By ANDREW GREEN 30th June 2009 The Government's announcement yesterday that they are handing councils new powers to give local people priority on the waiting list for social housing is a clear admission that they have been misleading us over the huge impact of immigration on housing. For years, they have been in total denial, refusing even to discuss how immigration has affected the supply of housing. Now, at last, they have acknowledged that this is an issue which must be tackled. Supply of social housing has fallen far behind the demand for it because waiting lists have grown by over 60 per cent in just six years. Desperation: A Britain-bound lorry is stormed at Calais One major reason for this is the number of asylum seekers who have been granted asylum - or other forms of protection which entitle them to remain in Britain - and offered social housing. Politicians frequently assure us that asylum seekers do not get social housing. This is true up to a point, as they are given private rented accommodation at public expense while their cases are decided. But as soon as they are granted permission to stay, they can go on the housing lists. Astonishingly, over the past ten years the Government has granted more asylum seekers permission to stay in Britain than they have actually built social housing for. So, inevitably, the waiting lists have got ever longer. This is not to suggest that we should not provide housing to genuine refugees. But surely the Government should have provided for the extra housing demand that their own policies have generated. So who on these bulging lists actually gets a council house? Currently, it is decided on the basis of 'need' which, in turn, is heavily influenced by family size. And once granted residence, a migrant or an asylum seeker can bring over his entire family and thereby move up the priority list. Of course local working people have seen this happening for years in their own communities. They know perfectly well that the Government have not been telling the whole truth - but few were prepared to listen. But a major study called 'The New East End', published in 2006, revealed the true extent of the problem. The researchers from the Young Foundation looked at what had happened in Bethnal Green in London's East End over the past generation. They found that the Whitehall concept of 'need' had, in practice, favoured Bangladeshi workers who were beginning to bring over their families. Young British workers with smaller families were pushed out to Essex, away from their roots and away from their parents, who stayed put in their council houses in East London. The outcome was that family and social bonding between Bangladeshi families was strengthened - while the traditional working-class family structure of the British workers, especially the role of grandmothers, was severely weakened. The researchers found that the white working class were seething with resentment. The Government rushed to assure their supporters that there was no truth in any of this, insisting that it was all down to scare tactics. Taking advantage of local resentment, the BNP started making inroads. In contrast to the major parties, they were willing to speak frankly about the issue - even if their solutions were distasteful. But when, in May 2007, the local MP, Margaret Hodge, remarked publicly on the advances the BNP was making in the local elections and suggested something should be done about it, she was jumped on by the Left of her party and told to shut up. A report was subsequently commissioned by the then Commission for Racial Equality which conveniently concluded that there was no evidence that newly arrived migrants were being allocated housing in preference to UK-born people. But that was to dodge the real issue. The rules for allocating social housing might have been administered scrupulously. But it was the system itself that was unfair. Little or no credit was given for the length of time people had been waiting for housing, nor for the strength of their ties to the locality. As a result, white working class people were indeed being leapfrogged by new arrivals with large families. That is the background to yesterday's announcement. Only now have the Government been forced into long-overdue action because their own supporters are deserting them in droves. But it is not just social housing that has been coming under such pressure because of immigration. All housing has been affected - yet the Government refuse to acknowledge this, let alone discuss it. All over the country, despite deep opposition, planning authorities have been told how many more houses they must build. They have no idea how much of this is caused by immigration - and nor do the local residents. But Migrationwatch dug out the figure from the last line of the last table of a technical paper produced by the then Office of the Deputy Prime Minister - and, astonishingly, it is nearly 40 per cent of all new homes. This figure comes from the government predictions of new households which are issued every two years. The latest set shows that 252,000 households will be formed every year until 2031. They also show that without immigration, there would be only 153,000 households. In other words 99,000 households, or 39 per cent, will be caused, not by existing immigrants, but by future immigrants and their families. Put another way, that is a requirement for a new home every five minutes for new immigrants over the next 23 years. This is an astronomical number. No wonder the Government avoid any discussion of it. As we face the most serious financial crisis for two generations and as the Government find themselves virtually broke, one has to ask, who is going to pay for all this? That is another subject the Government do not wish to discuss.At last, the truth about immigration and council house queue jumping
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Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research.
The early 1950s were seen to be a golden age in the East End of London, a time of brilliant new promise and an amazing widening of horizons. However, following this period of high social anticipation the white working class community argues they have become powerless and marginalised.
The long history of the East End is one of fierce competition but of eventual integration, a history particularly evident during the latter half of the 20 th century. The 1970s witnessed the arrival of the Bangladeshi community while the 1980s saw the regeneration of the Docklands and the arrival of the new 'Yuppies'. Each new community transformed the area, but these transformations caused tension and conflict with the existing white working class.
Laurie Taylor is joined by Kate Gavron, co-author of theNew East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict, Rushanara Ali, Associate Director of the Young Foundation and Dick Hobbs, Professor of Sociology at London School of Economics to discuss the social history of one of Britain's most culturally diverse regions.
The New East End : Kinship, Race and Conflict
by Kate Gavron, Geoff Dench and Michael Young
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
ISBN: 1861979282
Kate Young, Social Anthropologist and a Trustee and Fellow of the Young Foundation.
Rushanara Ali, Associate Director at the Young Foundation
Dick Hobbs, Professor of sociology with special reference to Criminology at the London School of Economics
Family & Kinship in East London
Michael Young, Peter Willmott
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 0140137238
Brick Lane 1978 - The Events and their significance
By Kenneth Leech
Publisher: Stepney Books Publications 1994
ISBN: 0 9505241 9 0
The Guardian, Monday 13 February 2006
Article history
Here is a book that will infuriate and bewilder the progressive left. It is also a book that David Cameron's Conservatives need to study closely. All the more ironic then that this study of family and race in Tower Hamlets, The New East End, comes out of the heart of the left - from the foundation set up by the social pioneer Michael Young and recently relaunched by the former Blair adviser Geoff Mulgan.
The study is the result of hundreds of interviews over 12 years with the residents of Tower Hamlets. One of the most compelling stories that emerges is an iconic case of how Labour lost the support of part of the white working class through the 80s and early 90s, and why its support for Blair's New Labour has always been highly conditional - and could be successfully wooed by Cameron's revamped Toryism. If Cameron is looking for a blueprint for a distinctively Tory take on communities, family and the welfare state, then he couldn't do much better than to start here - with the output of an institution of impeccable Labour lineage.
The nub of the argument put forward by the authors, Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, is that the well-intentioned policies of a rights-based welfare state in which benefits and housing were awarded on the basis of need, not past contributions, directly contributed to the ratcheting up of racial tension as poor incoming Bangladeshis were given priority for council housing. The white working-class extended families were broken up as their offspring were moved to Essex for housing. The ones who suffered most were women, left bereft of their social status as the arbiters of family and neighbourhood life. The latter both fragmented. And the blame is pinned on the welfare state (not helped by the economic decline of the docklands in the 60s and 70s).
The problem, claim the authors, was the betrayal of the working class's vision of the welfare state as a system of mutual insurance - to tide one over a tough patch - and its transformation into a welfare state of entitlement and rights based on need. It had moral force, but to many interviewees it was unfair: anyone can live off the system, they complained.
A sense of loss and betrayal among white working-class East Enders underpins many of the interviews. A heroic second world war history, suffering the Luftwaffe's depredations on the docklands, entitled them and their children to something better. Their world "was snatched from them - by bombs and housing policies, other people's notions of progress and the pressures of consumerism".
To compound the sense of injury, the dogged white racism that provides a convincing rationale to many of what has happened is treated with contempt by the "do-gooders" of the welfare state - the social workers and housing officers. Not for the first time, the professional middle classes find grounds for moral superiority over the working class.
All of this is true not just of Tower Hamlets but perhaps of other urban working-class areas of Britain, from Birmingham to Bradford. A few years ago I spent an uncomfortable few hours in the sitting room of a delightful elderly couple near where I live in Hackney. They plied me with tea and cakes while they described their wartime deprivations, and how the brand-new estate they moved into 50 years ago with such hope had become a place of lawlessness and vandalism. The racism was unapologetic, as was the deep sense of nostalgia for the strong networks of mutual support and good neighbourliness of the past.
It was precisely these last that Michael Young predicted would be the price of a strong welfare state back in his first book on the East End, Family and Kinship, published in 1957 - one of the great works of popular sociology of the 20th century. For this new book Young (who died in 2002) and his co-authors went back to the communities he had interviewed in the 50s, and the findings prove his prescience.
He originally argued that a strong market and a strong state would undermine relationships in families and communities, and that this would be disastrous because they determine much of our physical and emotional wellbeing. But despite the book's popularity, his arguments were ignored by politicians and sociologists. The networks of mutual support that sustained many working-class communities, and the virtues of participation and self-reliance they embodied, were disregarded by policy-makers - indeed, often supplanted by professionals.
The point of all this is not that it's a quaint piece of local history, nor even a poignant epitaph to a bygone age of romanticised pearly kings and queens, but that the consequences of 50 years of depredations on the social structures of the urban working class are all coming home to roost. What else is the government's respect agenda about? Or the national preoccupation with antisocial behaviour? Or even problems that attract far less attention because they don't represent such a threat to social order, such as the loneliness of elderly women, left stranded in their long old age? Or the fact that the highest levels of stress and anxiety are among working-class women (who don't always have each other to rely on to share the burdens of child-rearing and sometimes don't have a stable male provider around either)?
The minutiae of who you turn to in a crisis has been disregarded in government policy, but it is precisely those relationships of support that prevent an estate being overrun by thugs, or a young mum taking an overdose. So the tricky question for the policy wonks is: how do you devise welfare policies that reinvigorate the relationship networks and stimulate the ethic of mutuality that is so vivid a memory among the elderly white East Enders, whereby no one ever locked their front door and everyone watched out for the kids who played in the street?
This is a politics of human relationship and place, and it is always rooted in specific local circumstances - Tower Hamlets' experience of migration and dockland yuppie regeneration over the past two decades has been particularly traumatic - and the key lesson for Whitehall and Westminster is that the policies devised at a national level can have totally unintended consequences on the ground.
Meanwhile, the bitter pill to swallow for the well-intentioned liberal is that while the welfare state may have saved many from dire deprivation, it has singularly failed to engage the active participation of its clients. Instead of being the engine of social democracy once envisaged, it has proved to be an engine of resentful alienation from the state.
So postwar "progress" may have served the middle classes well, materially and socially - they've still got their social networks, which they use for personal advancement, status and companionship - but it has served the working class much less well. Their brightest offspring are adopted and well rewarded, but the networks and self-respect of the communities from which they come have largely been destroyed.
· The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict by Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young is published today by Profile.
m.bunting@guardian.co.uk
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