Simon Fanshawe Blog

You Can’t Put Me in a Box - Super-diversity and the end of identity politics in Britain

russell — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:33:20 +0000

This is the recent (some people say ‘ground-breaking’) report that ippr published, co-written with Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah on a new approach to equality and diversity. It forms the basis of much of my consultancy work at the moment.

Download a PDF of the report here

GAYDAR IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH

simon — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:49:22 +0000

I met someone the other day. Well I say I met him. I didn’t meet him in any accepted human sense of the word. I “met” him online. On Gaydar. We “chatted”. No we didn’t. We typed. We had no eye contact, no tone of voice. Well, I suppose, he did have a picture (assuming just for a minute it was his picture) But did I hear his voice? No. Taste him? Smell him? I guess one day Gaydar might have a scratch and sniff app. But not yet. And Touch? No. The most sensual of all is the one so crucially missing. No hugs, no kisses, no hands. Just the unfulfilled landscape of one’s own expectations. In fact through all the useless hours I have spent on gaydar, I have been wondering exactly through which of my five senses I was experiencing any of these men. Gaydar is essentially an inhuman experience.

So why log on? Well this is the difficult bit. I feel very exposed writing it down. But here goes….. I think I have been addicted. I think it has become a dangerously invented bit of my life where I indulge in a grown up version of ‘Let’s Pretend’. I can spend hours in this Never Never land of sexual and social promise that never delivers reality. JM Barrie didn’t quite mean it this way, but Gaydar is full of Lost Boys.

The fact that I am able to write this, to put it out into the public domain, is a sign that I might be kicking the habit. At least that I am thinking of doing so. Although what just now flashed through my mind was a devilish opening filled with .. ‘I could pause and log on for a mo and see who’s there’. So I am not sure if I am over it. I know I am trying to exorcise it. But I don’t know if I I’ll succeed. I am writing a novel at the moment and, as a writer much wiser than me once said, there is a definite link between masturbation and the chapter. And I am writing a fictional diary. So the chapters are very short.

Gaydar has not been an occasional pastime over the last few years. It’s been everyday and sometimes for far too much of a day. I have found myself thinking about it on the train, on the way home, in moments during meetings. I am writing this on the way to Manchester and I am imagining what I could do when I get to my hotel room. And it’s not just me, is it? Go on. Be honest. Are you reading this and thinking that it’s also you? Increasingly I reckon this is one of the most widespread, unspoken and toxic slices of many gay men’s lives. When I look at who is in the chat rooms, every day it’s mostly the same people. Yet being in this “community” is the most isolating thing that I do.

On the other hand, it can be fun. No doubt about that. But, by and large, the fun fades when the tissue appears. It’s a classic stimulant. The highs are good and the lows are swift. It’s a drug. It deadens us. Its virtual reality is as destructive to our psychological state, and drives us underground quite as effectively, as anything society ever did to the homosexual culture when we were illegal. Virtual contact threatens to lock us away from the richness of face to face, lip to lip, body to body emotional reality. Other men on gaydar become porn. They are mirages on the horizon of our own yearning.

Of course straight men are addicted to porn too. I don’t think this is a gay thing. It’s a man thing. But it has a gay dimension. I don’t know anything about straight sites . I’ve never been on one. But I do know that when you see a man for real you know something about him from his look, his clothes, his eyes, the way he holds his glass, the way he stands and walks. We make instant judgements about every human being that we see, so fleeting sometimes that we’re not even conscious of what we think. But when we’re interested, we take in and process detail like a top of the range Police witness. And above all we know if there is chemistry. But the virtual is mere simulation. On Gaydar you are just an avatar.

Of course people have met on Gaydar and had fun and sex. I have. People have even met on Gaydar and moved in. Hurrah. But when that happens it defies the inhumanity, the coldness, the sheer mendacity of the virtual. People online are not “friends” or “favourites”. They’re just other atoms. And until we collide there is no explosion. Human contact is the only thing that produces energy. And love.

Going on Gaydar is not about being single and wanting to meet a boyfriend. That is definitely part of my life (email address on my website). That’s what I want. (Again application downloadable from simonfanshawe.com). But the likelihood of Gaydar filling that sock hanging at the bottom of my bed like some romantic Santa is up there with me going out with Johnny Depp and Iceland’s economy recovering. Gaydar is about avoiding all that. And I admit I have been hooked. I need out. But its grip is strong. Now I’ve finished writing this, I might just log on and see who’s there. And I know that many of you know exactly what I am feeling right now.

Parody of Democracy

simon — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:12:01 +0000

The Guardian,
Wednesday March 5 2008

For very good reason, there is much soul searching and hand-wringing about local councils and councillors. The recent Councillors Commission was debated at a Local Government Association conference last week. And on Friday, London councils launched what was inevitably described as an “X Factor search” to find the councillors of the future in the capital.

Behind all this lies the uncomfortable truth that fewer and fewer people want to become councillors or vote in council elections. Work done recently by Andrew Collinge, at Ipsos Mori, indicated that only 35% of people trust local councillors to tell the truth and only 32% think that they “make a real effort to listen to the views of local people”, whereas 85% of councillors think they do.

The Councillors Commission has suggested a series of well thought out, if slightly dreary, recommendations, ranging from allowances to accreditation, affecting the attitudes of employers and suggesting that local authorities should be charged with “a statutory duty to facilitate local democratic engagement”. And the X Factor search will do its best to re-balance the kind of people who stand - so at least there is a chance that the current 4% nationally who are from ethnic backgrounds might better represent the almost 30% of Londoners who are.

But we need a little more frankness. Councillors are caught in a downward vortex. Their self-importance elevates them above the ordinary Joe and Joanna, while the government systematically undervalues and mistrusts them, dropping the odd crumb of autonomy into a recipe that makes them instruments of national policy, rather than truly local actors.

Councillors need to realise that they are not the only ones with a mandate. They get incredibly sniffy about partnership because they think it devalues them. But while they may be ennobled with the legitimacy of a universal franchise, they work best when they participate with others who are trying to operate within the civic sphere in the interests of the whole city, town or parish.

I should declare an interest. I chair an economic partnership. I am not elected by “the people”, but I exercise the influence I have not in my own interests, but arguing for the greater good of the economy and mainly for jobs and homes. To act beyond your own self-interest is to play out democratic values. Democracy doesn’t always flow through election. It also &flows through responsibility. The Roberts report states, without nuance, that “local government is the institutional embodiment of the community of place”. It isn’t. What shapes the place is a far wider variety of forces. What symbolises the place for many people is their place of work, their festival, their great civic buildings. Councillors are just one voice in that mix.

But they do have a very specific role and they are not playing it honestly. What their particular mandate does give them is the duty to decide between competing interests. And yet they insist endlessly that their job is “to listen”. The Councillors Commission quotes with breathless enthusiasm South Tyneside council as offering one of the best examples of effective communication, saying that their “We asked … You said … We did” listening campaign is “based on effective two-way communication”.

This kind of sloppiness is guaranteed to undermine trust. Famously, you can’t please all of the people, because they talk with many voices. If you listened to the people, you’d bring back hanging, in some areas you wouldn’t house asylum seekers never mind how desperate their need, you wouldn’t allow gay people to adopt and, as was reported yesterday in the Observer, you wouldn’t allow Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour to spend £3.6m of his own money trying to house poor people in your area because residents had “concerns about security since many residents would have mental health problems”.

Don’t just listen, accept the responsibility to decide. We need to resolve this contradiction for councillors. You cannot act in the general good if you are tied to a ward. We should have cabinet councillors, full-time with executive responsibility elected city-, town- and county-wide and local councillors to act as local ward advocates. The cabinet would have the honesty to present its role as the decider. Councils working with clarity about their precise role together with others in the civic sphere to act in the overall good might be a way of attracting a majority of people with serious skill to do a meaningful job. Otherwise we will continue with this parody of democracy where councillors will dupe the people into thinking they can all have what they want and that legitimate involvement only comes from being elected by, let’s face it at the moment, a small minority of the population.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/mar/05/6

Jenny Rogers - chair of Councillors Commission’s response

No one has as much local legitimacy as elected councillors
They are not the only voices worth listening to, but their link to the voters is crucial, says Jane Roberts
_. The Guardian, Friday March 14 2008 Article history
About this article
Close
This article appeared in the Guardian on Friday March 14 2008 on p41 of the Leaders & reply section. It was last updated at 00:17 on March 14 2008.
Simon Fanshawe’s article (A parody of democracy, March 5) was a parody of the Councillors Commission report Representing the Future. Fanshawe says “we need a little more frankness”. I’ll second that. But frankness demands more than a partial, lazily glib view of councillors.
Our report conveyed the complexity of the councillor’s role and the range of skills that are needed in order to fulfil it. Fanshawe writes: “Don’t just listen, accept the responsibility to decide.” Did we say councillors are elected only to listen? Did we ignore their decision-
making role? Certainly not. We said: “The package of skills which this demands from councillors … is extensive: listening; negotiating; probing and scrutinising; handling contradiction; lobbying; campaigning; community development; conflict resolution; mediation; and of course decision making.” It is precisely this wide range that makes the role so intriguing, demanding and enriching.
This does, however, put a high premium on councillors’ communication skills. If people disagree with a decision they should at least understand how and why it came to be taken, and councillors should do the explaining. How else can people make sense of what happens in their locality?
I simply do not agree with Fanshawe’s sweeping statement that councillors “cannot act in the general good if you are tied to a ward”. Who defines the general good? Our report teased out the components of effective representation and stressed the importance of councillors sharing similar life experiences with their constituents - hardly fostered by Fanshawe’s notion of “cabinet councillors, full-time with executive responsibility”. And just where would Fanshawe find “local councillors to act as local ward advocates” when councillors already feel, with some justification, that they have too few powers?
We know there is much anxiety about the relationship between the citizen and the state: a widespread disengagement from and disenchantment with politics. If we are to tackle these issues, local democracy is the most accessible way of understanding how change comes about through the political process.
Our report goes out of its way to acknowledge Fanshawe’s “rich variety of forces” that makes up the culture and symbolism of any one place. Of course “councillors are just one voice” in that heady mix, but a crucial one that should take account of the wider plurality.
While acknowledging that he is “not elected by ‘the people’”, Fanshawe, from his perspective as chair of a local economic partnership, writes that “councillors … are not the only ones with a mandate”. Yes, he has a key role in his area, and I hope local councillors work constructively with him. But putting yourself up for election surely endows an extra legitimacy that is not to be so quickly downplayed. It’s not good enough for Fanshawe to argue that his influence is exercised “not in my own interests … but for the greater good of the economy”. Who is the judge of that? Who can get rid of you?
Go for it, put your head above the parapet, Simon - stand for election. You might even enjoy it.
· Jane Roberts is chair of the Councillors Commission_roberjane@gmail.com

Isra - a thoroughly modern muslim

simon — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:00:52 +0000

This is a conversation I have had in two halves with a young Muslim woman. The first half was at a conference in front of an audience of youth workers. The second was on the phone last week. Like most of us I know few practising Muslims. Which is hardly surprising. After all they constitute only 3% of the population. She has profoundly opened my mind about her faith.
SF If we were on the radio and I said to the audience that you were wearing the hijab; they wouldn’t see in their minds who I see in front of me now. (This is because she is wearing a bright pink hijab, a white jacket, pink flowing skirt and jewelled slippers)
IJ I know. My friends and I call out selves the Hijabi-Barbies
SF That’s the first Muslim joke I have ever heard.
IJ Yes, it’s been a bit dull since the 16th century
SF And that’s the second
What does the hijab mean to you?
IJ I can’t remember a moment when I decided to wear it. I often say it grew over my head. As I got older, and I know this sounds stupid, I realised how much we are judged by how we look. I hear boys saying, “she’s a real minger” about some girl when I know she’s really sweet and “she’s fit” about some girl who is just horrible. If you believe in a merciful God then everybody is beautiful. To call someone ugly is condemning a creation of God. I know I am gorgeous, that I have a beautiful body. It’s the bit of me that is clever and caring that you can’t see. The hijab in a way makes you naked.
SF Do you have lots of different coloured hijabs?
IJ I think I have more hijabs than knickers. Sometimes I think that’s going against what I am saying. But I don’t claim to be a perfect Muslim. I rationalise that I am living in a western country, so do in Rome and all that. It’s my way of bridging the gap. If I am sitting on a train, I am far less threatening to someone sitting next to me than someone covered from head to toe.
SF You’re melding your traditions with Britain?
IJ This kind of melding has been going on for centuries with Muslims.
SF What is your relationship with the Muslims we so often see in the news, ‘Beeston’, if you like?
IJ I feel towards them the same as I feel towards the BNP. I recognise that we share some things. With them I recognise that we have our faith in common. With the BNP we live in the same country and watch the same TV programmes. But both groups are making my life really different.
SF How?
IJ One group is making me into something I am not. When the radicals are aggressive about this country and the way of life I feel very difficult. I have made this my country and I would die for it. Their actions are limiting me.
SF I sense that you might find it difficult to criticise other Muslims in public?
IJ Lots of Muslims want to change Muslim behaviour. But part of me still feels extremely defensive. When these debates happen in public I feel pulled in two directions. There is a certain amount of friction in public which is damaging to Muslims when we are so misrepresented in the media. But I know that when I say this to you, you’re going to write it down. It is only 2% of my concerns but it always gets far more attention than it deserves. I wish more people would just say that there are millions of different Muslims. Because all of a sudden we became the same thing – associated with sects in Pakistan. I don’t know what a Madrassa is!
SF Do you find it difficult to criticise your leaders in public?
IJ What they have done is important. Getting Muslim organisations into the mainstream is a way of bridging the gap. At the same time do they represent me? They sure as hell don’t sound like they do.
SF Now you’ve graduated from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) what do you want to do?
IJ I want to work for an NGO. I am starting looking for jobs now. But I went to a recruitment agency and they said that I should make some of the stuff on my CV, voluntary work etc, look less Muslim. So I’ve changed things like the International Forum for Islamic Dialogue to IFID. I don’t want to be unemployed for ever!
SF When I write this up how shall I refer to you?
IJ I think as Ms I Jawad. I have a funny thing about seeing my name written down. I’ll finally be Isra Jawad when I write “The Hijabi Barbies, the Muslim update of the Bridget Jones diaries”.

Leicester - city of no surprises

simon — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:00:43 +0000

I went to a vegetarian restaurant the other day. (Bear with me on this.) The food was terrific. But more than that, Halli Restaurant somehow summed up the idea of a plural city, a symbol of a very modern take on diversity.

It’s in Leicester. There are myths about Leicester. One is that it is dull. In one sense this is not a myth at all, but rather part of the story of a city that was once most famous for producing socks and pantyhose – the wonderfully Mrs Slocomb-esque “hosiery”. Leicester is the embodiment of a kind of ornate suburbia. Joe Orton and Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole, both masters of the language of comic self-importance, were born there. Both were geniuses at imparting over-significance to the minutiae of the everyday, with hilarious effect. Leicester has the same quality. It once launched a glorious promotional slogan. On all the buses in huge letters, incredibly, ridiculously, it read “Leicester City of Surprises”. Most people tittered.

At the end of the sixties the city played host to a group of Indians, fleeing East African. They are now the largest minority group in the city. Unlike in many other cities in the North and the Midlands Leicester’s Asian population is largely Hindu and Indian rather than Pakistani or Bangladeshi and Muslim. In clumsy broad-brush strokes Leicester is roughly 60% “white” and 40% “black or Asian”. Which has given rise to another myth, a rash of stories uncritically reported by the papers and repeated by the CRE and other agencies that “Leicester will be the first non-white majority city in Britain by 2011”.

But according to Professor Ludi Simpson and Dr Nissa Finney of the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research at the University of Manchester in their recent paper, this is highly unlikely to happen before 2020. And anyway, they argue, this really only has any real significance, if you think that “white” or “black and Asian” have any kind of homogeneity as groups. They point out that the story is really a shorthand for anxieties that some existing consensus about how to live in and govern cities will be displaced by a different and foreign one, that “newcomers….will upset the applecart of the accepted way of life and governance”.

During the conference where I was speaking (hence the dinner the night before) a number of people referred to diversity in such clumsy ways as organised religion or these broad ethnic groups. Clearly both notions do contribute to our identities, but they do not describe the whole of us. They are just stepping-stones on the journey to creating what Robert Putnam, the American sociologist, calls ‘a new we’. One woman next to me muttered in my ear with a sarcastic grin “my boyfriend is white and I am not having an arranged marriage”.

So why did the restaurant seems to transcend this? Well, because when I walked in the door, my spirit slightly dropped as I looked at the décor. There was more blonde bargain pine in there than in Ikea. The pie crust backs to the chairs and the dark wooden floor made me think that we had come to one of those vegetarian restaurants that in the 80’s called themselves Health food Cafes. I expected to be bloated with faceless veggie gloop, off a menu, of the kind that I once described as being ‘lentilly handicapped’. But in fact Jamion Thomas the owner came from Kerala six years ago to join his wife, an NHS nurse, and after a working life spent in the hospitality industry, realised his dream of opening a Southern Indian vegetarian restaurant. The food has its roots in Udupi, a village – a Halli - in Karnataka. I asked the waiter for a wine recommendation, but he was a Muslim, so it wasn’t his strong suit. He smiled and we chose. The customers, who were an all-encompassing bunch, were ordering the food with the confidence of regulars. Outside proudly hangs the banner announcing Halli’s Award as Venue of the Year in the Leicester Comedy Festival. In February they play host to a regular diet of comedy newcomers.

What was so striking about this cultural melange was that the aesthetic of the place had broken free of its preconceptions. It just felt like a restaurant in Leicester. Rather ordinary looking, it’s light hidden under a bushel of inexpensive pine (even the menus are made of wood), it is a symbol of what Leicester is now. As the city tells the story of its next forty years, those who have come to live there have not so much changed it as become it. Listen to them talk and they don’t sound Asian, they just sound Leicester. A city of no surprises whatsoever.

BLASTED BISHOP/ SILLY MUSLIMS

simon — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:02:47 +0000

So the Bishop gets of for actually hurting somebody’s life and the three foul mouthed, aggressive Muslims go to gaol despite the fact that they just shouted nasty things and offended everyone. Shouldn’t the bishop go to prison and the Muslims just be told off for abusing other people’s sensibilities?

The bishop of Hereford for reasons of pure prejudice denied someone a job for the simple reason that he was gay. John Reaney, the most reasonable of men took him to a tribunal and won. Mizanur Rahman, Umran Javed and Abdul Muhid shouted “Bomb, bomb Denmark, Bomb the USA”. One of them, unpleasantly, shouted for the soldiers to be brought back from Iraq in body bags. But, you will note, Denmark and the USA were not bombed, not by Mianur and his friends anyway, and they have not killed any soldiers in Iraq. They just offended everyone.

We have to get a handle on how we deal with these clashes of lifestyle, belief and freedoms. So see if this helps: there is a difference between words and actions and a difference between offence and material hurt.

The publication of the Danish cartoons caused my head to spin. Freedom of speech fought with the idea that we needed to protect people from being offended. Then I realised we didn’t need to protect people from that. In fact being offended is part of the deal in a free society. Religions have the freedom to practise and the rest of us have the freedom to offend them. I can’t shut up the Bishop’s prejudiced words and he can’t stop my feelings of anger towards him.

Nor can we stop the silly extremist posturing of these Muslim men. “Freedom of speech has to be exercised with restraint,” says the usually admirable Lady Scotland today. Why? Incitement to action when there is a real and proven connection between words and action should be policed. Yes indeed there is a dotted line between general racist abuse and the death of Stephen Lawrence. There is certainly a jagged connection between the foul faggot bashing and perverted poof punishing of the homophobes in the streets and the vicious murder of Jody Dubrowski. But that doesn’t mean that words are actions. They aren’t. We should police actions but just suffer the offence caused by words

The Bishop of Hereford had the cheek to hold a press conference yesterday after being found guilty by the Tribunal and said, with no apology at all, “I took the decision after a great deal of though and prayer and anguish”. Oh yes Your Grace this is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me, as the sadistic headmaster said while he hid behind the thin veil of false concern.

Next time think why don’t you think harder and pray to a God that might advise you against harming someone’s life. At least in their perverted appeal to their God the Muslim guys only postured. You sacked someone.

GANGS

simon — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:00:26 +0000

I have been talking to young people. And it scared me. They were basically lovely. Four lads from North London. They are all 14 and have the innocent posturing of the almost young man plus of course the bum fluff and the creaky voice. And they fight after school. Not each other. But big set piece rucks involving fifty or so boys. They come from one estate and their opponents from another. I am not going to say where they’re from. It doesn’t actually matter, except that it may put them in, if not danger, certainly potentially some difficulty. They were Asian. That again doesn’t matter. I only say it to dispel the wrong conclusion that this violence is somehow ethnically inspired or generated. The author of the most recent report on gangs in London, Professor John Pitts, who was also there at this conference, makes it very clear that “impetus towards gang membership is determined by the social predicament of gang members rather than their race or ethnicity”. And my four youngsters are not gang members. Not yet. Might they be? I hope not. They came to me via the Leap Project’s Quarrel Shop, where young people learn “mediation, communication and conflict resolution skills”. So there’s hope.

But Pitt’s report “Reluctant gangsters” is an arresting read. Coupled with meeting the four young guys, it was the source of my anxiety. I asked them why they fought like this. “It’s our area, isn’t it” said one. “They’re coming into our area,” said another. It was local pride distorted. And it sounded like an excuse. They wanted to fight. They were tiny, these boys. Yet they were being swept up into clashes of fists and weapons involving tens of youths in which they could easily get hurt. Have they ever been hurt? Or hurt anyone? “Not badly” is the sheepish admission. They want to fight but it scares them, so they don’t want to fight, but they do. They fight, they say, because the others “cursed my mum”. Each of them says it. They “cursed my mum”. Why not turn your back? What did you learn in the Quarrel Shop about your red flag (what it is that tips you over into a conflict)? “That we should know our red flag and back off”. Why don’t you then? Peer pressure? Older boys making you fight? No, apparently not. Just they “cursed my mum”

Their parents know what they are doing. They naturally disapprove. The boys feel their disapproval. Acutely. They drop their heads when I mention it. But it doesn’t stop them fighting, even though they say if they get into trouble with the law, they will bring dishonour on their families. The Policeman with them, Steve, whom they clearly respect, says to me that they’re not bad boys. And they don’t seem so to me. Except, oddly the smallest one who seems full of hidden menace. But will that parental disapproval eventually kick in?

Pitts’ report flags up a big warning. It is in the title. He estimates that at least a third of those involved in gangs do so not wholly voluntarily. Not getting involved can have dire consequences for a young person. They are frightened of being seen a “pussy”. Worse, their families or siblings might suffer. What is quite clear from his report too is that many of them are terrified of their own involvement. Like, on a much lower level, my four little fighters are in fact frightened too. One boy quoted by Pitts says, “He was crouched up in the corner crying because he brought the gun out to protect himself and he was challenged so he pulled the trigger… he didn’t want to pull the trigger”. One on level, no sympathy. But on another a clue to helping kids out of gangs is to recognise that a bit of them doesn’t want to be there.

I heard story this week about just such a lad in another city. It took months for him even to talk to this youth worker. He just hung around. Eventually the worker discovered that he was in a gang and couldn’t see a way out. So the worker did something clever. He got him an ASBO and had the other gang members named in it. The kid had an excuse not to associate with them. He began his exit from the gang.

What is frightening about this report is simply that as violent crime falls overall, gang crime and violence, a more extreme from of social dislocation, is more and more focused in poor areas. And furthermore, in the sixties and seventies, gangsters were mainly burglars and fraudsters. Now it’s changed from blag to business. From cracking safes to crack cocaine. Drugs drive it all. The street crime, the violence and the guns. Protection of territory and family is the excuse.

”They came into our area”. “They cursed my mum”. Is that how it starts? I hope not. Pitts’ has produced a seven-point plan for Waltham Forest. It’s worth a read. It may just save my four kids from anything deeper than just a fistfight after school.

Professor John Pitts, is at Vauxhall Centre for the Study of Crime, University of Bedfordshire
His report “Reluctant gangsters: youth gangs in Waltham Forest” can be obtained form Waltham Forest Council.
Conference:
Gangs: Implications for Social Work Practice
Tuesday 9 October 2007
10.00am – 1.00pm
King’s College London, SE1

http://society.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2128391,00.html

Back it don’t copy it

simon — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 08:28:37 +0000

Pat Stewart is remarkable. She takes for granted that someone has to do what she does and it might as well be her. She set up a project in Gorton in Manchester called On The Streets (OTS). I made a Radio Four programme about it last autumn. It’s just a terrific project. Yet today it has no regular funding. It’s ears are full of the praise of every agency you can lay your hands on. The Council press office boats, “Manchester City Council is impressed by the work undertaken by On The Streets” and then goes on proudly to trumpet that they have approved funding for “almost £27,000”. Oh yippee. At the last count there were 369 young people who attended OTS projects, 3000 times. That’s £73 a young person.

“Is it time to throw in the towel now?” says Pat, despite, as she asks the question, sounding eternally optimistic. And she steadfastly refuses to criticise any of the funders or the council. She is endlessly generous about the agencies that seem to me to be strangling her project.

In 2001 Pat, who had brought her two children up in Gorton, went back to the area. A large number of kids were out of control and behaving anti-socially. The residents were terrified. So she, and a colleague called Rob Burley, called a meeting of the young people. The Housing Department, who bless them seem to have been constantly supportive, lent them their canteen. They thought noone would show. But 36 arrived. “They virtually insisted we did something and not give up on them” says Pat. At the next meeting there was 72.

The special thing about the way OTS works is that it focuses on groups of kids not just individuals. “Anti-social behaviour is a bloody spectator sport” says Pat, “I am not just going to deal with one person, I want the whole group”. And further than that they try and work with the whole family. “That way we leave the young person with nowhere to hide and no-one else to blame”. Tough language. Pat and Rob are insistent that OTS is a Crime and Disorder project and what they are doing is facing these young people with the consequences of their behaviour. Getting them to see that they have choices in their lives.

Pat is constantly praising the youth service in the city. “They were very very good, When we started they gave us the framework - insurance, child protection rules, Criminal Records bureau checks and all that”. But you can’t help feeling as you listen not just to Pat, but to others talking about OTS, that the youth service also rather resented their tough way of working. There is a blunt ness with the kids and an ease with making judgements of their behaviour which traditional youth work often eschews. “:These young people have a choice. They can carry on behaving badly or live decent lives”, says Pat. She is a great fan of ASBOs. “They put a break on someone. They are not a badge of honour. That’s ridiculous. They are one of the best things this country has ever done. Young people know when they are committing anti-social behaviour. They need to be told in a direct way. If you water down the challenge, they don’t take us seriously”.

Of course as the project became successful, the inevitable happened. The Council, in that dreaded automaton phrase, wanted to “roll it out”. But you can’t bottle what Pat and Rob do and just reproduce it in-house. Yet Pat is again endlessly complimentary. She says the Council probably doesn’t have enough money to fund the kind of intensive work that OTS does. They have their own youth service and they have to pay for them first. This woman is so damn conciliatory to the Council it’s remarkable. She wouldn’t be that soft on the kids.

So let me say it for her. OTS is successful. People in Gorton feel safer. OTS could grow if even more of the kids who have been through the project could be trained to be volunteers and workers. That’s what Gorton needs, not more professionalized youth workers. Manchester needs to learn how to invest in OTS’s innovation and grow its impact across the city. Yes, there are problems of scalability, as they call it and of unusual ways of working. But give me a hundred of those problems to solve and a tribe of Pat and Robs and their kids than a roll out of the idea through the Youth Service.

When I asked to talk to anyone senior in the council, about this I was referred to their press office. They all ran and hid. If you ask me, Manchester City Council needs some tough talking to, to be served with an ASBO and told to change their behaviour and fund this project.

http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,,2106413,00.html

Blame the Parents - I say

simon — Mon, 21 May 2007 08:32:24 +0000

Everyone is talking about manners in Britain. Naturally there should be a queue. And I want to talk about manners. But after you, of course. Nice, warm cuddly things they are. Everyone wants them. There’s even a National Day of Courtesy on…… (??). But everyone is too scared to enforce them. And they need enforcing; they don’t just come about through natural grace. They work because there is a social sanction, even if it’s not spoken. Despite the evident benefit to our general sense of well being, and the self-interest in simply getting what you want a great deal more easily if you are polite, we do not seem to behave in a graceful and generous way to each other freely. But we have a crisis of authority. We have outsourced it to asbos, the police, teachers, the council. Anybody but us. We have become scared of enforcing rules. The left has gone all wibbly woo about cultural relativism and how you can’t impose out values on others? And the right is still trying to enforce rules that no one agrees with any more.

The trouble is that those we have outsourced it to sacrificed our admiration. A long time ago the Police took refuge in bombast and authoritarian ways compounded by corruption. And teachers went the other way and became feeble negotiators rather than guides. In their different ways they lost our respect. Bobbies became bullies and racists. And then refused to deal with their reputation and their behaviour until even the Lords Scarman and McPherson had to point out to them that they had to change or sacrifice their effectiveness forever. Teachers, on the other hand, began to fear the children in their care and, instead of exercising firmness, they started to bargain. Fearful of retribution from parents they backed off. But it is to parents we have to look most of all to give children the senses that there are rules, that there is a framework for life. That there are manners. And I know your liberal heart is huffing and puffing now about what an old fart I have become. But many parents refuse to draw boundaries.

They seem to have enormous difficulty in putting themselves in a position where they are unpopular with their children. We feel strongly that democracy matters and that tyranny is bad. We want to be seen as kind, negotiating, sensitive people. So the way people parent is more about how they want to feel about themselves, and be seen, than it is about the good of the child. Parents are negotiating with three year olds. They ask them what they want for supper. If parents start abrogating responsibility when their children are that young, what chance do kids have later on when they are teenagers and need to rebel to find their, and your boundaries?

There is a mistaken belief that manners are the natural attribute of the gracefully born. They’re not. They stem from a value system that has within it the idea that there are right and wrong ways to behave. This is not about how you hold your knife and fork. That’s etiquette and was designed as a trip wire for the working class. Manners are the respect you pay to other people by treating them with thoughtfulness. Manners are a form of mutual obligation. Without the sense that there are rules justifiably enforced by our own authority, how can there be an agreement about decent behaviour? Without our preparedness to take responsibility for other people’s behaviour and our own, how will courtesy even become national? Even for a day?

Shaun - a self build man

simon — Mon, 21 May 2007 08:31:26 +0000

When I ring Shaun he is checking the fire alarms at the Tyneside Cyrenians building. He’s their maintenance man. Not so long ago, if I’d rung him he’d probably have been drunk. He drank to pass the time. He was never an alcoholic, just a chaotic drinker. “I could take it or leave it. But most of the time I’d take it”, he says ruefully now. His is a classic story. For no particular reason he “fell by the wayside’ after school and for seven years drank and got into trouble. His parents threw him out. He slept rough, lived in hostels and generally failed to get it together. Eventually he went back to live with his dad and one night, after drinking, crashed his dad’s car. His dad threw him out again. It was the wake-up all. He’s not sure why, but since then, with the exception of the odd pint on a Friday night, he’s been teetotal. Now with a partner, Lisa and two kids, Ben, 2, and little Shaun, 6 months, he says he hasn’t got time to drink. It’ll be three years in September that he’s been the maintenance man.

Everybody speaks very highly of Shaun. But his story is about more than just personal will. It goes back to when the Cyrenians decided to improve their hostel. They could have just got in a contractor. Instead they decided to recruit from the people who used their services. The risks, according to Stephen Bell, the Cyrenians chief-exec, were huge. But the potential rewards were enormous. The challenge was not so much that in order to satisfy the funding and give the guys a real chance of working in the building trade afterwards they would all have to achieve an NVQ level 2, but that it wasn’t really the building skills that they needed. It wasn’t about getting them a qualification but supporting them so that they could sustain themselves in work, after in some of their cases having been out of employment for 10 – 15 years. You can learn bricklaying or timber frame assembly once you’re on site. But it’s getting on site in the first place, sober, regularly. And then being able to apply for other jobs. Even as one person put it, learning to shake hands again.

With University education, we take this for granted. Just because someone studies history they’re not necessarily learning to be a history teacher. They’re learning to marshall an argument, write coherently, analyse facts. They are learning to deploy themselves in the outside world of work. But when it comes to basic training, the Learning and Skills Councils and the other agencies tend to be obsessed with qualifications and for projects to squeeze the other, and ultimately more important support out of the money available is almost impossible. June Barnes of Thames East, in the midst of the East London regeneration spree that is the Olympics, says they can only do it because they are big enough and financially robust enough. They have mentoring services in their organisation already. Funding needs to be more imaginative in the first place, she says. Start with the broad human objectives with people who have been out of the swim for so long and work back to the NVQ.

The Cyrenians had to find a partner who understood this. With so much building going on there are considerable opportunities to get the long term unemployed into work. But the industry finds this very difficult. Mostly the big companies contract the work out to small businesses who just don’t have the capacity to mentor people like Shaun. In the Esh Group however, Cyrenians found a company with local roots in the northeast that, unusually, employs 1200 people directly. Including one Peter Darkings, who according to his boss Bill McCafferty “has an exceptional ability to communicate and grow people. He rose to the occasion becoming father and brother to the guys with inspiration and patience. Although when it was needed he can certainly tell them, as we say in Scotland, ‘which way is up’”. Darkings, and a man called George Evans who was too modest to talk to me, ran the project.

Shaun’s story is not just a personal triumph, but the project’s victory over the narrowness of the funding system. Of the thirteen people who worked on the hostel rebuild, none of them are living in hostels anymore and seven have jobs in construction. The NVQs are really the least important piece in the jigsaw of their rebirth. It was the investment in them as individuals. The project title was a play on words. Cyrenians Self-Builders. It wasn’t a hostel Shaun built. But with his foreman and his mentor, it was himself and the rest of his life.