New book The New East End has prompted widespread discussion. Alan Hudson, John Marriott and Michael Owens review The New East End, and co-author Geoff Dench responds to their comments.
The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict, Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, Michael Young, Profile Books, 2006
This book is stimulating, important and a good read. In this review I would like to follow the two main concerns of the authors. The first is the fate of the traditional white working class. This links the new book to an earlier incarnation of the Young Foundation, the Institute of Community Studies, and the concerns of its founder the late Michael Young as famously expressed with Peter Wilmott in Family and Kinship in East London (1957). The second theme is the changing experience of the relatively new Bangledeshi population in the heart of the Old East End: Spitalfields, Bethnal Green and parts of Stepney and Poplar.
In discussing the authors’ comments on the white working class, I want to look at the sociological tradition of ethnography and the role, I think, it has played in what I’ll call for shorthand purposes the culturalisation of the working class. This theme carries over into the treatment of the Bangladeshi population. But also developed in the text are important insights into the dynamics of immigration policy, the role of Labourism and the relationship of the citizen to state welfare provision, and the fragmentation of national identity. This book has a lot to say.
At the research core of this book are a number of in depth interviews with East End residents, both white British and Bangladeshi British. The interviewees, as Richard Sennett reminds us in his introduction to the Young Foundation’s recent publication Porcupines in Winter (2006), edited by Allessandra Buonfino and Geoff Mulgan, are allowed to speak for themselves.
The words of the East Enders are organised and interpreted by the authors but the rationale for this treatment is to give them a voice. This calls to mind the assertion by E.P. Thompson in his seminal work The Making of the English Working Class (1963) that his concern is to give a hearing to the individuals and social groups that have been forgotten by and defeated in history.
In the arcane world of sociological methodology this is to place the emphasis on agency over structure and to assert the significance of meaning or quality over the objective status of data. This is all to the good, and it must also be said that The New East End gives due attention to the socio-economic context in which the meaning of the lives it investigates are situated. I think a problem lies, rather, in the nature of the agency being discussed. In the same introduction to which I referred earlier Thompson also says that the working class was present at its own making. By this I take him to mean that the working class, or members of it, both struggled to change and were aware of the circumstances in which they lived and acted. This is why it is the making of the English working class. In the 1950s when Young and Wilmott wrote and certainly now in 2006, we are rather discussing the unmaking of the working class.
The transformative understanding of the role of agency has vanished and we are left with agency as inter- and intra-subjectivity. Stuff happens to the working class; the working class does not make stuff happen. I should add that this is undoubtedly true for what’s left of the white working class population in the East End and to deny otherwise is utopian. But nevertheless to accept this as unalterable is to narrowly delimit the potential for change and to acknowledge change as only possible in the tentative new forms of communitarian policy sketched in the last pages of this book.
Let me put this in what I know is a slightly mischievous fashion but it will, I hope, allow me explain what I mean by the culturalisation of the working class. When I read the descriptions of white working class life and especially the authors’ commentary on them, I hear the awed whispers of a naturalist describing the patterns of life and the habitat of a favourite animal species: ‘See how the mum entrusts the care of her offspring to the next female in line as she prepares for the trip to the laundrette’. In my youth this would have been in the German accented tones of Armand and Michaela Dennis; now you have to substitute the inimitable David Attenborough. The experience of the working class is naturalised or its human anthropological variant - culturalised. The circumstances, outlook and habits of a historically specific and ephemeral working class become not only cultural norms but also cultural and ahistorical absolutes. As such they become immune to criticism or perhaps more precisely the challenge and yardstick of socio-political critiques become inappropriate.
The objects of study are passive beneath the concerned, investigative gaze of the observer. But the observed are soon to vanish from history and we are asked to be sorrowful for them as victims and then become nostalgic for that which is lost.
I’d like to make three points about this. The first is an obvious one. It should not come as a surprise that a particular pattern of life should change. This happens all the time. It is especially the case for working class life, which all other things being equal, is the product of and response to the particularities of capital accumulation.
The second point is that the nostalgia tells us much about our own attitude both to the past and to the future. The past is more comfortable, or there is a strong tendency to create it as more cosy than it was. But at the risk of being equally one-sided, it was a harsh and parochial world that we are well rid of except, of course, we are not sure that anything better has replaced it.
The third point is much more substantial and more complex. It relates to the conceptualisation of welfare and the inclusion of the white working class in the British nation. This incorporation the authors correctly place as the temporary result of the Second World War. This is a fascinating theme and one that should be a major point of reference in the present, somewhat superficial discussion on national identity. The high point of Britishness was the temporary inclusion of the working class in the national story and it lasted about thirty years from 1940 to 1970. For the rest of modernity much of the working class has been not of the nation but other than the nation.
The working class, and often especially the working class of the East End, has been a dangerous other. An other which has more often been an object of fear and loathing, and not nostalgia, for the respectable and political classes observing it from just a few miles to the west. The nature and scope of the intervention that respectable society wishes to achieve in working class lives opens up fundamental questions – more so even than the valuable discussion in this book as to whether state regulation has undermined mutuality and elevated individualism over collective values and institutions (points well made). What is essentially at issue is the reworking of the historic problem of social order, the relationship between the elite and the masses. The present difficulty of which and the fragmented nature of the proposed solutions, are so well captured in both the tone and content of this book. Take for example the title of the penultimate chapter: ‘Managing Diversity’.
The authors’ argument is that given the heterogeneous experience of the East End, this diversity must be managed. By whom the diversity should be managed is not immediately obvious. Except, I suppose, as soon as the definition of the problem is accepted, that diversity needs managing, then all becomes clearer. One suspects that even if it were not the direct role of Young Foundation personnel, it should be the ideas of the Young Foundation which inform the managing. But does diversity need managing in the first place?
The introduction of diversityprovides my bridge to the second population of the text, the Bangladeshis. In passing I think it is worth suggesting that far from being especially diverse, that even including the new yuppie population, the East End is actually much less diverse than it ever was with the exception of the period of the post war consensus.
More significantly, the story that the authors tell about the Bangladeshi population makes a strong case for the malleability of cultures other than ones that are forged as defence mechanisms for communities under threat. The original Bangladeshi population had no strong allegiance to the mosque and today for older men it is still a predominantly convivial experience rather than a religious one. With this in mind the question comes to mind, why did a generation of Jewish youth in the inter-war period turn to Marx and Kropotkin rather than the rabbi, while 70 years on a fundamentalist twist to the Koran seems more attractive than a secular political radicalism?
I suspect the answer does not lie in a cultural predisposition. It is more sensible to examine the political institutions and legacy of Labourism in the old East End. And it is here I have my strongest disagreement with the authors. The Labour Party gets off far too lightly and this is nowhere more the case than in the politics and policies of immigration controls. The Old Labour councillors and the local community activists who migrated to the Tower Hamlets Liberals are held to account for their racist manipulation of local sentiment and housing policy, but the national organisation of Labour is immune to criticism. We are told with very little in the way of supporting evidence that Labour consistently opposed the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act which incidentally transformed the pattern of economic migration to the UK and through the closing of the door, created the modern minority communities. We are not reminded at all of the Cabinet discussions of the Atlee government (1945–1951) that evinced fear and horror at non-white immigration. And a veil is drawn over the record of the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s. This record is a litany of capitulation to the demands for ever-stricter immigration control dressed up as humanitarian concern.
What seems to me more important is the failure to engage with the peculiar, two-tier legislation on race and immigration which characterises and produces first the climate of hostility to ethnic minorities, and, second, their more recent incorporation into local institutions in general and into New Labour membership in particular. The first tier, and by far the most important, is the system of immigration controls that turned Bangladeshis and other ethnic minorities into second-class citizens. This legislation was an open invitation to less powerful but violent racists to vent their anger on the newcomers. The second tier of legislation is the framework for an evolving race relations industry that prescribes the codes of conduct to be applied toward the body of people which immigration controls have made inferior in status.
The peculiar outcome, repeated in the treatment of asylum seekers, is the legitimation of state coercion, the demonisation of the dispossessed sections of the white working class, the fixing of cultural identity as a qualification for the allocation of supposedly scarce resources, and the incorporation of a narrow stratum of the ethnic minority as a new leadership to supervise the distribution of such resources. The East End is an extreme example of this, probably unique, given the peculiar configuration of the population and the socio-economic environment; but nonetheless instructive given the ethnic tensions which have emerged in other parts of the UK.
The obvious point of comparison is with the old mill towns of East Lancashire and the West Riding, but as Kenan Malik suggested in his recent Channel 4 documentary (10th February 2006, 7.30pm, Britain’s tribal tensions) using the example of Lozells in Birmingham,the politics of multiculturalism so clearly highlighted in the East End are now more likely to give rise to different ethnic populations coming into conflict over resources, status and respect rather than the classic white antagonism to immigrant communities. There is much in the evidence presented in The New East End that gives weight to this argument.
The New East End is an important document of the lived experience of working class East Enders of all ethnicities up to 2006. It is also a perceptive and challenging study of the limits to post war social policy in working class communities and as such it is to be welcomed and valued as a powerful contribution to the most important domestic discussions of our day. It also demonstrates, I think, how even the most compelling insights cannot easily be transformed into policy prescriptions.
Alan Hudson is co-author, with Dennis Hayes, of Basildon: the mood of the nation (Demos: 2001), and Director of Studies in Social and Political Science at the Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford.
The reception of The New East End has suggested it is well on its way to becoming part of an orthodoxy previously enjoyed by Wilmott and Young’s Family and Kinship in East London. For the authors, including the late Michael Young, there could be no higher accolade: the study, after all, was designed as a repeat of the Wilmott and Young project completed nearly 50 years ago. If, however, we are to take seriously their intent to provoke debate about the vital issues raised by the book, then the following comments are very much in that spirit.
Bethnal Green, we discover, is not the place of 50 years ago. In those days its residents displayed a ‘warmth and conviviality’ which helped to compensate for the material privations many suffered. That golden age is now over, and a sense of bitterness and betrayal prevails among the indigenous, white population, most of it directed toward the Bangladeshis who in the past 30 years have settled in significant numbers. The reasons for this hostility maybe complex, but at its core is a profound unease about how the good, equitable society has been dismantled by a well-meaning but ill-informed housing policy. In extending the rights of citizenship to migrants, priority is now decided on the basis of need rather than as it was in the past on the basis of claims to membership of the community. Put simply, by demonstrating need, migrants are able to jump to the front of housing lists, leapfrogging over those who have patiently waited while they slowly but surely worked their way to the front.
This touches on a vital issue, and we are indebted to the authors for revealing the precise nature of the unintended but worrying consequences of such shifts in government policy. To what extent it helps to explain the admittedly complex nature of tensions between host and immigrant communities in the recent history of the East End, remains in doubt. The East London described is one I struggle to recognize. Most of the discussion and all of the data relate to the borough of Tower Hamlets. But this is not the Tower Hamlets of Canary Wharf, of Tredegar Square, of Columbia Road market, or of St Katharine’s Dock. This might be closer to the old inner East London of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, but even here, where are the fashionable and artistic young who work and live in the enclaves along Brick Lane, or the television executives who are fortunate enough to own one of the splendid houses in Folgate and Elder Street originally occupied by Huguenot weavers? And when is/was this East London? It is clear that the interviews were carried out some 10–15 years ago. Since then there have been some fairly dramatic demographic changes as large numbers of Bangladeshis, following the route taken by so many migrant settler communities in the past, have moved east, over the Lea, no doubt on their way to metropolitan Essex. Spaces left by these departures have been filled by other migrants, most notably, Somalis and East Europeans, none of whom appears in the pages of the book.
Recognition of these changes would necessarily have complicated the rather too neat and convenient division between indigenous white and migrant Bangladeshi populations adopted by the book. The failure to do so rests largely in the authors’ seeming inability to distance themselves from the cosy mythology of Family and Kinship. This earlier study, the product of the moment of left culturalism in the late 1950s, nostalgically celebrated a working class community whose very existence was under threat from slum clearance schemes. The forced migration of many of their members to new housing estates in Essex, it was argued, effectively dismantled networks of mutual help, intimacy and solidarity that had been built over generations. Now in the 1990s what survived of this community was under siege from similarly ill-informed housing policies, provoking bitter discontent against migrant families. What prevails, therefore, is a narrative of decent working-class people assailed by the impersonal forces of an unthinking local state with disastrous consequences, the only antidote to which is the reconstitution of a community based on a strengthened family life committed to civic virtue.
There is much in this narrative that is questionable. Popular and critical accounts of working-class life in the twentieth century have vigorously challenged the sorts of myths constructed by left culturalism which were so effectively promoted by Wilmott and Young. Few still accept the cosy images of extended family life. On this no issue is more revealing than racism.
The book rightly points to the complexity of people’s feelings of hostility, but its seeming reluctance to disentangle the interwoven threads of working-class racism marks its ultimate failure. If housing is singled out as the major source of discontent, it is entirely unclear how this comes to be racialized. It is claimed that resentment is expressed against any constituency such as single mothers or bogus claimants that is able to abuse the moral economy and so receive privileged treatment. For Bangladeshis to be subject to racist sentiment, therefore, something else must be going on. And the clues are provided. Several of those interviewed speak of the dirty habits of Bengalis and complain of the smells created by their cooking, and these are seen by the authors almost as extraneous features of a general hostility to migrant communities. In fact by being articulated to discontent over housing they become integral to the complex make up of a racialized discourse.
Elsewhere the discussion promises to open up more fruitful lines of inquiry. In a rare glimpse at the historical record the authors suggest that antagonism to migrant communities in East London has often been predicated on use of stereotypes – Jews, Irish, Maltese and now Bangladeshis have suffered from this. Sadly, the lessons to be learned from these powerful historical continuities are ignored. And in a brief survey of the moral elevation that East Londoners experienced during the Second World War, we are informed of the profound sense of patriotism they embraced. There is even reference to the significance of Britain’s imperial past. None of these fragments, however, is brought into a coherent narrative explaining the contingent and mobile nature of racist sentiment. Thus, while seeming to accept the implicit racism of working-class East Londoners, the authors’ use of history fails to reveal precisely how it was linked to distinct senses of national and local identity thrown into crisis by the post war settlement in their manor of previously colonized peoples.
It is bitterly ironic that the salience of the book has been seriously compromised by the events of 9/11 and the London bombings. Not only have these impacted dramatically on the cultural landscape of East London, but perhaps also underscored the book’s analytical weaknesses. I, for one, am left wondering how the authors now might begin to explain the heightening of racial tension, most evident in recent attacks on East London’s mosques.
John Marriott is director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre and Reader in History at the University of East London.
What´s new in New Labour’s New Localism? We are familiar with the Blair/Brown concoction of communitarian values and enterprise. Now a new book suggests that welfare reform should be another ingredient in the mix. The New East End is an ethnographic social study, built on 1000 interviews over 12 years in Tower Hamlets and told by extensive quotes from typical informants. The study offers a formidable evidence base to suggest that the modernisation of welfare in the 1970s and 1980s had perverse impacts. In the past, patient queuing and local knowledge built on family connections gave local legitimacy to the housing allocations system. Changes in welfare that made need the key determinant of service provision helped destroy kinship ties and communities. The older system resonated with the accord built between the East End communities and the nation during World War Two, creating expectations for the comprehensive slum/ bomb damaged clearance and redevelopment project that followed. The authors argue that ending the informal sponsorship of community and kinship ties by the local state fuelled resentment and racism in the poor white working class.
Geoff Mulgan’s arrival at the helm of the Young Foundation has added to the frisson at the publication of this new book. Although the research upon which it is based has preceded his tenure by some years, Mulgan´s arrival, following his time at the GLC, Demos and latterly leading the Number 10 Policy Unit, indicates that he regards the Foundation’s method and insights to be an appropriate base from which to contribute to the further development of New Labour’s social policies.
This book is a contemporary review of the community previously studied in Family and Kinship in East London, written by Peter Wilmott and Michael Young and published in 1957. Michael Young founded the Institute of Community Studies (ICS) in 1954. He died in 2002, and, revamped as the Young Foundation, the ICS now bears his name as well as his legacy.
Family and Kinship described the impact on old communities of comprehensive redevelopment and dispersal of communities through the creation of the New Towns and through council house building beyond the city. The arguments anticipate some of the critiques of modernism in the form of high rise development. New developments replaced slums with new physical fabric, but paid little heed to the structures of community life. The New East End rails against the structure of welfare provision based on universal provision of services prioritised by individual need. How times have changed, or perhaps not. In both cases the ICS offers a critique of deeply held managerial policies (modernism and comprehensive redevelopment led by planning and building regulations, and now strict adherence to equal opportunity policies and decisions made transparently by prioritising need). Perhaps it is the willingness to think the unthinkable, within a state managerial context, that appeals to Mulgan and others.
Family and Kinship in East London became a standard sociology text and remains as much, renowned for meticulous research into East End life derived from methods of observation including exhaustive detail gathered from primary interviews and careful iteration of typological characters and local social structures. As a student in the 1970s, I remember the impatient criticism of the first book’s romantic portrayal of working class life, its apparent uncritical stance in relation to the role of women within it and its blindness, given by its bottom up method, to the wider forces at play that were shaping the social objects of the study.
The decades in between have been marked by a declining interest in theory and ideas accompanied by a proliferation of trashy accounts masquerading as sociology in the form of cultural theory. It is therefore worth recording how good both the first and the second studies are in the rigour of their approach, their ability to offer insights, and the clarity with which they put forward method, findings and conclusion. In my view, today’s study deserves the trenchant criticism that met the first, but it is a breath of fresh air to read a book based on serious research with considerable clarity and insight.
The new book tells the story of the differing fortunes of the Bangladeshi community and the poor white working class community in Tower Hamlets, interleaved with the relationship of each to the new municipal leadership in formation. The book also provides the context by describing wider economic and social forces reshaping the Borough. It describes the decline of the docks and related industries to be replaced by a new affluent residential base and a dynamic commercial sector. These changes were accompanied by the development of new employment in service sectors. The restructuring of housing has continued the trend first described in Family and Kinship, with large scale movement of the working class outwards to Kent and Essex, and up towards a reconstituted lower-middle class.
The authors use the personal accounts and intimate experiences of informants to describe the impact of wider circumstances and active policies. All this offers fine-grained insights and richness in account. We learn, for example about the mutuality between Bangladeshis and the young white middle class in the squatters’ movement in the 1970s. We learn also about the shift that occurred from a time when Bangladeshi men lived singly in lodging houses to the moment when the same working men sought to establish large family homes, and how this shift played itself out in both visibility and housing need. For my part, I read for the first time an accessible account of the circumstances of Bangladeshis both in Bangladesh and then in the UK, that for me had logic and much explanatory force. I am keen to know whether this account, pleasing to me, accords with the remembered experiences of those who lived through it.
The central proposition of the book is that there was a radical shift in the nature of welfare provision described through the prism of local housing provision. We see the shift from arrangements that favoured family and community affiliation, particularly in the “indigenous” (i.e. non Bangladeshi, older white working class) community, towards the stricter allocation of welfare based on need in ways that tended to privilege the incoming Bangladeshi population. This, argue the authors, had the unintended consequence of undermining community and fostering individualism. They contend that this change in the character of welfare arrangements was a driver of individualism in society, preceding the impact of the credit-fuelled Thatcherite 1980s more popularly associated with selfishness, greed, and the attendant breakdown of community.
The authors describe enduring arrangements within the Bangladeshi community that reinforce family ties. They suggest some of these characteristics are similar to those of white working class family life described in the earlier book. And here I find one of the moments at which the book creaks under the strain of its communitarian proposition and the causal relationship that it posits between local welfare relations and community life. It seems to me that so much has changed for everybody between then and now, and it is not at all clear in what sense there is a unity of experience between any members of the community of the fifties and any section of today´s East End communities, still less what unifies one group of the past with the other today.
This forced comparison belies, for example, the unifying experience given by school, work and social life that is resulting in commonality between young people of both groups, and the slow but steady entry of some young Bangladeshis into lower middle class life. The public sector has played a particular role as an entry point for employment; though there are a number of the same community gaining entry into finance, business services and other dynamic sectors of the London economy. Dynamic, enterprising young people, supported by good teachers and good FE colleges, are making it.
Of course one would need to have rose tinted cornea (they do transplants for those of us in the regeneration industry) to ignore the fact that large groups of young Asians and white working class young people are not succeeding in schools (and there are some really good ones in this area), and are struggling to enter work and end up doing so fitfully at the margins. Discrimination endures. However, the narrow terms of the problem as posed do not help our understanding. One might ask when Bangladeshis will catch up with their white counterparts who have moved to Kent and Essex, with the affluent young professionals of Docklands and the owner-occupiers across the borough and in neighbouring Hackney and Islington (and to note that some are doing so). One might as easily ask why a segment of the older working class has been left behind whilst a larger section became more affluent, becoming owner-occupiers in greener fields or dissolving into the middle classes. It was neither Bangladeshis arriving nor Tower Hamlets Council’s housing policies wot done it, guv.
The authors, and their methodology, have made Tower Hamlets into a goldfish bowl and invited us all to peer in. They see some people trapped inside it who are experiencing the allocation of scarce resources differentially. The book treats the boundaries as a given and, by taking its lead from the voices of its respondents, fixes the analysis and the problems even further. The respondents are highly attuned to an unusually public and political set of local circumstances in which the policies and decisions of the local council have real force. There is a real sense in which citizens are the objects of welfare, resources are limited and locally made decisions have profound consequences. But the ICS take their lead from the subjective voices of their informants and take the terms of the debate as given.
On the face of it, it is shocking to read anyone argue that welfare provision should not be made on need, so much have equal opportunities policies become mainstream managerial practice; almost as shocking as if a return to prejudice and corruption had been proposed. However, for me the underlying shock, reading this story spanning two books across half a century, is to peer into a mirror that shows how low our expectations have become.
Firstly, why did we stop building public housing when it was and still is so desperately needed? It is not as though we were all persuaded by Family and Kinship and invested our collective resource into refurbishment and renewal. Either way, we have not done enough to eradicate need. Having spent some years with managers in the public, social and private sectors in Tower Hamlets, it is evident that the market is only delivering housing to meet some very specific needs, such institutional investors commissioning flatted developments sold on to management companies for rent to single professionals. Public sector subsidies for housing development are insufficient to build on the scale and at the quality required to meet need, despite the considerable skill, creativity, dedication of those trying to make the system work. These managers are trying to ride a wonky bicycle in a straight line. They make the best of the circumstances but did not create them – and it is wrong to identify the roots of competition and failure in the locality.
At one level, the particular is lent too much weight in this account. In another sense, the leap from the particular to the general is too great. Surely it is not legitimate to make a case for restructuring welfare without considering its wider impact? It has often been argued that welfare disproportionately benefits Middle England. How would a change as proposed play itself out as a national policy?
Secondly, can we really believe that somehow it was reverse discrimination that gave Bangladeshis pole position in housing allocation? Reporting local views as reality means that the authors have entered into the debate as it has been experienced – the choice between Lansbury or Aberfeldy estates. We should note in passing that the prejudiced idea that Bangladeshis got the best housing is not borne out by a cursory walk around the area. That aside, the book fails to record the narrow terms of this choice and truly to account for the myopic views of some of their respondents for what they are: narrow, uninformed prejudices of people struggling to make out in constantly frustrating circumstances.
The researchers clearly wandered the mean streets of Bromley ward and smelt the fumes of the Blackwall Tunnel approach. In their intoxication, they forgot that the first hand accounts of the residents of Bromley by Bow only provide their own story; our discourse about the shape of welfare policy is necessarily derived from a much wider set of considerations.
As vivid and engaging as this picture of local life is, this book relies too heavily on first hand accounts and derives theory from them. At the same time, the objects of the study in this book are just that –objects not subjects. The Young Foundation has described community as fixed – that which presents itself. The dynamic element they present for us to consider is the scope to change the way welfare resources are deployed. We are invited to observe a community of consumers of welfare services. The choices we are asked to review are managerial ones – how better to offer services and in what form. This approach does not offer scope for change at the hands of the participants themselves.
How would it be if we thought about community as a coming together of individuals to change things – a community of active subjects? Seen this way, possibilities exist to create new and different communities in the course of changing circumstances.
Strong individuals make things happen – they are a precondition for strong communities, and in this sense individual action is what counts, not individual consumption.
Or is that too naïve for our times? The Young Foundation is right to say that Thatcher never invented individualism, and that welfare arrangements were as much part of the driver as was the market. But for me, their explanation is hopelessly lost in the minutiae of the phenomena they are studying. This book makes much of the impact of World War Two and the Blitz in generating the One Nation consciousness that spilled in to post war expectations. We need to unpack this proposition much more, and to put it in its historical context, if we are to begin to explain how the nature of the relationship between the individual and society has changed.
Michael Owens is a regeneration professional who has worked in Tower Hamlets and on plans for the Thames Gateway
There are quite a few points which arise in these reviews. So I have tried to group the issues they raise together into broader questions so that I can deal with more of them. I will accordingly look in turn at why the book covers the topics it does, at its methodology – always a favourite when ICS is in the frame – at various questions about our findings, and then finally at the matter of policy ideas arising from them.
Firstly the scope of the book. There are a number of questions raised about why the book focuses on a certain part of the East End – mainly Spitalfields and Whitechapel – and on a particular period, and around relations between whites and Bangladeshis while ignoring other groups, and so on. At one level the answer is of course simply because that is what it does. But that response fails to acknowledge that there is a real question here – which in fact there is.
The study arose initially out of curiosity over what had happened to Bethnal Green since the original 1950s wave of research at ICS. Much of what the Institute had gone on to do had been located elsewhere. There was a feeling, as Michael came (whether he recognised it or not) towards retirement, that it would be interesting to look systematically at how things had changed in its own manor. The initial survey that was then carried out was modelled very closely on the original Family and Kinship questionnaire, and was conducted in the area of the defunct Bethnal Green borough, but with a number of open questions to pick up fairly freely on current feelings. It was after analysing this survey that a decision was made to focus on relations between the old white Bethnal Greeners and newly arrived Bangladeshis, as it was this topic which seemed to dominate so many respondents’ views about what had happened in the area. So this was the theme then pursued in the more ethnographic stages of research which followed.
But it was not an easy or clear-cut decision. Michael in particular felt that many other changes were significant, and that ‘the book’ should encompass all of them to some extent, even if it became a very long book in the process. As a result of this he was constantly coming up with new proposals for organising the study, or frameworks for encompassing the materials. Some of your reviewers would be interested that ‘End of Empire’ was an angle considered for a while, and at one point the East End became incorporated into a global analysis of social change. This frequent shifting of emphasis and orientation was a major reason why the book took so many years to produce. It was only when we made some fairly arbitrary decisions about what exactly to take as the axis, and what issues to leave out, that we were able to complete it.
On methodology, thankfully, everything was much simpler. ICS has often been given a hard time for choosing mainly just to report what informants say, rather than presenting this within carefully constructed theoretical frameworks. But we go on doing it, because we believe in it. Essentially we feel that if we try our best to listen to exactly what people have to say – especially people whose voices are not often heard or taken seriously – then we can record materials which will have some validity outside of our own theoretical notions and preoccupations. Such data can be used widely by other people to build or test whatever theories they feel that they can bear.
What I should perhaps emphasise here is that Kate and Michael and I did have quite a few differences of opinion on issues of theory, and even more so on questions of policy. But in spite of this we were able to agree on the questions being asked in the research, on the methods used to pursue them, and on the findings that these methods came up with. I feel that this is very important, and increases my own confidence in those findings, and indeed in the capacity of social research to produce materials which can usefully inform opposed theoretical enterprises, even different paradigms.
The alternative general method is to try to define and measure phenomena so precisely that data generated can be used to determine the limits of validity of specific theories. In my own experience this does not work. The aim soon founders on the problems of getting different people to agree on key concepts and definitions. In practice it results in the creation of small coteries of rival theorists who cannot even communicate with their opponents. Some degree of conceptual flexibility is preferable to that, and reflects better the nature of actual society.
And so to the findings we came up with. Several points have been made to suggest that we have put too much weight on housing, and its implications. In many ways I agree. Before working on this study I knew very little about housing and, as they say, cared even less. But the subject came up frequently in the interviews, and revealed such strong patterns in informants’ responses, that I could not help becoming fascinated myself – at least while working on the case. So I think we are justified in emphasising it.
Secondly we are (as was Family and Kinship before us) accused of peddling a cosy image of extended families. My reply is different here. This is actually a topic I was very keen on before the study. So here my surprise lay in finding just how much our informants shared in this too. For many or even most ordinary people, family life, for all its restrictions and frustrations, does seem to be an abiding source of personal support and meaning. This emerges very strongly, and if this comes over as cosy in the book I suspect that this simply indicates that readers must have different values. Our political class and dominant culture at the moment are profoundly sceptical about families, so that there may not be chords there for our informants’ sentiments to strike.
More generally, there seems to be a certain lack of sympathy among your reviewers for ‘working class’ life, which is seen as something that is on its way out, and a good job too! Its historical specificity is almost taken as a reason for not caring about what has happened in the East End. Time was up anyway. Here I would just say that we do not feel that East Enders’ working class identity is a fact of any great moment. It is not being ‘working class’ which made the old East Enders what they were. It was their local life and the problems arising for them locally – in many ways so different from other working class parts of Britain – which was real and interesting.
Even if the British Working Class is no more, there are and will be poor people in the East End, who share problems by virtue of where they come from and where they live. This is why we were interested in parallels between white and Bangladeshi family life – as similar mechanisms for coping with daily problems. And this is why, too, as one of our few stabs at policy analysis, we argued for the need to give more chance to families to find their own ways of supporting members in the way that people in the area have done for centuries.
This leads naturally into a ‘policy’ section here, as there is a point made by one reviewer that we appear to be advocating a managerial approach to local diversity. If this is what comes across then we have been unclear. Our chapter ‘managing diversity’ is not a recipe for action. In fact it is meant to be a description of the way in which middle-class activists in the area have developed a role for themselves as brokers of racial harmony, bridging the gap between the white and Bangladeshi communities. We do not put this forward ourselves as a solution to local problems – or indeed as a model for dealing with such issues at the national level. On the contrary, we see it as probably generating a new and potentially dangerous form of class division, in which the elite may develop an interest in discovering ethnic conflict and competition because this gives them a rationale for their own supremacy. The role of Tertius Gaudens was seductive for Britain in the old Empire, and now seems to have been recreated in an internal empire within Britain.
Our own solutions, insofar as we do offer any, lie instead around giving power back to small groups and localities in order to limit the power of this new political class. The traditional pattern of immigrant settlement in the East End revolved around small family businesses (miles from definitional ‘working class’ behaviour) which enabled newcomers to grab a stake in the area – and the economy – which could remain directly under their control. With the creation of the welfare state, though, there seems to be a danger that centralised supports may inhibit such local enterprises and produce a situation in which many poor people become increasingly dependent on the state.
How can we rebuild communities, asked one reviewer. The answer, I suppose, starts with the importance of valuing that which is genuinely local, along with the family life which for ordinary people tends to be concentrated locally. Only policies which embody those values, and are unambiguously bottom up, seem to me to stand any chance.
Professor Geoff Dench is a fellow of the Young Foundation and co-author of The New East End: kinship, race and conflict
© 2004·06
Our regulars began to refer to us as ‘the community centre’. I always grimaced at the term but it was true; The Eclipse became the hub of a community
Welcome to this issue
Contents of this issue
Editor’s letter
Academic
Debate
Entertainment
Essays
Journalism
Feedback
Multiculturalism and Counter-Terrorism
The Place of Faith in a Multicultural Society
Who Will Build The Thames Gateway?
The New East End
Olympics Effects
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