[Reader-list] Britain Riots: Doug Nicholls

[A. Mani]

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ALIENATION IN OUR CITIES: Only a radical response will work

Doug Nicholls is National Officer of Unite Youth and Community
workers. He argues powerfully in the Morning Star, for a radical and
working class-led response to the alienation of sections of young
people.
I have a picture in my office that shows the high-rise opulence of
Canary Wharf, the centre of financial gambling, and in front a young
person in a hoodie.

The caption reads: "There is more crime in the suites than crime on
the streets."

This is worth bearing in mind as young people again become the demons
for all society's ills.

The opposite is of course the case. Sociologists and educationalists
all over the world have shown how the condition of youth has changed
in the neoliberal economies with acute degrees of inequality.

The more unequal a society the more violent and alienated young people become.

They turn against each other in gangs and against the high street
trappings of wealth from which they are excluded. Young people in
Knightsbridge won't be rioting.

The classic account of this new reality is in the brilliant book by
Henry Giroux called Youth In A Suspect Society, Democracy Or
Disposability?

Giroux looks at the severe trends of youth alienation and disaffection
in the United States, the society with the least welfare state
provision and the highest extremes of market madness and inequality.
But these trends are all too clear in Britain now.

The policies of a few are wrecking our communities. The Tories
particularly have targeted youth services not for cuts but for
closure.

The significance of this is very great. Young people saw the new
government come in and without a mandate to do so raise student
tuition fees, get rid of the education maintenance allowance and then
begin its most serious assault on the architecture of services closest
to young people's hearts.

What is little recognised is that one of the public services
substantially built by young people in their own interests, the youth
service, could be the first public service to disappear.

Already a number of Tory councils have abandoned it and London
Boroughs has been reckless in its neglect, with £17 million proposed
to go from 15 already threadbare London youth services in the last
half of this year.

The youth service was created 50 years ago in its modern form as a
service that young people choose to get involved with. This element of
personal choice means it becomes a service that young people shape and
mould themselves. It's part of our democracy.

It is designed to give free association and fun, experience of
collective decision-making and above all a democratic voice.

Youth workers fundamentally are political educators whose subtle work
to assist personal and social education belongs to a long progressive
tradition of community learning and development.

They work alongside young people on their agenda and do not approach
them as "problems" or deficient individuals requiring "cure."

Most youth councils have been created and sustained by youth workers.

At a deeper level, literally millions of young people who once saw no
hope or who lacked self-esteem, communication skills and felt
miserable about their predicament have been transformed into active
positive citizens by the youth service over the generations.

It is a vital service in working-class communities where many other
services have disappeared already or where services are about doing
things to young people rather than with them.

Youth workers empower young people and this empowerment is the best
foil to the sense of hopelessness and worthlessness that mass
unemployment and poverty breed.

Around this service over the years a range of other support services
developed for young people, advice and information, youth arts,
disability and sexual issues support, street work, mental health
services and legal guidance.

Look at any study of the cuts and you will see that these are the
first and hardest to be hit.

Lifeline services which our young people need and help to create have
been wilfully and deliberately targeted. Even the hardest-hit
charities are those supporting children and young people. Many are
closing.

Fifty-seven per cent of young people volunteer in a positive way in
their communities. For every one pound spent on youth work a further
eight pounds are generated in voluntary activity.

Youth workers are not just trained to engage responsible and properly
treated volunteers in positive community activities, they area also
trained to fund-raise.

A third of the amount invested by local authorities in youth services
is raised from other sources by youth workers keen to see young people
resourced and supported.

There will be 400,000 fewer young people engaged in voluntary activity
in their neighbourhoods this year as a result of cuts to youth
volunteering projects.

Alongside the closure of Connexions services and youth services have
gone the closure of vital street level advice and legal services.

Also, hundreds of youth centres which have been the only source of
safe, warm and creative activities in rural and urban areas have
closed.

In boroughs like Haringey and Hackney huge 75 per cent cuts to youth
services have been proposed.

Young people have campaigned tremendously and very responsibly against
this vandalism of their services throughout the country, but
Haringey's campaign was a shining example.

Young people used and reused every element of the existing political
machine to make their point.

But, as in so many parts of the country, councillors and MPs simply
have not listened to the voice of the disenfranchised with no vote.

Despite some of the largest petitions ever gathered in defence of
public services in many parts of the country against youth service
cuts, Tory and Lib Dem councillors have ignored all of the warnings.

Like the TUC and the British Youth Council, we say it is time for
votes at 16. Alienation and frustration have been compounded as young
people feel the established political system simply does not listen or
care.

At the end of this summer term I cautioned publicly that this was
going to be the worst summer for young people since the second world
war as the devil makes work for idle hands and the combined effect of
youth unemployment and destruction of their services outside school,
together with the feeling of being a target and being ignored, was
creating a new cocktail of frustration and anxiety.

A recent parliamentary select committee showed how about 85 per cent
of young people's waking hours are spent outside formal education, yet
each year local authorities spend 55 times more on formal education
than they do on providing services for young people outside the school
day.

The committee went on to condemn the government for saying that youth
service expenditure represented large slugs of public money and
congratulated the sector for its long-standing dexterity in making
limited resources go a long way.

Yet the government is attempting to ignore this report and proceeding
with the daftest set of youth policy papers ever produced. These are
under the misleading title "positive for youth."

Never has a government been more negative for youth as this one. It is
managing a disposable generation of unemployed and unwanted young
people who will not even be a reserve army of labour as the predicted
double-dip recession now begins to bite.

If policy is based on the idea of young people as being disposable,
then it sheds any democratic aspirations.

Even the "big society" bank originally designed under Labour to
provide funding for youth organisations, has been redesigned as little
more than a scam for the banks to recycle loans to each other for a
profit.

>From our perspective we must show that our progressive labour movement
will be the source of engagement and nurture and political activity
for the young.

Trade unions must re-engage with young people as never before. The
young people who have come forward to lead hope for the future must be
welcomed more into our meetings at community and national trade union
level.

This is essential as these disturbances are different from the Notting
Hill riots of the 1950s or the Brixton, Toxteth and other riots of the
'80s.

This time there is a lack of any semblance of direction, there is a
lack of any faith in the public sphere to solve community problems.

There is a turning in on each other as reflected in the continuing
instances of youth-on-youth violent crime.

The average age of the young people caught up in the disturbances is
16. Society has to offer something better and fast or next year's
problems as the economy goes into tailspin will be even worse.

Society should treasure our young, not vex them to this intense degree.

Doug Nicholls is national officer for Unite the Union's community,
youth workers and not-for-profit sector.

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Best

A. Mani



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