Steel Yourself
by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2010)
There is nothing more melancholy than a steel town without the steel. Even at their most prosperous, such towns are not often lovely; but at least they can then generate a sense of individual purpose and a municipal pride. When the steel departs, these two things depart with it.
As it happens, I have had occasion recently to spend a few weeks in two steel towns in Great Britain from which the steel has fled to more welcoming climes abroad. One was in the North of England, and the other was in Wales; both were grim almost beyond description, though there were slight differences between them.
The one in Wales, for example, still has architectural traces of its strongly Baptist past. There were many chapels, of surprising if forbidding and soot-covered grandiosity, still standing, though now not much attended. I confess that my attitude to the Welsh Baptist form of Christianity is somewhat ambivalent.
On the one hand, I can see that it created and sustained a sense of community where life was generally very hard and without many social amenities. It gave to people a strong sense of morality in a situation in which only such a sense could have made life bearable. Licence is no friend to the poor.
On the other hand, the aesthetic aspects of the religion do not please me, its strong choral tradition notwithstanding; it was dismally puritanical, and the morality it inculcated and enforced by social pressure was often a narrow and intolerant one, without any sense of irony. I think this weakness (a weakness integral to its strength) is best summarised by the only joke I know about Welsh Baptist religion:
A preacher finishes his sermon. A young man in the congregation puts up his hand to ask a question.
‘Preacher,’ he says, ‘is it all right to have sex on Sundays?’
The preacher thinks for a moment.
‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘So long as you don’t enjoy it.’
Of course, to appreciate the joke fully it has to be told in what is to me the beautiful and poetical Welsh accent which, however, is very well suited to a kind of unctuous religious hypocrisy.
Like everywhere else in Britain, though, religion is now dead or dying in Wales (except that the town of which I speak is now vying to become the location for a large ‘Halal industries’ site, though at the moment it has very few Moslems, which will supposedly create 1500 badly-needed jobs).
No doubt people will go on arguing for ever about whether the kind of religion that was once predominant in the town was a cause or a consequence of its former industrial greatness, that is still to be glimpsed in the grandiloquent municipal buildings that stand out in the town like a few rotten teeth in an otherwise edentulate mouth; but it is hard to imagine that the fortitude, self-control, self-discipline and self-respect that it inculcated in the population was of epiphenomenal importance only.
By contrast, the town in the North of England had once been dominated by a magnificent 15th Century church, originally Catholic, of course, but now Anglican. It was totally irrelevant to the life of the town, if life is quite the right word for what went on there. The vicar was an amiable and kindly man – it was written on his face – but these were not the times, nor was this a place, propitious to the exercise of amiability and kindliness. Many of the buildings around the church, some of them hundreds of years old, were boarded up against the inevitable vandalism; there was no other possible purpose for them now.
Even more distressing to me was the Church of England’s complete disregard for its own aesthetic heritage. For many years now a host of snivelling cowardly bishops have sought to do the impossible, curry favour with the liberal intelligentsia, by abandoning the magnificent Book of Common Prayer for a version that reads as if it were written by the Ministry of Transport of a country in the throes of reconstruction after a devastating war; but what applies to the liturgy applies also to the physical fabric of the churches.
With complete disregard for the aesthetics of this church – a magnificent monument in a wasteland of man-made hideousness - cheap modern furniture had been installed, and even (in place of a lady chapel) a kitchenette, complete with plywood cladding, used for the doling out of tea to lonely old ladies.
Please do not misunderstand me: I am not against the doling out tea to lonely old ladies; indeed, I am much in favour of it. But I do not think that a fifteenth century church is the right place for it, especially if the interior of the church has to be spoiled in the process, and the fact that the Church of England thinks that this is all right accounts in some part for its demise. The kitchenette was visible and obvious evidence of the Church’s lack of belief in transcendence, in anything other than the most earthbound of values. (The ancient tombstones had also been removed from the grass around the church for reasons of public safety.)
The ex-steel town in Northern England had been selected by the government, or by some department thereof, as a place of settlement for asylum-seeking refugees, mainly Kurds from Iran and Iraq. These young men – they were overwhelmingly young men – had made their way across dangerous and hostile territory, often by very chancy means, to reach Britain. I know from experience of talking to them that it is not easy to arrive at an estimate of their true motives for coming: but whatever those motives might be, their initiative and willingness to take risks can scarcely be doubted. If allowed to be, they could be an asset to the country that received them.
Instead of which the official policy was to turn them as quickly as possible into welfare dependants. Unable either to prevent them from coming or to deport them once they have arrived, British officialdom in its wisdom has decided to prohibit them from working, and to enforce this prohibition it has selected places like this ex-steel town, where unemployment is near-universal, as their enforced place of residence. So there they congregate, quickly turned from adventurous and eager young men into dispirited idlers, mere habitues of billiard halls and consumers of pornography on the public library’s computers (or as near to pornography as library’s system would permit): that is, when the most enterprising among them they did not become traffickers in something or other.
In both towns, the only economic activity is the administration of poverty and the recycling of government subventions, usually through supermarkets and charity (thrift) shops. Even the charity shops are in effect governmental because most of the larger charities in Britain have been nationalised, their most important donors now being the government. I enter these shops – the Germans have a saying that never fails to come to mind as I do so, namely ‘It smells of poor people here’ – because they always have a few books for resale, overwhelmingly the trashiest of trashy novels, but usually (and unaccountably) with an academic tome among them at a knockdown price, for example Herbert S Klein’s African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean.
If anyone doubts the existence or reality of a dependency culture, he should visit one of these two towns. They are East European communist towns with a bit more consumer choice, but not much the better for that, and in some respects worse, in so far as there is less intellectual ferment in them.
The people do not walk so much as trudge, plastic bags hanging from them like heavy fruit. They are grey-faced, bowed-down, prematurely aged, arthritic before their time. An astonishing proportion of them need (or at any rate use) walking sticks from their thirties onwards. Many of them are enormously fat, and one can imagine them completely immobile by the age of sixty. The small children – overwhelmingly illegitimate, of course, for more than half of children born in Britain are now illegitimate, and the poorer the area (except for Indian and Pakistani immigrants) the higher the proportion – are devoid of the sweetness of young childhood, instead having a fixed look of malice on their faces by the age of three. Ferret-faced young men, attired in international ghetto costume, often with a hood, stand around talking to one another, at least a third of their words being ‘fuck’ or one of its cognates. The young women are all highly sexualised without being in the least alluring. Their fate is to have children by more than one of the ferret-faced young men.
Hopelessness, indifference, apathy is everywhere, omnipresent like the gases of the atmosphere. No Indian or African slum has ever affected men in the same way: this is far, far worse. Energy is dissipated before it is expended, as if by some kind of magnetism. The people are not starving – if anything, the problem is the reverse – nor are they living in physically intolerable housing conditions, though their houses are depressingly ugly. That so many are festooned with satellite dishes is a bad sign: where satellite dishes are many and prominent, the people are bored and listless. Litter lies everywhere and many people do not clear it even from their own front yards, preferring to wade their way through it to their front doors.
It astonishes me, however, that when I speak to the people here – posh voice, obviously an emissary from another world, if not from another universe altogether – I am responded to not with hostility, but with smiles (though I inwardly remark on the terrible dentition), kindness, cheerfulness, and helpfulness if for example I want directions. I am not sure I could live their life and talk to a stranger so politely.
This underlying decency makes me all the sadder. I think of the words of Edward, Prince of Wales, when he visited South Wales at the height of the Depression: ‘Something,’ he said, ‘must be done.’
Yes, but what? Certainly, pity, with its almost inevitable leaven of condescension, is no answer.
The situation is this: the people, for the most part, are not well-educated and they have no skills. The next generation will not be well-educated either, because the state educational system steadfastly refuses to teach. But unskilled labour in factories is unavailable and will never be available again, at least not without protectionism that would wreck the world economy as a whole.
Thanks to the subventions they receive, and no doubt to the loss of the work ethic or habit, their labour is unlikely ever to be worth as much to an employer as he would have to pay them to make it worthwhile for them to go to work. After all, as things stand, their rent is paid, their local taxes are paid, their schooling and health care are paid, they have to make no contribution to ensure they will get a pension, and their bus fares are paid. Their one responsibility is to stretch out the cash-subvention that they receive in such a way that they can eat, smoke, drink and watch television.
They cannot start little businesses of their own, of course, because of regulations: regulations ostensibly for their own benefit, for the sake of their health and safety. In any case, if commerce were free, if the entry price to it were much lower than it is, the most important economic activity of these towns – the administration of their own poverty - would be severely threatened. There is now a nomenklatura class, as a glance in the staff car-park of any welfare institution will prove. So everything must remain the same, forever, at least until a general collapse.
In one of the towns the local newspaper enjoined its readers to vote for the baby of the year (illegitimate, of course, but bonny for the time being). Here, at least, was something worthwhile to vote about, unlike the forthcoming general election in the country with its choice between Labour and Conservatives, between Mr Brown and Mr Cameron, between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
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