Can't Say Fairer than That

The RER comes to a shuddering stop. The doors open and the mademoiselle in the clipped accent says charmingly “Bienvenue a Chatelet Les Halles” but there is not much to welcome. I can see it in my mind’s eye. The exit to Rue du Reamur Sebastopol. The swinging doors where the same blind man with the uneven legs sits soliciting funds in a grey bucket sits, permanently stationed. The queues of African men and women to Ligne 4, heading to Porte de Clignancourt and the waves of French Mesdames and students headed the opposite way to Porte d’Orleans. You stay in Les Halles and you can either go up the stairs and be confronted by the huge H&M on the right or Le Fnac on the left. You can walk a bit further on and find the Starbucks and a cinema, playing the latest American flicks in VO (version originale). The actors in this mise en scene are always there, young extravagantly dressed young men and women, wearing the latest urban styles, expensive baskets- Nike or Adidas, congregating before a jaunt to KFC. They do not meet in Chatelet by accident, they meet in Chatelet because it is where the RERs from the outer regions of Paris intersect; they bus themselves in, by the trainload, every Saturday to the epicentre, as if to stake some adverse possessary right to this arrondissement.

The latest cap on housing benefit has led to outcries that London will be soon like Paris in that the suburbs will be ghettoised and the areas in the middle of town would be reserved for the uber- rich, not even the Camerons and the Spencers of this world, but maybe, even more frighteningly for the bourgeoisie- the Baidikovas, the Assaubayevs and the Amin Al-Shareefs who are only in residence 90 days a year, lest they be asked to pay UK tax. Others say well so be it. There are millions of hard working men and women who cannot afford to live in these affluent areas, and who make do with going to work each day from less than perfect conditions, facing a long commute from Romford, Bexleyheath and even as far away as Folkestone. My first PA was one of them. She did a two hour commute each day, twice a day to get into work. It certainly seems absurd that taxpayers should be asked to pay upwards £104,000 a year, so that individuals who are supported by the State could live within a hop skip and a jump of the City’s and the West End’s amenities. Is the price of social diversity necessarily so high?

I know that we are hypocrites in London. We want equality but we are not prepared to bear the inconveniences. We admire the village character of Paris but we also believe that everyone has a right to his/her betting shops and branch of Morleys. We believe in the welfare state until the recipients of benefits live in nicer houses than we do, in nicer areas than we do.

We certainly do not wish for another Clichy-sous-Bois, where the police are afraid to enter except with bullet-proof jackets, and where young men in hoods, with sharpened faces and razor tough glints patrol the streets. We do not wish for the outskirts of London to become synonymous with severe impoverishment, segregation and gang violence all because unemployment has hit critical masses. We do not wish that in a few years, Clegg and Cameron start speaking of the “racailles” on the outskirts who infest the good town of London. Nonetheless, where I depart from Tolynbee and the rest of the Guardian leftists is that I genuinely do not believe that this is likely. Contrary to Boris Johnson’s politically ambitious insinuation that the cap on benefits would result in a Kosovo style cleansing, the statistics show that very few persons will be affected by this measure; the estimate is barely 5,000. A cap of £200 a week means that enough poorer people will still get to live in the fancy areas in wealthy boroughs, but maybe that they won’t leave in the most luxurious townhouses with Saatchi and Lawson as neighbours. And isn’t that okay?

I know that lots of us love the idea that the Sloanites and Muswellites and Hampsteadths have had to learn to live with persons of different backgrounds like anyone else because the council flats are almost superimposed onto their end of terraces, but this is only a figment of our imagination- Londoners are already strongly separated by class and by income and most of the individuals who live in these areas hardly even look at the “hoodies” down their street, much less to integrate and to live together in inner city “one-love” harmony. It is clear that out inner city experiment does not work and that it only serves to highlight the glaring gaps between rich and poor in areas like Islington and Notting Hill. There is already a sub-ghettoisation which already occurs. Lewisham, Southwark and Greenwich councils houses a substantial proportion of workers who cannot afford to live in the nicer parts of town.

Fact is that the proposed reforms will see hundreds of thousands of people facing less than a £20 decrease in housing benefit and if the odd anomalies of councils paying for seven bedroom houses in Maida Vale at £4000 a week cease to exist, I can’t say fairer than that. I simply cannot see the case for taxpayers funding housing at levels which ordinary policemen, doctors and lawyers cannot afford. In fact, many of us started off by living in shared accommodation in nicer areas, and if we wanted to live on our own, we decided to live further out of the city of London, eastwards and southwards, in Kent and Essex. It is said that these measures will only affect 692,000 persons in total living in private rented accommodation paid for councils, and if the decreases are only modest, I cannot fathom how this will result in a mass exodus. Social housing in the middle of London will continue to exist, and rightfully so.

We do, however, need to be vigilant. These cuts come at a time when hundreds of thousands of public jobs are being made redundant. There are also corresponding cuts to Job Seeker’s Allowance, and a change in the index on which benefits are being pegged. In many cases, individuals are not being able to find jobs because they do not exist. It is tempting to label job seekers as “scroungers” but when individuals are on £67 a week, out of which bills and other essentials need to be paid, it does not take a genius to work out that the cumulative effect of all these measures may just be a run on the poor.