By Richard McKeever
Last week we debated the portrayal of poverty in the media and touched on the poverty game show format – last night Channel 4 screened the first in the series the Tower Block of Commons following Members of Parliament as they spend a week living with families in Tower Block Estates across the UK.
The aim of the exercise was unclear. Was it to present to policymakers the everyday reality of their voters struggling through recession? To demonstrate how difficult it is to get by without a second-home allowance and a charge account at John Lewis? Or was the aim to portray the people living in social housing as workshy layabouts?
Just as the focus was unclear at the outset so was the documentary makers’ approach. At times hard-hitting exchanges, for example about drug misuse, provided a genuine insight to life on the estates. Yet the game show format meant challenging moments were interspersed with exchanges which ridiculed stereotypes – the MP’s were each provided clothing by their hosts to make them fit-in resulting in a comedy costume competition.
Building one-to-one, personal contact enabled a couple of MPs to express real concern about improving the circumstances of their hosts. However what did the MP’s think would happen to the damp, mouldy bathroom after “their” resident had been re-housed? It would simply be occupied by the next on the waiting list – without changing the underlying conditions.
Whilst warm relationships were established with individuals each of the MPs, to different extents, demonstrated their distance from the lives of some of the UKs neglected communities. The audience watching on TV were invited to participate in the “Us” side of an “Us and Them” equation, gazing at the residents of the Tower Block as if they were aliens.
We have written before about the process of “othering” and referred to Ruth Lister’s definition
‘Othering’: people in poverty are thought about, talked about and treated as ‘Other’ and inferior to the rest of society. A dividing line is drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the dividing line is imbued with negative judgements that construct ‘the poor’ variously as a source of moral contamination, a threat, an undeserving economic burden, failures in the meritocratic race, an object of pity or even as an exotic species to be studied.
There is a long history of people living in poverty being viewed as “other” dating back to melodramatic Victorians exploring the “Internal Orient” of London’s East End this TV programme reverts to simplistic stereotyping of people in poverty and, in reality, adds nothing to our understanding.
I also really enjoyed the programme – and was appalled by the MPs’ lack of knowledge about estate life.
What I find particularly difficult is this: most MPs ought to know about these issues as most run regular surgeries and get hundreds of letters per week. My MP certainly does. These tend to fall into three categories: “political”, meaning the form and non-form letters on national issues such as Iraq or climate change; “local”, meaning letters about matters of local policy that people have concerns about, such as the imposition of permit parking or the closure of a local service; and casework. Overwhelmingly, casework is about immigration, benefits and housing, with a long tail of other issues.*
How, then, can it be that MPs don’t understand the sheer misery that bad housing and neglected estates can bring? I don’t have an answer: it always mystifies me, particularly in the case of Labour MPs who often represent the poorest areas (given that demography still has an impact on party choice) yet can blithely bring in policy that the people who depend on them as the advocate of last resort would know was ridiculous.
The other point that infuriated me was the limited understanding of the remedies available to the tenants they were living with. Mark Oaten and his petition particularly made me cross, as petitions make people feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but are amongst the least effective campaigning tools. It is so wrong for him to raise the aspirations of residents in that way, with no plan for helping them be further involved. Surely he, with all his resources, could have used his skills to find out the plans for the tower blocks and helped the tenants’ organisation get a seat at that table? Surely he could have helped them hold their council to account? Millions have been spent on the Decent Homes programme nationwide – so why hasn’t any of it found its way to that block? There are remedies available – but he fell back on lazy populism that will have no effect.
All in all, I was much more shocked by the limitations of the MPs than by the portrayal of poverty. And, in some ways, hats off to the production company for finding a diverse set of people willing to be the hosts. My heart was in my mouth as Selina took Austin Mitchell to collect her methadone; it is rare to find a mainstream depiction of drug addiction where it is but one aspect to a human being.
*It’s off the point, but MPs are often the only ones who can get a straight answer out of the UKBIA, as documented again today in the Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/02/border-staff-asylum-seekers-whistleblower.
I have to say i agree with Will’s comments that my feeling having watched the programme was that it was the MPs that seemed out of touch rather than seeing poor people as ‘workshy’. I totally accept the point about negative portrayals of poor communities as helpless, needy, lacking social values or a sense of community and all the other stereotypes that are common in the media. I dont think this was particularly a serious documentary or hugely significant, but nonetheless i enjoyed it (more or less). What really shocked me, even as someone who works regularly with parliamentarians, was just how frighteningly out of touch our MPs are.
On the same day that Gordon Brown talked about new politics and constitutional reform, it highlighted how it’s not just how we elect leaders that needs reform, it’s who we elect too.
Interesting. Having, I admit, only read about it rather than watched it, I get the impression that the MPs ended up looking equally ‘othered’ – certainly most of the comments on the Channel 4 site lay into the MPs for being out of touch, rather than the residents for being poor.
However, some of the comments on there – from other residents of the estates, and even from one person who appeared in it – reveal a serious problem with these kinds of programmes: they focus on the worst cases and present it as the norm. One comment reads:
“I fear you are only going to see the bad in the programme and not the good. I live in Goresbrook Village myself and can tell you for a FACT that there is a lot more good going on than is given credit for…”
There are several other comments like it.