The lower depths Of the unemployed
Mary Morgan
There are four ways of holding the gate against the loss Of this generation of young People in their slow shuffle to the dole queue. `Small is beautiful', as the late Dr Schumacher had it, is the most beguiling Possibility; it would be nice to think of the Unemployed teenager simply visiting the local, friendly entrepreneur.. There is the Mich fantasy that turning our backs on schooling and the rat-race will liberate us all from such sterile preoccupations as earning a living. Or there is the brutal simplicity of the Soviet or Chinese solution: if there are any dustbins unemptied in Samarkand or Hangchow, the boys and girls leaving school are put on a truck and the dustbins get emptied. What is most likely here, as the effects of new tactics already show, is that our social democratic confusions will lead to endless piece-meal schemes which will not
halt the crisis. The growth of unemployment itself has changed the character of the problem. In Glasgow, Liverpool and London I met children of our lower depths who are, I fancy, well beyond the reach of government amelioration programmes.
Leaning against the steel-barred window of a tobacconist's shop in Liverpool's Scotland Road was a good-looking boy of seventeen, neatly dressed. 'Don't mention the word work', he said, 'It's a swear word around here. Jail is all the go round here. I reckon that's where I'll be by the summer.' If so, it won't be the first time he's been caught. He's done four years in an approved school for shopbreaking. 'It's what I was brought up to do'. His mother died after a short rough life bearing six children (no husband) and cleaning Merseyside ships. He lives with two bachelor uncles, both drunks, in their fifties, on the dole. The flat is unspeakable. There is no gas, no electricity, no food.
In Govan, Glasgow, the foxy-faced, sharp suited leader of the quartet sharing the can teen of the Community Centre with the
Darby and Joan Club said, 'What's the point in working? I have a hunger for
money. I picked up £500 in the Inter national in Cardiff. The Welsh are dumb bastards, all boozed up and bawling their heads off, they don't know where they're shoving their wallets. I flew back and next week I'm hiring a car to take my mates to Wembley.' The Community worker, desperately trying to keep a government work scheme afloat but having to spend more time than he'd choose in the local police station, told me, 'The fathers are out of work and the teachers are indifferent. What is natural here is to go on the bru' and make a bit on the side. It doesn't pay Social Security to prosecute and it's too expensive to keep them in jail'.
In a private hotel were living a young couple and their baby. They were both under eighteen. Social security was paying the bill because here was a homeless case. When the girl found herself pregnant the boy left his naval training school. They lived with her family in a council flat, thirteen of them altogether; six were unemployed. He got a job in a fishing tackle shop. But he needed money for the down payment on a place of their own and so joined the other boys in ripping off rods, was caught, and was sacked. The girl then loaned to her mother the fifty pounds he had made in the robbery. What did she do? She gave it to her lover. When the boy asked for it back the lover kicked them out. T11 never get a job,' he said. 'Sometimes I think we are the only people in the world with no luck at all, nothing to make us happy.'
In Barry, South Wales, the scene is a council house, filthy fresh with the smell of nappies, the curtains drawn against the afternoon sunshine. Dad, unemployed, grossly fat, sat not speaking a word, sucking his way through a bag of oranges. Two older sons, unemployed, sprawled on a settee watching television. Gordon, the youngest son, is the latest to join the dole queue. He stopped going to school last November. The last straw for him had been a project entitled 'Design for Living'. 'I didn't have a clue what to do'. There is no labouring work: 'You have to be eighteen before they'll look at you. Mostly I look after my pigeons, got no money to .go anywhere.' His thirty pigeons take all of the £3 a week he keeps back from his social security money. The rest goes to Mam, also enormous, also speechless.
Walmer House is a Church Army Hostel in Marylebone. It houses boys in care for various local authorities. Bernard is just eighteen, one of eight children of a man always in jail and a mother on social security. He comes from Hackney, is on pro bation for a number of offences and has been expelled from three hostels for organising fights. The day before our meeting he had applied for ten jobs: petrol pump attendant, off-licence loader, greengrocer assistant, messenger boy. 'They all said they wanted women. I don't care what I do, the future doesn't bother me!
You may argue that it scarcely takes much effort to discover such wretchedness in these lost urban wastes. And, of course, there are young people out of work in healthier locations. The point, however, is that it is generally the children of families where parents are in work, and to whom the notion of unemployment is abhorrent, who do, in the end, find jobs. It may take them months, the jobs not come up to expectations, the future appear dreary and insecure, but, at least, they are off the register. A survey done by the Manpower Services Commission 'indicates a high level of unemployment amongst other members of their households: 14 per cent of unemployed young people reported that their fathers were also unemployed: 22 per cent that their brothers or sisters were unemployed; and 19 per cent were living in households where no-one was in full-time employment.'
My concern here is for the 'lost' generation and the next to be lost, who are both more numerous than it is in the bureaucratic and political self-interest to admit, What is to prevent the progression of urban decay, the poverty, the racial hatreds, or the consequences of a rising divorce rate, of the fantasies of expectation raised by adver tising, which lead to hundreds of thousands of young people with time, which often equates with crime, on their hands? Even if wealth re-accumulates in the Western world it will not reach these youngsters. The new leniency of the social security rules is a good indication of this new acquiescence in the problem by government.
Perhaps we should simply recognise that they are lost, will forever be lost: that in a period of long recession and gathering automation, where the only work available for them is the kind of 'shit job' they will no longer take, the only thing to do is to relax the rules of helpless charity even further.
So defeatist a marginal growth in public expenditure seems, unfortunately, more likely than a bolder strategy which would strike at the heartlands of ignorance and want. It may be a wild, old-fashioned approach in the hour of the monetarists' triumph, to suggest that there is no other way of creating even the hope of a solution than to double expenditure in those two disaster areas: education and housing. That it should have been a Labour government that has hastened the crisis along is no longer regarded even as ironic. Whether the next government is going to lose the next generation should be in the hands of the electorate. But I can't somehow see the issue swaying any votes.
This is the last of three articles on youth unemployment
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