Out of Sight

Robert McAuley

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138861510
• eBook ISBN: 9781134041022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Youth crime is simultaneously a social problem and an intrinsic part of consumer culture: while images of gangs and gangsters are used to sell global commodities, young people not in work and education are labelled as antisocial and susceptible to crime.

This book focuses on the lives of a group of young adults living in a deprived housing estate situated on the edge of a large city in the North of England. It investigates the importance of fashion, music and drugs in young people's lives, providing a richly detailed ethnographic account of the realities of exclusion, and explaining how young people become involved in crime and drug use. Young men and women describe their own personal experiences of exclusion in education, employment and the public sphere. They describe their history of exclusion as 'the life', and the term identifies how young people grew up as objects of suspicion in the eyes of an affluent majority.

While social exclusion continues to be seen as a consequence of young people's behaviour, Out of Sight: crime, youth and exclusion in modern Britain examines how stigmatising poor communities has come to define Britain's consumer society. The book challenges the view underlying government policy that social exclusion is a product of crime, antisocial behaviour and drug use, and in focusing on one socially deprived neighbourhood it promotes a different way of seeing the problematic relationship between socially excluded young people, society and government.

Chapter 1

A mugger's paradise

This study begins by identifying the context for young people's experiences of exclusion: Britain's consumer society. I show how a consumer lifestyle gains its definition thinking about crime. I also pinpoint how communications – television, personal computers and mobile technologies – screen out poverty by allowing consumers to imagine poor people as criminal. But first I want to describe the physical set on which the masquerade of crime is played out. This chapter charts the physical creation of Britain's consumer society, specifically the redevelopment of cities into theme parks organised around the pursuit of a consumer lifestyle.

The dominant explanation as to why crime persists is that Britain's cities contain communities where people, including families, are intolerant of work. The idea of an underclass has no bearing on people's experiences of poverty, nor is it intended as an explanation for crime. Instead, this is the masquerade of crime in a consumer society. It is consumed by people in a landscape where everything appears available, including work.

The unusual suspects

Even though crime has been a reality of the industrial city for three centuries, thinking about crime is embedded in the consumer society. Crime's function in defining a consumer lifestyle links back to the transition from a manufacturing to service economy in many cities (see A. Young, 1996; Lea, 2002). For many people this meant an end to earning money through production and a move to a working life organised around making money from other people; through services provided to others either locally or in other parts of the globe. Because many people chose to operate this way in order to live a consumer lifestyle, the result is that other people appear as objects: characters in a theme park. Since the start of the 1980s, consumer industries have remade cities, applying one standardised landscape. Gemini Park is one piece of that, a series of geometrically organised ornamental sheds built in the 1980s along Ford's border. Throughout this study, young adults describe ‘the life’ of poverty people are forced to lead in Nova because of the nature of work in the local economy and the perception consumers in Ford have about people living in council estates. As a consumer society, Ford is a microcosm of the world we now live in, divided between individual lifestyles and communities forced to survive in poverty.

Everyone I spoke to in Nova described exclusion as a dialectic experience, of segregation within and from school as a result of the stigma surrounding the children of Nova. After being expelled or discouraged from staying on, young people described being confined to Gemini Park by workfare policies designed to get young people into work. Later, young people describe the difficulties of trying to gain skills and qualifications while being forced to work unsocial hours and for minimum wages. The circle of exclusion was completed when young people tried to work together outside of Nova's local service economy; working together, all became demonised as a gang.

Working poor

The significance of exclusion in the consumer society stems from the changing nature of work over the past 30 years and its effect on people's perception of society. When one looks at contemporary culture, people with a degree of affluence do not aspire to live as part of a community. The consumer society is defined by what Jameson (1998) describes as a perpetual present: each day organised around a circadian cycle or body time of seduction and consumption (see Adam, 1995). The result is a society made up of images or objects, instead of social relations, outside of which are poor communities such as Nova.

In Britain today, poverty is the antithesis to a consumer lifestyle because work, for many people, no longer has a social meaning. In Nova, people still believe in work because for the past 30 years poverty has stalked the estate. In the following chapters, young people describe searching for money to buy food and pay for utilities and growing up in families facing the exact same hardships. Because labour has always been the only way to survive poverty, the continuance of poverty and exclusion explains why a work ethic remains so important in Nova. Work is the foundation for the community young people describe in the coming chapters, of ‘earning’ to gain respect and self-respect within their community. Linden, my main sponsor in Nova whom I introduce in Chapter 2, described the importance of work for everyone living in what remains a very poor community: ‘See, everyone I know is unemployed but there's one group of people that are unemployed that just do nothin’. Sit around all day, fuckin’ in front of the telly. And there's lads that I know that get up and go to work.’

For almost all of the 30 young people I met, ‘working is a value in its own right, a noble and ennobling activity’ (Bauman, 1998: 5). Yet the realities of work in Nova's local service economy are temporary jobs and incomes that only create poverty. Young people explained how employers in Ford have a negative attitude to people from Nova, an attitude that stems from the belief that Nova exists as a culture of crime. This study concludes with an examination of the idea that poor communities are inherently criminal. My concern here is how Ford was gradually divided between an affluent consumer society and poor communities.

Residents I spoke to who were born before the 1970s described how Ford's culture used to be socially progressive. Andy, a youth worker who I introduce in Chapter 2, described ‘a buzz around the place’ when Ford itself was at the centre of the post-war boom. Young people I met in Nova were children at that time, and grew up when Nova's local economy collapsed. After the recession, many described how Nova's social fabric disintegrated under the weight of mass unemployment: also, how within Ford, residents were gradually perceived as a collective danger. For many young people I spoke to that process began at school during the 1980s, when Nova began to experience mass unemployment. Many of the young adults I spoke to described being stigmatised at school for belonging to a community responsible for its own downfall. Jimmy, who I introduce in Chapter 2, described his own experience at Greaves, Nova's feeder secondary school, ‘see at Greaves, it was like two sides of a fence. Those who went to the school were either from Greaves Park or Nova. But the kids from Greaves Park were middle class. See if you lived in Nova, the teachers looked down on you; they never gave you a chance. After the third year, I stopped goin’.’ Greaves Park is a residential area neighbouring Nova.

Growing up in a poor community

Nearly all the young adults in Nova talking about growing up described a feeling of belonging to Nova. Yet, this was the 1980s, when class was felt to be at odds with a burgeoning free market society. Anthony Giddens (1991: 197) identifies how, to survive de-industrialisation, economies began to require societies of individuals: ‘Market-governed freedom of individual choice becomes an enveloping framework of individual self-expression.’ People living in areas worst affected by de-industrialisation, such as social housing estates, were unable to be part of the consumer society. Instead, as young people describe later, being part of a community was the only way to survive. This is why, in the consumer society, life appears split between a consumer lifestyle and poor communities.

Nova was built on a belief in community. Many of Nova's first residents had migrated to Ford, often with nothing but a suitcase, so people had to get on to survive. Steve, a close friend of Jimmy who I also introduce in Chapter 2, told me how his parents, like many of the young adults I know in Nova, migrated to Ford.

Steve: Yeah, I grew up there. Me mum and dad are from Ireland and they moved here, to Nova. That's it, I was born in Ford.

RM: Nova was the first area they came to?

Steve: That's it; they never lived anywhere else after that.

In Nova, culture continues to be defined by a collective belief that people can overcome poverty, and, listening to residents of all ages, that feeling also characterised Ford up until the 1980s. Ford's burgeoning manufacturing economy was the reason why many people came to the city. The fact that people had migrated to the city, often from other countries, meant that being part of a community was vital. People and families from Ireland, the Caribbean, Poland, the Asian subcontinent, Eire, Scotland, Wales and other areas of England all moved to Nova during the post-war boom in the 1950s. Like the formation of a constellation, Nova was created by people with one overriding desire, for a better life in Ford. Then at the end of the 1970s, when most of Ford's factories closed, the city's peripheral social housing estates, of which Nova is the largest, experienced economic collapse. As the public life of estates such as Nova became eclipsed by poverty, unemployment, crime and violence, it seemed as though the rest of Ford retreated into a private culture of consumption.

Through the looking glass

Growing up during the 1970s, the idea of society seemed to decline in parallel with the disintegration of Fordism (see Gellner, 1983). Recession had real consequences on society: as the cost of living rose and production levels slumped, unemployment, especially long-term unemployment, rose sharply. In many areas including Ford, the problems stemmed from an over-concentration of manufacturing industries. When manufacturing collapsed in Britain at the end of the 1970s, it was inevitable that heavily industrial cities such as Ford would experience the brunt of recession.

In the first three years of the 1980s, the region lost 319,000 jobs, or 14.3 per cent, again the highest loss compared with any other region in the area. By February 1983, there were 46 unemployed adults for every vacant job in the region – a higher number than in any other region. In April 1983, Ford City Council estimated 39,000 people were claiming unemployment benefit, a rate of 16 per cent, which was higher than the rates in several areas with Development Area status, such as Merthyr Tydfil, North Tyneside and Dunfermline. By the time of the next recession in 1989–91, Ford's Economic Development Unit predicted a net loss of 7,000 jobs between 1991 and 1993. Once again, many of these jobs went from what remained of the city's manufacturing base. After 1991, most major manufacturing firms in Ford made further redundancies. In August 1991, a large vehicle production factory announced 1,490 redundancies while Ford's last remaining colliery closed. As with the recession of the late 1970s, subsequent slumps had a disproportionate effect on already economically deprived regions such as Ford. Alongside other regions where manufacturing sustained whole communities, such as the north of England and parts of Wales, levels of poverty and unemployment here remained disproportionately high. Worst affected were social housing developments such as Nova that had been purposely built to supply factories with labour (see Power, 1993, 1997; Morris, 1995).

Unemployment has always been a feature of industrialisation: the problem in Britain is that we live in a society that grew accustomed to consumption during the 1960s. This was why the global economic crisis of the 1970s had such a profound effect on British society along with other affluent societies of the post-war period. To prevent social disintegration, former industrial economies across Europe and North America had to sustain consumer demand even though goods that had characterised the post-war boom – from cars to domestic appliances – were now too costly to produce. Many succeeded by transforming cities into a commodity through the creation of retail parks and shopping malls, mainly to try to attract tourism and business investment. As a result the urban landscape of many cities was redrawn. The production of goods sold in cities now occurred in other parts of the world, though concept design and service industries remained. As young people describe in the following chapters, what followed was the steady disappearance of working-class culture from now post-industrial cities such as Ford. The city's transition to a post-Fordist economy meant that factory jobs were replaced by what young people I met refer to later as ‘shit work’.

In many former industrial areas such as Ford, labour demand divides between highly skilled specialist industries, such as finance and telecommunications. Usually to maintain these industries there has also been a proliferation of ‘bad jobs’ (see Sassen, 1997). Lash and Urry (1994: 12–30) describe the creation of ‘core’ industries in their study on the creation of Britain's post-industrial economy:

This information-saturated, service-rich, communications-laden core represents a major shift from the older order's central cluster of Fordist industries. It is in this new core, and not in the restructured older manufacturing sectors, that the most significant processes of flexible specialisation, localisation, and globalisation are developing.

Alongside the development of this core has been a growth in hotel and catering trade, office work, leisure time and entertainment, service trades and commerce, cleaning and maintenance. These ancillary sectors are characterised by jobs that are labour intensive and require few qualifications, are badly paid and offer no career prospects (Benassi, Kazepov and Migione, 1997). They also characterised Nova's local economy; for example, in a study carried out by Ford City Council in 1992, researchers interviewed 300 local residents, 73 of whom were employed. The nature of the jobs held by the 73 (33 men and 40 women) gives a picture of employment opportunities in the area and the skills necessary for these jobs. Firstly, compared with other areas of Ford, Nova residents were under-represented in managerial and professional occupations and over-represented in service occupations such as care assistance and kitchen and bar staff. Although almost as high a proportion of women worked as men, the survey found that many of these jobs were part-time and poorly paid, such as cleaning, school meals assistance and care assistance. Respondents were also asked how long they had worked in their present occupation. One in eight workers had been in their current occupation for less than a year.

Being poor in an affluent society

Changes in the nature of work in Ford have led to a radical shift in the nature of work and poverty. From a city where the bulk of the working population was employed in manufacturing, de-industrialisation meant that many people had to specialise, often through providing services to others. Others were lucky, working in so-called ‘core’ industries such as teaching, local governance and administration (see Kumar, 1984). This is one reason why Ford appears such divided city, carved up into sites of consumption, residential districts and socially excluded communities. However, the division now appears to be essential to the city economy: creating labour markets where jobs prevent people from breaking even. This is how the young people I met define poverty, a condition I experienced myself when I worked for three months in Nova's local economy.

Gemini Park, a retail park built during the 1980s on the edge of Ford, characterises the workfare merry-go-round young people describe in the following chapters. This open-air shopping mall was intended to regenerate Nova's local economy after the recession of 1980–1. At the centre of Gemini Park is a ring road: on the left, a collection of anonymous office buildings practically invisible next to the gaudy retail park on the right. Even though the area itself looks completely familiar, the social divisions that operate there are as bad as those described by Frederic Engels (1845), Charles Booth (1889–91) and George Orwell (1937) in their accounts of poverty during the industrial period. Because of the way Gemini Park is organised, as a world of consumption, the extremes of poverty and wealth are invisible.

People I met from Nova who work in Gemini Park lived in poverty because no one could earn enough money to live. However, because Gemini Park's service industries literally dress people as characters, no one sees this. The retail side of Gemini Park is open 24 hours, though consumers rarely see the system required to make that possible. During my fieldwork, I worked at Anderson's, a large supermarket on the perimeter of Nova. Anderson's forms part of Nova's local labour market. There I, like everyone else, was required to wear an outfit that, in its design, gave the impression that I was a service provider: black tie, white shirt, black trousers, shoes and a nametag. Everyone had to appear impeccably dressed with just two outfits, so you continually had to wash one while wearing the other. This was just one of numerous hardships people endured working in Anderson's that together resulted in incomes less than state benefits. Depending on people's age, employees earned approximately £3 to £4 an hour. I earned just over £400 a month and after rent and utilities found it difficult to find money for food. That was only after working at Anderson's for three months. Young people described working in these industries after leaving school at 16, often because teachers assumed young people I met were either lazy or incapable.

All that remained was Gemini Park, which typifies Britain's urban regeneration, an edge city made up of large multinational retail stores and anonymous hi-tech industries. Most financial businesses are call centres or administration facilities for leading high-street banks. The jobs available in both sectors are radically different. In Gemini Park, the majority of work available in superstores is very low-paid and often temporary. Jobs usually involved working as checkout operators or maintaining stock supplies for customers. The financial service industries usually employ people with forms of knowledge denied to Nova's residents: programming skills and software production. Many of the people who work in this sector were graduates and came from other parts of Ford or from outside the city itself. However, these glaring inequalities are invisible because of the way the world within Gemini Park is designed (see Picture 1, p. 3).

Nova's local service economy

Gemini Park is an urban redevelopment aimed at a consumer society: a cultural enterprise symptomatic of the McDonaldisation of Britain's post-industrial cities during the 1980s. Based on the success of the restaurant chain, McDonaldisation became a blueprint for urban regeneration in North America and Europe. In the case of Ford, it seemed that local areas with high rates of unemployment were identified. Then the local landscape was re-created to look rural, in an attempt to eradicate any sign of Ford's industrial past. Completed in 1985, Gemini Park has helped beautify Ford's southern edge, covering over the derelict landscape and literally obliterating Nova itself from the horizon. Once shoppe...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A mugger's paradise
• 2 Nova
• 3 Work
• 4 Respect
• 5 Education
• 6 Community
• 7 Society
• Bibliography
• Index