Seriously - why do we still have an underclass?

I was up late last night immersed in one of the most compulsively absorbing books I’ve ever come across: Lost London 1870-1945, by Phillip Davies. Apart from the pang one feels when confronted by the loss of so many pleasing buildings and streets and small businesses, with their wonderfully proud, boastful shop-fronts – all that beauty and elegance and confidence and verve (and all that smoggy dirt, it must be admitted) – the disturbing aspect of many of the photographs is the sheer, awful, crushing, killing poverty in which so many people lived at the time. Parts of Millbank - literally across the road from Parliament, and now distinctly upmarket - were apparently as bad as anything the East End had to offer at the time.

The latest series of Harry and Paul offers a regular item featuring three modern underclass males and their constantly barking dog, Ghostface, invading  a a bank, a car showroom, a library etc. – mistaking the organisation’s purpose, looking for lottery cards and fags, suspecting everyone of being a paedophile, punching people for no reason, destroying property and generally creating mayhem, before departing with the words, “All right, mate. Be lucky!” It’s very funny in a horrible sort of way, and captures perfectly the way most of us regard Britain’s sizable underclass.

So how did we get here from there? 

True, they aren’t really poor any longer, or only in relative terms: their Victorian counterparts would have considered their 21st Century equivalents unbelievably wealthy. Some of our contemporary “poor” may be malnourished, but that’s because they eat rubbish food, not because they can’t afford to eat properly. Most of them are, one assumes, non-numerate (except when peddling drugs or fencing stolen property) and, at best, semi-literate – but they all have schools to go to (if they can be arsed). But they’re still poor in terms of knowledge, culture and aspiration. Above all, they’re poor in the sense that they serve no useful function - they don’t work for a living, and, ostensibly, nobody wants or needs them. I’m not talking about hopeless drug addicts, alcoholics or the genuinely ill, or anyone who works for a living  - I mean “families” who live on council estates with or without the relevant sperm-donor in attendance, and whose existence is funded solely by benefits and/or crime. 

We’ve had over a century of more or less left-wing government. Untold billions have been spent funding universal education, a lavish welfare state and a vast bureaucracy to run it, “free” health care, extensive slum clearance accompanied by the provision of subsidised housing for the poor: a constant river of money has flowed from the comparatively well-off to the poor, and from self-sustaining parts of the country to areas where the majority of the local “economy” is funded by the state (now often via Brussells, so Eurocrats can extract their “vig”).

All this activity has created a vast middle class, but it hasn’t eradicated the underclass, which shows no sign of shrinking, let alone disappearing. This isn’t the fault of businesses needing cheap labour, as might have been the case in Victorian times – we now have immigrants to do the work these people can’t or won’t undertake -  or because jobs are moving abroad (jobs are an irrelevance to these people), or because Mrs. Thatcher was the cruelest woman in recorded human history, or because the rich are selfish and hide their money from the taxman, which then can’t be spent on the poor: it isn’t even the fault of the EU (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence!)

So whose fault is it that so many able-bodied members of our society are allowed to remain useless spongers?

Partly, I suspect, it’s because the middle classes, who pay most of the tax, don’t often come into contact with the underclass (unless we or our children are mugged). Even when they rob our homes, we don’t often come face to face with them. Most of us don’t use buses. Most modern council estates are self-contained ghettos: the poor don’t live cheek by jowl with us the way they did in many parts of Victorian London. Now that the  state has taken almost sole responsibility for dealing with poverty in the UK, modern philanthropists seem to be more concerned with Africa (as does our own government). If the recipients of our taxes were to turn up in person on our doorstep to demand their dosh, you can be sure we’d object to this bizarre and utterly unjustifiable transfer of wealth from those who work for a living to those who won’t. But, although they cost us an arm and a leg, they don’t really impinge much on our daily lives, and therefore there isn’t the same urgent “something must be done” pressure as there was in the late 19th Century. The people who actually have to put up with the idle, up-to-no-good underclass on a daily basis are the working bit of the working class – but the mainstream parties gave up caring about them years ago. After all, they’re just “bigots”, and Labour’s never going to lose enough votes to the BNP to threaten their stranglehold on heartland seats.

I’m with the excellent right-wing commentator and former prison psychiatrist, Theodore Dalrymple, on this one: the continued existence of the underclass is partly the result of basic human nature – if you pay someone not to work, they won’t – but it’s mainly to do with the vested interests of the people whose incomes and, in some case, purpose in life depend on the continued existence of their needy, demanding, unreasonable, feckless “clients”. 

Any sensible attempt to deal with the problem of the willfully unemployed and their numerous dependants (why not have yet another kid when not only won’t you have to pay for it, but you’ll be given even more taxpayers’ money as a reward?) is met with howls of rage and accusations of heartlessness from the caring classes. But strip away the sentimental, “compassionate” posturing, and the true cause of their anger is revealed: social workers, council workers, prison officers, policemen, civil servants, politicians and, yes, charities – funded in the main by the coping classes – want to continue receiving salaries (and to enjoy a sense of purpose in life) for endlessly placing tiny sticking plasters on a vast, suppurating, gangrenous sore. These people - many of them genuinely caring, otherwise blameless human beings - are as reliant on the underclass as the underclass is on them.  

The caring classes don’t consciously realise that this is their motivation - and would be outraged to be accused of perpetuating a shameful, ennervating system for their own purposes – but that’s what their behaviour amounts to.

The poor, like death and taxes, will always be with us, because of stupidity, laziness, terrible parenting or sheer bloody awful luck. There is nothing more heartening than hearing of people refusing to be victims, those in modern, state-created, concrete semi-slums working like dogs to escape poverty and to imbue their children with a sense of responsibility – only a monster would begrudge them a helping hand: within a generation or two, there’s little to stop them winding up running companies or becoming doctors (or if things go wrong, ending up as lawyers or MPs). As for the true underclass, though, unless Ian Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms genuinely turn off the money tap (which I doubt), I suspect we’ll have to stop people from basing a career on them before we see any genuine shrinkage.