Grayling’s projection of drama onto our reality is ignorant, dishonest and politically irresponsible

The Labour movement column

By Anthony Painter / @anthonypainter

The Wire is real. All the characters that it portrays are fictional – in the main – but the world that David Simon and Ed Burns created exists. It is the ghettoes in Baltimore and elsewhere. Their creative genius was to realise that what we needed to see was warts and all reality and not some embellishment.

Chris Grayling watches TV. He sees a world that he doesn’t recognise but still projects it onto the world around him. It is an arch fantasy to compare modern Britain with the reality of urban decay in too many US cities. He is Ed Burns and David Simon in reverse: he takes drama and then attempts – in a truly cack-handed and politically irresponsible way – to hoodwink us into thinking that it is our reality.

A year ago I visited an extremely deprived area in Chicago while researching Barack Obama: the movement for change. It is difficult to put into words how unspeakably unjust was the level of poverty and despair in Altgeld Gardens. Why did I choose this area? It was where Barack Obama had been a community organiser in the 1980s.

A colleague of Barack Obama’s from that time, Linda Randle, described the plight of Altgeld Gardens to me:

“Altgeld Gardens is the worst community in Chicago, no doubt. At least where there is poverty and deprivation elsewhere there are programmes to deal with it and other communities are more mixed. The only thing is to suspend your rational responses when it comes to Altgeld. None of your rational instincts work. You need to catch your breath and try to contemplate the enormity of it.”

By lunch on the first day, my breath had gone. Paulette Edwards, a family support charity worker, guided me around Altgeld Gardens. She was holding back the tears as she described a community that had, to coin a phrase, broken down. She said:

“I am determined to get just one kid, just one kid, all the way through. Then it was all worth it.”

Her colleague Kim explained:

“It used to be that the “Stones” would control this block and the “BDs” would control that block but now they are all mixed in together….We are told that people should learn to get along. And they will. By killing each other.”

Grayling-esque melodrama? No. The day before I arrived at Altgeld Gardens, there had had been a gangland shooting – a 14 year-old boy had shot a 19 year-old girl. The week before there had been another homicide. Kids as young as eleven have access to guns and you can see them hanging by the dumpsters or on the basketball court. Murders are routine but police recording of the ‘stats’ is not. There were 11 murders in Altgeld Gardens in the last quarter of 2007. This is in a population of barely 3,500.

Perhaps intended, perhaps by pure chance, the name of the founder of the Black Gangster Disciples was a David Barksdale. Avon Barksdale was a gang leader in The Wire. The community is Wire-esque in every regard.

The gangs are the parasite that feed on the economic collapse of a community. When steel mills started to close in the late 1970s and early 1980s the economic lifeblood of Altgeld Gardens – an almost entirely African American community – was drained away.

The result? Worklessness is somewhere north of 80%. Drug addiction is pandemic. Family breakdown is pervasive. Few kids graduate from High School – by 8th Grade, 51% of kids are at 6th Grade standard only. Many of them are already living adult lives so it is little wonder that they fail to achieve. The High School was closed last year. It had failed so many.

Welfare is miserly. In the US, a year out of work and your only income is the occasional hand-out and food stamps. Of course, food stamps become currency (especially as they don’t attract sales tax) so they are sold at below face value and families are under-nourished. There’s only junk to eat anyway. The only other sources of income are a job if you are very, very lucky or gang related activity.

Now, you tell me where in the UK these conditions are replicated with such severity? Even if you name one place – which you can’t because we have a proper welfare state – then fifty more places in the US could be given as examples. It’s all very well banging on about welfare dependency but in a place like Altgeld Gardens there really is very little choice – there’s no work and the only real welfare you get is a public house and some food stamps. Besides, whatever the actions of the parents don’t the kids deserve some sort of chance?

This is the real issue with Chris Grayling’s The Wire comparison. Quite apart from the fact that it is simply not true, it trivialises suffering. If suffering just becomes some sort of political play thing then what chance is there of meaningful political action? Where is the type of textured policy discussion that can make a difference? If we start with a myth, how on earth will we end up with the truth?

It is difficult to resist the Tommy Carcetti analogy. However, ultimately Carcetti was honestly portraying social crisis though he had neither the personal integrity nor nous to do much about it. Chris Grayling’s starting position is fundamental dishonesty. This wasn’t just an off-the-cuff comment; it was pre-meditated and deliberate. That makes it all the more unforgivable.

Nobody is claiming that Britain doesn’t face major social issues – few nations do not. To pretend they are new is dishonest. To compare Britain to the communities we see both in The Wire and across America is disingenuous. The only conclusion has to be that while it is clear that the Conservatives are desperate to get into government, they are not serious as a party of government. If they were, they would not fantasise about a Britain derived from a TV drama in this way.