The Secret Life of the Evil Poor (part one)

The following story is true, though written in anonymous form.  It’s about gutter scum in broken Britain.  I suspect if your life is blighted by close proximity of such scrote, that you will discover the authorities you previously thought ‘dealt’ with such matters are a bunch of incompetent arseholes and even worse than the scum (on the grounds the scum are usually ill-educated, low IQ no-hopers and people like your MP, cops, housing workers and social services should at least know what they are doing and give a damn).

You can get some clue about scrote in academic books and papers.  This isn’t my preferred route as the material is expensive and most people don’t access it.  I can assure you this story is in there.  I was an academic for a long time and don’t see this culture as likely to do anything worthwhile other than for its own members.

I was a middle class boy, the son of a headmaster who left school himself at 13.  Like many people who taught me, he’d survived WW2 and done some half-assed teacher training, some of which had been delivered in Latin.  They were a good lot and I remember his staff and my own teachers with gratitude.  I was never a good student, though near the top of my grammar school classes.  Various cock-ups led me into the police.

We can think of the story starting when I entered the first council house I’d ever been in.  It was a total shock to discover people living like this, even though most of my undergraduate accommodation had been crap and I’d been born a backstreet kid.  My parents were weird, but they’d loved and fed me.  This was a different world, though a minority one even amongst financial poverty.  ‘Husbands’ and ‘wives’ beat each other and their kids, the sexual ‘morality’ made my undergrad years look tame and the world was violent.  There were ‘riots’ centred on the town bus station every now and then and very few of us to cope with it.  The young hoods didn’t disguise themselves and quickly succumbed to factory work, joined the Army or sailed off with the Harrison Line.  I soon discovered most people I dealt with were actually rather decent, given the chance. There were a few ‘families’ and criminal elements that were not.

The same is true in the street I live in now.   The book I could write on Dirty Mary’s brothel (a corner council house), the drug gangs, illegal boozing and shagging dens and the bandits who joy-rided, burgled, shop-lifted, weighed in roof lead, screwed their daughters  and the rest could be written by a modern cop.  See the Night Jack archives or Inspector Gadget when she’s describing action and not trying to put cops above the law. My shift played hard, on and off the job.  The work was made unnecessarily hard by a rotten culture.  Some cops were bent, some actors in Horses Arse, the fictional GMO Division I’m sure I worked,  One colleague was arrested for burglary and turned out to have a previous conviction for such, which should have been impossible.  Later, others were on the take in incidents involving a night club which never had a justices’ licence. I never got to trust drug-squad detectives, but overall we were an honest bunch of sick puppies.

Fiction probably gives a better feel for this world than any sociology I’ve read, but two or three episodes of The Sweeny is a career.  The dull, boring and repetitive nature of police work is impossible to sell.  Much the same is true of the gutter scum lives I’ve been studying for the last 10 years – this is not my sole pursuit and I would be deranged if it was. Joseph Wambaugh and Charlie Owen give some clues along with Irving Welsh.  The Wire, The Shield, Spiral, Cops and Shameless get somewhere towards the right track, but the real story is too bleak to tell.

It is easy enough to paint the picture of people who ‘exchange’ their daughters to buy drink and drugs as miserable scum.  What is more difficult is to get at why they remain such a problem for people around them for so long, and persist in their pathetic, vile, criminal lives, making the problem generational.  Looking at the then 3 year old son of two scum who centre my story, my friend turned away, nearly in tears.  It was obvious to both of us the kid was already doomed.  Yet this was not obvious to the bent police inspector covering-up repeated failures by his officers, or the housing or social workers (it was, in private to one of them).  The kid, six years on, is described as ‘an empty space’ by his peers or ‘dead brain’.  We tried to save him, but it was pointless.  Easy enough to blame his scum parents, but what was going on was so obvious it is not enough.  The authorities gone mad and our weird economy for the rich plays its grinding grim part.  What chance has a kid left with parents with endless drink, drugs, mental health and criminal recidivism got?  Looking back, I could have made more difference writing a business plan for their drugs and shoplifting activities in the hope more ‘income’ would have made a difference!  They are gone from the street now and the quality of life here is immeasurably improved.  A family nearly died because the authorities were so useless, but there is no follow-up to ‘learn lessons’.

One answer to the scrote problem is a cull.  We’d do this in a farmed animal community.  I don’t approve, but this solution was popular in the 1920’s and 30’s.  What we need is a proper description of the scrote and a proper description of what is done to control them by the authorities, and how we might instigate beneficial changes and what interests lie in making real change and those involved in maintaining the status quo.

To really understand scrote you need to try living next door to a set.  This is bad, but there’s worse – the areas dominated by them.  The shortages of volunteers for my living amongst scrote project tells us something about our existing regard for them.  Let’s face it we do jobs we don’t like to buy houses in areas where their kids don’t get to go to school. We already know something about them and what they do to the lives of others around them.  Every taxi driver knows about scrote.  Passing some council area regeneration programme that has made some clapped out row of shops presentable, they will mutter ‘it would be better if they did something about the scrotes’. You know – yet if I ask you how many there are you won’t know.  I don’t, though I’ve read some figures.

How many of our population do things like sex-exchanging their kids for a fix, or grows them to the kind of rioters we’ve seen recently, or live so noisily no one can live near them and so on?  What can you get done about them if they are moved in near you – increasingly likely in the shortage of social housing and increasing private rental sector?  We may not have precise answers, but we know enough to want to earn enough to be away from them.  This should raise moral questions, though I hear few of them.  I suspect this lack of morality is the real reason people like Fiona Pilkington have their lives destroyed and many others can’t get an even break.  We presumably expect our evil poor not be be in the top 50% of wealth owners and the top 50% own 93% of all the country’s wealth.  We presumably don’t think scrote own much of the wealth of the bottom 50% either.  We can conclude the evil poor are negligible in terms of wealth.  Some of us might well think half our population is if it only owns 7%.

Let’s say the scrote are the bottom 10% in wealth terms – that’s one in ten of our population.  Too high, I’d guess?  The point is laboured enough – they are decidedly fractional in wealth terms.  I suspect there are ways to establish a fairly exact number for the evil poor.  It’s important in defining them to understand they own almost nothing and that this doesn’t mean all of them are broke.  They are competing for scarce wealth resources with almost half the rest of our population that owns very little – the battle is going on in only 7% of UK wealth.  This makes them even bigger bastards in my book – they are perverting the system for the majority of our poorest.  In the UK the top 20% of households earn 16 times that of the poorest 20% – so we can assume scrote don’t trouble the scorer much on income as well as wealth.

Of course, if these bastards did own anything, the legal or benefits systems might well want to take it off them.  It’s obvious they aren’t cornering the country’s wealth and won’t be much more than a pimple on a flea’s back in terms of holding the economy back in any straightforward way.  Hate them for real, but don’t blame them for our advance towards banana republic status.

What other resources might scrote consume and steal from others as surely as they ‘borrow from shops’?  Nearly all of them are stealing from a benefit system they have never contributed to, but there are questions about whether many of them are fit for work in the normal sense.  It is clear that they consume social housing or housing benefit, general benefits, legal aid and all kinds of social work, police, prison, probation, charity and whatever they can steal or defraud.  I have no doubt this is an enormous problem, yet it is also small in comparison from what the rich siphon off.  It may be argued the rich earn their corn, but this is crap and we need to disabuse ourselves of this myth.  My own contention is that if we gave every scrote a million quid to leave the UK we’d be better off, but also find the bastards back in a year broke and begging again. If their are half-a-million evil poor families the cost would be 500,000 million or 500 billion or half a trillion.  How much did we bail the banks out for or what do the rich pay themselves every year? The UK’s richest 1000 people have about half a trillion in wealth.  We could probably get rid of our scrote for half of that.  If you think giving scrote families a million to fuck right off is stupid, ask yourself why we spend such huge amounts on some of them without the result of not seeing them again!

Let’s start back in my story, with Samuel and Sally Scrote moved into the other half of the semi-detached I lived in.  My partner had bought her council house when she had good neighbours.  Now who were Sam and Sally before they were moved in?  Decent hard-working people, disabled or otherwise ‘deserving’ – well no, they were well-know local thugs and drug-dealers.  Base-ball bats had been used in their previous ‘eviction’ from a house half-a-mile away, where the terrified neighbours through noise abuse, violence, constant domestic violence and visits from their colleagues in the drug industry.  I was working abroad and came home to find all our neighbours had complained.  When I went to the housing association to ask why they had moved such a pair of criminal shits in, I was told the woman had been a council tenant before, paid the rent and been no trouble. This turned out to be a lie.  Neither had ever been council tenants before.  This was the first example of the kind of lying and incompetence typical of the authorities.  The only answer if you are caught like this is to move.  I’ll explain why in part two and develop the ethnography of scrote economics further, as Sam and Sally sell their daughters into prostitution and we discover they are not standard 75 IQ evil poor.  At this IQ you are as dumb or smart as my dog and the average IQ of people passing through police interview rooms is 82 (that’s the bottom class in a bad comprehensive level).

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What are our politicians really like?

We had an expenses scandal in the UK that led to a few scapegoats being offered up for imprisonment or shame.  It blew over pretty quickly and we really missed the point.  They were nearly all at it and couldn’t blow the whistle – this was done for money.  I know more about Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man, who dominated their politics from 1994, than any British politicians. He has clearly been a disaster as a national leader.

The lurid saga of his “Bunga Bunga” sex parties has almost been written off in our broadcast media, though it involved sex with a minor.  The Italians admire an older guy who can still keep it up.  Blair was cosy with him before becoming a bag man for JP Morgan (whatever).  He has been tried more than a dozen times for fraud, false accounting or bribery. His defenders claim that he has never been convicted, but this is untrue. Several cases have seen convictions, only for them to be set aside because the convoluted proceedings led to trials being timed out by a statute of limitations. Mr Berlusconi himself changed the law for this purpose, something wider in western politics than we have recognised.

I’m not at all convinced that politics is any cleaner across Europe. The dodgy sex and the dubious business connections seem disastrous almost everywhere.  Berlusconi had total disregard for the economic condition of his country and this is endemic now in western politics.  Italy is a country in dire straits – but whither the rest of us?  It’s had tight fiscal policy and has so far escaped the markets’ wrath. Italy avoided a housing bubble; its banks did not go bust. Employment held up: the unemployment rate is 8%, compared with over 20% in Spain. The budget deficit in 2011 will be 4% of GDP, against 6% in France.  But these numbers are deceptive.  When Europe’s economies shrink, Italy’s shrinks more; when they grow, it grows less. Only Zimbabwe and Haiti had lower GDP growth than Italy in the decade to 2010. In fact GDP per head in Italy actually fell. The public debt is still 120% of GDP, the rich world’s third-biggest. This is all the more worrying given the rapid ageing of Italy’s population.

As in the UK, low average unemployment disguises some sharp variations. A quarter of young people—far more in parts of the depressed south—are jobless. The female-participation rate in the workforce is 46%, the lowest in western Europe. A mix of low productivity and high wages is eroding competitiveness: whereas productivity rose by a fifth in America and a tenth in Britain in the decade to 2010, in Italy it fell by 5%. Italy comes 80th in the World Bank’s “Doing Business” index, below Belarus and Mongolia, and 48th in the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness rankings, behind Indonesia and Barbados.  It has a two-tier labour market with protected insiders and exposed outsiders, and too few big firms.  Young people are leaving, infrastructure is getting shabbier, public services are stretched, the environment is suffering and real incomes are at best stagnant. Few Europeans despise their pampered politicians as much as Italians do and their elite is old.

Everywhere the claim that his kind of business leader is essential to the changes we need has been hot air. The euro crisis is forcing Greece, Portugal and Spain to push through huge reforms in the teeth of popular protest. Standard economics will claim Italy needs to do the same.

In fact we all end up ‘needing the same’ as the books unravel and we discover what has been ‘off balance sheet’.  The question is whether we now have any politicians who are or could act in our interests because none of them appear to be asking any real questions about what is going on.  The world is mad.  Houses were built in droves in Ireland for no one to live in.  The Italians hosted an obvious crook.  We are at war in countries we know nothing about, including (for the UK) a large set of rocks not fit for sheep.  1984 can’t match the lunacy.

The ‘shape’ that fits much of this well is that of puppet governments, with strings pulled by the Bilderburgers – certainly some dark politics.  Do our politicians know or are they jobsworth dupes worried about ‘mortgage payments’ and their own libido?  Do we all somehow know whatever this is about, realise there is nothing to do but play the game with heads down?  If it is like this how could we fight it and win?

We have failed over millennia with argument – corruption is as endemic as Plato predicted.  In public argument, however crap the media is, the cause is lost because most can’t grasp argument and we have almost no proper idea of disinterestedness – a poor word as it has nothing to do with lack of passion.  In the UK, our politicians couldn’t even report the dismal and petty corruption around themselves – but more importantly commissioned no work to look into why and what this meant about them.

Instead of work like this we get polls of what we generally think about our public figures, which only tell us how we answer poll questions.  It would matter if we actually knew our politicians, but we don’t.  I believe they are chancers with no moral fibre, but that hardly separates them from the rest of us except in degree.  Their morals and ethics are those of lawyers, so more or less nonexistent.

What we want is a system that works that we hardly notice and this is where we have gone wrong.  We are hence again on the path to war and the end of the hopes of democracy.  Most of us don’t even know the famed Athenian Democracy was always at war, committed genocides and spun fine words.  No change then?

The Greeks are now ‘indignant’ and this may be where the hope of a real politics lies.  The idiot view I hear in little Britain is they have somehow been profligate and brought their current position on themselves.  Instead, what happens there will come to us all, before whatever war is being planned for beyond the professional ones being fought that no one fears their own being drafted into.

I was born, like our politicians, after the second war to end all wars.  These were both imperialist wars about parts of the world where big profits could be made.  My country has never been at peace and is now bombing part of the world it planned to take over with the French in 1956.  We killed at least 28,000 Indonesian combatants in a war most of my fellows don’t know happened and I meet no one who knows how many Iraqis have been killed and maimed.

I expect the shift to the really revolting war to be heralded by some tub-thumping by the likes of Cameron or whoever the ‘Blair in place’ is at the time.  Our politicians won’t resist as they failed to do over Iraq.  All I know about what our politicians are like is that they aren’t fit people for office because they preside over this inevitable drift to war.

When it comes to high wage high productivity jive, think of someone like me with years of varied experience and a couple of others with similar abilities in university teaching.  Three of us could teach a large number of students across, say, a business studies course.  If we paid ourselves £100K a year, we’d be ‘making’ £600K a year in profit from fees from only 100 students, less expenses.  Only red tape stops us doing this.  And these days one can think of a home and electronic based service, with students doing sports and social stuff more or less organised themselves.  It would be a bit like on-line banking.  No rocket science – but it ain’t happening.  Of course, most of the current non teaching jobs would go.  The truth is we nearly all rely on inefficiency and most of the jobs we do are already redundant.  I know of no financial services that are really needed either.

Our politicians never speak of any of this.  What sort of people are they?  I have no wish to make any money from teaching.  It saddens me to play any role in taking hard earned money off those who pass through my ‘care’.  I would be something other than a functionary.  I would teach other than the road to serfdom and this is all politicians offer.  We could already have a university of the air, free to all.  Instead, ejukation is just part of the road you must pay for to be a better class of serf to those who take it on themselves to rent us the Earth.  They have been tribal, feudal, capitalist and communist.  Politicians – we know them in history like an Undead.  They expect me to teach their history.  All that’s left of me is auto da fe – fuck them all.  I have waited in vain for the return of language and must hunt them on my own.  We need another kind of war.  They are already winning, destroying easy availability of jobs where some decent work will do.  Now you must pledge your soul.