The original rural-urban migrants

So these are the swan-eating immigrants we've been hearing about. Torrid reporting in the Haringey Independent: "The Killing Fields", it snarled, with its customary caution and reserve. More on this in a later post. I have inside information. Coming soon.....
Meanwhile, enjoy this luscious beast who graced my garden at 4.00pm yesterday, and whose magnificently foxy image I managed to photograph from my bedroom.

Yes I KNOW I need to mow the lawn. That's coming soon too.

Under the Floorboards: The C Word’s Most Loathsome.

Spring glanced at the garden this week, brought out the plum blossom, magnificently white and sweet smelling, and the ‘pond’ filled with amorous frogs, shrieking, giggling and splashing ecstatically at all hours of the night and VERY early morning. Now it’s rumoured to be freezing again. Apple blossom still shy, but I remain optimistic.
Such is the miracle of even the most hesitant moments of spring because along with the ecstatic frogs and absurdly pretty plum blossom came the most horrifyingly appalling infestation of flies. Some tiny and creeping, crawling into and on to and under and inside things I didn’t even know had an inside or an underside; some enormous vast and loathsome, mutating monstrous beasts, lumbering along the walls and carpet like the vile progeny of sexually disturbed helicopters.
Then I remembered. Something, I thought, had died. Some weeks ago this was, but not so long that I couldn’t remember the nauseating stench of what I suspected at the time was a dying or dead rodent, somewhere wholly inaccessible and invisible: something for which I chased and searched and hunted and stalked, until, eventually the stench became a smell which became a distant memory and finally vanished. Then came the flies. Whatever it was is producing these creatures at rate equalled only by our esteemed government’s capacity to turn refugees into criminals. Could it, horror of Hitchcockian horrors, be the rotting corpse of the The C Word’s most loathed, his Royal Loathsomeness, the Minister for Immigration, Borders, Detention camps and the Gulag: The Miserable Byrne. Had someone finally done for him, and in some unspeakably cruel twist of fate, dumped his vile twitching remains under MY BATH? Was it now my task to count his crimes which swarmed pitilessly around my bathroom and kitchen, yea unto the very fruit bowl containing the garlic meant to ward off such hideous evil?
Well, the refugees running the shops down the road provided all manner of toxic spray, the migrant workers running the shops in Green Lanes came up with the most viscously sticky fly papers imaginable, unspeakably disgusting but highly effective, and the asylum-seeking dancing-pal came and blocked up the holes in my bathroom thus excluding further invasion by the vile progeny of Byrne.
Who shall we expel, the Home Office Minister or the Immigrants?
No contest really.

The C Word, Seconds Away, Round 2: Class

The Workhouse, the Slum, the Slum Landlord and the Eternal Waiting-Room.

Some people are saying ‘the white working class’ has disappeared, some that class as a political issue has ‘got away,’ it has even been said that ‘we are all middle class now,’ but whichever way you look at it, you could hardly fail to notice that Britain is still infested with class structures of numerous sorts which blight lives and stifle minds.
For a while I thought we were just reinventing class; that we’d put the fences up in different places. Now I suspect we may be reintroducing some much older structures.The next six posts were written as one over the last few days and divided up to make it a bit more blog-friendly.

The Loathsome Peasant

My first candidate for reintroduction is the character of ‘The Loathsome Peasant.’ I noticed the return of this character, dragged back from the mid Eighteenth Century, when I lived in Yorkshire, in a village impoverished almost beyond retrieve. Surrounding this character was a motley crowd of influential others. Step forward: The Countryside Alliance, The (pro) Hunting Lobby, The (anti) Hunting Lobby, The Old Aristocracy, or what remains of them, and The New Aristocracy (‘media types,’ newspaper owners, their editors, some of their journalists, and most of the BBC).

‘The Loathsome Peasant,’ as constructed by the NAs, in particular, and their various stooges, is working class, or possibly lower middle class, lives in the country and isn’t very cultured. They might also live in a small town. They’re always racist, even if they’re black, which of course they never are because only white people live in the country. They’re probably not that well educated because the schools aren’t much good. The area is poor and these areas are concentrated in – well everywhere that isn’t a large thriving metropolitan centre and isn’t London or The South, or rather the ‘Home Counties’ with some other bits added on. In other words this character is probably the very same white working class who’s ‘disappeared.’ While the NAs would cheerfully execute the lot of them, which could be why they’ve disappeared, what really confuses the issue is that all those influential others, above named, also despise them. You see, they’re not Proper Peasants. They’re just a bit common.

A Yorkshire Village and the Urban Peasant

That Yorkshire village I mentioned provides a fine example of what I’m talking about. I was organising a community project which involved repairing the railings of the local community centre. Ah ha, thought I, let’s get the ‘Young Offenders Team’ in to do it, local participation and involvement and all that. The YOT were in fact part of social services, not, as the name suggests, a team of obliging local hooligans. The point is that the YOT worked with YOs, and supervised them doing good works around the county, in particular good works of the sort that ‘made reparation’ for the bad deeds they’d done before. So, along they come with their very sweet supervisor from Halifax and set to with the railings. Good reports of the day’s activities proliferated. ‘It can’t have been that exciting, surely,’ I thought, suspicious. Further enquiries revealed that the YOs, had indeed been having a whale of time: while they’d been working at the front of the community centre, the centre ‘workers’ had been cheerfully selling class A drugs out the back. It was only a matter of time before the too sweet supervisor had her back turned and a nice little circuit was set up.

This was how most people in the village were making their daily bread. They’d long given up on jobs. It’s not just that there weren’t any, there were never going to be any. Thus I decided to return to London to seek my fortune. Much as I loved that place, it really didn’t have a future. To my surprise, I found that the ‘Loathsome Peasant’ also lived in London. It took me a while to recognise him/her at first, because everyone, even the poor people, looked fantastically rich by comparison to the village. What I hadn’t grasped was that the rich-looking poor people were in fact just living on the never-never. The NAs despise the Urban Peasants in slightly different ways. Sometimes they use ‘social exclusion’ language, sometimes it’s about ‘under achievement,’ and much of the time its about ‘culture,’ which is the acceptable face of class, but contempt is contempt, whichever way you wrap it up.

The Workhouse

Next in line for reintroduction, also with a nice flavour of the mid Eighteenth Century is the Workhouse.
I live in Tottenham, an unlovely part of the North London Borough of Haringey. I love it, because I like my neighbours. But it is bleak. It has no centre and little soul and fairly bristles with workhouses. People migrate here from numerous different countries, but in the lattice of streets where I live, the population is mainly Kurdish, from Central Turkey. They are not PKK and need asylum as much to escape unwelcome and violent attention from that organisation as from the equally violent and unwelcome interference from the Turkish Gendarma, the military police. A mixture of studied ignorance and institutional brutality from the Home Office has resulted in large numbers of what can only be called Ignored Asylum Seekers. These are the ones who cannot be deported because their case for asylum is too good. So the HO has instead adopted a policy of first ignoring them and then criminalising them by refusing to allow them either to work or to claim benefit. They have to survive, so they work illegally and are exploited to the limits of their endurance.
So we have in Tottenham a critical mass of criminalised workers, who, as my friend Jamal did, work standing up for at least 14 hours a day with no break, (stop and think about that for a second), no day off and no holiday. He worked like this, without a single day off, for six years, rarely seeing the light of day, because mostly he worked nights. He is one of hundreds, possibly thousands. Jamal worked at the front of the shop, he met the customers; we all knew him. Most of the women, however, especially in the kebab and pizza shops, are at the back, in the kitchens. You wont see them. Our local economy is more or less dependent on these people. Remove them and we lose our entire local community. Welcome to Britain’s workhouses.

The Slum Landlord

Hogarth would be proud of our next candidate: The Slum and its cohort, The Slum Landlord. This comes complete with Gin Lane, or, more accurately, Cider Close.
Our local newspaper, ‘The Haringey Independent,’ excelled itself on Friday march 7th, ‘Migrant workers’ slum cleared out,’ it howled. Turned out a bunch of Polish men had set up camp under the arches next to the car park near Seven Sisters Tube station. The paper said about thirty people had been there for four weeks, but a small number have been there for some months, certainly since last summer. Directly related to this is the reintroduction of Lord Land-Scumbag, or The Slum Landlord. These are the buy-to-let vermin who bought up properties on the cheap, and let them to ‘asylums’ and migrant workers at extortionate prices. In order to pay the COLLOSSAL rent, a two bedroom flat, such as the one next door to me, will house anything up to twelve people. Two in each room including the living room, sleeping the day shift, and another two in each for the night shift. The charmless Goksun Guest House on the corner of my street also does this. After he’d finished his shift at the shop opposite, Jamal went to his bed which had just been vacated by Mehmet, only minutes before. Mehmet would then come downstairs to do the day shift.