holding the basket. They are there to make you feel watched and therefore less likely to be naughty. There is a lot of waste of public money here.

*Why don't we wire them up to the internet (some already are) and let pensioners and the unemployed watch them and if they see anything they can call the cops. Acitive citizenship and entertainment in one. Its a Winner.

I agree that most of these things are totally useless to prevent crime because nobody is watching and even if they were nothing could be done in time to prevent whatever was happening. The best real time use CCTV has is allowing bored security guards get off on zooming in on attractive girls breasts or watching people shagging, then selling the tapes to internet sites.

The future of CCTV is facial recognition though, they won't need peoples manning the cameras, they'll have computers able to recognise 10,000 different faces in a few seconds -

Facial recognition technology has quietly matured to the point where software can scan live video feeds in real-time, find faces in the video stream, capture them, and match them against photographs in databases in merely a few seconds. 

With today's technology, a decent source photo such as a passport or driver's license photo has a 95% success rate to match the subject, regardless of any superficial facial features.  Ninety-five percent.  It's going to get more effective with time.     

Why with such technology, wouldn't it then be jolly useful to have a giant database of the entire population with a hi-res photograph and every single piece of personal data imaginable about them?

Ohh damn...

[jaydee81]

Does that mean in the future we'll all wear funny glasses and fake noses... or.... rebellion alert... V for Vendetta masks?

[Mary Hinge]

Does that mean in the future we'll all wear funny glasses and fake noses... or.... rebellion alert... V for Vendetta masks?

Or...We could all have big squares of cardboard with our avatars on them, then when no one's looking swap over, If I give you mine Biggytitbo so you can go free despite being leader of the CaB resistance can I have yours and get to steal err, look after your GOLD.

[shiftwork2]

Of course the unusual thing about CCTV, exisiting as it does purely to keep the public safe, is that it mysteriously switches itself off when really serious crimes happen like when Brazilian plumbers are exterminated in public, people blow up London buses or when the London Underground is attacked.

Not true, CCTV was instrumental in catching and convicting the 21/7 bombers.

[jaydee81]

It's the age old argument of, why should I ever care if big business is watching me, seeing as my life primarily consists of watching Arrested Development on DVD, eating chinese and occasionally masturbating?

[Ignatius_S]

I agree that most of these things are totally useless to prevent crime because nobody is watching and even if they were nothing could be done in time to prevent whatever was happening. The best real time use CCTV has is allowing bored security guards get off on zooming in on attractive girls breasts or watching people shagging, then selling the tapes to internet sites.

The future of CCTV is facial recognition though, they won't need peoples manning the cameras, they'll have computers able to recognise 10,000 different faces in a few seconds

Ohh damn...

As to the misusing of tapes:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/4609746.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/6266564.stm

There was another case where two workers were too busy looking at women walking in the street to spot a serious assault in broad daylight.

Evidence is mixed about how CCTV helps reduce crime. There's been more than one area, where it was hailed as achieving a significant drop even though the cameras were bedevilled by technical problems and vandalism.... for some reasons, they never managed to catch these vandals

Facial recognition, we'll have to wait and see... but with these things, we're promised all sort of wonderful things that never seem to materialise. I'm not sure how successful the computer system they use in the States for matching up fingerprints is these days, but several year back it was pitifully inaccurate and lead to a large number of miscarriages of justice.

Going back to what Hari said, about the Ipswich killings, the CCTV footage took thousands of hours to go through and were one piece of the evidence against Wright. Wright had been questioned more than once about the killings by the police – partly to do with the CCTV footage, I believe – and let go, so the CCTV angle here was hardly a smoking gun as he's suggested.

The Ipswich killings have also been used an argument why there should be a complete national DNA database – not very surprising that that's where the article leads too, particularly as the whole thing seems a rehashing of countless articles about this subject.