Martin Hannan: Don't let estates sink any further

Published on Tuesday 1 June 2010 09:43

THE Scheme. Love it or loathe it, you could not ignore BBC Scotland's devastating exposé of what passes for life on a sink estate in Kilmarnock. I confess I watched it through my fingers, cringing at each successive tableau of sluttish drug-addled debauchery, appalled yet riveted by the human tragedies unfolding in front of our eyes.

Poverty porn was how one stuck-up Weegie hack railed against it. Middle-class patronisation of the non-working class, said others.

Maybe that's a little true but, having checked, I know that the BBC was rigidly fair in its editing policies and did not over-emphasise the sensationalist elements. Indeed, my understanding is that they left some of the most gobsmacking stuff out, while the remaining two episodes will show the community trying to right things – we won't see them until certain court cases are over, sadly.

The howls of anguish in East Ayrshire and the west coast media decrying the way such a programme demonises a town or certain type of person are just nonsense.

A social worker friend laughed and said she wished she had clients as nice as the people in The Scheme. For what you saw was real life for a great many people in Scotland, and not exaggerated one whit.

On the contrary, I know that the producers could have gone into 30 or 40 such areas across Scotland – at least six in Edinburgh I can think of without difficulty – and found people in much, much worse situations. Take it from me, The Scheme barely touched the tip of the iceberg of the underclass in this country, including Edinburgh.

What made it even more dreadful was that it showed how generations have passed with people trapped in this mire. More than 30 years ago as a young reporter in Dumbarton, I took a call from a woman on a council estate not dissimilar to Onthank. The council was refusing to rehouse her even though she qualified for a move. A few hours later, I went to check out her story, accompanied by a photographer who had been a paratrooper and served in some hellholes in his time.

Her garden was a jungle, the front door was lying wide open. We shouted inside but got no reply, and then I smelled gas. In we went, very gingerly. We had to move with caution, as there were no floorboards.

There were none in the hall, the toilet or the kitchen, where the cooker had a ring belching out gas but which had not been switched on. The whole place stank.

In the living room was a pile of bottles and beer cans. A woman of indeterminate age sat legs akimbo, snoring deep in a filthy armchair, reeking of booze.

On a grimy sheet-less sofa bed, a fully-dressed grizzled grey haired man lay with his arm around a teenage girl whose clothes were dishevelled. They, too, were alcoholically comatose. My photographer colleague motioned for us to leave, saying: "This is a job for the police, not us."

As we left the scene, a neighbour came out. "You from the Social?" she inquired. It transpired the neighbours had reported the older woman to the social work department because they were at the end of their tether with a tenant who held parties day and night.

They knew the floorboards had been used as fire wood. It was not the first time that she had fallen asleep with the gas on. Her "move" was, not surprisingly, on hold.

As we left the street, a police van arrived. Shortly afterwards I was in court to see the woman being jailed for selling her 14-year-old daughter for sex to feed her booze habit. I often wondered what happened to that poor girl.

The problem back then in Dumbarton and in Onthank a generation later is the same. Feckless people with no work and no prospect of it because there are simply not enough jobs for them. They have become unemployable – who is ever going to give a job to The Scheme's 30-year-old reformed junkie Marvin? – because they never experience the discipline of work.

Back in the day it was booze that the jobless underclass imbibed for solace. Nowadays it is drugs. The consequences are much the same – hopelessness and lawlessness on an industrial scale. Since The Scheme was shown, internet websites have proliferated with cries of "lock them all up", usually accompanied by pleas to withhold benefits "because it's taxpayers' money they get". It's such a popular cry that the new UK government is taking it up.

What utter folly. We should be thankful that there is a benefits system in place and be happy to pay the social workers and police to deal with the human detritus of our unjust society.

The Scheme surely shows those elected to have authority over us that they should think very carefully about tampering with benefits. For unless the underclass get their ciggies, their booze and drugs, they might engage their brains and boots and come looking directly for their share of Britain's wealth. You say it can't happen – have you forgotten Toxteth and Brixton already?

Call me cynical, but mess with the benefits systems and Armageddon will not await in Korea or the Middle East, it will come from a scheme near you.