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Nobody gains from this kind of moral panic |
Ever since the pro-war Bishop of Rochester announced there were "no go" areas in cities across Britain, some sections of the media have been doing their bit to whip up a moral panic. Now Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has joined in, announcing there are places in London she would not dare to walk as a single woman.
No one can doubt that there are very serious problems of crime, particularly in our inner cities. But in order to address these and other problems rationally and therefore successfully, we need to put matters into context.
The first context is that of history. There certainly used to be areas of Tower Hamlets where it was risky to go if you were black or Asian because of the threat of racist attack. British National Party deputy leader Richard Edmonds was jailed only 15 years ago for glassing a black man in the face outside the old Blade Bone pub in the Bethnal Green Road. That black man’s crime – to have a white girl friend.
Twenty and thirty years ago football gangs used to rampage around the place – they had knives, cut throat razors, knuckle dusters, machetes and the rest.
There was no golden age when crime and violence were not a fact of life in London in general and East London in particular.
The attack by three Asian men on a white man on the Clichy Estate was terrible and is rightly condemned by everybody. Nonetheless, a lot of people live on the Clichy Estate and, believe me, they are not all cowering behind their curtains fearing to go out. The fact is that most people in Tower Hamlets, most of the time, are not victims of crime and violence, or live in fear of them.
There is a whiff of racism around this issue of “no go” areas. The areas that have been identified are often places racists don’t like because of their prevailing ethnic composition.
Moreover, there has been real progress here in Tower Hamlets. When I was young there was a school I knew where the white kids used to go out of the front gate and the Asian kids out the back, because the threat of violence was so great. Now it is a model school - mixed, integrated, multi-cultural and with good exam results.
The second context that is vitally important to understand is social. Here in Tower Hamlets, there are some 12,000 families who live in overcrowded conditions.
I meet parents, white, black and Asian, at my surgeries and in my ward every day who are ambitious for their children, but who despair that there is no place for them to study at home. Some of their children have to take it in turns to sleep because there is not enough space for them all to sleep at the same time. This is positively Victorian.
Unemployment amongst young people in this borough is up to almost one in five, and the jobs young people get are often low in pay and in esteem. And all of this is happening next to obscene wealth in the City and Canary Wharf. If we don’t address this social deprivation, we will only ever be papering over the cracks.
Even so, much can be done to reduce crime and violence. Properly designed and well-lit walkways, CCTV, Safer Neighbourhood Team (SNT) patrols are, for example, an important part of trying to make our estates and our streets safer.
We need to see the SNTs at times when people feel at their most vulnerable, in the evening, and we need to establish a network of estate wardens.
A lot of work is being done by social and community workers. “Community” is a vogue word with the government. But too often the ideas for strengthening communities come from men and women in suits who do not understand the first thing about the communities which they are addressing.
These are communities which are suffering multiple deprivation and, for many young people, loss of hope.
But there are many good people out there doing their best to restore hope and genuinely strengthen communities from the bottom up. Moral panics about no go areas do nothing to help their invaluable work, but instead reinforce stereotypes and the forces which have undermined these communities in the first place.
Abjol Miah
Respect Councillor
Respect candidate for Bethnal Green & Bow |
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