Between Being and Becoming? Rights, Responsibilities and the Politics of Multiculture in the New East End
by Michael J Keith
Goldsmiths College, University of London
Sociological Research Online, Volume 13, Issue 5, <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/5/11.html>.
To cite articles published in Sociological Research Online, please reference the above information and include paragraph numbers if necessary.
Received: 11/6/2008 Accepted: 23/9/2008 Published: 30/9/2008
Introduction
1.1 In this article I draw on two pieces of work that analyse how we consider the relationship between place and belonging in the rapidly changing city. The interplay between rhetorics of community and languages of civil rights appeal to different senses of the good society. When inflected by notions of solidarity that are mediated by place and by race we can see at times a confused sense of how we understand both what it means to think about la droit à la ville (the right to the city) and how we might want to think differently. This is important in a city such as London where the frequently contested arenas of local politics take place in settings where demographic change is extremely rapid. The stranger in the midst of dynamic London settings can be the refugee, the Chinese DVD seller, the asylum seeker, the A8 migrant from the old Eastern Europe, the gentrifier, or the affluent businessman from the Gulf, New York or Shanghai.
1.2 How do we think the settlement of these new articulations of multicultural urbanism should arbitrate between alternative claims on the welfare state, the public realm or the labour markets that structure employment opportunities? And when London bases its Olympian claims on the interplay of regeneration and multicultural diversity of the East End, whilst simultaneously the British National Party in the 2006 local elections make their largest gains in the city in the borough of Barking and Dagenham just to the east of the Olympics site, then perhaps the time has come to unpick the way we think about city form and social justice in the setting of today's globalised urbanisms.
1.3 To pursue these questions this article draws on the author's longstanding engagement with research and politics in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and on a piece of research conducted in Barking and Dagenham in 2006-2007 to think about the simultaneous realisation of processes of 'multicultural being' and patterns of 'city becoming' in today's London[1]
The Inner East East End
2.1 In a well publicised book titled The New East End, Geoff Dench and Kate Gavron (2006) of the Young Foundation have argued that Britain's welfare system has marginalised the white working class and helped fuel years of racial conflict in London's Tower Hamlets. As the Introductory essay to this collection of articles notes, the book was published in 2006 to strongly positive responses from Trevor Phillips, chair of the old Commission for Racial Equality (and the new Commission for Equalities and Human Rights), Lord Bhikhu Parekh (of the Parekh Report 2000) and sundry political players.
2.2 The book's unremittingly downbeat narrative of racial antagonism squares oddly with the absence of milltown disorders in the borough (as witnessed in the northern UK towns in the summer of 2001), the diverse solidarities that faced down seven East End bombings since 1990 by the Irish Republican Army, the Nazi nail bomber on Brick Lane and the '7/7' Islamist bombings in London in 2005. The emphasis on state failure likewise sits awkwardly alongside unrivalled improvements in Tower Hamlets schools, the recognition of a social services department and a local strategic partnership as the best in the country, and an award by the local government watchdog, the Improvement and Development Agency, for 'community cohesion'. Between 1993 and 2003 the borough had moved from Beackon to Beacon - from the first fascist councillor in a British town hall, Derek Beackon, to the 'Beacon Award' for national excellence won in the annual competition held by the national Improvement and Development Agency that supports local government in Britain. None of this is to gainsay the historical legacies of poverty in the East End, the pronounced forms of social polarisation that juxtapose the Docklands' new wealth with reproduced patterns of social disadvantage or the massive pressures on limited welfare resources of housing, health and education locally.
2.3 So what is at stake here? The issues raised by the Young Foundation are important and the book is significant. But the authors conflate three contentious assumptions: an historical amnesia around whiteness; a confusion of selective histories and absent geographies; and debates about welfare rights and migration.
2.4 Nostalgia sits in that space after history ends and biography begins. It is always on the move and invariably personally inflected. In the Young Foundation narrative, nostalgia trumps history. Historically, the white East End of London gave us exemplary moments of cultural fusion. The quintessentially British fish and chips emerged here from the legacy of Jewish methods of preparing fish and the Huguenot tradition of fried Irish spuds. But it also generated clashes between Catholic and Jew, iconically marked in turf wars such as the Battle of Cable Street. 'Whiteness' crumbles under even minimal scrutiny; held together by a plaintive appeal to the true horrors of the Blitz that conceals the invention of the cockney tradition. As the old manor of Wapping immortalised in the racist British TV character Alf Garnet has been subverted by the gentrification of Cher, Rio Ferdinand and Helen Mirren, and the pacification by cappuccino of the old Docks proceeds apace, it is easy to forget that in each decade of the last century the East End sheltered visions of a new global order mediated by creatively local spaces. From Rudolph Rocker's Jewish cosmopolitan anti-colonialism through the anarchism of Peter the Painter that challenged Churchill and the internationalism that led people to fight Franco in Spain, a transnational sensibility has structured the political horizon of the parochial white East End's global imaginary. White solidarities have emerged out of crucibles of frequently violent conflict that belie the cosy image of the cockney, personified by Irish crime families that retain a hold on some parts of the local drugs trade and the protection rackets.
2.5 In this setting, the selective edit that passes for 'history' privileges some voices and silences others. The slaughter of the Blitz was real enough. But the authors of the study suggest that white families were discriminated against in the post war settlement through the foregrounding of Bangladeshi housing needs in a 'preoccupation with the most vulnerable' (a preoccupation shared by Christ). Yet the splash full page Guardian article that coincided with the book's publication and the book itself were curiously silent about the systemic institutional racism uncovered in the Greater London Council allocation policies in the 1980s. Bangladeshi families were awarded consistently the worst housing and the Commission for Racial Equality was stirred to move against the local authority (Bunting 2006). Bangladeshi rights to the city were also fought for rather than given; the right to walk the streets of Brick Lane required a struggle of the youth movements of the late 70s. The price paid by the high profile victims of racist violence – from Altab Ali to Quddus Ali and many others– are barely recognised in a narrative that privileges the golden era of the 1950s when Michael Young first characterised the area's local culture (Young and Wilmott 1957).
2.6 But most significantly the work ducks one of the central questions in contemporary politics: how do we regulate the welfare state in a world structured by global flows of people and resources? Whilst the economic benefits of migration accrue nationally, the social costs are concentrated geographically. Crudely put, we make most demands on the welfare state at the beginning and the end of our lives. Migrants are cheap for the welfare state. The majority come born, nurtured, schooled and skilled. They participate disproportionately in the workforce and are net contributors to tax revenues. But the social costs of migration in housing shortages and ethnic competition are focused on dense city neighbourhoods. This is where the greatest descriptive power and the most serious analytical flaw of the Young Foundation work come together, in describing the local consequences of postcolonial migration flows of Bangladeshi labour. White working classes (frequently second or third generation 'migrants' themselves) competed in a scarcity auction with new and old migrants alike. Historical truths find less comfortable parallels in the contemporary equivalents that also are rarely mentioned. Today sink estates bought through the 'right to buy' (often by Bangladeshi migrants) are let out to Lithuanians and Russians and the Catholic school rolls rise again. Who has a 'right' to demand welfare support in this globalised world? Whose communities should be recognised in forms of welfare provision? These tensions demand a more robust exploration of the responsibilities and rights of the welfare state in a global city than a simple appeal to the unifying bathos of the Blitz narrative.
2.7 Conflicts between strands of political Islam and secular Bangladeshis, new EC accession country migrants and black and white East Enders are not adequately addressed by a vocabulary of 'race' or race relations that belongs in the 1980s. In recent ethnographic work (Back et al. forthcoming), new realities reflect sentiments that transcend local neighbourhoods and appeal to a global sensibility. They epitomise Britain's new multiculture, what Stuart Hall has described as 'globalisation's accompanying shadow' (Hall 2001: 217). The 'years of racial conflict' the Young Institute espouses do not square with the sense of the global-local found both for better and for worse in today's East End. The legacies of Iraq, the macabre spectacle of local left MP George Galloway as a pussycat in the Big Brother TV spectacle, and the 7/7 bombings all suggest that geopolitics has come home again, sometimes in uncanny ways. We have passed beyond the moment when we can think of a little Britain that 'assimilates' migrant minorities. Jew, Catholic and Muslim, Sylheti, Lithuanian and Celt are British and something else simultaneously. New welfare state configurations of community sentiment and rational organisation must speak to these globalised realities in a language of rights and responsibilities fit for purpose in the 21st century.
2.8 This might make us want to think about how a sense of communitarian belonging sits in tension with a sentimental transnationalism that accompanies globalisation's flows of people and finance. Transnational links sit in tension with spatially bordered configurations of rights, something that becomes more revealing still when considering the borough a few miles east of Tower Hamlets, the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, a part of the city hosting some of the largest regeneration projects in the capital and at the heart of the 'largest regeneration project in Europe', the Thames Gateway.
The Outer East End
3.1 Shortly after the publication of The New East End, and the controversy that surrounded the work, the local authority elections in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham witnessed the victory of the British National Party in almost every seat that they contested. The shocking rise of the far right through electoral success at the local level properly focused attention and debate on the source of their support and the sentimental power of their party's appeal. The plight of the white working class in contemporary London, the mutating forms of contemporary multiculture, the trajectories of industrial restructuring on the job market, price inflation on the homes market and the stresses and strains of the welfare state all attracted attention. And in this context it is more rather than less important that journalistic cliché and muddled thinking are avoided in understanding both the ethical power of sociological analysis and the moral perils of racial polarisation, nationalist politics and community division. In this context, the act of sociological description, modestly but accurately deployed, fuses private troubles and public issues, details the plural perspectives and singular dilemmas of city transformation in all their incommensurability ( C. Wright Mills 1959).
3.2 The borough is undergoing radical and speedy change. The population of the borough is growing fast and its ethnic composition is reconfiguring. At the same time as the consequent pressures on public services of all kinds, and especially social housing, have increased, the once impressive manufacturing economy of the area – which offered plentiful jobs to the less skilled – has been in severe decline. This combination of growth, decline and pressure is the back-drop to recent events in Barking and Dagenham and to an understanding of the challenges facing public policy[2].
3.3 Change inevitably brings both opportunities and threats, sometimes perceived and sometimes real. In this fast-moving context, public policy generally needs to evolve if the best outcomes are to be achieved.
3.4 Barking and Dagenham was created in 1965 by the amalgamation of the two councils. To this day the historic divide between the two places and their quite different structures and morphologies, and to some extent destinies, remind us of the challenge of building a third significant locus at Barking Riverside. How can this be done well and for the long term, let alone without exacerbating the existing divides within the borough?
3.5 Barking Town centre is a historic town, originally a fishing port and market and subsequently a residential and service hinterland for London's Docklands in their heyday. It is now well connected by public transport to central London, the city and the new financial district of Canary Wharf. With a concentrated retail offer and other assets you would associate with a market town, Barking has a quite different urban structure from Dagenham. The recent surge in projects in and around Barking town centre is rooted in that structure and the transport connections which make Barking town centre a key new site in the build-out of the London Thames Gateway.