One of my regular routes is what I call the “Southeast London Sink Estates Walk”. It takes in the Aylesbury, the Heygate and North Peckham. Or, that’s to say, it used to. Thanks to former Mayor Johnson and his cronies, the Heygate, for one, has been given over to the sort of market-value redevelopment that is turning the Elephant and Castle area into hedge-fund heaven.
I saw it go up in 1974, around the time of the last Euro-referendum, and now I’ve seen it come down. It was set up to provide affordable housing for the “industrous working class” and then became, in Daily Mail-speak, a “mugger’s paradise” when social housing was designated as a dumping ground for the capital’s most vulnerable inhabitants.
According to lazy regional demographics, anyone living south of the Wash belongs to a cosseted class of effete cosmopolitans, ready to sell out their country for a half decent bottle of Burgundy. Anyone north of the line belongs to a loyal, patriotic English folk-tribe that would no more surrender its sovereignty than it would castrate the family whippet.
It’s not really that simple. There are are lot of poor people in London, despite the efforts of Johnson and his friends to conspire in the city’s social cleansing. He clearly intended to make London a place “fit for rich people” but it’s an exercise in progress. In the meantime, in the London borough with the highest level of social housing – Southwark, 3 out of 4 voters opted for “remain” in the June 23 referendum on EU membership.
The Heygate was at the tail end of a programme of post-war social interventionism that also produced the NHS and free schooling (er, up to a point). Watching it go up, many were horrified by its inhuman neo-brutalism. But it did provide housing for 3,000 people.
Maybe London has always been a bit more “chillaxed” about the rest of the world than Sunderland or Hook Norton. Round at the King’s Arms in Tooley Street today, a slightly inebriated Frenchwoman was shouting “Allez! Allez! Allez!” as her team knocked in its second goal against the Republic of Ireland. She was a stone’s throw from the capital’s poorest estates.
It could be that the north-south, rich-poor divide is a bit of a fiction, a product of what, in our pre-Gove primary school textbooks, we would have recognised as “divide and rule”. Thanks to the Brexiteers, we are certainly divided, but nobody rules.
In the last couple of depressing days, it’s been interesting that those who have leapt to the defence of the inalienable right of the working classes to fuck themselves have tended to come from the ever-patronising middle classes, whose closest connection with the proletariat is no doubt via their sub-minimum wage cleaning lady.
I know from long experience that the working class are as capable of stupidity as are the toffs. On the other hand, the vast majority know when they’re being conned – particularly if they are crafty Cockneys.
So this is a warning to all those Englanders out there who might be tempted to screw with London. We’re not gonna take it any more. There’s no defined plan yet. But, then again, you have no plan for how best to plunge us into the abyss.
The proposal is this: that we establish a “sane” movement, which will not be based on past party allegiance but will embrace those who can put the power of logic over the folly of emotion. It may be that diehard lefties, Greens, Libs etc will even have to compromise and find common cause with the non-loony wing of the Tory party to preserve our country. You owe it to the Heygate!
Idle Thoughts on London Walks 