Live by the river

There are some stories I just try ignore. But some items will always break through, even when you just read the FT or the International Herald Tribune.

If everyone is talking about an issue, maybe a stance should be taken. Besides, I mentioned Big Brother when George Galloway was there. Why shouldn’t I do it again?

I can see from the coverage of the Jade Goody affair that blame needs to be apportioned and fingers pointed, apparently. Witches need to be burnt.

On Saturday the tabloids scrabbled to fit their sharpest thrust under the worst photo they could find of the Bermondsey bigot.

On Sunday, the ‘qualities’ (what a title of arrogance) jumped on Goody from a great height, with their Oxford prose and post Modernist turn of phrase.

So let me finger point as well. Let me condemn those guilty of spouting ignorance and racism as well as those who haven’t done anything to organise against the conditions that make these sentiments thrive.

There are many who have wished to add their tuppence worth in condemning Goody. Let me shine the spotlight on them. I put a few in the frame but they are just some from a much larger cast.

I blame the left

The left has or had little traction with the white working classes in Bermondsey or in other cockney heartlands.

'Militant' made some headway there once - they had the Labour candidate in 1987 - but their impact was marginal and now is as dust.

The influence of socialists - against racism and for everything else in our cannon - has been pitiful. The revolutionary left has rarely been able to put down roots here and in many other working class areas. They have had no conception of how to engage.

Quite often they are like a modern version of the denizens of the Victorian Missions that were set up in places like Bermondsey to bring Christianity to the locals.

I also hold little hope for the thoughtless ExTrots.

The language they have used to condemn Goody - ‘chav’ and ‘pig’ - is that of the Daily Mail and The Sun.

They have no conception of class, as well as race, and have no knowledge about materialism - ideas are determined by conditions, not vice versa.

inner London

When I first moved to Bermondsey, it was the last remaining all-white area in inner London - it was a tiny white dot on a Greater London Council (GLC) map showing ethnic makeup.

Nearly all the housing was council owned and the pre 1982 Labour controlled Southwark council was said to have ensured that non-whites were housed in the south of the borough.

It’s a lot more mixed now. And many of the remaining working class whites there and elsewhere in inner London - from Hackney to Harlesden - no longer have the extreme racist views that were prevalent twenty years ago.

It’s currently inconceivable that the BNP would be able to re-establish itself in former areas of far-right support, such as Bermondsey and Shoreditch, not least because of the present racial makeup of these areas. Many inner London white families will now have black (but not Asian) relatives.

But a lot of white supremacist sentiment, in the south of England, followed some of the cockneys along their route out from inner London - along the A13, the A12 and other roads. I predict an upsurge in BNP support along the A2 in the Medway Towns and North Kent.

This racist sentiment should have been inoculated in London by the left.

I blame Labour

I recall canvassing for Labour along Spa Road in Bermondsey in the early 80s and the apoplexy of my fellow canvasser, with me, when I attempted to engage in conversation, a twelve or thirteen year old ‘fascist’ (sic) who was expressing strong support for the National Front.

‘How can you talk to people like that’, the canvasser, a secondary-school teacher and a 'left' councillor, asked me?

She left Dulwich not long after that. ‘For Dorset’, she told her boyfriend, ‘to get a decent education for my kids’. I hope they didn’t end up in her class.

These councillors never dug in their heels with the government or (until 1990) the Inner London Education Authority.

They never said 'you can't educate children in schools where some rooms are unusable because of the mould growing up the walls. You can’t expect students to learn in schoolrooms where the doors won’t shut in winter because of the damp.’

They were content with the ‘school trip’ being a visit to Rotherhithe baths instead of to the Royal Academy. They put up with school sports being played amongst the dog shit in Southwark Park.

They lived with a system where all the kids left at sixteen and added substantially to their family’s income by signing on. These do-nothing councillors could easily see that ignorance and bigotry were the untimetabled lessons learnt in such schools, if only by the disdain in which their electorate held them.

Long time Bermondsey ‘old’ Labour MP (and Chief Whip) Bob Mellish watched despair seep in from the river as the docks went east, all the while continuing to commute from his smart Kent mansion to parliament with rarely a diversion to Southwark.

After he mocked his Labour satraps for a little too long, he was deselected. So what did this grand figure of the Labour Party do? He resigned in a huff, abandoned the party that had provided for him for so long and supported the ‘real Labour’ candidate against Peter Tatchell in ensuing bye-election.

And what did his constituents do? It was two fingers up to both Labour’s candidate (Peter Tatchell) as well as to Mellish’s pawn.

Bermondsey residents voted for the first inner London Liberal MP within living memory. The Liberals have never looked back - they have since won control of many an inner London council (and in other big cities) where Labour laughed at their voters for too long.

I blame Ken Livingstone

I remember his talk, as Mayor of London, that low cost housing would be part of new developments. I look, but not with any surprise, as the developers either ignore or work around this hollow promise.

These developers have cherry picked sites to develop a sliver along the river of homes for yuppies in a process that has consigned the original inhabitants to Lewisham and beyond. It's not the 'foreigners' who are taking over Bermondsey and other places, it's the rich who are consigning workers to live in a French system of far-distant banlieue.

I also remember Livingstone as the Leader of the GLC, when he set the rate and so undermined the last big fightback by councils for more money from the government.

'Working for London' was the GLC slogan, 'Working for Peanuts' was written on the NALGO banner as you were showered with Planters' finest at a council committee meeting. 'Working for Property Developers' could be your slogan now.

I blame Lee Jasper

He's a Livingstone henchman and an aspirant Labour politician.

I remember him prominent on a march through Rotherhithe in the early 90s, purportedly against the BNP or the National Front (which is why I attended).

I realised too late that the intention of the march wasn’t to seek to encourage all living locally to demonstrate against local fascists. It was more of an offensive into what they saw as ‘enemy territory’.

The leaders of the march seemed to take the view that if you weren’t with us on the march, you must be against us. Some took to shouting ‘racist’ and the like at a few bemused and then insulted passers-bys.

I blame Trevor Phillips, OBE (Order of the British Empire)

In sending his kids to a posh private school, he has no ability to understand the reasons for the petty comments of the ill-educated; as well as the ignorant remarks of those who have never benefited from the wide-ranging and international culture that only those of his class can afford to enjoy.

I blame the media companies

I blame the TV producers, the broadcasters, the newspapers - all those with a financial stake in stoking and encouraging controversy to get their premium rate numbers called and their newspapers sold.

I blame the cynical media relations strategy of the Big Brother PR advisers. If only they could go public on every devious stunt they pulled, I’m sure they would win a 'PR Week' award.

But the media also play their part in spreading the cultural poverty that leads to such bigotry.

I saw a clip the other day of the 70s TV programme - ‘Til Death Us Do Part’. The lead character, Alf Garnett (Archie Bunker in the US) was a working class Tory, cockney and fervent West Ham supporter.

The programme would often hinge on the conflict inherent in his dislike of leftie shirkers - especially his militant son-in law, the ‘Scouse Git’ (who, incidentally, in real life is Tony's Blair's father-in-law).

And it wasn’t just ‘militants’ as in bolshies that Garnett didn’t like. In the clip I saw, when he said militant he also could mean 'Militant'. The 'Scouse Git' actually appeared to be reading a copy of that left paper on screen.

That scene then went on to mention power workers, the Prime Minister (Edward Heath) and strikes. This was stark political discussion in one of the most popular programmes and when there was only three TV channels.

Contrast that with the soap ‘EastEnders’. This is one of today’s most popular programmes and it's a show in which never a political comment (and of course, any racist words) ever passes the mouths of its characters.

It’s a version of London that is about as true to life as the flimsiness of the wooden scenery in its Hertfordshire studio.

We’re now a long way south from the million and a half selling ‘Picture Post’ - accused (by its owner!) of publishing ‘communist propaganda’ - and the Daily Mirror - selling five million a day and later publishing stalwart critics of the status quo like John Pilger and Paul Foot.

Now we have titles selling similar numbers campaigning to expose paedophiles to the mob or for better armaments for ‘our boys’ in Iraq.

I blame Jade Goody

I did my research on Goody. She comes from Bermondsey and worked as dental nurse. Could she be the person who had took my X-rays at the dentist’s next to the Charlie Chaplin pub?

I got talking with that nurse when she explained she was worried about the X-rays and safety. I suggested she join a trade union and explained what they are. But it was something that she had never heard of before and she seemed to think that trade unions were something like her mothers’ Christmas Savings club (Farepack, probably).

Whether Goody ever got the opportunity to understand the world around her or not, many others from the same circumstances did. I blame her for her small-minded horizons.

I blame the usual suspects

The placemen of capitalism - Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (and many more).

Their responsibilities in the matter are deep and manifold, not least their role in the slow closing of the route to higher and further education for those not from the middle classes; their support for the encroaching casualisation of the labour market and their ongoing love affair with the concerns of the bankers from Barnes and Berkshire rather than bus drivers from Bermondsey.

(I did enjoy seeing the Dauphin have his press conference in India, set up to portray him in a statesmanlike manner, destroyed by questions about Big Brother. His nose turned up.)

I blame capitalism

But there is something missing from this cast of villains. A thing which imposes those we despise to rule over us; an item which stops the media and the entertainment industry delivering to us what we want instead of what makes the most money and a process that educates a select few but only barely educates the masses - and then just enough to enable them to labour for their bosses.

Yeah, you know what it is. You've read it in the sub-title. It’s capitalism that spawns trash TV, dilutes culture, enriches the few and propagates racism (and more) to keep divided its wage slaves.

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The death of the cockney

When I was a Millwall regular you'd read quarter page ads in the matchday programme taken out by the Cockney diaspora. They'd be from electrical and sub contracting firms and the like that were run by guys with names like 'Big Mick' and 'Davey Boy'. They’d be based in places like Welling and they’d wish to be remembered to all their old neighbours - ‘along the Old Kent Road’- and from back in the days before ‘it changed’.

They'd be workers but wouldn’t think like that. They saw themselves as small businessmen not realising that their self-employed status was a ruse against them - to ensure they wouldn’t get paid if things went wrong or to put all the responsibilities on them. They'd no connection with the organised working class but then no-one was inviting them to join in.

east London

I also remember being on a Newham 7 (or Newham 8 or maybe Newham 78) demo to Plashet Park in Newham in the early 80s.

We were heckled by the regulars from a pub on High Street North, East Ham. You may have thought the drinkers would have supported their neighbours but there was little communication between these whites and the protesting lefts and Asians.

That pub is now closed. It is covered in Islamic stickers and sits abandoned amidst the many Dosa shops in the heart of the Newham Asian ghetto.

The former drinkers will have found a new watering hole. It could well be one of those unfeasibly large ‘drinking palaces’ that are the only objects that break up the endlessly repeating pattern of uniform, bleak council housing that stretches seemingly forever across the Dagenham white ghetto - the London heartland of the BNP.

The Elephant

I had a girlfriend who lived with her family at the Elephant (& Castle) They were so cockney that they even sang a song about ‘round the Elephant, down Vauxhall…Kennington something…’

But like all cockneys they would never admit it. ‘We’re not cockneys! That’s them ponces living in Bethnal fucking Green and places like that! Sarf London nah nah nah, Sarf London nah nah nah.'

(I’ve never, ever met someone who said ‘I’m a cockney’ in the way that a Geordie would claim his description).

I’d got a temporary job with Southwark council. I spoke to my g/f's father about vacancies there. He’d been trying to get a job for over a year.

He told me that it was pointless; he’d applied for a job there twice and with no success. And he now 'knew', and ‘on very good authority’, that the council wasn’t giving any new jobs to whites. He really believed that.

History

There's no unbroken phalanx of cockneys who marched together or shared a common point of view.

So, in 1968, some dockers downed their hooks and marched on Parliament in support of Enoch Powell who'd been sacked from the Tory Shadow Cabinet because of the racist (even for them) comments that he’d made in his famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.

But, in the same period, Jack Dash, the famed cockney communist docker, fought the employers hard in places like the Isle of Dogs. His desired obituary gives a favour of his life - ‘Here lies Jack Dash. All he wanted was to separate them from their cash.’

And what of Isle of Dogs now? It includes the fortified transplant from Surrey that is Canary Wharf, where the bankers amble along the tunnel that links the chic designer shops to an underground Waitrose.

Blacks that you will see there will be the cleaners, using the service entrances. Anyone born on the Island isn't likely to using the resplendent lifts but travelling in from Thurrock to fix them.

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The future

The real ‘dumb’ and the ‘stupid’ ones are those ‘intellectuals’ who think that a lack of knowledge - about where a place is or how something works, etc - is a manifestation of lack of intelligence rather the result of a bad schooling and the sort of poverty stricken lifestyle that often goes with the territory when kids are fostered and a parent is a heroin addict.

And racism isn’t innate. It’s one of the oldest tactics in the bosses‘ book - divide and rule. Where the competition for jobs is at its grimmest - in the lowest paying - it may be most openly expressed.

‘First it was the Irish who first took our jobs. Now it’s the blacks and Asians. They’re not from round here, they’re taking our territory’.

These are said by those not noticing that the land was never theirs and the job, either today’s temporary contract via an agency or its previous equivalent of trying to catch the eye (or grease the palm) of the overseer outside the dock gates to get a day’s employment of humping more than your bodyweight - was never ‘theirs’.

This article may concentrate on London but the issues are not a London thing. I’m sure very few lower paid workers now live in Manhattan.

The long dead heavy industries of the Clyde and the Welsh valleys produced world-class militants as well as the lowest form of scabs. Maybe there will yet rise a feeling of solidarity amongst the Thames Valley IT workers or the Scottish call centre workers.

Or perhaps, the capitalists will nearly manage to bring to an end 200 years of organisation. When people work from home, in their service industry jobs - answering the phone or inputting data - it's but a modern version of the cottage dwelling artisans of the 18th century. The weavers and hatters and lots more were forced into the factories but it's also from there that they started to organise.

So maybe the technology will be used against the bosses? Tens of thousands rang to complain about the racism in Big Brother - what if they then move on from registering a passive protest against racism to actually doing something about it?