In defence of the inner city

A few days ago Graeme Archer sat outside the Michelin recommended gastro-pub on the top of the trendy Broadway Market – host to Time Out’s top market on a Saturday – chatting to friends about why he was leaving Hackney. Sure he no longer wanted to commute. His lifestyle is no longer well-suited to the urban tempo. He wants to have a bigger house and a garden. Fair enough and good luck – hope you enjoy your new life.

But Archer is not the average early-40s time for a different pace of life kind of guy. He won the Orwell prize for political blogging this year – unanimously – and has a media profile. And instead of moving to the ‘burbs and saying good-bye with grace and affection he chose, instead, he used this profile in a Telegraph blog to spit on Hackney’s doorstep as he is leaving.

It’s the riots you see. Presumably, if he lived in leafy Clapham – where more severe riots took place – he’d feel a similar way. He looked in the eyes of feral youth on the night of the riots and saw nothing – no shred of empathy, just raw untethered power. And in this novel-esque dramatic moment he knew things had changed. And when interest rates go up, we’ll be all find ourselves in a Ballard-esque end of days.

These epiphanies are a dramatist’s delight. The only problem is that if you are a blogger you leave a trail – the writer’s craft is laid bare and that means there are things that you can’t get away with so easily. And this blog from the election reveals Archer’s hand. He has a lot of hatred to give: for people who vote Labour (they make him feel sick and he ‘blames them’), for the young and their urban lingo, for the woman who lives in a house he clearly covets, and so on.

Perhaps we are meant to sympathise with Archer, the voice of sanity, morality, and empathy. But the problem is, like the youths he encountered on the night of the riots, we read his bile and fear who this feral blogger might choose as his next target. The difference though is while those rioters, terrifyingly powerful for a night, become creatures of collective fear, the power hungry in the media, in blogs, in politics, on trading floors, in the board room can exercise their power at will: anytime, anywhere aimed at any target. The only difference is that we come face to face with the power complex when it violently takes over our streets.

Hackney doesn’t lack empathy. It has it in droves. It is a changing and dynamic multiplicity of communities that defy description. Like any community in an urban setting where the tail is long it has its outliers and sometimes violence can occur. Pretending that the extremes are the norm might make good copy but they discard the determined majority. On Hackney’s doorstep you find two globally competitive economic clusters: the City and Tech City. What chance have Hackney kids got of finding a way into either if Archer’s garbage becomes the accepted view?

When the blog popped up on Twitter yesterday I happened to be reading an obscure report into the relationship between colleges and the riots submitted to the riots panel. How many Hackney Community College students were arrested or charged in connection with the riots? The answer is zero – despite the college being the largest single provider of post-16 education in the borough. The social bonds and economic opportunity the college and all colleges provide were strong.

And this is the point. After a decade of investment – in new and existing public institutions – opportunity and success in the borough have soared. It’s going to be a tough decade but we should never lose sight of that. Where people have access to communities of support enabled by public institutions they have hope – and empathy.  And unless we acknowledge that and assert it then it will be undone by Tories of this kind aiming to de-legitimise such investment and intervention. Communities will be written off in the service of a rapacious political ideology. For all the big society cant, it’s been happening in Hackney not despite the state but because of it.

One day I may too decide that Hackney life no longer works for me. Equally, it wouldn’t surprise me if that day doesn’t come. If it does then I’ll look back at a borough that has radically improved; it’s retained all its verve and variety but its people have new and better opportunities. It has severe problems for sure. It has its irritations. But there’s something magical about it too. And it is testament to the power of collective action at both a national and local level. Graeme, sorry to lose you, I wish you the best of luck in your new life – but if you could just clear up the antisocial mess you’ve left on the doorstep before you leave for good we’d be ever so grateful.

Anthony Painter is a governor of Hackney Community College and Hackney UTC but is writing strictly in a personal capacity.