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LIFE AT THE BOTTOM

Theodore Dalrymple

Monday Books
www.mondaybooks.com

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 Life at the Bottom
© Theodore Dalrymple, 2010
The right of Theodore Dalrymple to be identified as the Author of
this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK
copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor
be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than
that in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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 Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY THEODORE DALRYMPLE

INTRODUCTION

SEEING IS NOT BELIEVING

THE KNIFE WENT IN

GOODBYE, CRUEL WORLD

READER, SHE MARRIED HIM – ALAS

TOUGH LOVE

IT HURTS, THEREFORE I AM

FESTIVITY, AND MENACE

WE DON’T WANT NO EDUCATION

UNCOUTH CHIC

THE HEART OF A HEARTLESS WORLD

THERE’S NO DAMNED MERIT IN IT

CHOOSING TO FAIL

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FREE TO CHOOSE

WHAT IS POVERTY?

DO STIES MAKE PIGS?

LOST IN THE GHETTO

AND DYING THUS AROUND US EVERY DAY

THE RUSH FROM JUDGMENT

WHAT CAUSES CRIME?

HOW CRIMINOLOGISTS FOSTER CRIME

ZERO INTOLERANCE

MORE FROM MONDAY BOOKS

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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author, doctor, psychiatrist and journalist Theodore Dalrymple was

born in London in 1949 to a German mother and Russian father.
After qualifying as a doctor in 1974, he chose to travel and take
his trade to the far flung shores of Zimbabwe, Tanzania, South
Africa and the Gilbert Islands. When he returned to the United
Kingdom he worked in the East End of London and then inner city
Birmingham in a hospital and the nearby prison. His medical work
has brought him into contact with drug addicts and alcoholics,
career criminals and sex offenders, the mentally disturbed and
battered wives and their lives have inspired him to write. He has
also appeared as an expert witness in numerous murder trials.
Dalrymple has written widely and regularly for publications as
diverse as The Spectator, The New Statesman, The Times, The
Times Literary Supplement, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday
Telegraph, The Sunday Times, and The British Medical Journal,
as well as many prestigious American magazines and
newspapers.
He also writes under his real name Anthony Daniels. Now
retired from medical work, he is still a prolific writer and splits his
time between the UK and France.

Praise for Theodore Dalrymple

'The harsh truths he tells are all the more shocking because the
media, in general, is unwilling to tell them'
Daily Telegraph

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 ‘Dalrymple’s clarity of thought, precision of expression and
constant, terrible disappointment give his dispatches from the
frontline a tone and a quality entirely their own… their rarity makes
you sit up and take notice’
The Spectator

'He actually cares about the people at the bottom of the social
heap while public sector jobsworths and slimy politicians only
pretend to'
Daily Express

'He could not be further from the stereotype of the 'little Englander'
conservative… he is arguably our greatest living essayist'
Standpoint

‘Dalrymple’s is the crystal voice of reason.’

Literary Review

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 ALSO BY THEODORE DALRYMPLE

SECOND OPINION

“Last week, a patient arrived in the prison, a fit (though

presumably not very skilful) young burglar.
‘Are you on any treatment?’ I asked him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘DF 118, diazzies and amitrippiline.’
An opiate analgesic, an addictive tranquilliser and an anti-
depressant.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Backache,’ he replied.
‘Ah, a burglar with a backache.’ I said.
He smiled at me, and I smiled back. Then we had a good chuckle
together. I knew, he knew I knew, I knew he knew I knew, and he
knew I knew he knew I knew.
‘Nice one, Doctor,’ he said as he left the room, in excellent spirits.”

Drug addicts and desperate drunks, battered wives and suicidal

burglars, elderly Alzheimer's sufferers and teenage stabbing
victims all pass through Theodore Dalrymple’s surgery and he

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exposes, with humour and incite, the unseen horror of modern life
as never before.

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 THE EXAMINED LIFE

“'Why are you wearing that face mask?' asked one of the security
guards.
'Germs, of course,' I said. 'Ubiquitous - they're everywhere.'
'They are for us, too,' he said, 'and we're not wearing masks.'
This was exactly the same argument as the doctor uses.
'What consolation was it to the victims of the Black Death that
there were millions of other victims?' I said.
'The Black Death?' said the security guard to his colleague.
'What's he on about?'”

A witty satire on contemporary health and safety culture. The

unnamed anti-hero is a man who takes to heart every tabloid
newspaper health scare, guards himself against every
conceivable illness and worries endlessly about his mortality. He
wears protective clothing to go shopping when he can't shop on-
line and every inch of unprotected skin is smeared in various
creams and lotions. Unfortunately, his caution is his eventual

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undoing as this elegantly written and amusing novella reaches its
climax.

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 THE POLICEMAN AND THE BROTHEL
A Victorian Murder

Deep in the bleak winter of 1846... Jersey is home to tens of

thousands of rough-and-ready sailors, who spend their time
drinking, chasing loose women and gambling through the teeming
and chaotic streets.
The job of keeping order in the crowded dockside tenements,
raucous brothels and riotous public houses falls to elected
centeniers – such as the respected and feared George Le Cronier.
There have already been two brutal murders on the island in the
last couple of weeks. And now Le Cronier is on his way to arrest
the madame of a notorious brothel...

The Policeman and the Brothel tells the true story of what came
next – one of the most gruesome and notorious murders the
island has seen.

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 THE WILDER SHORES OF MARX

What is life like in a totalitarian regime?

It is a question which has always fascinated Theodore Dalrymple -
whose father was a strict if slightly inconsistent Communist.
The Wilder Shores of Marx sees the acclaimed writer visit five
countries which still labour under systems inspired by the writings
of Marx, Engels, Lenin and other luminaries of the left.
He visits North Korea as part of a delegation of British students,
and listens in horror to his fellow travellers (in the literal sense
only) talk enthusiastically about torturing and murdering political
prisoners, while the cowed population, enslaved by their mad
leaders, endure a living death.
In grey, miserable Albania, the cult of the late and insincerely
lamented Enver Hoxha still burns bright - unlike the light bulbs.
In Romania - which he visits just before the overthrow and brutal
execution of the despotic Nicolae Ceaucescu - terrified citizens,
starving and desperate, whisper of their longing for freedom while
waiting for the murderous Securitate to knock on the door at any
moment.

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Vietnam and Cuba are warmer and brighter - but the same sinister
undercurrent is present.
As always, Dalrymple's eye is as sharp as his pen - not for
nothing has he been called 'the George Orwell of our times' - and
his observations of these rarely-visited countries are fascinating,
witty and, ultimately, frightening.

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 MONROVIA MON AMOUR

As Charles Taylor begins a 50-year sentence for his role in the

brutal civil war in Liberia, Theodore Dalrymple’s fascinating
memoir of a visit to the country, and its capital Monrovia, makes
fascinating reading.
Founded in 1822 as a refuge for freed African slaves from
America, Liberia is a curiosity which became a catastrophe.
For well over 100 years it was a civilised and relatively prosperous
country under the rule of Americo-Liberians, but it was thrown into
chaos in 1980 when Samuel Doe led a revolution of those
considering themselves ‘natives’.
The incumbent president was murdered, and his cabinet ministers
paraded naked through the streets of the capital, Monrovia, before
being summarily executed by firing squad on the beach.
Doe – a brutal and incompetent tribalist (also, say some, a
cannibal) – was himself overthrown by Charles Taylor in 1990.
Dalrymple arrived in Monrovia the following year, where giggling
Liberians show him a videotape of Doe’s torture and murder at the
hands of Taylor’s goons. In the film, one Prince Y Johnson – now

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a Liberian senator – calmly sips a Budweiser as the naked Doe’s
ears are hacked off. Unsurprisingly, Dalrymple forms the
professional opinion that Johnson is a psychopath.
Monrovia was once a peaceful and ordered city; by the time of
Dalrymple’s visit it has been almost completely ransacked.
His experiences in the city formed the basis for Monrovia, Mon
Amour - a profoundly moving and interesting book about a country
which is little-understood and less visited.

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 IF SYMPTOMS PERSIST

“Last Monday morning, a man whom I know to be a very heavy

drinker consulted me because he was feeling ill. I examined him.
‘I can’t find anything wrong,’ I said. ‘It must be the drink.’
‘It’s all right, doctor,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back when you’re sober.’”

A series of short, funny, vignettes about Dalrymple’s work as a

doctor in an inner-city hospital and a British prison.
Axe-wielding maniacs, 'arthuritis' sufferers and apple crumble-
cooking rapists... they're all here, offering pearls of wisdom to the
incredulous physician.
The eBook version also includes stories from his follow up book 'If
Symptoms Still Persist.'

FOOL OR PHYSICIAN

Most of the antipodean beachcombers were heavy drinkers. It

was a way of life with them. An Australian trader consulted me
one day because of a serious drink problem he had.
‘I only had ten cans yesterday, doc,’ he said. ‘And today I haven’t
had any. I just don’t feel like it. Today’s the first day in ten years I
haven’t had a drink.’
I looked at him. He was yellow; he had hepatitis.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve got hepatitis. That’s why you don’t want to
drink. What’s more, you mustn’t drink for at least three months.’
‘Oh!’ he said.
‘And I see from looking at your hospital records that sometimes
you vomit blood in the morning.’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’

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‘It’s not a terribly good sign, you know.’
‘Oh, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I thought everyone did it.’
He returned three months later. To my surprise he had not
touched a drop.
‘Hey doc!’ he said. ‘I feel terrific, I haven’t felt this good in years.
Why’s that then?’
‘Why do you think?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. You’re the doc, you should know.’
‘Well, for the first time in ten years you haven’t got a hangover.’
‘Oh.’
A look of deep cogitation passed over his face like the shadow of
a cloud over a field on a summer’s day.
‘Does that mean I can go back on the beer?’

In Fool or Physician, his second and most personal book,

Theodore Dalrymple writes under his real name Anthony Daniels
about his early career as a doctor – giving his fans some insight
into his past.
It details his reluctant entry into medical school (‘I specialised in
doing and knowing the least necessary to pass the
examinations’), his earliest ventures in medicine in a small
midlands town and his subsequent work overseas when, bored
almost to tears by life in the NHS, he travels first to the then-
Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa and later to the Gilbert
Islands, a pacific paradise brimming with drunken expatriates,
eccentrics and lunatics.
As ever, doctoring was the key to a door, on the other side of
which was a different, more interesting life.

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 INTRODUCTION

A SPECTRE IS haunting the Western world: the underclass.

This underclass is not poor, at least by the standards that have
prevailed throughout the great majority of human history. It exists,
to a varying degree, in all Western societies. Like every other
social class, it has benefited enormously from the vast general
increase in wealth of the past hundred years. In certain respects,
indeed, it enjoys amenities and comforts that would have made a
Roman emperor or an absolute monarch gasp. Nor is it politically
oppressed: it fears neither to speak its mind nor the midnight
knock on the door. Yet its existence is wretched nonetheless, with
a special wretchedness that is peculiarly its own.
As a doctor who has worked for the past decade in a busy
general hospital in a British slum, and also in a nearby prison, I
have been in a privileged position to observe the life of this
underclass. I have, for example, interviewed some ten thousand
people who have made an attempt (however feeble) at suicide,
each of whom has told me of the lives of four or five other people
around him. From this source alone, therefore, I have learned
about the lives of some fifty thousand people: lives dominated,
almost without exception, by violence, crime, and degradation. My
sample is a selected one, no doubt, as all samples drawn from
personal experience must be, but it is not small.
Moreover, having previously worked as a doctor in some of the
poorest countries in Africa, as well as in very poor countries in the
Pacific and Latin America, I have little hesitation in saying that the
mental, cultural, emotional, and spiritual impoverishment of the
Western underclass is the greatest of any large group of people I
have ever encountered anywhere.

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 As a doctor I am, of course, committed to treating each patient
as an individual. It could hardly be otherwise: when you talk to
people about the most intimate details of their lives, it could
scarcely occur to you that they are other than fully conscious
agents, in essence no different from yourself.
Nevertheless, patterns of behaviour emerge – in the case of the
underclass, almost entirely self-destructive ones. Day after day I
hear of the same violence, the same neglect and abuse of
children, the same broken relationships, the same victimisation by
crime, the same nihilism, the same dumb despair. If everyone is a
unique individual, how do patterns such as this emerge?
Economic determinism, of the vicious cycle-of-poverty variety,
seems hardly to answer the case. Not only is the underclass not
poor, but untold millions of people who were very much poorer
have emerged from poverty within living memory – in South
Korea, for example. If being poor really entailed a vicious cycle,
man would still be living in the caves.
Genetic or racial determinism is no better. It will come as a
surprise to American readers, perhaps, to learn that the majority
of the British underclass is white, and that it demonstrates all the
same social pathology as the black underclass in America – for
very similar reasons, of course. Genetics, moreover, can hardly
explain such phenomena as the rise of mass illegitimacy,
unprecedented in recorded history, since the late 1950s.
The role of the welfare state in the rise (if that is quite the word
for it) of the underclass is likewise overstressed. At most it might
have been a necessary condition for that rise: it made it possible,
not inevitable. Welfare states have existed for substantial periods
of time without the development of a modern underclass: an
added ingredient is obviously necessary.

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 This ingredient is to be found in the realm of ideas. Human
behaviour cannot be explained without reference to the meaning
and intentions people give to their acts and omissions; and
everyone has a Weltanschauung, a worldview, whether he knows
it or not. It is the ideas my patients have that fascinate – and, to
be honest, appal – me: for they are the source of their misery.
Their ideas make themselves manifest even in the language
they use. The frequency of locutions of passivity is a striking
example. An alcoholic, explaining his misconduct while drunk, will
say, ‘The beer went mad.’ A heroin addict, explaining his resort to
the needle, will say, ‘Heroin’s everywhere.’ It is as if the beer
drank the alcoholic and the heroin injected the addict.
Other locutions plainly serve an exculpatory function and
represent a denial of agency and therefore of personal
responsibility. The murderer claims the knife went in or the gun
went off. The man who attacks his sexual consort claims that he
‘went into one’ or ‘lost it’, as if he were the victim of a kind of
epilepsy of which it is the doctor’s duty to cure him. Until the cure,
of course, he can continue to abuse his consort – for such abuse
has certain advantages for him – safe in the knowledge that he,
not his consort, is its true victim.
I have come to see the uncovering of this dishonesty and self-
deception as an essential part of my work. When a man tells me,
in explanation of his anti-social behaviour, that he is easily led, I
ask him whether he was ever easily led to study mathematics or
the subjunctives of French verbs. Invariably the man begins to
laugh: the absurdity of what he has said is immediately apparent
to him. Indeed, he will acknowledge that he knew how absurd it
was all along, but that certain advantages, both psychological and
social, accrued by keeping up the pretence.

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 The idea that one is not an agent but the helpless victim of
circumstances, or of large occult sociological or economic forces,
does not come naturally, as an inevitable concomitant of
experience. On the contrary, only in extreme circumstances is
helplessness directly experienced in the way the blueness of the
sky is experienced. Agency, by contrast, is the common
experience of us all. We know our will’s free, and there’s an end
on’t.
The contrary idea, however, has been endlessly propagated by
intellectuals and academics who do not believe it of themselves,
of course, but only of others less fortunately placed than
themselves. In this there is a considerable element of
condescension: that some people do not measure up fully to the
status of human. The extension of the term ‘addiction,’ for
example, to cover any undesirable but nonetheless gratifying
behaviour that is repeated, is one example of denial of personal
agency that has swiftly percolated downward from academe. Not
long after academic criminologists propounded the theory that
recidivists were addicted to crime (bolstering their theories with
impressive diagrams of neural circuits in the brain to prove it), a
car thief of limited intelligence and less education asked me for
treatment of his addiction to stealing cars – failing receipt of
which, of course, he felt morally justified in continuing to relieve
car owners of their property.
In fact most of the social pathology exhibited by the underclass
has its origin in ideas that have filtered down from the
intelligentsia. Of nothing is this more true than the system of
sexual relations that now prevails in the underclass, with the result
that 70 percent of the births in my hospital are now illegitimate (a
figure that would approach 100 percent if it were not for the

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presence in the area of a large number of immigrants from the
Indian subcontinent).
Literature and common sense attest that sexual relations
between men and women have been fraught with difficulty down
the ages precisely because man is a conscious social being who
bears a culture, and is not merely a biological being. But
intellectuals in the twentieth century sought to free our sexual
relations of all social, contractual, or moral obligations and
meaning whatsoever, so that henceforth only raw sexual desire
itself would count in our decision-making.
The intellectuals were about as sincere as Marie Antoinette
when she played the shepherdess. While their own sexual mores
no doubt became more relaxed and liberal, they nonetheless
continued to recognise inescapable obligations with regard to
children, for example. Whatever they said, they didn’t want a
complete breakdown of family relations any more than Marie
Antoinette really wanted to earn her living by looking after sheep.
But their ideas were adopted both literally and wholesale in the
lowest and most vulnerable social class. If anyone wants to see
what sexual relations are like, freed of contractual and social
obligations, let him look at the chaos of the personal lives of
members of the underclass.
Here the whole gamut of human folly, wickedness, and misery
may be perused at leisure – in conditions, be it remembered, of
unprecedented prosperity. Here are abortions procured by
abdominal kung fu; children who have children, in numbers
unknown before the advent of chemical contraception and sex
education; women abandoned by the father of their child a month
before or a month after delivery; insensate jealousy, the reverse of
the coin of general promiscuity, that results in the most hideous
oppression and violence; serial stepfatherhood that leads to

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sexual and physical abuse of children on a mass scale; and every
kind of loosening of the distinction between the sexually
permissible and the impermissible.
The connection between this loosening and the misery of my
patients is so obvious that it requires considerable intellectual
sophistication (and dishonesty) to be able to deny it.
The climate of moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism – a
relativism that began as a mere fashionable plaything for
intellectuals – has been successfully communicated to those least
able to resist its devastating practical effects. When Professor
Steven Pinker tells us in his best-selling book The Language
Instinct (written, of course, in grammatically-correct standard
English, and published without spelling mistakes) that there is no
grammatically-correct form of language, that children require no
tuition in their own language because they are destined to learn to
speak it adequately for their needs, and that all forms of language
are equally expressive, he is helping to enclose the underclass
child in the world in which he was born.
Not only will that child’s teachers feel absolved from the
arduous task of correcting him, but rumours of Professor Pinker’s
grammatical tolerance (a linguistic version of Pope’s dictum that
whatever is, is right) will reach the child himself. He will
thenceforth resent correction as illegitimate and therefore
humiliating. Eppur si mouve: whatever Professor Pinker says, the
world demands correct grammar and spelling from those who
would advance in it.
Moreover, it is patently untrue that every man’s language is
equal to his needs, a fact that is obvious to anyone who has read
the pitiable attempts of the underclass to communicate in writing
with others, especially officialdom. Linguistic and educational
relativism helps to transform a class into a caste – a caste,

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almost, of Untouchables. Just as there is said to be no correct
grammar or spelling, so there is no higher or lower culture:
difference itself is the only recognised distinction. This is a view
peddled by intellectuals eager to demonstrate to one another their
broad-mindedly democratic sentiment. For example, the
newspaper that is virtually the house journal of Britain’s liberal
intelligentsia, The Guardian (which would once honorably have
demanded that, in the name of equity and common decency, the
entire population should be given access to high culture), recently
published an article about a meeting in New York of what it
described in headlines as ‘some of America’s biggest minds’. And
who were America’s ‘biggest minds’? Were they its Nobel prize-
winning scientists, its physicists and molecular biologists? Were
they America’s best contemporary scholars or writers? Or perhaps
its electronics entrepreneurs who have so transformed the world
in the last half-century? No, some of the biggest minds in America
belonged, in the opinion of the Guardian, to rap singers such as
‘Puff Daddy’, who were meeting in New York (for ‘a summit,’ as
the Guardian put it) to end the spate of senseless mutual killings
of East and West Coast rap singers and improve the public image
of rap as a genre. Pictures of the possessors of these gigantic
minds accompanied the article, so that even if you did not already
know that rap lyrics typically espouse a set of values that is in
equal part brutal and stupid, you would know at once that these
allegedly vast intellects belonged to people indistinguishable from
street thugs.
The insincerity of this flattery is obvious to anyone with even a
faint acquaintance with the grandeur of human achievement. It is
inconceivable that the writer of the article, or the editor of the
newspaper, both educated men, truly believed that Puff Daddy et
al possessed some of the biggest minds in America. But the fact

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that the debased culture of which rap music is a product receives
such serious attention and praise deludes its listeners into
supposing that nothing finer exists than what they already know
and like. Such flattery is thus the death of aspiration, and lack of
aspiration is, of course, one of the causes of passivity.
Does the fate of the underclass matter? If the misery of millions
of people matters, then the answer must surely be yes. But even if
we were content to consign so many of our fellow citizens to the
purgatory of life in our slums, that would not be the end of the
matter. For there are clear signs that the underclass will be
revenged upon the whole pack of us. In the modern world, bad
ideas and their consequences cannot be confined to a ghetto.
Middle-class friends of mine were appalled to discover that the
spelling being taught to their daughter in school was frequently
wrong; they were even more appalled when they drew it to the
attention of the school’s head teacher and were told it did not
matter, since the spelling was approximately right and everyone
knew anyway what the misspelling meant.
Other institutions have been similarly undermined by the
acceptance of ideas that have encouraged and maintained an
underclass. When street prostitutes moved in considerable
numbers to the street corners of the neighbourhood in which I live,
the senior local policeman said in response to residents’ requests
that he do something about it that he would do nothing, since the
women came from disadvantaged homes and were probably all
addicted to drugs. He was not prepared, he said, to victimise them
further. It was therefore our duty as citizens to pick the used
condoms from our rose bushes. Such is life under the regime of
zero intolerance.
Worse still, cultural relativism spreads all too easily. The tastes,
conduct, and mores of the underclass are seeping up the social

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scale with astonishing rapidity. Heroin chic is one manifestation of
this, though no one with any real knowledge of heroin and its
effects could find anything chic about either the drug or its effects.
When a member of the British royal family revealed that she had
adopted one of the slum fashions and had had her navel pierced,
no one was in the least surprised. Where fashion in clothes, bodily
adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that
increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much
downward cultural aspiration.
The disastrous pattern of human relations that exists in the
underclass is also becoming common higher up the social scale.
With increasing frequency I am consulted by nurses, who for the
most part come from and were themselves traditionally members
of (at least after Florence Nightingale) the respectable lower
middle class, who have illegitimate children by men who first
abuse and then abandon them. This abuse and later
abandonment is usually all too predictable from the man’s
previous history and character; but the nurses who have been
treated in this way say they refrained from making a judgment
about him because it is wrong to make judgments. But if they do
not make a judgment about the man with whom they are going to
live and by whom they are going to have a child, about what are
they ever going to make a judgment?
‘It just didn’t work out,’ they say, the ‘it’ in question being the
relationship that they conceive of having an existence
independent of the two people who form it, and that exerts an
influence on their lives rather like an astral conjunction. Life is
fate.
In what follows I have tried first to describe underclass reality in
an unvarnished fashion, and then to lay bare the origin of that
reality, which is the propagation of bad, trivial, and often insincere

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ideas. Needless to say, a true appreciation of the cause of
underclass misery is desirable in order to combat it, and even
more to avoid solutions that will only make it worse. And if I paint
a picture of a way of life that is wholly without charm or merit, and
describe many people who are deeply unattractive, it is important
to remember that, if blame is to be apportioned, it is the
intellectuals who deserve most of it. They should have known
better but always preferred to avert their gaze. They considered
the purity of their ideas to be more important than the actual
consequences of their ideas. I know of no egotism more profound.

Theodore Dalrymple.

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 SEEING IS NOT BELIEVING

THE FIRST DUTY of the modern intellectual, wrote George

Orwell, is to state the obvious, to puncture ‘the smelly little
orthodoxies... now contending for our souls.’
Orwell meant by these the totalitarian doctrines that
mesmerised the intellectuals of his time and that prevented them
from accepting the most obvious and evident truths about their
own and other societies: but his admonition holds true even now,
when fascism and communism are dead. The demise of
totalitarianism has led not to a more straightforward or honest
appreciation of reality but merely to a proliferation of distorting
lenses through which people choose to look at the world. If
humankind, as T. S. Eliot put it, cannot bear very much reality, it
seems that it can bear any amount of unreality.
The intellectual’s struggle to deny the obvious is never more
desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his
preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would
undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview. Given the
social history of England in the last 40 years, little wonder that
collective denial should be one of the most salient characteristics
of our national intellectual life.
I am in an unusual position: while I spend most of my
professional life as a doctor working in the extensive lower
reaches of society, I have, because of my writing, an entrée into
literary society.
The complacent disregard by the latter of the social catastrophe
wrought in the former appalls me almost as much as the
catastrophe itself. Never has so much indifference masqueraded
as so much compassion; never has there been such wilful

30
blindness. The once pragmatic English have become a nation of
sleepwalkers.
Recently, for example, I was invited to a lunch at a famous and
venerable liberal publication, to which I occasionally contribute
articles that go against its ideological grain. The publication’s
current owner is a bon vivant and excellent host who made
several scores of millions in circumstances that still excite
considerable public curiosity. Around the lunch table (from which, I
am glad to say, British proletarian fare was strictly excluded) were
gathered people of impeccable liberal credentials: the one
exception being myself. On my right sat a man in his late 60s,
intelligent and cultivated, who had been a distinguished foreign
correspondent for the BBC and who had spent much of his career
in the United States. He said that for the last ten years he had
read with interest my weekly dispatches – printed in a rival,
conservative publication – depicting the spiritual, cultural,
emotional, and moral chaos of modern urban life, and had always
wanted to meet me to ask me a simple question: Did I make it all
up?
Did I make it all up? It was a question I have been asked many
times by middle-class liberal intellectuals, who presumably hope
that the violence, neglect, and cruelty, the contorted thinking, the
utter hopelessness, and the sheer nihilism that I describe week in
and week out are but figments of a fevered imagination.
In a way I am flattered that the people who ask this question
should think that I am capable of inventing the absurd yet oddly
poetic utterances of my patients – that I am capable, for example,
of inventing the man who said he felt like the little boy with his
finger in the dike, crying wolf. But at the same time the question
alarms me and reminds me of what Thackeray once said about
the writings of Henry Mayhew, the chronicler of the London poor:

31
we had but to go a hundred yards off and see for ourselves, but
we never did.
On being asked whether I make it all up, I reply that, far from
doing so, I downplay the dreadfulness of the situation and omit the
worst cases that come to my attention so as not to distress the
reader unduly. The reality of English lower-class life is far more
terrible than I can, with propriety, depict. My interlocutors nod
politely and move on to the next subject.
It is the custom at the lunches of that famous and venerable
liberal publication, once the plates have been removed, for one of
the guests to speak briefly to a subject that preoccupies him at the
moment. And on this occasion it was the BBC’s former
correspondent in the United States who spoke: eloquently and
well, as one might have expected.
And what was the subject upon which he dilated with such
eloquence? The iniquity of the death penalty in the United States.
It is not easy to capture the contented mood that settled round the
table as he spoke, a mixture of well-fed moral superiority (one of
the pleasantest of all emotions) and righteous indignation (another
very pleasant emotion). The consensus was that they were
benighted savages over there, while we over here, guardians as
ever of civilisation itself, had not resorted to such primitive and
barbaric methods for ages – that is to say, for 35 years.
Everyone agreed with the BBC man, and it was my turn to say
something. I confess to not being an enthusiast for the death
penalty: it seems to me that the possibility of error, and the
historical fact of such errors having taken place (not only in the
United States but in Britain and presumably in every other
jurisdiction where true due process reigns) is a powerful, if not
absolutely decisive, argument against the death penalty, whatever
its deterrent effect might be. And having seen photographs of

32
execution chambers, where fatal injections are administered,
decked out as if they were operating rooms in hospitals, I cannot
help but feel that something sinister is going on: the pretence that
execution is a therapeutic procedure. One begins to see the force
of Dr. Johnson’s argument that executions should be in public, in
the open air, or not take place at all: at least there is no danger
then that executions might be taken for something other than what
they are. But I was anxious to dispel the cozy atmosphere of
rectitude, of sanctity so easily achieved without cost or effort. I
said we should look closer to home, to the fact that, with the single
(and admittedly important) exception of murder, crime rates in
Britain were now higher, and in some cases much higher, than in
the United States: and that the chief failing of our criminal justice
system was not its excessive harshness or its liability to wrongful
imprisonment but its patent failure to enforce the law or to protect
citizens from the most blatant lawbreaking. The result was that for
untold numbers of our compatriots, life was a living hell.
I briefly outlined my reasons for saying so: the vast numbers of
people – thousands and possibly tens of thousands – who have
told me about their lives, which are dominated by the possibility, or
rather the high probability, of violence and other criminal acts
being committed against them, and who quite rightly felt
themselves to be totally unprotected by the police or by the courts.
Opposite me was a well-known pacifist, a man of the highest
principle, who was by no means a puritan, however, at least with
regard to food and wine. His shiny cheeks radiated bonhomie and
self-satisfaction at the same time, and he spoke in the plummy
tones of the English upper-middle class.
‘You know funny people,’ he said, leaning slightly toward me
across the table.

33
 I know funny people: I was reminded of a medical school friend
of mine whose mother, when introduced to his girlfriend,
whispered in his ear, ‘NQOCD,’ the acronym for Not Quite Our
Class, Dear.
‘Funny’ those people whom I knew might be, I replied to the
pacifist, but there were a lot of them, and moreover they lived in
our country, often within walking- and burgling-distance of our
front doors.
The man’s complacency was by no means unusual. A few days
earlier I had met a publisher for lunch, and the subject of the
general level of culture and education in England came up. The
publisher is a cultivated man, widely read and deeply attached to
literature, but I had difficulty in convincing him that there were
grounds for concern. That illiteracy and innumeracy were
widespread did not worry him in the least, because – he claimed –
they had always been just as widespread. (The fact that we now
spent four times as much per head on education as we did 50
years ago and were therefore entitled to expect rising rates of
literacy and numeracy at the very least did not in the slightest
knock him off his perch.) He simply did not believe me when I told
him that nine of ten young people between the ages of 16 and 20
whom I met in my practice could not read with facility and were
incapable of multiplying six by nine, or that out of several
hundreds of them I had asked when the Second World War took
place, only three knew the answer. He replied smoothly – almost
without the need to think, as if he had rehearsed the argument
many times – that his own son, age seven, already knew the
dates of the war.
‘The trouble is,’ he said in all seriousness, ‘your sample is
biased.’

34
 And true enough: everyone’s experience is founded upon a
biased sample. But it didn’t occur to him to doubt whether his
sample – of one, the son of a publisher living in a neighbourhood
where houses usually cost more than £800,000 – really
constituted a refutation of my experience of hundreds of cases, an
experience borne out by all serious research into the matter. He
accused me of moral panic, as if the only alternative to his
imperturbable complacency (he was so serene you might have
thought him a monk from a contemplative order) were irrational,
agitated alarmism.
‘Have you actually ever met any of the kind of people I’m talking
about?’ I asked him.
He replied not that he had, but that he supposed he must have
done.
Complacency and denial dominate public as well as private
discourse, and when a little of the unpleasant side of
contemporary English reality is allowed an airing, a damage-
control exercise swiftly ensues.
A newspaper recently asked me to go to Blackpool to describe
the conduct of the people who go there for a weekend. Blackpool
has never been a place of great refinement and has long attracted
people who cannot afford to go to more desirable places for their
holidays. Boarding houses rather than hotels predominate,
presided over by formidable landladies. But Blackpool was, within
living memory, a resort of innocent fun, with donkey rides and
Punch-and-Judy shows on the beach, and a brisk sale of the
mildly salacious comic postcards about which George Orwell once
wrote with great sympathy and insight, in which weedy men are
dominated by large, fat wives in bathing costumes, in which
mothers-in-law are always battle-axes, in which unmarried men
are always trying to escape the snares of marriage set for them by

35
young women, and whose captions are always saucy double
entendres. (For example, a judge in the divorce court says to a
co-respondent, ‘You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not
sleep with this woman?’ to which the co-respondent replies, ‘Not a
wink, my lord!’)
This sophisticated innocence has departed. Without the
institution of marriage, mother-in-law and divorce jokes are
pointless and passé. Fun now means public drunkenness on a
mass scale, screaming in the streets, and the frequent exposure
of naked buttocks to passersby. Within moments of arriving on the
street along the beach, which was ankle-deep in discarded fast-
food wrappings (the smell of stale fat obliterates completely the
salt smell of the sea), I saw a woman who had pulled down her
slacks and tied a pair of plastic breasts to her bare buttocks, while
a man crawled after her on the sidewalk, licking them. At midnight
along this street – with the sound of rock music pounding
insistently out of every club door, and each door presided over by
a pair of steroid-inflated bouncers, among men vomiting into the
gutters – I saw children as young as six, unattended by adults,
waiting for their parents to emerge from their nocturnal
recreations.
On the day after the publication of my article, I appeared briefly
on the BBC’s main breakfast-time radio programme, which has an
audience of several million. The interviewer was an intelligent and
cultivated woman, and having briefly and accurately summarised
for the readers my account of what I saw in Blackpool, she then
asked me, ‘Aren’t you being a toff?’ – that is to say, a social and
cultural snob.
The question was, of course, a loaded one, with many layers of
deeply derogatory implication. I in turn asked her whether she
would herself bare her buttocks to passing strangers, and if she

36
wouldn’t, why not? She declined to answer this question, as if it
were not serious – just as a future government minister with whom
I once appeared on the radio, after asserting that one of the
tragedies of some recent urban riots was that they had taken
place in the rioters’ poor inner-city neighbourhood, refused to
answer when I asked her if she would rather the riots had taken
place in her own rich neighbourhood.
Not long after the interview about my experiences in Blackpool,
the BBC broadcast letters from a few listeners who charged that I
had failed to understand the nature of working-class culture. They
used the word ‘culture’ here in the anthropological sense of the
sum total of a way of life, but they were also taking cunning and
dishonest advantage of the word’s connotations of Bach and
Shakespeare to insinuate that the wearing of plastic breasts on
the Blackpool promenade is indistinguishable in value from the B-
Minor Mass or the sonnets. The liberal assumption, in this as in
most things, is that to understand is to approve (or at least to
pardon), and therefore my disapproval indicated a lack of
understanding.
But strangely enough, the letters that the BBC and the
newspaper that published the original article forwarded to me –
those they hadn’t broadcast or published – wholly endorsed my
comments. They were from Blackpool residents and from working-
class people elsewhere who passionately denied that working-
class culture had always consisted of nothing but mindless
obscenity. Several writers spoke very movingly of enduring real
poverty in childhood while maintaining self-respect and a striving
for mental distinction. The deliberate exclusion of these voices
from public expression provided a fine example of how the British
intelligentsia goes about its self-appointed task of cultural
destruction.

37
 Violence, vulgarity, and educational failure: three aspects of
modern English life that are so obvious and evident that it requires
little observational power to discern them. Indeed, it requires far
more mental effort and agility not to discern them, to screen them
out of one’s consciousness: the scenes in Blackpool, for example,
being only slightly worse and more extreme than those to be seen
in the centre of every English town and city every Saturday night
of the year.
It is worth examining the mental mechanisms that liberal
intellectuals use to disguise the truth from themselves and others,
and to ask why they do so.
First, there is outright denial. Increasing crime, for example,
was long dismissed as a mere statistical artifact, before the sheer
weight of the evidence overwhelmed the possibility of denial. It
wasn’t so much crime that was increasing, we were told, as
people’s willingness or ability to report it – via the spread of the
telephone. As to educational failure, it was long denied by the
production of statistics showing that more and more children were
passing public examinations, a classic half-truth that omitted to
say that these examinations had deliberately been made so easy
that it was impossible to fail them (the concept of failure having
been abolished), except by not turning up for them. But even the
most liberal of university professors has now noticed that his
students can’t spell or punctuate.
Second, there is the tendentious historical comparison or
precedent. Yes, it is admitted, violence and vulgarity are a large
part of modern British life; but they always were. When English
soccer fans ran amok in France during the European cup finals
(the kind of behaviour now universally expected of them), even
the conservative Daily Telegraph ran an article to the effect that it
was ever thus, and that Hanoverian England was a riotous,

38
drunken era – thereby implying that there was nothing to be
alarmed about. For some reason not fully explained, it is
supposed to be a comfort – even a justification – that anti-social
behaviour has persisted unabated over hundreds of years. In the
same way, intellectuals depict alarm over rising crime as
unreasonable (and those who express it as lacking in historical
knowledge), because it is not difficult to find historical epochs
when crime was worse than it is now. I have even seen worry
about a rising murder rate treated with mockery, because in
medieval England it was very much higher than it is now. Thus
historical comparison with a period hundreds of years ago is held
up as more relevant than comparison with 30 or even ten years
ago, as long as that comparison fosters an attitude of
complacency towards undesirable social phenomena.
Third, once the facts are finally admitted under the duress of
accumulated evidence, their moral significance is denied or
perverted. Do children emerge from school as ignorant of facts as
when they entered? Well, of course: this is because they are no
longer taught by rote but instead are taught how to go about
finding information for themselves. Their inability to write legibly in
no way lessens their ability to express themselves but rather
accentuates it. At least they have not been subjected to the
learning of arbitrary rules. Vulgarity is liberty from unhealthy and
psychologically deforming inhibition; it is merely the revival of
popular bawdy, and those who oppose it are elitist killjoys. As to
violence, any quantity of it can be explained away by reference to
the ‘structural violence’ of capitalist society.
A BBC television producer recently outlined the phases of
liberal denial for me. His colleagues, he told me, regarded him as
a maverick, a tilter at windmills, almost a madman. And what was
his madness? He wanted the BBC to make unvarnished

39
documentaries about life in the lower third of society: about the
mass (and increasing) illiteracy, the mass (and increasing)
illegitimacy and single parenthood, the mass (and increasing)
hooliganism, violence, lawlessness, drug taking, welfare
dependency, and hopelessness, so that the rest of the population
might begin to take stock of what was happening on their very
doorstep. And he wanted, in particular, to concentrate on the
devastating effects of the fragmentation – no, the atomisation – of
the family that liberal legislation, social engineering, and cultural
attitudes since the late 1950s have so powerfully promoted.
His BBC superiors greeted his proposals with condescension.
First, they denied the facts. When he produced irrefutable
evidence of their existence, they accused him of moral panic.
When he proved that the phenomena to which the facts pointed
were both serious and spreading rapidly up the social scale, they
said that there was nothing that could be done about them,
because they were an inevitable part of modern existence. When
he said that they were the result of deliberate policy, they asked
him whether he wanted to return to the bad old days when
spouses who hated each other were forced to live together. And
when he said that what had been done could be undone, at least
in part, they produced their ace of trumps: the subject was not
interesting, so there was no point in making programmes about it.
The British public would be left to sleepwalk its way undisturbed
through the social disaster from which a fragile economic
prosperity will certainly not protect it.
But why so insistent a denial of the obvious by the very class of
people whose primary function, one might have supposed, was to
be what the Russians called truth bearers? The answer is to be
sought in the causative relationship between the ideas that liberal
intellectuals advocated and put into practice and every disastrous

40
social development of the last four decades. They saw their
society as being so unjust that nothing in it was worth preserving;
and they thought that all human unhappiness arose from the
arbitrary and artificial fetters that their society placed on the
satisfaction of appetite. So dazzled were they by their vision of
perfection that they could not see the possibility of deterioration.
And so if family life was less than blissful, with all its inevitable
little prohibitions, frustrations, and hypocrisies, they called for the
destruction of the family as an institution. The destigmatisation of
illegitimacy went hand in hand with easy divorce, the extension of
marital rights to other forms of association between adults, and
the removal of all the fiscal advantages of marriage. Marriage
melted as snow in sunshine. The destruction of the family was, of
course, an important component and consequence of sexual
liberation, whose utopian programme was to have increased the
stock of innocent sensual pleasure, not least among the liberators
themselves. It resulted instead in widespread violence consequent
upon sexual insecurity and in the mass neglect of children, as
people became ever more egotistical in their search for
momentary pleasure.
If liberal intellectuals recalled their childhood experiences of
education as less than an unalloyed joy, education had to become
a form of childish entertainment: for who, in any case, were mere
adults to impose their ideas on those equally sentient beings, their
children? Were not grammar and arithmetic – indeed all
disciplines – mere bourgeois (or, in America, racist) tools with
which to maintain social hegemony? And self-respect being
radically incompatible with failure, the very idea of failure itself had
to go. The only way to achieve this was to do away with education
altogether – an experiment that could be carried out in full only on
that section of the population least concerned about education in

41
the first place, thus creating a now hereditary caste of
ineducables.
And if crime was a problem, it was only because an unjust
society forced people into criminal activity, and therefore
punishment constituted a double injustice, victimising the real
victim. By what right could an unjust society claim to impose its
version of justice? Empathy and understanding were what was
needed, provided they absolved the criminal of his responsibility.
The creation of a universal disposition to do good, and not the
creation of fear of the consequences of doing evil, was what was
needed to extirpate crime. Not surprisingly, these were glad
tidings to those tempted by the life of crime and demoralising ones
to those who upheld the law.
Every liberal prescription worsened the problem that it was
ostensibly designed to solve. But every liberal intellectual had to
deny that obvious consequence or lose his Weltanschauung: for
what shall it profit an intellectual if he acknowledge a simple truth
and lose his Weltanschauung? Let millions suffer so long as he
can retain his sense of his own righteousness and moral
superiority. Indeed, if millions suffer they are additional
compassion fodder for him, and the more of their pain will he so
generously feel. And so the prescription is: more of the same.
The Liberal Democrat Party, Britain’s third party, which is
dominated by the middle-class liberal intelligentsia and is gaining
an unthinking popularity born of disillusionment with the
government and of the patent incompetence of the official
opposition, recently held its annual conference. And what were
the most important proposals put forward there? The legal
recognition of homosexual marriage and shorter prison sentences
for criminals.
Nero was a committed firefighter by comparison.

42
2000

43
 THE KNIFE WENT IN

IT IS A MISTAKE to suppose that all men, or at least all

Englishmen, want to be free.
On the contrary, if freedom entails responsibility, many of them
want none of it. They would happily exchange their liberty for a
modest (if illusory) security.
Even those who claim to cherish their freedom are rather less
enthusiastic about taking the consequences of their actions. The
aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose
and for someone else to pay when things go wrong. In the past
few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged
in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and
admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years.
It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints,
and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has
been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.
Listening as I do every day to the accounts people give of their
lives, I am struck by the very small part in them which they ascribe
to their own efforts, choices, and actions. Implicitly they disagree
with Bacon’s famous dictum that chiefly the mould of a man’s
fortune is in his own hands. Instead they experience themselves
as putty in the hands of fate.
It is instructive to listen to the language they use to describe
their lives. The language of prisoners in particular teaches much
about the dishonest fatalism with which people seek to explain
themselves to others, especially when those others are in a
position to help them in some way. As a doctor who sees patients
in a prison once or twice a week, I am fascinated by prisoners’
use of the passive mood and other modes of speech that are

44
supposed to indicate their helplessness. They describe
themselves as the marionettes of happenstance. Not long ago, a
murderer entered my room in the prison shortly after his arrest to
seek a prescription for the methadone to which he was addicted. I
told him that I would prescribe a reducing dose, and that within a
relatively short time my prescription would cease. I would not
prescribe a maintenance dose for a man with a life sentence.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s just my luck to be here on this charge.’
Luck? He had already served a dozen prison sentences, many
of them for violence, and on the night in question had carried a
knife with him, which he must have known from experience that
he was inclined to use. But it was the victim of the stabbing who
was the real author of the killer’s action: if he hadn’t been there,
he wouldn’t have been stabbed.
My murderer was by no means alone in explaining his deed as
due to circumstances beyond his control. As it happens, there are
three stabbers (two of them unto death) now in the prison who
used precisely the same expression when describing to me what
happened. ‘The knife went in,’ they said when pressed to recover
their allegedly lost memories of the deed. The knife went in –
unguided by human hand, apparently. That the long-hated victims
were sought out, and the knives carried to the scene of the
crimes, was as nothing compared with the willpower possessed
by the inanimate knives themselves, which determined the
unfortunate outcome.
It might be objected by psychologists, of course, that the deeds
of these men were so heinous that it was a natural and perhaps
even necessary psychic defence for them to ascribe the deaths of
their victims to forces beyond their control: too swift an
acknowledgment of responsibility would result in a total collapse
of their morale and, possibly, in suicide. But the evasion in their

45
own minds of the responsibility for their deeds was in no way
different from that exhibited by lesser criminals: offenders against
property or, more accurately, against the owners of property. A few
examples will suffice.
A prisoner, recently convicted for the umpteenth time, came to
me to complain that he had been depressed ever since his trouble
came on him again. And what, I asked, was this trouble that came
on him periodically? It was breaking and entering churches,
stealing their valuables, and burning them down to destroy the
evidence. And why churches? Was it that he had been dragged as
a child to tedious services by hypocritical parents and wished to
be revenged upon religion, perhaps? Not at all; it was because in
general churches were poorly secured, easy to break into, and
contained valuable objects in silver. Oddly enough, he did not
deduce from this pragmatic, reasonable, and honest explanation
of his choice of ecclesiastical burglary as a career that he was
himself responsible for the trouble that mysteriously overtook him
every time he was released from prison: he blamed the church
authorities for the laxness of their security, which first caused and
then reinforced his compulsion to steal from them. Echoing the
police, who increasingly blame theft on the owners of property –
for failing to take the proper precautions against its
misappropriation – rather than on those who actually carry out the
theft, the ecclesiastical burglar said that the church authorities
should have known of his proclivities and taken the necessary
measures to prevent him from acting upon them.
Another burglar demanded to know from me why he repeatedly
broke into houses and stole VCRs. He asked the question
aggressively, as if ‘the system’ had so far let him down in not
supplying him with the answer; as if it were my duty as a doctor to
provide him with the buried psychological secret that, once

46
revealed, would in and of itself lead him unfailingly on the path of
virtue. Until then he would continue to break into houses and steal
VCRs (when at liberty to do so), and the blame would be mine.
When I refused to examine his past, he exclaimed, ‘But
something must make me do it!’
‘How about greed, laziness, and a thirst for excitement?’ I
suggested.
‘What about my childhood?’ he asked.
‘Nothing to do with it,’ I replied firmly.
He looked at me as if I had assaulted him. Actually, I thought
the matter more complex than I was admitting, but I did not want
him to misunderstand my main message: that he was the author
of his own deeds.
Another prisoner claimed to be under so strong a compulsion to
steal cars that it was irresistible – an addiction, he called it. He
stole as many as 40 vehicles a week but nevertheless considered
himself a fundamentally good person because he was never
violent towards anyone, and all the vehicles he stole were insured,
and therefore the owners would lose nothing. But regardless of
any financial incentive to do so, he contended, he stole cars for
the excitement of it: if prevented for a few days from indulging in
this activity, he became restless, depressed, and anxious. It was a
true addiction, he repeated at frequent intervals, in case I should
have forgotten in the meantime.
Now the generally prevalent conception of an addiction is of an
illness, characterised by an irresistible urge (mediated
neurochemically and possibly hereditary in nature) to consume a
drug or other substance, or to behave in a repetitively self-
destructive or anti-social way. An addict can’t help himself, and
because his behaviour is a manifestation of illness, it has no more
moral content than the weather. So in effect what my car thief was

47
telling me was that his compulsive car-stealing was not merely not
his fault, but that the responsibility for stopping him from behaving
thus was mine, since I was the doctor treating him. And until such
time as the medical profession found the behavioural equivalent of
an antibiotic in the treatment of pneumonia, he could continue to
cause untold misery and inconvenience to the owners of cars and
yet consider himself fundamentally a decent person.
That criminals often shift the locus of responsibility for their acts
elsewhere is illustrated by some of the expressions they use most
frequently in their consultations with me. Describing, for example,
their habitual loss of temper, which leads them to assault
whomever displeases them sufficiently, they say, ‘My head goes,’
or ‘My head just went.’
What exactly do they mean by this? They mean that they
consider themselves to suffer from a form of epilepsy or other
cerebral pathology whose only manifestation is involuntary rage,
of which it is the doctor’s duty to cure them. Quite often they put
me on warning that unless I find the cure for their behaviour, or at
least prescribe the drugs they demand, they are going to kill or
maim someone. The responsibility when they do so will be mine,
not theirs, for I knew what they were going to do yet failed to
prevent it. So their putative illness has not only explained and
therefore absolved them from past misconduct, but it has
exonerated them in advance from all future misconduct. Moreover,
by warning me of their intention to carry out further assaults, they
have set themselves up to be victims rather than perpetrators.
They told the authorities (me) what they were going to do, and yet
the authorities (I, again) did nothing; and so when they return to
prison after committing a further horrible crime, they will feel
aggrieved that ‘the system’, represented by me, has once again
let them down.

48
 But were I to take the opposite tack and suggest preventive
detention until they could control their temper, they would be
outraged at the injustice of it. What about habeas corpus? What
about innocence until guilt is proven? And they deduce nothing
from the fact that they can usually control their tempers in the
presence of a sufficiently opposing force.
Violent criminals often use an expression auxiliary to ‘My head
went’ when explaining their deeds: ‘It wasn’t me.’ Here is the
psychobabble of the slums, the doctrine of the ‘Real Me’ as
refracted through the lens of urban degradation. The Real Me has
nothing to do with the phenomenal me, the me that snatches old
ladies’ bags, breaks into other people’s houses, beats up my wife
and children, or repeatedly drinks too much and gets involved in
brawls. No, the Real Me is an immaculate conception, untouched
by human conduct: it is that unassailable core of virtue that
enables me to retain my self-respect whatever I do. What I am is
not at all determined by what I do; and insofar as what I do has
any moral significance at all, it is up to others to ensure that the
phenomenal me acts in accordance with the Real Me.
Hence one further expression frequently used by prisoners: ‘My
head needs sorting out.’
The visual image they have of their minds, I suspect, is of a
child’s box of bricks, piled higgledy-piggledy, which the doctor,
rummaging around in the skull, has the capacity and the duty to
put into perfect order, ensuring that henceforth all conduct will
automatically be honest, law-abiding, and economically
advantageous. Until this sorting out is done, constructive
suggestions – learn a skill, enroll in a correspondence course –
are met with the refrain, ‘I will – once my head’s sorted out.’
At the very heart of all this passivity and refusal of responsibility
is a deep dishonesty – what Sartre would have called bad faith.

49
For however vehemently criminals try to blame others, and
whatever appearance of sincerity they manage to convey while
they do so, they know at least some of the time that what they say
is untrue. This is clear in the habit drug addicts often have of
altering their language according to their interlocutors. To doctors,
social workers, and probation officers – to all who might prove
useful to them either in a prescribing or a testimonial capacity –
they emphasise their overwhelming and overpowering craving for
a drug, the intolerability of the withdrawal effects from it, the
deleterious effects it has upon their character, judgment, and
behaviour. Among themselves, though, their language is quite
different, optimistic rather than abject: it is about where you can
obtain the best-quality drug, where it is cheapest, and how to
heighten its effects.
I suspect (though I cannot prove, except by anecdote) that it is
the same among prisoners. It is hardly a new observation that
prisons are the universities of crime. Yet prisoners invariably
describe to doctors and psychologists their difficult upbringings
(which they bring out for the occasion almost like heirlooms), their
violent or absent fathers, their poverty and all the difficulties and
disadvantages to which urban flesh is heir. Among themselves,
though, what must be the discourse as they establish contacts,
learn new techniques, and deride the poor fools who earn an
honest living but never grow rich? That their outlook is dishonest
and self-serving is apparent in their attitude towards those whom
they believe to have done them wrong.
For example, they do not say of the policemen who they allege
(often plausibly) have beaten them up, ‘Poor cops! They were
brought up in authoritarian homes and now project the anger that
is really directed at their bullying fathers onto me. They need
counselling. They need their heads sorted out.’

50
 On the contrary, they say, with force and explosive emotion,
‘The bastards!’
They assume that the police act out of free, if malevolent, will.
The prisoner’s public presentation of himself often takes on a
curious resemblance to the portrayal of him by liberals. ‘You want
me to be a victim of circumstance?’ he seems to say. ‘All right, I’ll
be a victim for you.’
With repetition of his story, he comes to believe it, at least some
of the time and with part of his mind. Denial of guilt – both juridical
and moral – thus becomes possible in the presence of the most
minute memory of the circumstances of the crime.
Man has always had a capacity for the deceit of others and for
self-deception, of course. It was Nietzsche who famously
observed that pride and self-regard have no difficulty in
overcoming memory; and every psychic defence mechanism
known to the modern psychologist makes its appearance
somewhere in Shakespeare. Yet one’s impression nonetheless is
that the ease with which people discard responsibility for what
they have done – their intellectual and emotional dishonesty about
their own actions – has increased greatly in the last few decades.
Why should this occur just when, objectively speaking, freedom
and opportunity for the individual have never been greater?
In the first place, there is now a much enlarged constituency for
liberal views: the legions of helpers and carers, social workers and
therapists, whose incomes and careers depend crucially on the
supposed incapacity of large numbers of people to fend for
themselves or behave reasonably. Without the supposed
powerlessness of drug addicts, burglars, and others in the face of
their own undesirable inclinations, there would be nothing for the
professional redeemers to do. They have a vested interest in
psychopathology, and their entire therapeutic world view of the

51
patient as the passive, helpless victim of illness legitimises the
very behaviour from which they are to redeem him. Indeed, the
tangible advantages to the wrongdoer of appearing helpless are
now so great that he needs but little encouragement to do so.
In the second place, there has been a widespread
dissemination of psychotherapeutic concepts, in however garbled
or misinterpreted a form. These concepts have become the
currency even of the uneducated. Thus the idea has become
entrenched that if one does not know or understand the
unconscious motives for one’s acts, one is not truly responsible for
them. This, of course, applies only to those acts which someone
regards as undesirable: no one puzzles over his own
meritoriousness. But since there is no single ultimate explanation
of anything, one can always claim ignorance of one’s own
motives. Here is a perpetual getout.
Third, there has been a widespread acceptance of sociological
determinism, especially by the guilt-laden middle classes.
Statistical association has been taken indiscriminately as proving
causation: thus if criminal behaviour is more common among the
poorer classes, it must be poverty that causes crime. Nobody, of
course, experiences himself as sociologically determined –
certainly not the sociologist. And few of the liberals who espouse
such a viewpoint recognise its profoundly dehumanising
consequences. If poverty is the cause of crime, burglars do not
decide to break into houses any more than amoebae decide to
move a pseudopod towards a particle of food. They are automata
– and presumably should be treated as such.
Here the subliminal influence of Marxist philosophy surfaces:
the notion that it is not the consciousness of men that determines
their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines
their consciousness. If this were so, men would still live in caves;

52
but it has just enough plausibility to shake the confidence of the
middle classes that crime is a moral problem, not just a problem of
morale.
Into this rich brew of uncertainty and equivocation, social
historians are inclined to add their dash of seasoning, pointing out
that the middle classes saw crime as a moral problem even in the
eighteenth century, when for many malefactors it really was quite
another thing, since sometimes the only way for them to obtain
food was to steal it. To say this, of course, is to overlook the
fundamental change in life chances that has occurred since then.
In Georgian London, for example, the life expectancy at birth was
about 25 years, whereas it is now 75. At the height of the Victorian
era, the life expectancy of the royal family was 50 percent lower
than that of the very poorest section of the population today.
Surely to cling to explanations that might once have held some
force but are no longer plausible is, in the most literal sense,
reactionary. The very form of the explanation offered by liberals for
modern crime – from social conditions direct to behaviour, without
passing through the human mind – offers those who commit crime
an excuse in advance, an excuse which with part of their minds
they know to be false but which is nonetheless useful and
convenient to them in dealing with officialdom.
Finally, consider the effect that the mass media’s constant
rehearsal of injustices has upon the population. People come to
believe that, far from being extremely fortunate by the standards
of all previously existing populations, we actually live in the worst
of times and under the most unjust of dispensations. Every
wrongful conviction, every instance of police malfeasance, is so
publicised that even professional criminals, even those who have
performed appalling deeds, feel on a priori grounds they too must
have been unjustly, or at least hypocritically, dealt with.

53
 And the widespread notion that material inequality is in itself a
sign of institutionalised injustice also helps foster crime. If property
is theft, then theft is a form of just retribution. This leads to the
development of that most curious phenomenon, the ethical thief:
the thief who prides himself on stealing only from those who in his
estimation can stand the loss. Thus I have had many burglars tell
me in a glow of self-satisfaction that they would not steal from the
old, from children, or the poor, because that would be wrong.
‘In fact, you’d steal only from people like me,’ I say to them. (A
house opposite mine has been burgled four times in two years,
incidentally.)
They agree; and strangely enough they expect my approbation
of their restrained feloniousness. That’s how far things have gone.

1994

54
 GOODBYE, CRUEL WORLD

ONE OF THE WARDS in the hospital in which I work is

designated for patients who have poisoned themselves by
deliberate overdose.
We treat about twelve hundred cases a year there, so each day
I go to work firm in the conviction that by now I’ve heard
everything that human foolishness, depravity, fecklessness, and
cruelty have to offer by way of narrative. But each day my faith in
the ability of human beings comprehensively to ruin their lives is
renewed: not for nothing did Tolstoy write at the beginning of Anna
Karenina that every happy family is happy in the same way, but
every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Of course, it would be an exaggeration to call the social
arrangements in which most of my patients live ‘families’, but still
the point is made. Truly, the ways of human misery are infinite.
Let us take a snapshot of the ward and examine the previous
day’s catch from the great ocean of unhappiness that lies all about
us.
In the first of the six beds is a young woman of West Indian
descent, aged 21, who has dyed her hair orange and painted her
nails bright yellow. She tells me that she was once a nursery
school teacher but then went ‘on the sick’ with an illness about
whose nature it would be indelicate to ask, since it is obviously
wholly fraudulent – the product and not the precondition of
receiving sickness benefits from the public purse. She has a
terrific black eye and a large swelling on her forehead. She tells
me that she took her overdose after her ex-boyfriend, aged 19,
punched her.
‘Why did he do that?’ I ask.

55
 ‘I phoned him,’ she replies. ‘He said he’d told me he didn’t want
me to phone him no more.’
‘So he came round and hit you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does he hit you often?’
‘No,’ she replies. ‘Usually, he head-butts me.’
In the next bed is a man in his 50s, a former graduate of our
ward. Back then, he took to the pills because his brother – his
best friend and virtually his only reliable social contact since his
own divorce – had died.
This time, however, he overdose was precipitated by an entirely
different matter.
‘Some gypsies was smashing my windows, so I got out my
shotgun and shot one of them.’
‘Was he injured?’ I ask.
‘No, not serious. A bit in the leg, like. It was only home-made
cartridges, see, a bit of powder and scrap metal.’
‘Are the police involved?’
‘No.’
After it happened, neither party to the transaction was
particularly anxious to seek the protection or interference of the
law.
‘But now, presumably, you are afraid to return to your flat
because they will come for you again, and it won’t be only your
windows they’ll want to smash?’
‘That’s right.’
I arrange for him to be admitted to the psychiatric hospital, the
asylum of his choice.
In the next bed is a slender girl, aged 15. She wears bright red
lipstick and tight-fitting clothes, binges on food and vomits after
eating, and has cut her wrists on many occasions. She has taken

56
her stepfather’s anti-coagulant pills, which he needs after his heart
operation. She is a problem child and was brought to the hospital
by her mother as one might deliver a sack of potatoes; her
daughter’s suicidal gesture had made her late for her bingo.
Pouting and eternally on the verge of a temper tantrum, the child
says she does not want to return home.
‘Because of your mother and stepfather?’ I ask.
No, she says. She doesn’t want to return home because she
was raped three months ago somewhere in the council estate
where she lives, and since then graffiti have appeared there
saying that she enjoyed being raped and that she’s a ‘slag’
(meaning, a girl of easier virtue than average when adjusted for
age, social class, educational background, and so forth). This is a
point of view with which her mother wholeheartedly agrees, and
so the patient has decided to run away and live on the streets
rather than return home.
She doesn’t want to go to a municipal children’s home either,
and in this I can’t entirely blame her. She says she wants to be
found a foster family, but the social worker informs me that not
only is this difficult to arrange in a hurry but that once any
prospective family knows her history – her truancy from school,
her bulimia, her wrist-cutting – it will not agree to take her. The
only possible solution would be for her to live with her aunt (her
mother’s sister), where she lived once before and was so happy
that she behaved herself. But her mother, exercising parental
rights if not duties, has specifically forbidden that, precisely
because, I surmise, she behaves well there. Her mother wants to
be rid of her as much as she wants to be rid of her mother, but her
mother also wants to maintain the fiction that this desire stems
solely from her daughter’s impossible conduct. In order to disguise
her own contribution to the situation and her indifference towards

57
her own offspring, it is imperative that no place be found for her
daughter that is so agreeable that her behaviour improves there.
An impasse results; and so my patient is like the Russia of the
old proverb, in which all roads lead to disaster.
On to the next bed. Here is a man in his 30s, of powerful
physique and malign countenance – an unfortunate combination,
in my experience. He has taken an overdose of his wife’s anti-
depressant pills, and it does not take Sherlock Holmes to deduce
that he is the principal reason she needs them. He took the
overdose after he pinned her against the wall by her neck, round
which, he says, there are now bruises ‘no bigger than love-bites.’
She started it, he says, so it’s her fault; she’d been giving him
earache about his drinking all day.
‘I couldn’t take no more, so I had to get out of the house, and
she wouldn’t let me go. So yes, I did pin her up against the wall.’
He shows me by mime how he did it. ‘Everyone’s got their
breaking point, even you.’
He tells me that they argue constantly.
‘What about?’ I ask.
‘When I was in prison, she had an affair with a black man, who
beat her up, and an abortion.’
‘How long were you in prison?’ I ask.
‘Three years.’
‘Long imprisonment doesn’t do much for a marriage,’ I remark.
‘Yeah, but I didn’t ask her to lie down and open her legs, did I?’
‘Are you staying with her, then?’ I ask.
‘She’s got my children; they’re the only thing I’ve ever had. If
she takes them away from me, I’d have to go straight back to
crime, because there’s nothing else out there for me. I’d blitz the
public and the police; they wouldn’t know what happened to them.
They don’t mean no more to me than cockroaches. And I can tell

58
you, I’d soon have money in my pocket, more than you’ll ever
have.’
I point out that history suggests otherwise: he’s already spent
16 years of his life in prison.
‘Yeah, well this time I’ll do something really big; there’s no point
in getting a three or a five.’ His eyes shine with the brilliant, hard
light of the purest psychopathy. ‘I’m what this society and this
government’s made me. My father fucked me off to reform school
when I was young, and all they learnt me was how to commit
more crime. Well, now they’ve got what they want, so they’d better
look out if they take my children from me.’
There is not much point in continuing the conversation, so let us
now progress to the next bed, which contains a thin 27-year-old
woman of West Indian extraction who has drunk half a bottle of
methadone. This she got from a friend, who got it from a friend
(the person for whom it was actually prescribed is like a distant
ancestor, whom only a diligent genealogist could be expected to
uncover). She took the methadone to help her come down from
crack cocaine, which she has been taking many times a day for
two years. She lives at home with her mother and nine-year-old
daughter.
‘And the father of your daughter?’ I ask delicately, as if I were
inquiring about a history of venereal disease.
‘I don’t see him no more.’
‘Does he support your daughter in any way?’
‘He comes to see her sometimes.’
‘How often?’
‘When he feels like it.’
The patient had been a secretary in a law firm until a boyfriend
introduced her to crack.
‘You didn’t have to take it,’ I tell her.

59
 ‘It was free,’ she replies.
‘You mean, if I handed you 50 pills now, free of charge, you’d
take them?’
‘I would if I saw you take them, and they gave you a good time.’
The free crack did not last forever, of course, and soon she had
to pay for it. And having lost her job, the only way she could do so
was by accepting what both the New England Journal of Medicine
and The Lancet now call ‘sex work.’
I ask her whether she currently has a boyfriend.
‘He’s in prison.’
‘What for?’
‘Burglaries. He’s out in two years.’
Her mother, who looks after her daughter, arrives on the ward.
She is in her 50s, dressed in a blue suit and wearing an old-
fashioned hat with a veil and white gloves. As a person of the
utmost respectability, a householder and a churchgoer who on
Sunday speaks in tongues, she is deeply distressed by the
dissolution of her daughter into vice and addiction, though she is
at pains to disguise just how deeply. We soon dispatch the
daughter to a drug rehabilitation centre.
In the last of the six beds in the ward, an 18-year-old girl lies
looking up at the ceiling. She took her overdose, she tells me,
because she hates life. But in my experience people who hate life
rarely take quite so much trouble over their appearance, from
which I deduce that something more specific is bothering her. She
has left home and gone to live with a friend. She took the
overdose after a row with her boyfriend, 10 years older than she,
an ex-soldier dishonourably discharged from the Army for
smoking marijuana. She has been his girlfriend for nine months
now (the whole of her semi-adult life), and so far she has not gone
to live with him. But he is very jealous of her, wants to know where

60
she is every minute of the day, accuses her of infidelity, searches
through her things whenever she meets him, cross-examines her
about her activities in his absence, and searches her purse.
Though he has not yet hit her, he has been threatening at times.
She is frightened now to go anywhere without him, for fear of his
reaction. If they go out together, he never lets her out of his sight.
‘Do you know about his previous girlfriends?’ I ask.
‘He was living with one, but she left him when she found out he
was seeing someone else.’
‘What is your boyfriend interested in, apart from you?’ I ask.
‘Nothing, really,’ she replies.
‘And what are your interests?’ I ask again.
‘I don’t have any,’ she says.
She hates her poorly paid job, which requires no skill at all – not
that she has any skill to impart. She left school as soon as she
could, though I would estimate that she is of above-average
intelligence, and in any case she never tried very hard to learn,
because it was not socially acceptable to do so. In short, I tell her,
she has always taken the line of least resistance, and as it says in
Shakespeare, nothing will come of nothing.
‘What should I do?’ she asks me.
‘Your boyfriend will imprison you,’ I tell her. ‘He will take over
your life completely, and if you go to live with him he will become
violent. You will spend several years being ill-treated and abused;
eventually you will leave him, but you will not have been a victim.
On the contrary, you will have been the co-author of your misery,
because I have now told you what to expect, just as your parents
and your friends have told you.’
‘But I love him.’
‘You are 18 years old. The law says you are an adult. You must
make up your own mind. Here is my telephone number: ring me if

61
you need help.’
Our tour of the six beds is complete: nothing unusual or out of
the ordinary today, just an average trawl of social pathology,
ignorance of life, and wilful chasing after misery. Tomorrow is
another day, but the same tide of unhappiness will lap at our
doors.
Attempted suicide – what is also known as ‘parasuicide’ or
‘deliberate self-harm,’ in a vain effort to find the perfect scientific
terminology – is the most common cause of emergency admission
to the hospital in England among women and the second most
common among men. There are more than 120,000 cases a year,
and England boasts one of the highest rates of such behaviour in
the world. Its completed suicide rate, on the other hand, is rather
low by international standards. I do not think this merely denotes a
general comparative decline in technical competence among the
English (‘Made in England’, after all, no longer indicates quality
and reliability, but rather its reverse): it means only that many of
those who attempt suicide don’t intend to die.
It was not ever thus. Attempted suicide enjoyed, if that is quite
the word, an explosive growth at the end of the ’50s and the
beginning of the ’60s. Until then, to attempt suicide had remained
a crime in England, and it had also remained a comparatively rare
event. But something more than the liberalisation of the laws was
involved in the opening of the floodgates of self-poisoning, for the
floodgates were opened throughout the rest of the Western world
also. Within a few years, overdosing was as traditional as
Christmas.
Suicide and attempted suicide have attracted the attention of
sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists ever since the
publication in 1899 of Emile Durkheim’s great work Suicide. Today
an academic discipline known as suicidology thrives. The great

62
majority of the published work of these suicidologists is
mathematical: their writings overflow with dense statistical tables
correlating one factor (the unemployment rate, social class,
income, even the phases, of the moon) with the act of suicide or
attempted suicide.
Try as one might to remember that a correlation does not mean
cause and effect, the overall impact of this work is to suggest that,
if only enough variables were examined, if only enough data were
collected and analysed with sufficient sophistication, the ‘cause’ of
suicide and attempted suicide would be found. The importance of
what goes on in the minds of individual human beings is thus
implicitly denied, in favour of vast impersonal forces that statistical
regularities supposedly reveal and that supposedly determine
people’s behaviour. Thus suicidology joins the other great
intellectual movements of the 20th century – Freudianism,
Marxism, and more recently, sociobiology – in denying
consciousness any importance in human conduct. On this view,
thought is irrelevant to action; and, dimly apprehending the
intellectual currents of their time, ordinary people actually begin to
experience themselves as unable to affect their own behaviour.
Many patients have described to me how they took the pills
because, like Luther posting his theses on the cathedral doors,
they could do no other. Nevertheless, statistical regularities do
exist, and used sensitively they can provide insights into the
minds of men. For example, the number of patients admitted to
our ward declined precipitously during the first days of the Gulf
War and during the European soccer championships. People were
too absorbed for a time in affairs other than their own – albeit by
the proxy of television – to contemplate suicide. The boredom of
self-absorption is thus one of the promoters of attempted suicide,
and being attached to a cardiac monitor for a time or having an

63
intravenous infusion in one’s arm helps to relieve it. I’m treated,
therefore I am.
Patterns are also discernible in the daily flux of a busy overdose
ward. There is, for example, the pre-court-appearance overdose,
precisely timed to preclude the appearance of the defendant in the
dock and calculated to evoke sympathy for him when he finally
does appear there, insofar as he now has a psychiatric history.
Anyone with a psychiatric history, of course, must be of doubtful
responsibility for his own actions and therefore can expect a
correspondingly reduced sentence.
And then there is the pre-employment overdose. A surprising
number of the unemployed who succeed at last in finding a job
take an overdose on the evening before they start work: their non-
attendance the following morning gets them the sack before
they’ve even begun, and so they join the ranks of the unemployed
once more.
And then again there are the young Indian women who take
overdoses to avoid arranged marriages or the wrath of their
fathers when they discover that, contrary to the community’s code
of conduct, their daughters have been courting men of their own
choice, thus bringing ineradicable shame upon their families.
But patterns and statistical regularities by themselves tell us
little unless we are prepared to search for their meaning, and that
meaning is always to be found in the minds of men and women.
Why, then, do so many take to the pills? To swallow an
overdose without seriously intending to die is a curious thing to
do, after all, and is specific to modern Western, or Westernised,
society. They don’t do it in Senegal or Outer Mongolia. A gesture
in the direction of death, even though only a gesture, is still a
powerful signal of distress. But in nine-tenths of the cases (in my

64
experience) the distress is self-inflicted, or at least the
consequence of not knowing how to live.
The emotions that surround most overdoses are simultaneously
intense and shallow. In modern welfare states, the struggle for
subsistence has been abolished. In Africa, where I have also
worked, the poor engage in a cruelly demanding battle to obtain
water, food, firewood, and shelter for the day, even in the cities.
This battle gives meaning to their existence, and another day lived
without hunger in, say, Kinshasa, is a personal triumph of a kind.
Survival there is an achievement and grounds for celebration. This
is not so in my city, in which subsistence is more or less assured,
irrespective of conduct. On the other hand, there are large
numbers of people who are devoid of either ambition or interests.
They thus have nothing to fear and nothing to hope, and if they
work at all it is in jobs that provide little stimulus. Without religious
belief to imbue their existence with transcendental meaning from
without, they can provide none for themselves from within. What,
then, is left for them? Entertainment and personal relationships.
Entertainment, absorbed passively, informs them, through
television and films, of a materially more abundant and more
glamorous way of life and thus feeds resentment. A sense of their
own nothingness and failure breeds powerful emotions –
especially jealousy and the intense desire to dominate or possess
someone else in order to feel in control of at least one aspect of
life. It is a world in which men dominate women to inflate their
egos, and women want children ‘so that I can have something of
my own’ or ‘someone to love and who’ll love me.’ Personal
relationships in this world are purely instrumental in meeting the
need of the moment. They are fleeting and kaleidoscopic, though
correspondingly intense. After all, no obligations or pressures –
financial, legal, social, or ethical – keep people together. The only

65
cement for personal relationships is the need and desire of the
moment, and nothing is stronger but more fickle than need and
desire unshackled by obligation. Unfortunately, the whims of two
people rarely coincide, and thus the emotional lives of people –
who , remember, have very little else to console or interest them –
are repeatedly in crisis.
They are the stars of their own soap operas. An overdose –
with the secure knowledge that help is at hand – is often the
easiest way to relieve the continued crises in their lives. The
hospital is warm and welcoming, the staff sympathetic. In the
world that I describe, where else can one turn? Parents are
frequently hostile, and acquaintances are in the same boat.
Most overdosers – not all, of course – live in an existential void.
Theirs are voices calling from an abyss – an abyss created in
large part by the idea, peddled by generations of intellectuals, that
material security and human relationships unconstrained by any
kind of necessity would set mankind free, beyond the dreams of
past unenlightened or less fortunate ages.
To be or not to be? Overdosers opt for something in between
the two.

1997

66
 READER, SHE MARRIED HIM – ALAS

WHEN MULTICULTURALlSTS imagine the future, I suspect they

have something in mind like the glorious multiplicity of restaurants
serving all the cuisines of the world, which is now to be found in
most large cities. You can eat Thai on Monday, Italian on Tuesday,
Szechuan on Wednesday, Hungarian on Thursday, and so forth,
without any strain whatever.
Anyone who has withstood the rigours of English cooking is
bound to welcome this particular development. However, the
multiculturalist vision of the good society seems to me to be about
as profound and realistic as Marx’s famous description of what life
would be like under communism once society was no longer
divided into competing classes. In communist society, wrote Marx,
nobody would have one exclusive sphere of activity; instead a
man might hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in
the evening, and criticise after dinner, just as he had a mind to do,
without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.
Under multiculturalism, a man might turn towards Mecca in the
morning, sacrifice a chicken in the afternoon, and go to Mass in
the evening, without ever becoming a Muslim, an animist, or a
Catholic.
As a doctor working in a slum area with many immigrant
residents, I see multiculturalism from the ground up, rather than
from the theory down. And it is clear from what I see almost every
day that not all cultural values are compatible or can be reconciled
by the enunciation of platitudes. The idea that we can all rub along
together, without the law having to discriminate in favour of one
set of cultural values rather than another, is worse than merely
false: it makes no sense whatever.

67
 Let me say at once that I believe immigration to be a healthy
phenomenon, particularly for an otherwise insular and inward-
looking country such as Britain. Immigrants are generally hard-
working and enterprising and enrich cultural life – provided, that is,
they are not given victim status ex officio and their culture is not
subjected to the sort of condescending patronage with which the
Soviet state treated minorities.
Very large numbers of immigrants do in fact succeed in living in
two cultures at once: not because anyone tells them to do so but
because they want to and because they must. Despite such
successes, however, conflicts frequently emerge between
individuals and groups because of different cultural standards,
beliefs, and expectations. For us, these conflicts can be resolved
by appeal to the deeply ingrained higher principle embodied in the
law, that individuals have the right (within defined limits) to choose
how to live. But this Western notion of individualism and tolerance
is by no means a conception in all cultures.
I am consulted by large numbers of young women whose
parents came to England from India and Pakistan and remain
deeply attached to the values that prevailed in the remote villages
from which they emigrated 20 or 30 years ago. It is even possible
that, despite the enterprising spirit that brought them from their
homeland, they are more culturally conservative than their
compatriots who remained at home: for migration across half the
world is very stressful and disorienting, and old customs therefore
become to some immigrants what soft toys are to children in the
dark – a source of great comfort. Be that as it may, their
daughters, having grown up in a different cultural environment, no
longer accept the customs to which their parents so tenaciously
cling and which seem to them unquestionably right and natural.

68
Conflict usually revolves around matters of education, career, and
love.
A 16-year-old Muslim girl was referred to me because she had
started to wet the bed at night. She was accompanied by her
father, an unskilled factory worker of Pakistani origin, and was
beautifully dressed in satins and chiffon, her ankles and wrists
covered with gold bangles and bracelets. Her father was reluctant
to let me speak to her on her own but at my insistence eventually
permitted me to do so.
I realised at once that she was both highly intelligent and
deeply unhappy. Because of my experience in such cases, it took
little time to discover the source of her unhappiness.
Her father had decided that she was to marry in a couple of
months’ time a man – a cousin – of whom she knew nothing. She,
on the other hand, wished to continue her education, to study
English literature at university and eventually to become a
journalist. Although she controlled herself well – in the
circumstances, heroically – there was absolutely no mistaking the
passionate intensity of her wishes or of her despair. Her father,
though, knew nothing of them: she had never dared tell him,
because he was likely then to lock her in the house and forbid her
ever to leave, except under close escort. As far as he was
concerned, education, career, or choice of husbands was not for
girls. She saw her future life stretch endlessly before her, married
to a man she did not love, performing thankless domestic
drudgery not only for him but for her in-laws, who, according to
custom, would live with them, while always dreaming of the wider
world of which she had caught so brief and tantalising a glimpse
at school.
I interviewed her father, also on his own. I asked him what he
thought was wrong with his daughter.

69
 ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘She is happy, normal girl. Only she is
wetting the bed.’
There was nothing I could do, other than to prescribe
medication. Had I tried to interfere, I could easily have precipitated
an extreme reaction on his part. The girl’s fears of being locked up
were by no means exaggerated or absurd. I have known many
instances of girls such as she who were imprisoned in their
homes, sometimes for years, by their relatives; there is even a
special unit of the local police dedicated to rescuing them, once
information has been laid that they are being held at home against
their will.
Not that fleeing the parental home is necessarily an answer for
a girl in such a situation, for a number of reasons.
First, her own feelings towards her parents are likely to be
highly ambivalent: family bonds are extremely strong and not
easily broken. The daughters love and respect their parents,
whom they normally honour and obey, even though the parents
inflict upon them a future that will cause nothing but the most
prolonged and unutterable misery. The parents are not neglectful
and incompetent, like those from the white underclass: according
to their lights, they are highly solicitous for what they consider the
good of their daughters.
Moreover, the ‘community’ will condemn the girl who runs away
and regard her, quite literally, as a prostitute. Since these girls are
not fully integrated into the rest of British society and have hitherto
led very sheltered lives, they have nowhere to go and nobody to
turn to.
In the parents’ scale of values, the respect of the community
comes higher than the individual happiness of their offspring and
indeed is a precondition of it. The need for this respect does
encourage a certain standard of conduct, but it depends upon the

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offspring carrying out without demur the obligations laid upon
them by the parents. Thus, once a marriage has been arranged, it
is indissoluble – at least by the woman. I have known many young
women who have been mercilessly and brutally treated by their
husbands, but whose own parents recommended that they put up
with the ill-treatment rather than bring public shame upon the
whole family by separating from them.
A young patient of mine tried to hang herself. She had had an
arranged marriage, but on the wedding night her husband had
come to the doubtless mistaken conclusion that she was not a
virgin and had administered a severe beating, of which the rest of
his family naturally approved. Thereafter he locked her up, beat
her regularly, and burned her with a cigarette lighter. She
managed to run away, though her husband had said in advance
that if ever he caught her doing so, or after having done so, he
would kill her, to pay her back for the loss of face she would have
caused him in the community. She returned to her mother, who,
horrified by her behaviour, said she should return to her husband
at once (even if he were going to kill her), in order to preserve the
good name of the family. Her other daughters would be
unmarriageable if it became known in the community that this was
the kind of conduct to which the family was prone. If my patient
did not return to her husband, she – her mother – would commit
suicide.
Torn between the threatened suicide of her mother and the
prospect of murder by her husband, she took to the rope.
In my quarter of the city there are private-detective agencies
that specialise in locating immigrant girls who have run away from
their husbands or parents. Once they are found, they are likely to
be kidnapped by relatives or vigilantes – an experience which
several of my patients have lived through. It is surprising how little

71
reaction bundling someone off the street and driving away with
him or her in a car causes nowadays – people do not wish to
involve themselves in problems not their own. And the police are
generally less than vigorous in their investigation of such cases,
for fear of being criticised as racist.
I frequently meet young women whose parents, in flagrant
contravention of the law, prevented them from attending school.
The parents resort to a variety of subterfuges to protect their
daughters from contamination by Western ideas. Complaisant
doctors from the same racial and cultural group, who share the
concerns of the parents, provide certificates for bogus illnesses,
either of the pupil or of the pupil’s mother, which require the girl’s
presence at home. Another technique is for the girl to be sent to
school one week in four, to keep the school inspectors at bay.
They too tread warily, for fear of being accused of acting from
racial prejudice.
A patient of mine was thus kept away from school after the age
of 11 for fear of being contaminated by Western notions. She was
sent back to India for months at a time, so that the school lost
track of her. Thanks to very superior natural intelligence, however,
and surreptitious reading, for which she had a passion, she was
now (at the age of 28) contemplating attending university to study
law. But the rest of her story is also instructive and not untypical of
what I hear.
At the age of 15 she had been taken back yet again to India,
this time in the company of her parents and a 16-year-old boy who
until then had been brought up in her house as her brother. When
they arrived at the village in Gujurat from which her parents had
emigrated, she was told that her ‘brother’ was in fact her first
cousin and that she was to marry him the next day. This she said
she would not do, whereupon her father beat her black and blue.

72
She still bore the scars of her beating, and her face was still
slightly asymmetrical where her cheekbone had been fractured.
She maintained her opposition, however, until her father
threatened to divorce her mother, casting her out, at the age of 45,
into the street, unless the daughter consented to the marriage. His
threat was not idle. Reader, she married him.
But still it was not enough: the relatives wanted to ensure that
the marriage was consummated.
Since the happy couple had been brought up as brother and
sister, consummation seemed to them rather like incest, but the
relatives would not take no for an answer and locked them
together in a room for two weeks. They put a tape recorder under
the bed to ensure that justice was done. When they discovered
that still nothing had happened between them, they threatened
violence: whereupon there was a happy ending, and she became
pregnant.
She lived with her husband for 12 years after their return to
England, never loving him as a husband but fearing to leave him
because of her father’s reaction. The husband, who likewise had
no love for his wife, feared to leave because of his own relatives’
reaction. Eventually they did separate but maintained the fiction
that they still lived together, a fiction whose verisimilitude it took
great expense of effort and ingenuity to maintain – a true expense
of spirit in a waste of shame.
One of the conceits of multiculturalism is that the intolerance
against which it is supposedly the sovereign remedy is a
characteristic only of the host society. In the impoverished
imagination of the multiculturalists, all those who do not belong by
birth to the predominant culture are engaged in a united struggle
against its oppressive and illegitimate hegemony. The reality, in
my experience, is somewhat different.

73
 For example, relations between immigrants from the Indian
subcontinent and from Jamaica, at least in my city, are often far
from amicable, the hostility extending to the generation born in
England. Indian families are often dismayed (to put it mildly) when
their daughters choose Jamaican lovers. I know of two who have
been killed by their close families to redeem family honour in the
eyes of their community. The first was hanged at home; the
second was taken back to Pakistan, where she was beaten to
death, the local police regarding this as the correct procedure
under the circumstances.
Religious tolerance is not a value universally admired. Not only
is it not emulated or practised, but the urbane skepticism, indeed
the lack of absolute faith, that it implies is regarded by many as
anathema. Relations between the Hindu Sikhs and the Muslim
Indians, for example, are particularly fraught, and scarcely any
greater disaster can befall a family – in the eyes of its respective
community – than for one of its own young people to fall in love
with a young person of the other religion. The telluric emotions
aroused by such liaisons often result in violence. Scarcely a week
goes by without a terrible or tragic case coming to my attention.
A pleasant and intelligent Sikh girl, aged 18, was asked by her
family to accompany her aged grandmother back home in a taxi,
in which she was then to return. The taxi firm was run by Sikhs,
who not only acted as transporters of the public but as vigilantes
and guardians of their community’s honour. The driver in this case
reported to the girl’s brother on her arrival home that, during the
return journey through a neighbourhood inhabited mainly by
Muslims, she had waved to a Muslim boy. The brother, fearing the
worst, called her into his room and asked whether she had in fact
done so. She denied it, but he did not believe her. He took out a
baseball bat (practically no baseball is played in Britain, but plenty

74
of bats are sold as weapons and lie detectors) and tried to beat
what he considered the truth out of her. She later appeared in my
hospital with a badly fractured skull, but maintained to the police
on her recovery that he had been assaulted on her doorstep by
person or persons unknown.
A young Sikh boy formed a liaison with a Muslim girl. He was
an outgoing lad, a good student and fine athlete who represented
his school and his city at several different sports. He used to meet
his girlfriend clandestinely, in the flat of a young Muslim friend of
his – or someone whom he had considered his friend. The friend,
however, telephoned the girl’s brothers and asked how long they
were going to allow their family to be dishonoured.
On his way to his evening work, the Sikh boy was attacked with
machetes by the girl’s three brothers. They knocked him to the
ground, threatened to cut his throat next time, and hacked
repeatedly at both his arms. This took place within 100 yards of
my hospital’s main entrance. He had a compound fracture of his
humerus, and so many of his tendons were cut that he will never
recover full use of his hands and arms. The three brothers were
duly caught and tried. Unfortunately, they were granted bail, and
when it was clear that the trial was certain to result in a verdict of
guilty, they failed to attend the court and were sentenced in
absentia to long terms of imprisonment. My patient went into
hiding in a city 400 miles away, fearing to leave his flat there and
sleeping always with a knife under his pillow. He had received
information from a reliable source that the three brothers were still
looking for him and would kill him if they found him.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the story is that the three
brothers were not regarded as delinquents by other members of
their community but as having behaved in a thoroughly honorable
and decent way. That they had broken the law in pursuing their

75
vendetta, thus risking imprisonment, only added to their honor:
they were spirited boys to be proud of.
Of course my work brings me into contact with the most
dramatic instances of such caste, religious, and cultural
intolerance, but I could tell very many such stories, the
protagonists of which also know of many similar instances
unknown to me: thus I am seeing the tip of an iceberg, not – to
change the metaphor – the last survivors of a rare and
endangered species.
I am by no means concluding that the cultures from which these
patients come are worthless, that there is nothing to be learned
from them (for example, about the role of family solidarity in
enabling many children who live in physically poor conditions to
achieve at school), or even that there is nothing whatever to be
said in favour of the scale of values they espouse. When I talk to
the parents who believe in that scale of values, they often speak
most eloquently and intelligently of the social devastation they see
around them among the white underclass, for whom human
relationships are kaleidoscopic in their changeability, and whose
lives are built on the most shifting of sands. I can quite understand
that what they see only reinforces their determination to live
according to their own beliefs, and that they do not want their
children to become like that underclass.
Nevertheless, the painful and inescapable fact remains that
many aspects of the cultures which they are trying to preserve are
incompatible not only with the mores of a liberal democracy but
with its juridical and philosophical foundations. No amount of
hand-wringing or euphemism can alter this fact. To allow certain
groups to refuse to send their girls to school, on the grounds that it
is not in their culture to do so, would be to grant such groups the
kind of corporate rights that will inevitably result in chronic civil

76
war, with every conceivable group claiming such rights. Individuals
will have to forgo altogether the freedoms in which Western liberal
democracy believes.
The idea that it is possible to base a society on no cultural or
philosophical presuppositions at all, or, alternatively, that all such
presuppositions may be treated equally so that no choice has to
be made between them, is absurd.
Immigrants enrich – have enriched – our culture, but they do so
by addition rather than by subtraction or division.

1995

77
 TOUGH LOVE

LAST WEEK, a 17-year-old girl was admitted to my ward with

such acute alcohol poisoning that she could scarcely breathe by
her own unaided efforts, alcohol being a respiratory depressant.
When finally she woke, 12 hours later, she told me that she had
been a heavy drinker since the age of 12.
She had abjured alcohol for four months before her admission,
she told me, but had just returned to the bottle because of a crisis.
Her boyfriend, aged 16, had just been sentenced to three years’
detention for a series of burglaries and assaults. He was what she
called her ‘third long-term relationship’ – the first two having lasted
four and six weeks, respectively. But after four months of life with
the young burglar, the prospect of separation from him was painful
enough to drive her back to drink.
It happened that I also knew her mother, a chronic alcoholic
with a taste for violent boyfriends, the latest of whom had been
stabbed in the heart a few weeks before in a pub brawl. The
surgeons in my hospital saved his life; and to celebrate his
recovery and discharge, he had gone straight to the pub. From
there he went home, drunk, and beat up my patient’s mother.
My patient was intelligent but badly-educated, as only products
of the British educational system can be after eleven years of
compulsory school attendance. She thought the Second World
War took place in the 1970s and could give me not a single
correct historical date.
I asked her whether she thought a young and violent burglar
would have proved much of a companion. She admitted that he
wouldn’t, but said that he was the type she liked; besides which –
in slight contradiction – all boys were the same.

78
 I warned her as graphically as I could that she was already well
down the slippery slope leading to poverty and misery – that, as I
knew from the experience of untold patients, she would soon have
a succession of possessive, exploitative, and violent boyfriends
unless she changed her life. I told her that in the past few days I
had seen two women patients who had had their heads rammed
down the lavatory, one who had had her head smashed through a
window and her throat cut on the shards of glass, one who had
had her arm, jaw, and skull broken, and one who had been
suspended by her ankles from a tenth-floor window to the tune of,
‘Die, you bitch!’
‘I can look after myself,’ said my 17-year-old.
‘But men are stronger than women,’ I said. ‘When it comes to
violence, they are at an advantage.’
‘That’s a sexist thing to say,’ she replied.
A girl who had absorbed nothing at school had nevertheless
absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness in general, and of
feminism in particular.
‘But it’s a plain, straightforward, and inescapable fact,’ I said.
‘It’s sexist,’ she reiterated firmly.
A stubborn refusal to face inconvenient facts, no matter how
obvious, now pervades our attitude towards relations between the
sexes. An ideological filter of wishful thinking strains out anything
we’d prefer not to acknowledge about these eternally difficult and
contested relations, with predictably disastrous results. I meet this
refusal everywhere, even among the nursing staff of my ward.
Intelligent and capable, as decent and dedicated a group of
people as I know, they seem, in the matter of judging the
character of men, utterly, almost wilfully, incompetent. In my
toxicology ward, for example, 98 percent of the 1,300 patients we
see each year have attempted suicide by overdose. Just over half

79
of them are men, at least 70 percent of whom have recently
perpetrated domestic violence. After stabbing, strangling, or
merely striking those who now appear in medical records as their
partners, they take an overdose for at least one of three reasons,
and sometimes for all three: to avoid a court appearance; to apply
emotional blackmail to their victims; and to present their own
violence as a medical condition that it is the doctor’s duty to cure.
As for our women patients who’ve attempted suicide, some 70
percent have suffered domestic violence.
In the circumstances, it isn’t altogether surprising that I can now
tell at a glance – with a fair degree of accuracy – that a man is
violent towards his significant other. (It doesn’t follow, of course,
that I can tell when a man isn’t violent towards her.) In truth, the
clues are not particularly subtle. A closely-shaven head with many
scars on the scalp from collisions with broken bottles or glasses; a
broken nose; blue tattoos on the hands, arms, and neck, relaying
messages of love, hate, and challenge; but above all, a facial
expression of concentrated malignity, outraged egotism, and feral
suspiciousness – all these give the game away. Indeed, I no
longer analyse the clues and deduce a conclusion: a man’s
propensity to violence is as immediately legible in his face and
bearing as any other strongly marked character trait.
All the more surprising is it to me, therefore, that the nurses
perceive things differently. They do not see a man’s violence in his
face, his gestures, his deportment, and his bodily adornments,
even though they have the same experience of the patients as I.
They hear the same stories, they see the same signs, but they do
not make the same judgments. What’s more, they seem never to
learn; for experience – like chance, in the famous dictum of Louis
Pasteur – favours only the mind prepared. And when I guess at a
glance that a man is an inveterate wife beater (I use the term

80
‘wife’ loosely), they are appalled at the harshness of my judgment,
even when it proves right once more.
This is not a matter of merely theoretical interest to the nurses,
for many of them in their private lives have themselves been the
compliant victims of violent men. For example, the lover of one of
the senior nurses, an attractive and lively young woman, recently
held her at gunpoint and threatened her with death, after having
repeatedly blacked her eye during the previous months. I met him
once when he came looking for her in the hospital: he was just the
kind of ferocious young egotist to whom I would give a wide berth
in the broadest daylight.
Why are the nurses so reluctant to come to the most
inescapable of conclusions? Their training tells them, quite rightly,
that it is their duty to care for everyone without regard for personal
merit or deserts; but for them, there is no difference between
suspending judgment for certain restricted purposes and making
no judgment at all in any circumstances whatsoever. It is as if they
were more afraid of passing an adverse verdict on someone than
of getting a punch in the face – a likely enough consequence,
incidentally, of their failure of discernment. Since it is scarcely
possible to recognise a wife beater without inwardly condemning
him, it is safer not to recognise him as one in the first place.
This failure of recognition is almost universal among my
violently abused women patients, but its function for them is
somewhat different from what it is for the nurses. The nurses need
to retain a certain positive regard for their patients in order to do
their job. But for the abused women, the failure to perceive in
advance the violence of their chosen men serves to absolve them
of all responsibility for whatever happens thereafter, allowing them
to think of themselves as victims alone, rather than the victims
and accomplices they are. Moreover, it licenses them to obey their

81
impulses and whims, allowing them to suppose that sexual
attractiveness is the measure of all things and that prudence in
the selection of a male companion is neither possible nor
desirable.
Often their imprudence would be laughable were it not tragic:
many times in my ward I’ve watched liaisons form between an
abused female patient and an abusing male patient within half an
hour of their striking up an acquaintance. By now I can often
predict the formation of such a liaison – and predict that it will as
certainly end in violence as that the sun will rise tomorrow.
At first, of course, my female patients deny that the violence of
their men was foreseeable. But when I ask them whether they
think I would have recognised it in advance, the great majority –
nine out of ten – reply, yes, of course. And when asked how they
think I would have done so, they enumerate precisely the factors
that would have led me to that conclusion. So their blindness is
wilful.
Today’s disastrous insouciance about so serious a matter as
the relationship between the sexes is surely something new in
history: even 30 years ago, people showed vastly more
circumspection in the formation of liaisons than they do now. The
change represents, of course, the fulfillment of the sexual
revolution. The prophets of that revolution wished to empty the
relationship between the sexes of all moral significance and to
destroy the customs and institutions that governed it. The
entomologist Alfred Kinsey reacted against his own repressed and
puritanical upbringing by concluding that all forms of sexual
restraint were unjustified and psychologically harmful; the novelist
Norman Mailer, having taken racial stereotypes as seriously as
any Ku Klux Klansman, saw in the supposedly uninhibited
sexuality of the Negro the hope of the world for a more abundant

82
and richer life; the Cambridge social anthropologist Edmund
Leach informed the thinking British public over the radio that the
nuclear family was responsible for all human discontents (this, in
the century of Hitler and Stalin!); and the psychiatrist R. D. Laing
blamed the family structure for serious mental illness. In their
different ways, Norman O. Brown, Paul Goodman, Herbert
Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich joined in the campaign to convince
the Western world that untrammelled sexuality was the secret of
happiness and that sexual repression, along with the bourgeois
family life that had once contained and channelled sexuality, were
nothing more than engines of pathology.
All these enthusiasts believed that if sexual relations could be
liberated from artificial social inhibitions and legal restrictions,
something beautiful would emerge: a life in which no desire need
be frustrated, a life in which human pettiness would melt away like
snow in spring. Conflict and inequality between the sexes would
likewise disappear, because everyone would get what he or she
wanted, when and where he or she wanted it. The grounds for
such petty bourgeois emotions as jealousy and envy would
vanish: in a world of perfect fulfilment, each person would be as
happy as the next.
The programme of the sexual revolutionaries has more or less
been carried out, especially in the lower reaches of society, but
the results have been vastly different from those so foolishly
anticipated. The revolution foundered on the rock of
unacknowledged reality: that women are more vulnerable to
abuse than men by virtue of their biology alone, and that the
desire for the exclusive sexual possession of another has
remained just as strong as ever. This desire is incompatible, of
course, with the equally powerful desire – eternal in the human
breast but hitherto controlled by social and legal inhibitions – for

83
complete sexual freedom. Because of these biological and
psychological realities, the harvest of the sexual revolution has not
been a brave new world of human happiness but rather an
enormous increase in violence between the sexes, for readily
understandable reasons.
Of course, even before any explanation, the reality of this
increase meets angry denial from those with a vested ideological
interest in concealing the results of changes they helped bring
about and heartily welcome. They will use the kind of obfuscation
that liberal criminologists so long employed to convince us that it
was the fear of crime, rather than crime itself, that had increased.
They will say (quite rightly) that violence between men and
women has existed always and everywhere but that our attitude
towards it has changed (perhaps also correct), so that it is more
frequently reported than formerly.
Still, the fact remains that a hospital such as mine has
experienced in the last two decades a huge increase in the
number of injuries to women, most of them the result of domestic
violence and many of them of the kind that would always have
come to medical attention. The increase is real, therefore, not an
artifact of reporting. About one in five of the women aged 16 to 50
living in my hospital’s area attends the emergency department
during the year as a result of injuries sustained during a quarrel
with a boyfriend or husband; and there is no reason to suppose
that my hospital’s experience is any different from that of another
local hospital, which, together with mine, provides medical
attention for half the city’s population.
In the last five years I have treated at least 2,000 men who
have been violent to their wives, girlfriends, lovers, and
concubines. It seems to me that violence on such a vast scale
could not easily have been overlooked in the past – including by

84
me. And there is very good reason why such violence should have
increased under the new sexual dispensation. If people demand
sexual liberty for themselves, but sexual fidelity from others, the
result is the inflammation of jealousy, for it is natural to suppose
that one is being done by as one is doing to others – and jealousy
is the most frequent precipitant of violence between the sexes.
Jealousy has always been a feature of the relations between
men and women: Othello, written four centuries ago, is still
instantly comprehensible to us. But I meet at least five Othellos
and five Desdemonas a week, and this is something new, if the
psychiatric textbooks printed a few years ago were right in
claiming that jealousy of the obsessive sort was a rare condition.
Far from being rare, it is nowadays almost the norm, especially
among underclass men, whose fragile sense of self-worth derives
solely from possession of a woman and is poised permanently on
the brink of humiliation at the prospect of losing this one prop in
life.
The belief in the inevitability of male jealousy is one of the main
reasons my violently abused women patients do not leave the
men who abuse them. These women have experienced three or
four such men in succession, and it hardly makes sense to
exchange one for another. Better the abuse you know than the
abuse you don’t.
When I ask whether they’d be better off without any man at all
than with a male tormentor, they reply that a single woman in their
neighbourhood is seen as an easy prey to all men, and, without
her designated, if violent, protector, she would suffer more
violence, not less.
The jealousy of the men – and the passion is commoner in
men, though women are catching up and becoming violent in turn
– is a projection onto women of their own behaviour. The great

85
majority of the jealous men I meet are flagrantly unfaithful to the
object of their supposed affections, and some keep other women
in the same jealous subjection elsewhere in the city and even 100
miles away. They have no compunction about cuckolding other
men and actually delight in doing so as a means of boosting their
own fragile egos. As a result, they imagine that all other men are
their rivals: for rivalry is a reciprocal relationship. Thus a mere
glance in a pub directed at a man’s girlfriend is sufficient to start a
fight not only between the girl and her lover but, even before that,
between the two men.
Serious crimes of violence continue to rise in England, many of
them occasioned by sexual jealousy. Cherchez la femme has
never been a sounder guide to explaining attempted murder than
it is today; and the extremely fluid nature of relations between the
sexes is what makes it so sound a precept.
The violence of the jealous man is not always occasioned by
his lover’s supposed interest in another man, however. On the
contrary, it serves a prophylactic function and helps to keep the
woman utterly in thrall to him until the day she decides to leave
him: for the whole focus of her life is the avoidance of his rage.
Avoidance is impossible, however, since it is the very arbitrariness
of his violence that keeps her in thrall to him. Thus when I hear
from a female patient that the man with whom she lives has
beaten her severely for a trivial reason – for having served roast
potatoes when he wanted boiled, for example, or for having failed
to dust the top of the television – I know at once that the man is
obsessively jealous: for the jealous man wishes to occupy his
lover’s every thought, and there is no more effective method of
achieving this than his arbitrary terrorism. From his point of view,
the more arbitrary and completely disproportionate the violence,
the more functional it is; and indeed, he often lays down

86
conditions impossible for the woman to meet – that a freshly
cooked meal should be waiting for him the moment he arrives
home, for instance, though he will not say even to within the
nearest four hours when he is arriving home – precisely so that he
may have an occasion to beat her. Indeed, so effective is this
method that the mental life of many of the violently abused women
who consult me has focused for years upon their lovers – their
whereabouts, their wishes, their comforts, their moods – to the
exclusion of all else.
When finally she leaves him, as she almost always does, he
regards it as an act of the utmost perfidy and concludes that he
must treat his next female companion with even greater severity
to avoid a repetition. Observing the fluidity of the sexual
relationships around him and reflecting upon his own recent
experience, he falls prey to a permanent sexual paranoia. Worse
still, the social trend to these kinds of relationships is self-
reinforcing: for the children they produce grow up supposing that
all relationships between men and women are but temporary and
subject to revision. From the very earliest age, therefore, the
children live in an atmosphere of tension between the natural
desire for stability and the emotional chaos they see all around
them. They are able to make no assumption that the man in their
lives – the man they call ‘Daddy’ today – will be there tomorrow.
(As one of my patients put it when talking of her decision to leave
her latest boyfriend, ‘He was my children’s father until last week.’
Needless to say, he was none of the children’s biological father, all
of the latter having departed long before.)
A son learns that women are always on the point of leaving
men; a daughter, that men are not to be relied upon and are
inevitably violent. The daughter is mother to the woman: and since
she has learned that all relationships with men are both violent

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and temporary, she concludes that there is not much point in
taking thought for the morrow as far as choosing men is
concerned. Not only is there little difference between them except
in the accidental quality of their physical attractiveness to her, but
mistakes can be rectified by the simple expedient of abandoning
the man, or men, in question. Thus sexual relationships can be
entered into with no more thought than that devoted to choosing
breakfast cereal – precisely the ideal of Kinsey, Mailer, et al.
But why does the woman not leave the man as soon as he
manifests his violence? It is because, perversely, violence is the
only token she has of his commitment to her. Just as he wants the
exclusive sexual possession of her, she wants a permanent
relationship with him. She imagines – falsely – that a punch in the
face or a hand round the throat is at least a sign of his continued
interest in her, the only sign other than sexual intercourse she is
ever likely to receive in that regard. In the absence of a marriage
ceremony, a black eye is his promissory note to love, honor,
cherish, and protect.
It is not his violence as such that causes her to leave him, but
the eventual realisation that his violence is not, in fact, a sign of
his commitment to her. She discovers that he is unfaithful to her,
or that his income is greater than she suspected and is spent
outside the home, and it is only then that his violence seems
intolerable. So convinced is she that violence is an intrinsic and
indispensable part of relations between the sexes, however, that if
by some chance she alights next time upon a nonviolent man, she
suffers acute discomfort and disorientation; she may, indeed, even
leave him because of his insufficient concern for her. Many of my
violently abused women patients have told me that they find
nonviolent men intolerably indifferent and emotionally distant, rage
being the only emotion they’ve ever seen a man express. They

88
leave them quicker than they leave men who have beaten and
otherwise abused them.
The sexual revolutionaries wanted to liberate sexual relations
from all but the merest biological content. Henceforth such
relations were not to be subject to restrictive bourgeois contractual
arrangements – or, heaven forbid, sacraments – such as
marriage; no social stigma was to attach to any sexual conduct
that had hitherto been regarded as reprehensible. The only
criterion governing the acceptability of sexual relations was the
mutual consent of those entering upon them: no thought of duty to
others (one’s own children, for example) was to get in the way of
the fulfilment of desire. Sexual frustration that resulted from
artificial social obligations and restrictions was the enemy, and
hypocrisy – the inevitable consequence of holding people to any
standard of conduct whatsoever – was the worst sin.
That the heart wants contradictory, incompatible things; that
social conventions arose to resolve some of the conflicts of our
own impulses; that eternal frustration is an inescapable
concomitant of civilisation, as Freud had observed – all these
recalcitrant truths fell beneath the notice of the proponents of
sexual liberation, dooming their revolution to ultimate failure. The
failure hit the underclass hardest. Not for a moment did the sexual
liberators stop to consider the effects upon the poor of the
destruction of the strong family ties that alone made emergence
from poverty possible for large numbers of people. They were
concerned only with the petty dramas of their own lives and
dissatisfactions. But by obstinately overlooking the most obvious
features of reality, as did my 17-year-old patient who thought that
men’s superior physical strength was a socially constructed sexist
myth, their efforts contributed in no small part to the intractability
of poverty in modern cities, despite vast increases in the general

89
wealth: for the sexual revolution has turned the poor from a class
into a caste, from which escape is barred so long as that
revolution continues.

1999

90
 IT HURTS, THEREFORE I AM

THE CAUSE OF CRIMINALITY among the white population of

England is perfectly obvious to any reasonably observant person,
though criminologists have yet to notice it. This cause is the
tattooing of the skin.
A slow-acting virus, like that of scrapie in sheep, is introduced
into the human body via the tattooing needle and makes its way to
the brain, where within a few years it causes the afflicted to steal
cars, burgle houses, and assault people.
I first formulated my viral theory of criminality when I noticed
that at least nine of ten white English prisoners are tattooed, more
than three or four times the proportion in the general population.
The statistical association of crime with tattooing is stronger, I feel
certain, than between crime and any other single factor, with the
possible exception of smoking. Virtually all English criminals are
smokers, a fact that sociologists have also unaccountably
overlooked.
There are two main schools of tattooing: the do-it-yourself and
the professional. They are by no means mutually exclusive; on the
contrary, their relationship is rather like that between alternative
(or fringe) and orthodox medicine. Devotees of the one often are
simultaneously devotees of the other. The differences between
the two schools are very marked.
Home tattooing is monochrome india-ink coloured, while
professional tattooing is polychrome. The designs of the first are
simple, though no less striking for that. The designs of the latter
are elaborate and often executed with exquisite skill, though I am
reminded of an old medical dictum that if a thing is not worth doing
– a radical mastectomy, for instance – it is not worth doing well.

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Finally, home tattooing is low-tech; professional tattooing is high-
tech.
All over England, lower-class youths aged between 14 and 18
indulge in a strange and savage rite de passage, in numbers that
far exceed those who perform this rite elsewhere in the world.
They take an ordinary sewing needle, wrap it in cotton gauze, and
dip it into india ink. Then they stab it into their own skins, thus
introducing a spot of ink into the dermis. They repeat this until the
desired pattern or words form indelibly in their integument.
Like surgical operations before the discovery of anesthetics,
this kind of tattooing is often done while the subject is drunk, in
front of a crowd of onlookers who encourage him to withstand the
pain of the process. In any case, this pain is inclined to diminish to
mere numbness after a few stabs of the needle, or so I am told by
my auto-tattooed patients. The redness of inflammation subsides
within a few days.
What messages do these young men wish to communicate to
the world? Generally, they are quite short and to the point: and
they all too pithily express the violent nihilism of their lives.
The most common consists of two words, with one letter on
each of four knuckles: LOVE and HATE. Another fairly common
tattoo consists of a dot on four knuckles of one hand, with or
without the letters ‘ACAB’. These letters stand for ALL COPPERS
ARE BASTARDS.
The anti-police theme is one that I have seen represented in a
more explicit way, in the form of a gallows from which was
suspended a dangling policeman. In case the meaning of this was
insufficiently clear to onlookers, the words HANG ALL COPPERS
were appended beneath. Alas, this frank and manly expression of
sentiment did not always stand the bearer in good stead,
inasmuch as he was frequently in the custody of the constabulary,

92
and the tattoo, being on his forearm, was not easily hidden from
their eyes. I shall return later to the several disadvantages of
being tattooed.
A surprisingly large number of auto-tattooists choose for the
exercise of their dermatographical art the chief motto of British
service industries, namely ‘FUCK OFF’. Why anyone should want
these words indelibly imprinted in his skin is a mystery whose
meaning I have not yet penetrated, though my researches
continue, but I recall a patient who had the two words tattooed in
mirror writing upon his forehead, no doubt that he might read them
in the bathroom mirror every morning and be reminded of the
vanity of earthly concerns.
It isn’t only in the service industries that Britain limps behind, of
course. The former workshop of the world has come to
manufacture so little that nowadays one rarely sees the words
MADE IN ENGLAND anywhere – except, that is, tattooed around
the nipple or umbilicus of some of the less cerebral alumni of our
least distinguished schools.
Naturally, this kind of tattoo can also serve romantic ends. Men,
it is well known, are frequently prepared to endure agonies for
love, and so it is not altogether surprising that the name of a
girlfriend is recorded not on pen and paper but in ink and dermis.
Unfortunately, romantic affections tend to be rather fluid in the age
of auto-tattooing, and it is not unusual to see an entire romantic
history inscribed, list-wise, upon an arm, sometimes with a name
crossed through when the parting of the ways has been
particularly bitter.
One youth I met had tattooed his romantic aspirations, rather
than his romantic history, upon himself. The fingers of one hand
bore the crude letters L T F C; those of the other, E S U K. When
he folded his hands together – in an emblem of the message he

93
wished to convey, that one alone is incomplete, but two together
make a whole – the letters spelled out ‘LETS FUCK’.
Did this ever work? I asked with some skepticism.
‘Well, yes,’ he replied with great complaisance. ‘Sometimes.’
Often a tattoo acts as a membership badge. For example, a
little blue spot on one cheekbone indicates that the bearer has
been to Borstal, a correctional institution for wayward youth
named after a village in Kent, the garden of England, site of the
first such institution. The blue badge of rebellion is worn in the
manner of the old school tie, that Old Borstalians may recognise
one another – and be recognised. For in the circles in which they
move, the meaning of the blue spot is well known and understood:
Noli me tangere.
But like those peculiar moths and butterflies about which
naturalists delight to tell us, which imitate the colourful plumage of
poisonous species without being poisonous themselves, that
potential predators on lepidoptera might leave them alone, so do
certain young people tattoo themselves with the blue spot without
ever having been to Borstal. They wear the spot both as
protection and as a means of gaining the admiration of their
peers; but, to change the metaphor slightly, the coinage is soon
debased, and what was once a sign of considerable value is now
almost emptied of it.
And thus the study of a seemingly minor social phenomenon
such as tattooing affords us a little glimpse into the Hobbesian
moral world inhabited by a section of the population with whom we
normally have little contact: they actually want to be considered
psychopathic. Not their eyes but their tattoos are the windows of
their souls.
Another popular pattern – though it makes one shudder to think
of the process by which it is inscribed upon the skin, or the

94
consequences if a mistake is made – is the spider’s web on the
side of the neck. Occasionally this is spread over the whole of the
face, even over the scalp. At first I assumed this design must have
a symbolic meaning, but having inquired of many bearers of it,
and having been assured by them that there is no such meaning, I
am now satisfied that it is its intrinsic beauty, and a certain vaguely
sinister connotation attached to spiders’ webs, that attracts people
to the design and induces them to adorn themselves with it.
Moreover, I vividly recall the scene at a murder trial in which I
testified. The judge and counsel were embroiled in a learned
discussion of the finer points of mens rea, watched by the prisoner
in the dock and his family in the public gallery – all of whom, down
to the nth generation, had spiders’ webs prominently tattooed on
their necks. Never was the class basis (as the Marxists used to
call it) of British justice more clearly visible: two classes separated
by, among other things, a propensity on the part of one of them to
self-disfigurement.
A considerable number of the auto-tattooed inject themselves
with swastikas. At first I thought this was profoundly nasty, a
reflection of their political beliefs, but in my alarm I had not taken
into consideration the fathomless historical ignorance of those
who do such things to themselves. People who believe (as one of
my recent patients did) that the Second World War started in 1918
and ended in 1960 – a better approximation to the true dates than
some I have heard – are unlikely to know what exactly the Nazis
and their emblem stood for, beyond the everyday brutality with
which they are familiar, and which they admire and aspire to.
About one in 20 of English auto-tattooists adorn themselves
with dotted lines around their neck or their wrists, with the
instruction to onlookers to ‘CUT HERE’, as if they were coupons in
a newspaper or magazine – an instruction that many of their

95
acquaintances are perfectly equipped to obey, inasmuch as they
routinely carry sharp knives with them. Such tattoos can have
serious consequences. Not long ago a prisoner with the words
‘NO FEAR’ tattooed prominently on the side of his neck came
before me with a medical complaint, and I inquired into his
medical history. He wore his hair shaved, and his scalp reminded
me of that of the old, one-eyed, half-eared tomcat in the garden
next door to me at home, whose scalp is a mass of scars.
‘Have you ever had any serious injuries?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he replied.
‘And have you ever been in the hospital for anything?’ I
continued.
‘Yes, four times.’
‘What for?’
‘Broken skull.’
I should explain in parentheses that the tattooed classes of
England do not consider fractures of the skull to be serious
injuries, even when they result in operations, steel plates inserted
into the remainder of the skull, and prolonged sojourns in the
hospital. It is difficult for them to conceive of everyday occurrences
as being serious: for example, one patient had his skull staved in
with a baseball bat but said of the incident that ‘it was just a usual
neighbourly row’ and therefore nothing for the police or doctors to
get too worried about.
‘And how did you come by these fractures of your skull?’ I
asked my patient.
It was his tattoo that was responsible. Everyone assumed that
NO FEAR meant precisely that, so that whenever he walked into a
pub he would be challenged to a fight by those who felt entitled to
be feared, and who regarded a lack of fear as a personal insult.
Moreover, he had often been glassed (the verb to glass meaning

96
to smash a glass into someone’s face or over his head, usually in
a pub) because of his tattoo.
When asked why they inflict these marks of Cain upon
themselves, the tattooed cite pressure from their peers and
boredom. Perhaps the pain of it reassures them they are alive: it
hurts, therefore I am.
‘I was bored,’ said one man whose hands were covered in
scores of such tattoos, and who claimed that they had kept him
unemployed for many years. ‘It was either tattooing myself, or
going out robbing.’
No other possibility presented itself to his ill-furnished mind; but
in any case, the distraction caused by the tattooing soon wore off,
and he went out robbing just the same.
Just as many who start with marijuana go on to crack, so do
most who tattoo themselves go on to be tattooed by professionals.
It is illegal in Britain to tattoo anyone under the age of 18 (though
of course if the government were really serious about restricting
the numbers of the tattooed, it would make tattooing compulsory).
The parlours of those whom I suppose I must call the ethical
tattooists – who refuse to tattoo their clients’ penises, for example
– are inspected regularly by the Health Department for cleanliness
and sterile technique. The tattooists display their licenses upon
the wall, as well as their membership in various organisations of
tattoo artists, as doctors in America do.
The tattoo and body-piercing parlours – and I have now visited
several – are all very much the same in both layout and
atmosphere. In the reception area are posters illustrating the
patterns from which most of the clients choose, bespoke tattooing
being considerably more expensive. The patterns seem inspired
mainly by sub-Wagnerian Norse mythology, the female figures
deriving in equal measure from Brünnhilde and Ursula Andress,

97
the male from Siegfried and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Snakes
winding their way round skulls, saber-toothed tigers, and bulldogs
baring their fangs are also popular. The owners are themselves
heavily tattooed, though some of them, in the privacy of our
conversation, admitted that they would not tattoo themselves, at
any rate so extensively, if they had their time again. But business
is business, and the demand is more than sufficient to keep them
in work. I estimate that in our city of one million inhabitants, about
3,000 are tattooed by professionals each year: a high proportion
of what epidemiologists call ‘the population at risk’, that is to say,
young men between the ages of 18 and 30.
Indeed, the popularity of tattooing in some quarters seems to
be growing rather than declining. It is a curious characteristic of
our age that cultural influences now seem to flow from the lower
social classes upward, rather than from the upper classes
downward, so that middle-class people are having themselves
tattooed in greater numbers than ever before. And what used to
be an all-male preserve is no longer so: along with banking and
gentlemen’s clubs, another bastion of patriarchy has fallen.
And just as Britain is the most culturally degraded country in
Europe, so does its cultural influence grow. Tattooing used to be
uncommon in France, for example, and discreet at that; but (or so
several tattoo artists have told me) it is becoming ever more
popular there. And one of the parlours has opened a branch in
Spain, mainly – but, alas, not entirely – for the drunken British oaf
market.
It doesn’t take long or cost much to have a small tattoo done,
though an hour or two of the process is the most people can stand
at anyone session. You can stigmatise yourself thoroughly in an
hour for a mere £25. But those who want to cover their entire
integuments (85 percent coverage of the body surface being by

98
no means rare) may spend years of their life in the tattooing
parlour. Watching as yet untattooed young men browsing through
the patterns in the parlour reception areas, I felt like a Victorian
evangelist or campaigner against prostitution, an impulse rising
within me to exhort them to abjure evil; but their adoption of the
characteristic expression of the urban underclass (a combination
of bovine vacancy and lupine malignity) soon put paid to my
humanitarian impulse.
But few are the tattooed who do not eventually come to regret
their youthful folly, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. A
patient of mine described how his tattoos had always prevented
him from getting a job: at interviews he was able to cover up the
dotted lines around his neck with a high collar, as the ruff in the
16th and 17th centuries covered up the scrofula, but those around
his wrist always let him down.
Well, perhaps he wasn’t all that keen on work anyway; but the
last straw – the precipitant of his despair – came when he was
refused entry to a nightclub because of his tattoos. On seeing
them, the bouncer at the door stepped in front of him and kept him
out: even in a world where distinctions are few and crude, his
tattoos put him beyond the pale.
The follies of the foolish are the opportunities of the wise, of
course. I learned from the Yellow Pages that for every five
professional tattoo parlours, there are three clinics for the removal
of tattoos by laser treatment (thus is our gross domestic product
increased). The most sophisticated of these clinics has several
lasers to deal with different colours, which are susceptible to
different wavelengths. The lasers shatter the particles of pigment,
and the body’s own macrophages can then remove the tiny
fragments. Many tattoo parlours offer a removal service as well,
but the method they most commonly use, the injection of a

99
dissolving acid into the tattoo, has scarring effects on the skin
tissue, so the results are not good.
The principal drawbacks of laser treatment are its cost and
duration. A single session lasting ten minutes costs £30. The skin
will not tolerate more prolonged treatment, and between each
session a period of six or eight weeks should elapse. An average
tattoo on the biceps muscle, three inches by three, requires
between five and eight such sessions for full removal. Since many
people have a much larger area than this adorned with tattoos,
they must invest many thousands in their removal. And in general
such people are drawn from the poorer segments of society.
Nevertheless, demand for treatment outstrips supply, and one
company that already operates four clinics throughout the country
is opening two more. The treatment is not generally available
under the National Health Service except for those patients in
whom their tattoos cause serious psychological or psychiatric
disturbance. Despair over tattoos can lead to suicide attempts,
even to efforts to carve them out of the skin with kitchen knives.
A patient who had tried to cut hers out with a razor blade told
me that for years she could think of nothing else. Her obsession
with her tattoos (incidentally, they had been done under duress by
other inmates in an all-female orphanage) sapped her will to live,
and only after they had been removed was she able to start a
normal life. That the Health Service makes exception in these
cases (subcontracting the actual work to private clinics) is not
generally known, and is certainly not advertised, for fear of
provoking a wave of money-saving psychological disturbance
among the tattooed. It is a regrettable fact that psychological
distress expands to meet the supply of publicly-funded services
available to reduce it.

100
 It occurred to me, however, albeit in a moment of
uncharacteristic weakness, that the prison in which I work should
offer a tattoo-removal service for its involuntary guests. After all,
even recidivists would be better placed to find honest employment
without their marks of Cain. But then I remembered that every
policy has its unintentional consequences. If tattoos were
removed free of charge in prison, then people with tattoos might
commit crimes specifically to avail themselves of this opportunity.
And then the association of tattooing with criminality would be
even stronger than it already is.

1995

101
 FESTIVITY, AND MENACE

THE ENGLISH, it was observed by an aristocratic Frenchman as

long ago as the 18th century, take their pleasures sadly. Nowadays
they also take them passively, like a drug addict who seeks
happiness and oblivion simultaneously by the simplest means
possible.
I do not mean that the English make no effort to seek out
entertainment; on the contrary, like the addict’s search for his
drug, this pursuit is often the only serious business of their lives.
But the entertainment, once found, should require – for it to be
truly entertaining – as little active mental contribution from the
entertained as possible.
Primum inter pares is, of course, television. The average
English adult now watches 27 hours of it per week, it is said, twice
as much as two decades ago. In this the English are no different
from many other nations; indeed, the Americans while away about
the same proportion of their lives in front of the small screen as
the island race.
In any case, the figure could be misleading; experience from
doing medical house calls convinces me that a television switched
on is not necessarily a television watched. It flickers in the
background, competing for fragments of divided attention with a
radio and perhaps a domestic quarrel or two. And even when it is
watched, there is no guarantee that anything gets much farther
than the optic nerves: I have many times asked patients whom I
have visited at home while they were sitting in front of a television
to describe what they were watching, only to be met with the blank
silence of inability or incomprehension. One might as well have

102
asked an habitué of an opium den for the contents of his
consciousness as ask modern viewers of television for theirs.
When I was young and inexperienced, I used to ask the patient
or his relatives to turn the television off; but in England that means
(at best) only a slight reduction in its volume. It is disconcerting to
conduct a medical examination with a moving picture casting a
changing light over the room, and the patient trying to peer over
one’s shoulder, or round one’s side, to catch a glimpse of it, while
confusing one’s questions with the dialogue of a soap opera.
Once I went to a paralysed old lady’s house and found the
television on. I asked the daughter, who was present, to turn it off.
‘I don’t know how,’ she said.
And she didn’t.
Nowadays I march into a house and turn the television off
myself. It is the only way to get the patient’s full attention – even if
he or she is seriously ill and likely to die without medical
treatment.
In the hospital it is now regarded as cruel to deprive the
patients of their daily screen: so much so that watching it has
become virtually compulsory for them, or at least inescapable for
those not in a position to remove themselves. Gone are the days
when the hospital was a place of quiet (insofar as possible) and
repose: no one dies nowadays without benefit of chat show.
I have many times tried the following simple experiment: in a
ward full of incapacitated patients, I have turned off the television
or televisions and then left the ward for five minutes. Unfailingly,
the television or televisions are switched on again by the time I
return; but who has turned them on again, I have never been able
to discover. The patients could not have done so, and the nurses
deny it; it is a mystery as complete as that of the Turin shroud. But
the nurses always say, ‘The patients want it on,’ and will continue

103
to say this even though a straw poll usually reveals precisely the
opposite. It seems to me prima facie unlikely that an 80-year-old
lady with a right-sided hemiplaegia after a stroke, and with
difficulty swallowing her own saliva, really wants to watch Mr
Motivator, a keep-fit fanatic in a body-hugging Lycra outfit of
fluorescent colours, demonstrating to the insistent beat of disco
music the exercises by means of which the viewer may rid herself
of the cellulite on her thighs. There is someone in the ward,
however (a postmodernist, perhaps), who believes otherwise, who
believes that a moment unentertained is a moment wasted, and
that a mind unfilled by someone else’s drivel is a vacuum of the
kind Nature abhors.
But it is on Saturday night, in a provincial town, that the
unquenchable English thirst for entertainment – at least among
the young – is seen to best advantage. To reach Saturday night is
the summit of ambition of much of English youth. Nothing fills their
minds with such anticipation or eagerness. No career, no pastime,
no interest, can compete with the joys of Saturday night, when the
centre of the city turns into a B-movie Sodom and Gomorrah,
undestroyed by God only because (it must be admitted) there are
worse places on earth, which call for more immediate elimination.
On Saturday night the centre of the city has a quite distinct
atmosphere. It is crowded, but gone are the shoppers, browsing at
shop windows like sheep on grass; almost no one over 30 is to be
seen on the streets. It is as if a devastating epidemic had swept
over the country and left alive no one who has reached middle
age.
There is festivity in the air, but also menace. The smell of cheap
perfume mingles with that of takeaway food (fried and greasy),
stale alcohol, and vomit. The young men – especially those with
shaved heads and ironmongery in their noses and eyebrows –

104
squint angrily at the world, as if they expect to be attacked at any
moment from any direction, or as if they have been deprived of
something to which they were entitled. It is, indeed, dangerous to
look them in the eye for longer than a fraction of a second: any
more prolonged eye contact would be construed as a challenge,
inviting armed response.
Even some of the young women seem aggressive. Two of them
pass me in the street, eloquently discussing their rivalry for the
affections of Darren.
‘You fancy him,’ snarled the first.
‘No I fucking don’t,’ snarled back the second. ‘You fucking do.’
‘Oh fuck off.’
I recall a recent patient of mine, her eyesight permanently
damaged by a group of girls in a club who glassed her (that is to
say, broke some glasses and pushed the jagged edges into her
face and neck) because she looked for too long and with too
intense an interest at the boyfriend of one of her assailants.
Outside the Ritzy club, as I walk past, there is a pool of as yet
uncongealed blood, next to which lies a broken bottle of beer. The
weapon is self-evident, if not the motive. Some unfortunate person
has not even got as far as being glassed: he has been bottled.
The people in the line to get into the Ritzy are untroubled by the
blood, however; it will not spoil their evening. The flashing pink
neon bulb casts an intermittently lurid light on them as the
bouncers frisk them two by two, checking them for knives.
All the cars that go by relay the insistent beat of quadraphonic
music via the stones of the pavement into the legs of people
walking or standing there. My own legs tingle with the vibrations.
Sometimes I wonder whether those who play their music so loudly
do so with the idea that they are performing a public service.

105
 I walk on. A group of young men stagger out of the Newt and
Cucumber, drunkenly chanting – one couldn’t call it singing – an
obscene song. This is the sound that terrifies the cheap coastal
resorts of Europe and any Continental city unfortunate enough to
play host to an English football team.
I enter the Newt and Cucumber. Everyone is shouting, but still
no one can make himself heard (which perhaps is just as well).
Twenty televisions blare: eight each playing two different songs
(one rock and one reggae), and four relaying a wrestling match.
Ten seconds of this and one feels one has a food mixer inside
one’s skull working at full speed on one’s brain: I too stagger out.
The base of a lamppost nearby has been fertilised with vomitus
during my brief visit to the pub.
I walk on, marveling at the wonderful vulgarity of English girls.
Is this a country, I wonder, without mirrors? Or is it merely eyes
that young English females lack? They have evidently chosen
their clothes with great care, for such gaudy slatternliness is not
natural. They squeeze their fat and suety figures – too much junk
food consumed in front of the television – into tight iridescent
outfits, which leave no contour unstated, or into extra-short skirts
that they pull down by half an inch when a gust of autumn wind
blows and they start to shiver. The only thin girls are those who
smoke more than fifty a day or who have anorexia.
I find a pedestrianised passage in which every doorway enters
a club. The passage is closed to all cars except for the scarlet
BMW of a chief bouncer, who makes a point of scattering the
crowd. He parks it ostentatiously where he shouldn’t and
swaggers out to greet his underlings.
Six feet tall and a yard and a half wide, he is a fine example of
the species. Hitting him would be like trying to punch your way
into a locked safe. He has three days’ stubble (how do they

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always manage to keep it at three days, I wonder?) and an
earring. A gold chain ripples round his bull neck. There are scars
on his shaven scalp. He oozes anabolic steroids and obviously
spends more time in the gym than most Englishmen spend in front
of the television. The lord of all he surveys – and he surveys his
surroundings constantly – he engages in an elaborate
handshaking ritual with his underlings, which would be of interest
to anthropologists who study the ceremonies of primitives.
The truth is that nightclub bouncing is part job, part protection
racket. I was told by a psychiatric nurse who was a club bouncer
during his off-duty hours that the smaller clubs – those not owned
by large corporations – are staked out by gangs of bouncers, who
offer to keep the customers in order but who also threaten to turn
the club over and destroy it if they are not thus employed. They
then protect the clubs that employ them against other gangs of
bouncers. The gangs recruit their staff in prisons, where grievous
bodily harmers and armed robbers hone their skills and their
physiques in the prison gymnasium.
Saturday night in provincial England belongs to the bouncers.
For some reason, looking at them reminds me of my childhood,
when the BBC ran an educational radio programme for children in
which correspondents were sent back 60 million years to report on
the appearance and behaviour of dinosaurs. How small and
vulnerable the correspondents said they felt among the
threatening saurian giants! Just like I feel this Saturday night, in
fact.
I pick my club: it looks a little more respectable than the others
(no jeans, no leather), and the bouncers seem calmer and more
confident than elsewhere, though their musculature still bulges
through their tuxedos. I am later told by one of them that my

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choice was wise; there is serious trouble here only once every two
weeks or so.
So this is the Mecca of all those young people who have told
me that their only interest in life is going out to clubs! This is the
cynosure of a million English lives!
The music is loud, but at least there is only one song playing at
a time. The lights flash kaleidoscopically. The dance floor is
upstairs, the main bar downstairs. This is where the wallflowers
(all women) sit, staring disconsolately into their drinks as in the
painting by Degas. Two young girls, one fat and one so drunk that
she must surely throw up soon, gyrate to the music, but without
reference to its rhythm.
On the dance floor itself, a great seething mass of people move
like maggots in a tin. With so large a number of people crammed
into so small a space, it is astonishing that there is no social
contact among them. Most of the pairs do not even look into each
other’s eyes; because of the noise, verbal communication is out of
the question. They dance solipsistically, each in a world of his or
her own, literally entranced by the rhythm and the continual
physical activity. They dance the way Scotsmen go to bars: to blot
out the memory of their lives.
Some of the bouncers patrol the club, gripping walkie-talkies;
some stay at lookout posts. I approach two of them – one white
and one black – and ask them about their work: we have to shout
to make ourselves heard. They love their work and are proud to
do it well. They are doormen, not bouncers. They have certificates
in first aid and in fire prevention. They are students of human
nature (their words, not mine).
‘We know who’s going to be trouble, even before they come in,’
the black doorman says.

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 ‘We try to prevent trouble, not deal with it afterwards,’ says the
white.
‘You don’t use words,’ explains the black. ‘You don’t discuss
with them. That only spreads the trouble, because if you stand
there discussing it, everyone notices and joins in.’
‘A quick surgical operation, and they’re out. You use the
minimum force possible.’
I ask what kind of serious trouble they expect.
‘Well, there’s a gang in the city called the Zulus that gets its fun
from wrecking clubs,’ says the black. ‘There’s too many of them:
we can’t handle them.’
‘Mind you,’ adds the white, looking on the bright side, ‘they
know us, so they wouldn’t kill us or nothing.’
‘No, they’d only give us a good kicking, no more than that.’
If I tried to kick either of them – and I’m not a dwarf – I should
be more likely to break my toe than to injure them.
‘And what do you do if you get a good kicking?’ I ask. ‘Surely,
you want to find other work?’
‘No, you just got to go back the next night, or you lose your
respect,’ says the black, grinning but serious.
There is a scuffle on the dance floor. My two bouncers are
called to assist with the ejection of a troublemaker. They move
with surprising agility, in unison. I have seen such coordination
before, among men who are like them in many ways: prison
wardens, who deal with disturbances in the cells in a similar
fashion.
A small young man, who resembles a pilot fish among sharks,
is escorted off the premises by eight doormen. I notice as he goes
by that he too is a bodybuilder: his biceps threaten to split the
short sleeves of his shirt. He is drunk, but not so drunk that he
does not recognise overwhelming force when he sees it.

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 I follow him out. Nearby, a girl in short cream satin pants, with
fat lily-white legs and black velvet high-heeled shoes, is draped
like a sack over the shoulder of her boyfriend, the St. Christopher
who carries her across the road because she is incapable of
making it herself. She is drunk and vomits, fortunately missing his
back but definitely hitting the pavement. The vomit will be cleared
up by morning: it makes you proud to pay your local taxes.
It is two o’clock. A little farther on, a small crowd gathers below
a first-floor window. A blowsy woman with peroxided hair and a
cigarette stuck by dried saliva to the corner of her mouth shouts
the name of a district of the city at the crowd below. This is a taxi
office, and she shouts out the destination of taxis as they arrive.
Some of the would-be passengers are too drunk to recognise the
destinations of the taxis they themselves have ordered, and so
she has to repeat them.
Only taxi drivers in desperate financial straits work Saturday
nights. They’ve all been robbed, of course, mostly at knife-point,
and an informal survey I once carried out revealed that about a
third of them have had their cars stolen. I remember one driver –
working Saturday night to pay for his divorce – who had had
seven of his ribs broken by passengers who were incensed by
being asked to pay for their ride. Like the doormen after a good
kicking, the driver returned at once to work.
The following Monday morning, I walk into my ward of the
hospital. In the first bed there sits an 18-year-old girl, dressed in a
gold satin bathrobe, staring blinklessly into space. Her blood
pressure is high, her heartbeat too fast, her pupils dilated. When I
speak to her, she does not hear me, or at least does not respond.
I try three simple questions, and then she leans forward, shrieks
‘Help!’ and sinks back against her pillows, exhausted and terrified.

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 She has been to the XL Club on Saturday night, a large barn of
a dance hall where everyone takes ecstasy – methylene-
dioxymethamphetamine, of very variable purity – and enters a
trance. We have a steady flow of patients from the XL: not long
ago, one of them was dead on arrival, and his friend who came
with him suffered permanent brain damage. This girl, though, had
begun to act strangely after leaving the XL – gesturing wildly at
something that was not there – and had been brought to the
hospital by a friend.
Next to her is another product of the XL Club. She made it
home on Saturday night but then tried to jump out of the window
because she thought her boyfriend’s enemies were coming to kill
her. She had taken ecstasy every Saturday night for six months,
and it had made her paranoid for most of that time. In fact, she
had given up her work in an office because she felt the other
workers there were plotting against her. Strangely enough, she
knows that ecstasy is not good for her, that it has nearly ruined
her life.
‘Then why do you take it?’
‘I want to get through the night.’
In another part of the hospital lies a 16-year-old girl who has
taken an overdose to force the local authorities to give her an
apartment. Such apartments are allocated on the basis of need
and vulnerability, and a young girl who attempts suicide could
hardly stand in greater need of help. She hates her mother
because they argue all the time, and she has left home to live on
the street; she doesn’t know who her father is, and she doesn’t
care. She hated school, of course, and left sooner than the law
allowed-not that the law cares much.
‘What are your interests?’ I ask.
She doesn’t know what I mean, and pouts.

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 I rephrase the question. ‘What are you interested in?’
She still doesn’t know what I mean. All the same, she is of good
intelligence – very good, in fact.
‘What do you like doing?’
‘Going out.’
‘Where to?’
‘Clubs. Everything else is shit.’

1996

112
 WE DON’T WANT NO EDUCATION

EDUCATION HAS ALWAYS BEEN a minority interest in England.

The English have generally preferred to keep the bloom of their
ignorance intact and on the whole have succeeded remarkably
well, despite a century and a quarter of compulsory schooling of
their offspring.
In the past their ignorance was purely passive: the mere
absence of knowledge. Of late, however, it has taken on a more
positive and malign quality: a profound aversion to anything that
smacks of intelligence, education, or culture. Not long ago there
was a popular song whose first lines successfully captured this
widespread mood of hostility: ‘We don’t need no education, We
don’t need no thought control.’ And a couple of months ago I
noticed some wall posters advertising a new song: Poor, White,
and Stupid.
I wish I could say that some irony was intended, but the cult of
stupidity has become in England what the cult of celebrity is in the
United States. To call someone clever has never been an
unequivocal compliment in England, but it takes a special kind of
perversity for students at the secondary school situated 400 yards
from my hospital to say to one of their colleagues, who took an
overdose because of the constant bullying to which she was
subject: You’re stupid because you’re clever.
What did they mean by this apparent paradox? They meant that
anyone who tried hard at school and performed well was wasting
his time, when he could have been engaged in the real business
of life, such as playing truant in the park or wandering down town.
Furthermore, there was menace in their words: If you don’t mend
your ways and join us, they were saying, we’ll beat you up.

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 This was no idle threat: I often meet people in their 20s and 30s
in my hospital practice who gave up at school under such duress
and subsequently realise that they have missed an opportunity
which, had it been taken, would have changed the whole course
of their lives much for the better. And those who attend the few
schools in the city that maintain very high academic standards risk
a beating if they venture to where the poor white stupids live. In
the last year I have treated two boys in the emergency room after
such a beating, and two others who have taken overdoses for fear
of receiving one at the hands of their neighbours.
Just as it was impossible to go broke underestimating the taste
of the American public, so it is impossible to overstate the
abysmal educational depths to which a large proportion of the
English have now sunk, boding ill for the country’s future in the
global market. Very few of the 16-year-olds whom I meet as
patients can read and write with facility; they do not even regard
my question as to whether they can read and write as in the least
surprising or insulting. I now test the basic literacy of nearly every
such youth I meet, in case illiteracy should prove to be one of the
causes of his misery. (I had a patient recently whose brother
committed suicide rather than face the humiliation of public
exposure in the social security office of his inability to read the
forms he was required to fill in.) One can tell merely by the way
these youths handle a pen or a book that they are unfamiliar with
these instruments. Even those who are under the impression that
they can read and write adequately are utterly defeated by words
of three syllables, and while they can sometimes read the words
of a text, they no more understand them than if they had been in
Church Slavonic.
I cannot recall meeting a 16-year-old white from the council
estates that are near my hospital who could multiply nine by

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seven (I do not exaggerate). Even three by seven often defeats
them. One boy of 17 told me, ‘We didn’t get that far.’ This after 12
years of compulsory education (or should I say, attendance at
school).
As to knowledge in other spheres, it is fully up to the standards
set in mathematics. Most of the young whites whom I meet literally
cannot name a single writer and certainly cannot recite a line of
poetry. Not a single one of my young patients has known the
dates of the Second World War, let alone of the First; some have
never heard of these wars, though recently one young patient who
had heard of the Second World War thought it took place in the
18th century. In the prevailing circumstances of total ignorance, I
was impressed that he had heard of the 18th century. The name
Stalin means nothing to these young people and does not even
evoke the faint ringing of a bell, as the name Shakespeare
(sometimes) does. To them, 1066 is more likely to mean a price
than a date.
Thus are the young condemned to live in an eternal present, a
present that merely exists, without connection to a past that might
explain it or to a future that might develop from it. Theirs is truly a
life of one damned thing after another.
Likewise, they are deprived of any reasonable standards of
comparison by which to judge their woes. They believe
themselves deprived, because the only people with whom they
can compare themselves are those who appear in advertisements
or on television. Mere semi-literacy and ignorance do not
necessarily disqualify young people from passing public
examinations, at least lower-level exams. Since failure is now
regarded as fatally damaging to self-esteem, anyone who actually
presents himself at an examination is likely to emerge with a
certificate. I recently encountered a boy aged 16 in my clinic who

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wrote ‘Dear Sir’ as ‘deer sur’, and ‘I’m’ as ‘ime’ (and whose
grammar was fully consonant with his orthography), who had
passed a public examination in English. Clearly, something very
strange is happening in our schools.
Our educational practices are now so bizarre that they would
defy the pen of a Jonathan Swift to satirise them. In the very large
metropolitan area in which I work, for example, the teachers have
received instructions that they are not to impart the traditional
disciplines of spelling and grammar. Pettifogging attention to
details of syntax and orthography is said to inhibit children’s
creativity and powers of self-expression. Moreover, to assert that
there is a correct way of speaking or writing is to indulge in a kind
of bourgeois cultural imperialism; and to tell children that they
have got something wrong is necessarily to saddle them with a
debilitating sense of inferiority from which they will never recover. I
have met a few teachers who disobey these instructions in an
atmosphere of clandestinity, in fear for their jobs, rather
reminiscent of the atmosphere that surrounded those who secretly
tried to propagate truth behind the late Iron Curtain.
I was told of one school where the teachers were allowed by
the headmaster to make corrections, but only five per piece of
work, irrespective of the number actually present. This, of course,
was to preserve the amour propre of the children, but it seemed
not to have occurred to this pedagogue that his five correction rule
was likely to have unfortunate consequences. The teacher might
choose to correct an error in the spelling of a word, for example,
and overlook precisely the same error in the next piece of work.
How is a child to interpret correction based on this headmaster’s
principle? The less intelligent, perhaps, will regard it as a species
of natural hazard, like the weather, about which he can do very
little; while the more intelligent are likely to draw the conclusion

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that the principle of correction as such is inherently arbitrary and
unjust.
Alarmingly, this arbitrariness reinforces precisely the kind of
discipline that I see exercised around me every day by parents
whose philosophy of child-rearing is laissez-faire tempered by
insensate rage. A small child rushes about noisily, creating havoc
and wreaking destruction about him; the mother (fathers scarcely
exist, except in the merest biological sense) first ignores the child,
then shouts at him to stop, then ignores him, pleads with him,
ignores him again, laughs at him, and then finally loses her
temper, screeches abuse at him, and gives him a clout on the ear.
What is the child supposed to learn from this? He learns to
associate discipline not with principle, and punishment not with his
own behaviour, but with the exasperated mood of his mother. This
mood will itself depend upon many variables, few of them under
the control of the child. The mother may be irritable because of
her latest row with her latest boyfriend or because of a delay in
the arrival of a social security payment, or she may be
comparatively tolerant because she has received an invitation to a
party or has just discovered that she is not pregnant after all. But
what the child certainly never learns is that discipline has any
meaning beyond the physical capacity and desire of the mother to
impose it. Everything is reduced to a mere contest of wills, and so
the child learns that all restraint is but an arbitrary imposition from
someone or something bigger and stronger than himself. The
ground is laid for a bloody-minded intolerance of any authority
whatever, even should that authority be based upon patently
superior and benevolent knowledge and wisdom. Authority of any
kind is experienced as an insult to the self, and must therefore be
challenged because it is authority. The world is thus a world of

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permanently inflamed egos, trying to impose their wills on one
another.
In the schools, young children are no longer taught in whole
classes but in little groups. It is hoped that they will learn by
discovery and play. There is no blackboard and no rote learning.
Perhaps the method of teaching by turning everything into a game
can work when the teacher is talented and the children are
already socialised to learn; but when, as is usually the case,
neither of these conditions obtains, the results are disastrous, not
just in the short term but probably forever.
The children themselves eventually come to know that
something is wrong, even if they are not able to articulate their
knowledge. Of the generations of children who grew up with these
pedagogical methods, it is striking how many of the more
intelligent among them sense by their early 20s that something is
missing from their lives. They don’t know what it is, and they ask
me what it could be.
I quote them Francis Bacon: ‘It is a poore Centre of a Mans
Actions, Himselfe.’
They ask me what I mean, and I reply that they have no
interests outside themselves, that their world is as small as the
day they entered it, and that their horizons have not expanded in
the least.
‘But how do we get interested in something?’ they ask.
This is where the baleful effect of education as mere
entertainment makes itself felt. For to develop an interest requires
powers of concentration and an ability to tolerate a degree of
boredom while the elements of a skill are learned for the sake of a
worthwhile end. Few people are attracted naturally by the
vagaries of English spelling or by the rules of simple arithmetic,
yet they must be mastered if everyday life in an increasingly

118
complex world is to be negotiated successfully. And it is the plain
duty of adults, from the standpoint of their superior knowledge and
experience of the world, to impart to children what they need to
know so that later they may exercise genuine choice. The
demagogic equation of all authority, even over the smallest child,
with unjustifiable political authoritarianism leads only to personal
and social chaos.
Alas, the age of 20 is not the age at which to learn either to
concentrate or to tolerate effort which is in itself not enjoyable.
Never having experienced the pleasures of mastering something
through disciplined effort, and with minds profoundly influenced by
the swiftly moving and superficially exciting images of television,
these young adults find that a sustained interest in anything is
now beyond them. And in the modern urban world, anyone who
cannot concentrate is truly a lost soul, for the only communities in
such a world are those which grow up around interests that
people hold in common. Moreover, in an age of increasing
technological change, those without the ability or inclination to
learn will be left farther and farther behind.
The gimcrack pedagogical notion that education should be
‘relevant’ to children’s lives gained currency in England in the
’60s. The thought that this would confine children to the world that
they already knew – and a pretty dismal world it was, too, as
anyone with the slightest acquaintance with English working-class
life will testify – apparently never occurred to those educationists
who claimed such exceptional sympathy with the relatively
disadvantaged. The result was that a route – perhaps the one
most frequently travelled – to social advancement was
substantially closed to them.
Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to overturn these
educational (or anti-educational) developments even now, when

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the central government has belatedly realised their disastrous
consequences.
Why? First, the teachers and the teachers of the teachers in the
training colleges are deeply imbued with the kinds of educational
ideas that have brought us to this pass. Second, a huge
educational bureaucracy has grown up in England (one
bureaucrat per teacher, pullulating like admirals in a South
American navy) which uses every subterfuge to prevent change,
from falsification of figures to wilful misinterpretation of
government policy. The minister of education may propose, but
the bureaucracy disposes. Thus it happens that Britain spends a
higher percentage of its GDP on education than any of its
competitors and ends up with a catastrophically ill-educated
population, whose lack of intelligence is evident from their
ruminant gaze to be seen on every street in the country, and
which is remarked upon by all my foreign friends.
Bad as educational policy has been, however, there remains an
important and refractory cultural dimension to the problem. It is
easy – conceptually at least – to see what should be done on the
plane of policy, but the English disdain for education is not easily
overcome even in principle. In the neighbourhood in which I work,
there are many immigrant groups. The largest are those from
northwest India, Bangladesh, and Jamaica. There is also a large
and settled white working class. The children from all these
groups go to the same bad schools with the same bad teachers,
but the results are dramatically different. The children of poor and
unemployed immigrants from northwest India are never illiterate or
semi-literate; a very respectable number go on to further
education, even at the highest level, despite overcrowding in the
home and apparent poverty. The other groups vie with each other
to achieve the lowest educational level.

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 The lamentable fact is that a considerable proportion of the
English population is simply unaware of the need for education. It
seems stuck with the Victorian idea that England is by right and
divine providence the workshop of the world, that Englishmen by
virtue of their place of birth come into the world knowing all that it
is necessary for them to know, and that if there are no jobs to
employ their unskilled (and, it must be said, rather reluctant)
labour, it is the fault of the government in league with the
plutocrats in top hats and tails who have conspired to exploit
cheap Japanese labour. One thing an unemployed young
Englishman is definitely not going to do is to make a concerted
effort to equip himself with a salable skill.
I have had the following conversation on innumerable
occasions with young men of about 20 who have been
unemployed since leaving school, and whose general educational
level is outlined above:
‘Have you thought of improving your education?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘There’s no point. There are no jobs.’
‘Could there be any other reason to get educated?’
‘No.’ (This after puzzlement as to what I could possibly mean.)
There are two things to notice in this conversation. The first is
that the unemployed young person considers the number of jobs
in an economy as a fixed quantity. Just as the national income is a
cake to be doled out in equal or unequal slices, so the number of
jobs in an economy has nothing to do with the conduct of the
people who live in it but is immutably fixed. This is a concept of
the way the world works that has been assiduously peddled, not
only in schools during ‘social studies’ but in the media of mass
communication.

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 The second thing worthy of remark is the complete absence of
the idea that mental culture is a good in itself, that it has a value
irrespective of one’s employment prospects. Just as patients’
responses to the same illness and disability vary according to their
predisposition and character, so does a man’s response to
unemployment. A man with an interest to pursue, or at least with
the mental equipment to pursue an interest, is not in such dire
straits as a man obliged by the tabula rasa of his mind to stare
vacantly at the four walls for weeks, months, or years on end. He
is more likely to come up with an idea for self-employment, or at
the very least to seek work in places and in fields that are new to
him. He is not condemned to stagnation.
There is one great psychological advantage to the white
underclass in their disdain for education: it enables them to
maintain the fiction that the society around them is grossly, even
grotesquely, unjust, and that they themselves are the victims of
this injustice. If, on the contrary, education were seen by them as
a means available to all to rise in the world, as indeed it could be
and is in many societies, their whole viewpoint would naturally
have to change. Instead of attributing their misfortunes to others,
they would have to look inward, which is always a painful process.
Here we see the reason why scholastic success is violently
discouraged, and those who pursue it persecuted, in underclass
schools: for it is perceived, inchoately no doubt, as a threat to an
entire Weltanschauung. The success of one is a reproach to all.
And a whole way of life is at stake. This way of life is akin to drug
addiction, of which crime is the heroin and social security the
methadone. The latter, as we know, is the harder habit to kick, and
its pleasures, though less intense, are longer lasting.
The sour satisfaction of being dependent on social security
resides in its automatic conferral of the status of Victim, which in

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itself simultaneously explains one’s failure and absolves one of
the obligation to make something of oneself, ex hypothesi
impossible because of the unjust nature of society which made
one a victim in the first place. The redemptive value of education
blows the whole affecting scene apart: no wonder we don’t want
no education.
In one sense (and in one sense alone), however, the
underclass has been victimised, or perhaps betrayed is a better
word.
The educational absurdities foisted on the lower orders were
the idea not of the lower orders themselves but of those who were
in a position to avoid their baleful effects: that is to say, middle-
class intellectuals.
If I were inclined to paranoia (which fortunately I am not), I
should say that the efforts of educationists were part of a giant
plot by the middle classes to keep power for themselves and to
restrict competition, in the process creating sinecures for some of
their less able and dynamic members – namely the educationists.
But if these middle classes have maintained their power, it is in
an increasingly enfeebled and impoverished country.

1995

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 UNCOUTH CHIC

LAST JUNE IN PARIS, a young Englishman walked into a bar

frequented by Britons, having agreed to meet his girlfriend there.
A row had been brewing between them all day, and he asked her
to leave with him. She was enjoying herself, however, and
demurred; whereupon he dragged her into the adjoining room,
punched her to the ground, and kicked her so viciously that he left
her head and stomach covered in bruises. The bar staff pulled him
off and threw him out, but not before he had received a Glasgow
kiss – a head-butt – from a chivalrous patron of the bar.
Only two months earlier, a court had acquitted the young
Englishman of an assault on his previous girlfriend, the mother of
his two-year-old child. The pair had quarrelled over access to the
child, and the woman alleged that, as his clinching argument, he
had beaten her.
On learning of his lucky and probably undeserved acquittal, his
new girlfriend – the one he assaulted in Paris – said, ‘For any dad,
what [he] has gone through is a nightmare, but the case won’t
affect our relationship.’ (Presumably, as the mother of a three-
year-old by a previous liaison, she had special insight into the
parental heart.)
But when his former girlfriend, the mother of his child, heard
about the assault on her successor in Paris, she was less
sentimental. ‘Frankly,’ she said, ‘I am not surprised that someone
[else] has found themselves on the receiving end of something
like this.’
When the young Englishman had had time to reflect on the
incident, he said, ‘I totally regret everything that happened’ – as if

124
what had happened were a typhoon in the East Indies, over which
he could have been expected to exert no influence.
Apart from its Parisian setting, every aspect of the story seems
familiar to the student of English underclass life: the easily
inflamed ego, the quick loss of temper, the violence, the scattering
of illegitimate children, the self-exculpation by use of impersonal
language. But the young Englishman was not a member of the
underclass, nor was the woman he assaulted. His salary alone
was £700,000 a year, and she was a well-known weather-girl-
turned-talk-show-host. Poverty was not the explanation of their
behaviour.
The young Englishman was a famous professional soccer
player. True, soccer players are usually drawn from the class
adjacent to the underclass, into which downward slippage is all
too easy. But in the past, those who managed to escape their
lowly origins usually aspired to be taken for bona fide members of
the middle or upper classes by conforming their conduct to
middle-class standards. The young soccer player felt no such
impulse: and why should he have, when his public behaviour
resulted neither in legal sanction, social ostracism, or even strong
disapproval? For the truth is that in modern Britain, the direction of
cultural aspiration has reversed: for the first time in history, it is the
middle and upper classes that aspire to be taken for their social
inferiors, an aspiration that (in their opinion) necessitates
misconduct. No wonder, therefore, that the young soccer player
didn’t feel that his newfound wealth imposed any obligation upon
him to change his ways.
The signs – both large and small – of the reversal in the flow of
aspiration are everywhere. Recently a member of the Royal
Family, a granddaughter of the Queen, had a metal stud inserted
into her tongue and proudly displayed it to the press. Such body

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piercing began as a strictly underclass fashion, though it has
spread widely to the popular culture industry – into a branch of
which, of course, the monarchy is fast being transformed.
Middle-class girls now consider it chic to sport a tattoo –
another underclass fashion, as a visit to any British prison will
swiftly establish. The idea that a girl should have herself tattooed
would have horrified the middle classes as recently as ten years
ago. But young middle-class women now proudly wear tattoos as
badges of antinomian defiance, of intellectual independence, and
of identification with the supposedly downtrodden – if not of the
entire world, then at least of our inner cities.
Advertising now glamorises the underclass way of life and its
attitude towards the world. Stella Tennant, one of Britain’s most
famous models and herself of aristocratic birth, has adopted
almost as a trademark the stance and facial expression of general
dumb hostility to everything and everybody that is characteristic of
so many of my underclass patients. A recent advertisement for a
brand of casual shirt featured a snarling young man demanding to
know, What you looking at? – precisely the words that spark so
many knife-fights between young underclass men of exquisitely
tender ego. A new style has been invented: uncouth chic.
Diction in Britain has always been an important marker, to some
extent even a determinant, of a person’s place in the social
hierarchy. Whether this is a healthy phenomenon may be
debated, but it is an indisputable fact. Even today, social
psychologists find that the British almost universally associate
what is known as received pronunciation with high intelligence,
good education, and a cultured way of life. Rightly or wrongly, they
see it as a marker of self-confidence, wealth, honesty, even
cleanliness. Regional accents are generally held to signify the
opposite qualities, even by people who speak with them. So it is a

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development worthy of remark that, for the first time in our modern
history, people who would, by upbringing, use received
pronunciation as a matter of course, now seek to suppress it. In
other words, they are anxious not to appear intelligent, well
educated, and cultured to their fellow countrymen, as if such
attributes were in some way shameful or disadvantageous. Where
once the aspiring might have aped the diction of their social
superiors, the upper classes now ape the diction of their inferiors.
Those who send their children to expensive private schools, for
example, now regularly report that they emerge with diction and
vocabulary little different from the argot of the local state school.
The BBC, which until a few years ago insisted with very few
exceptions on received pronunciation by its announcers, is now
falling over itself to ensure that the speech that comes over the
airwaves is demographically representative. The political ideology
underlying the decision to make this change is a crude and simple
one, a hangover from Marxism: that the upper and middle classes
are bad; that what has traditionally been regarded as high culture
is but a fig leaf for middle- and upper-class oppression of the
working class; and that the working class is the only class whose
diction, culture, manners, and tastes are genuine and authentic,
valued for their own sake rather than as a means to maintain
social hierarchy. Communist utopianism may be dead in Russia,
but it molders on at the BBC – exclusively among people of the
upper and middle classes, of course.
Symbolic of the sea change in the direction of cultural influence
brought about by liberal middle-class self-hatred is the contrast
between two recent prime ministers, Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Blair.
Mrs. Thatcher, of lowly origin, taught herself to speak like a
grandee; Mr. Blair, nearer to the grandee class by birth, now toys
(not altogether convincingly) with the glottal stop and other vocal

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mannerisms of the lower classes, such as the short a in words like
‘class’ and ‘pass’. And the only clubs of which Mr. Blair admits
membership in his entry in Who’s Who are the Trimdon Colliery
and Deaf Hill Working Men’s Club and the Fishburn Working
Men’s Club. Indeed, the most exclusive social organisation to
which any of his cabinet admits membership in Who’s Who is the
Covent Garden Community Centre. Otherwise the cabinet
appears to confine its socialising to the Jewel Miners’ Welfare
Club and the Newcraighall Miners’ Welfare Club: a curious
phenomenon for a group of people distinguished chiefly for their
wealth.
After his election, Mr. Blair lost little time in establishing that his
tastes were thoroughly demotic, contrary to the impression
created by the recent sale of his house for £1 million. He invited
one of the Gallagher brothers, of the pop group Oasis, to his first
party at Downing Street, seemingly as a matter of national
urgency. The Gallagher brothers are notorious for their crudity.
Their antics might be a mere publicity stunt, of course, and it is
possible that in private they are charm itself, but it was as a public
figure that one of them was invited to Downing Street. I saw their
act for myself when a newspaper asked me to attend one of their
concerts, an event I would otherwise have been at some pains to
avoid. Nine thousand young fans (at £20 a ticket) crowded into an
exhibition hall; they were mainly people at the lower end of the
social and educational spectrum. The group’s publicity agents
gave me earplugs, surely a strange way of currying favour for a
musical act. Not that there was any danger that I wouldn’t be able
to hear it: for despite the plugs, the sound waves were so strong
that I felt a vibration in my throat, detectable even with my hand.
The Gallaghers dressed exactly as the underclass dresses; their
mannerisms were precisely those of my underclass patients.

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Between songs, one of them spoke a few words, among which
‘fuck’ and its various derivatives were frequent, uttered not so
much to convey a meaning as a general mood of egotistical
defiance. About halfway through the concert, one of the brothers
asked the audience, ‘Any of you fuckers out there got any fucking
drugs?’
His attitude of untouchable snarling insolence was not lost on
his audience, of course; and neither will have been its effective
endorsement by the prime minister’s invitation. What is the point
of restraint and circumspection if such stream-of-consciousness
vulgarity can win not merely wealth and fame but complete social
acceptance? For the hundreds of thousands of young men and
women who have been to Oasis concerts, what is good enough
for the Gallaghers and the prime minister will be good enough for
them.
By so ostentatiously inviting one of the Gallaghers, the prime
minister also endorsed a belief about music that is now general in
England: that there is no better and no worse, only popular and
unpopular. Difference is held to inhere not in the quality of the
music but in the size and social composition of the audience: so
that the easy and the popular that might once have been
considered worse is now considered not merely equal but better.
Even people one might have expected to defend high culture have
surrendered abjectly to populism – indeed, have fanned its flames
with multicultural fervor. I recently heard an Oxford classics don
aver that in point of quality there was nothing to choose between
Mozart and the productions of the latest rap group (though I
wouldn’t mind betting what his deeply-held preferences were,
under all the posturing and bad faith). When anyone mentions
great songwriters, it is now obligatory to bracket the Beatles with
Schubert to establish one’s broad-minded, democratic bona fides;

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and the Midland Bank has just withdrawn its subsidy of the Royal
Opera House, Covent Garden – on the grounds that opera is a
minority interest – and will now give the money to a pop festival
instead. Patronage of the arts, therefore, has become mere
polling and pandering.
Even in behaviour, the new orthodoxy for all classes is that,
since nothing is better and nothing is worse, the worse is better
because it is more demotic. Everyone knows that British soccer
crowds are the worst-behaved in Europe, if not the world. But
what is less well known is that these crowds are not made up
solely, or even mainly, of people at the bottom of the social ladder
– and, in fact, solid middle-class citizens perpetrate much of the
worst behaviour. What was once a proletarian entertainment is
now distinctly bourgeois, and far from having improved the
conduct at matches, the change in the social composition of the
audience has caused a deterioration. I saw this for myself in
Rome, where I went to report for a newspaper on British soccer
hooliganism at a match between Italy and England. For the
duration of the English invasion, Rome had the atmosphere of a
city under siege (though the barbarians were truly within the
gates). Thousands of police were on duty throughout the city to
prevent the drunken riot and looting to which an English crowd,
left to its own devices, now almost always degenerates.
At the match itself, in the Olympic Stadium, the English crowd
behaved with typical unpleasantness. For about three hours –
before, during, and after the game – it hurled insults in unison at
the Italian crowd. It chanted, Who the fuck do you think you are?
and You’re shit and you know you are, with scarcely a break. As
far as I could tell, I was the only person in the English section of
the stadium who did not join in. It was precisely for this that the
thousands had come to Rome. Even worse, this mob of free-born

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Englishmen accompanied the chanting by what looked
unconscionably like the fascist salute – taking the adage, ‘When in
Rome, do as the Romans do,’ a step beyond urbanity. The 10,000
Britons who went to Rome – a notoriously expensive city – had
well-paid jobs, requiring education and training. The man next to
me, for example, was a computer programmer, in charge of the
information technology of a city council. All those I asked were
employed in skilled capacities; a Sotheby’s auctioneer, I was told,
was in the crowd.
I asked a few people around me why they behaved like this. Did
they not think it unseemly to go a thousand miles just to shout
obscenities at strangers? They all claimed that it was both fun and
a necessary release for them. A release from what, exactly?
Frustration, they replied, if they replied anything. It had occurred
to none of them that the petty drama of their internal lives did not
provide a justification for anti-social activity. They thought that
frustration was like pus in an abscess, better out than in: and I
was reminded of a murderer who once said to me that he had had
to kill his victim, otherwise he didn’t know what he might have
done.
At the Rome airport I witnessed an extraordinary instance of the
desire for the appearance, if not the reality, of downward social
mobility. An Englishwoman in her 30s ahead of me, unmistakably
upper-middle class, spoke politely, with the received
pronunciation, at the check-in counter. A little later I saw her again
in the bus that took us to the plane. Now that she was among the
soccer-fan friends with whom she had come to Rome, she
adopted a lower-class accent and larded her speech liberally with
four-letter words.
Soccer fans are by no means the only prosperous Britons who
affect underclass hooliganism abroad, however. Recently the

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British vice-consul on the island of Ibiza resigned because he no
longer wished to rescue the citizens of his country from the legal
consequences of their own incontinent behaviour.
Why should the British have become such total and shameless
vulgarians in a matter of three or four decades? Why should a
kind of Gresham’s Law of behaviour now operate, such that bad
conduct drives out good?
Like so many modern ills, the coarseness of spirit and
behaviour grows out of ideas brewed up in the academy and
among intellectuals – ideas that have seeped outward and are
now having their practical effect on the rest of society. The
relativism that has ruled the academy for many years has now
come to rule the mind of the population. The British middle class
has bought the multiculti cant that, where culture is concerned,
there is only difference, not better or worse. As a practical matter,
that means that there is nothing to choose between good manners
and bad, refinement and crudity, discernment and lack of
discernment, subtlety and grossness, charm and boorishness.
To refrain from urinating in doorways, say, is thus no better than
not refraining: it is merely different, and a preference for doorways
free of the smell of urine is but a bourgeois prejudice without
intellectual or moral justification. Since it is easier and more
immediately gratifying to behave without restraint than with it, and
there is no longer any generally accepted argument or even
prejudice in favour of the restraint that leads to public decorum,
there is no standpoint from which to criticise vulgarity.
British society and culture were additionally vulnerable to attack
from the intellectuals, for historically they were openly elitist and
therefore supposedly undemocratic. That its cultural productions
were magnificent, that Newton and Darwin, Shakespeare and
Dickens, Hume and Adam Smith did not speak to or for a national

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elite but to and for all mankind, has been conveniently forgotten.
Nor did it matter for ideological purposes that, though elitist,
British society and culture were never closed, but that anyone of
talent was able to make his contribution: that Britain absorbed
outsiders into its inner circle with ease, from Sir Anthony Van Dyck
to Joseph Conrad, from Sir William Herschel to Sir Karl Popper,
from George Frideric Handel to Sir Ernst Gombrich. A simplified
account of British history has been peddled, according to which it
was nothing but a tale of oppression, exploitation, and snobbery
(all of which, of course, existed). A rejection of the traditions of
British high culture was therefore in itself a meritorious political
act, a sign of solidarity with those whom history had oppressed
and exploited.
An early avatar of this rejection was the metamorphosis of
Viscount Stansgate into Tony Benn, the left-wing politician, via the
intermediate or pupal stage of Anthony Wedgwood-Benn. He was
obliged to forgo his hereditary peerage to continue to sit in the
House of Commons, but the plebeian contraction of his family
name was his own invention. Left-wing in everything except his
finances, he sent his children in well-publicised fashion to the local
state school, omitting to mention the extensive private tutoring
they received. A perfect solution to the moral dilemma facing
every left-leaning parent of the upper and middle classes: the
moral high ground of having self-denyingly rejected private
education while simultaneously having avoided the disastrously
low educational standards in the state system that have left at
least a quarter of the British population virtually illiterate.
The combination of relativism and antipathy to traditional
culture has played a large part in creating the underclass, thus
turning Britain from a class into a caste society. The poorest
people were deprived both of a sense of cultural hierarchy and of

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the moral imperative to conform their conduct to any standard
whatever. Henceforth what they had and what they did was as
good as anything, because all cultures and all cultural artifacts are
equal. Aspiration was therefore pointless: and thus they have
been as immobilised in their poverty – material, mental, and
spiritual – as completely as the damned in Dante’s Inferno.
Having in large part created this underclass, the British
intelligentsia, guilty about its own allegedly undemocratic
antecedents, feels obliged to flatter it by imitation and has
persuaded the rest of the middle class to do likewise. And so, just
as in Russia under the tsars every town and village had its Holy
Fool for Christ’s Sake, whose selfishness and misconduct were
taken as signs of his deep attachment to Christian principle, we in
Britain now have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of
middle-class people whose willingness to shout Fuck off for hours
at Italians is living proof of the purity of their democratic
sentiments.
For anyone who does not want to see the lowest common
cultural denominator triumph, but who also remains attached to
the ideal of liberal democracy, the spectacle of British vulgarity is
very disturbing. There are more votes in the flattery of vulgarity
than in the denunciation of it.
Does that mean it is destined to be ever victorious?

1998

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 THE HEART OF A HEARTLESS WORLD

OPPOSITE MY HOUSE, in the centre of the square, stands a

Victorian Gothic church, a building of some grandeur, which soars
upward with immense confidence. Its interior is unspoiled, its
stained-glass windows magnificent. It is almost always empty.
The architect, when he built it, could only have supposed that
he was expressing in stone a faith that would endure forever. He
could not have imagined that, a century and a quarter later, the
established church that commissioned his splendid building would
be on the verge of extinction, its bishops straining vainly after
modernity by signing on to the fashionable sociological untruths of
a couple of decades ago or by suggesting variously that Jesus
was a homosexual or that he was not resurrected in any corporeal
sense. Still less could he have imagined that members of the
Synod of the Church of England would one day express more
interest in third world indebtedness or global warming than in sin.
In its characteristically lukewarm and timorous fashion, the church
has adopted (and diluted) the liberation theology that has so
hastened the erosion of Catholic hegemony in Latin America.
But the Church of England is a broad church, and the vicar is a
survivor of the days when God was still on the side of the upper
classes. An ex-Army man, he wears a monocle and has a twinkle
in his other eye. He is a most amusing dinner guest, far too
urbane to bring religion into the conversation. He won’t have
anything to do with his Bolshevik of a bishop; and he still believes
in good works at the prompting of a kind heart, now deemed a
most retrograde, even reactionary, conception of charity. He once
found a job in the church for a patient of mine, an alcoholic ex-
prisoner who wanted at last to go straight: he said, with an

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amiable laugh, that if the church couldn’t give reformed sinners a
chance, who on earth could?
Still, the vicar’s tolerant and restrained kind of religion is not the
kind to spark a revival, and he knows he is almost the last of his
breed. The hold of a church over its society is like the bloom of a
grape: once gone, it is gone for good. Belief in the supernatural,
however, has not necessarily gone the same way as attendance
at the Church of England. Until quite recently I had rather casually
supposed that the English, being among the least religious of
people, had somehow become indifferent to the superlunary world
of angels, devils, evil spirits, and so forth. I was disabused of my
too-easy assumptions by a television discussion programme on
the practice of exorcism, in which I was asked to participate on the
panel, representing Science – or at least Rationality.
The other participants included a self-proclaimed bishop who
had set up a Catholic church in opposition to the one ruled by the
impostor in Rome and an active member of the British Humanist
Association of the type who spends wet Sunday afternoons at
Speakers’ Corner, preaching fiercely anti-God sermons to a
congregation of one.
Next to me in the studio sat a man who had served several
prison sentences for crimes of violence, obviously a psychopath
who, however, had reformed ever since his exorcism, in the
course of which he had vomited up a little green devil into a plastic
bucket. He had served no sentences since, and I was asked – as
the sole legitimate representative of Reason in the studio – to
comment.
Of course I found myself unwilling to humiliate the exorcised
psychopath in front of ten million viewers. The argument went by
default; and what surprised me was the reaction of the audience,
bused in from a local factory for the evening. It regarded the little

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green devil theory of this man’s former misconduct as perfectly
plausible, not as inherently absurd.
Since then I have taken more notice of the symptoms of
religious revival in the city. Large (and competitive) signs exhort
the passerby to read the Holy Quran, God’s Last Testament, or to
Read the Bible Before Christ Comes.
In the Yellow Pages there are, amazingly enough, half as many
places of worship listed as pubs – including the President Saddam
Hussein Mosque, to which the city council recently granted tens of
thousands of pounds to extend its car park, which is now,
presumably, the mother of all car parks.
The Eternal Sacred Order of Cherubim and Seraphim, on the
other hand, is omitted from the list because it has no telephone –
though the Chief Apostle has a portable one.
The Eternal Sacred Order’s chapel, as it happens, is not more
than 200 yards from the church opposite my house, and though
the building somewhat lacks grandeur, still displaying architectural
features of the cold, Gradgrindian school hall it once was, there is
no mistaking the warmth of feeling that suffuses it during a
service.
I first encountered the Eternal Sacred Order in eastern Nigeria,
near the city of Port Harcourt, where the order was founded.
Every Sunday large numbers of the faithful, dressed in long white
seraphic robes, trooped down a path of beaten red earth through
the lush undergrowth to a large church built of cinder block, where
they sang and prayed lustily, forgetting for a while the insecurities
of life in a country in which the police and soldiers hired out their
weapons by the night to armed robbers, and where at least one of
the Four Horsemen was never far off.
Two hundred yards, then, from the church where the religion of
the English upper class genteelly sighs its last, an assembly of

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Nigerian immigrants (all from Rivers State in eastern Nigeria) don
their robes (now satin), sing, and shout hallelujah.
The air in the chapel is thick with incense and rent by urgent
prayer. The police in England don’t hire out their weaponry to
armed robbers, at least not yet, but life is still full of insecurities for
these immigrants. By no means welcomed with open arms by the
local population, they find the climate cold, the cost of living
unexpectedly high, and the moral dangers for their children
manifold and pervasive.
‘Oh, Lord,’ sighs the Junior Apostle (the Senior Apostle is away
in Jerusalem), ‘many are widout jobs, many are widout mudders
and farders, many are widout homes. We pray thee, Lord, to find
dem work, to find dem homes, to bring comfort to dem dat are
widout mudders and farders.’
The congregation is on its knees, facing in all directions, and
unanimously utters a heartfelt amen, with some banging of heads
on the ground for added emphasis. Then one of the women in the
congregation – which is two-thirds female – comes forward and
prays in distinctly biblical language, King James version, for the
sick of the world, especially for Sister Okwepho, who is in the
hospital with abdominal pain. She asks the Lord to guide the
doctors and scientists who are trying to rid the world of diseases,
and from thence she moves by natural progression to the Second
Coming, when there will be no more suffering or abdominal pain,
when there will be no more disease or hunger, no more injustice
or war, no more unemployment or poverty, but only goodness,
brotherhood, and contentment. Now the congregation is standing,
its hands upraised, and it begins to sway rhythmically, eyes
closed, already bathed in the bliss of a world without grey hostile
skies, a suspicious immigration department, or temptations for
adolescents to fall into the wrong company.

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 The ability to give meaning to the everyday vexations of
existence and to overcome them, at least in the imagination, is
one of the characteristics that unite the myriad churches that
flourish, unseen except when looked for, among the poor.
A hundred yards from the prison where I work is another church
unlisted in the Yellow Pages, a large octagonal building (an
ecclesiastical Benthamite panopticon to match the penal one
close by) with a seating capacity of 800, built by subscription of its
impoverished members. They are either Jamaicans or of
Jamaican parentage, and they live at the heart, both physically
and socially, of the inner-city maelstrom. What remain for me mere
events to observe and theorise about are to them the daily
problems of life; and two days before I attended a service in the
church, a young crack dealer had been shot dead 20 yards from
the prison gate in a drive-by assassination, while a few minutes
later another dealer was shot dead not a quarter of a mile away. In
all, five young men had been shot dead during the previous
month, a small tally by Washington standards, perhaps, but still
enough to instill fear into the local population.
I had met the suspected killers in the prison the day before I
attended the service, three young blacks in their early 20s, to
whom killing was no more problematical, morally, than making a
telephone call: men who, when I spoke to them, were so
convinced of the gross injustice of the world that they were
convinced also that nothing they did themselves could add
significantly to its sum.
The congregation – perhaps 400 strong and, again, two-thirds
female – was all black. The congregants were dressed in all their
finery, immaculately turned out in elegant hats and dazzling
dresses; the older among them wore veils and gloves. Some
might be inclined to laugh at this quaint sartorial echo of the

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respectability of a bygone age; but I learned long ago, when I
practiced briefly in the townships of South Africa, that the yearning
of poor people for respectability, their desire to appear clean and
well-dressed in public, is not laughable in the least but is, on the
contrary, something noble and inspiring. It is the prerogative of the
unthinkingly prosperous to sneer at the bourgeois virtues, and I
now recall my own adolescent gestures and affectations in that
direction with distaste.
The shootings were much on the mind of the congregation, for
the victims and perpetrators alike could have been the sons,
brothers, or consorts (I hardly dare speak of husbands anymore,
for fear of being thought implicitly intolerant) of the women who
now sobbed their impromptu prayers facedown on their pews. The
preacher, a young woman, called the congregation for testimony
to the Lord, and an old lady with a limp, whom I had passed
several times in the street, came forward.
She thanked the Lord in trembling voice for all the blessings
that He had showered upon her, His servant, among which was
the great gift of life itself.
‘We thank Thee, Lord! We thank Thee, Lord! We thank Thee,
Lord!’
It was extraordinary to hear this lady, who in other
circumstances appeared retiring and undemonstrative, whip a
large congregation into a frenzy of emotion by the repetition of a
simple phrase, with a constantly rising intonation. And then, with
an instinctive mastery of crowd psychology (which she shared
with many others who later came forward), she waited for the
hubbub of excited gratitude to die down, choosing precisely the
right moment to resume her testimony.
‘We thank Thee, Lord, for the gift of healing.’
‘Amen!’ muttered the congregation. ‘Praise the Lord!’

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 ‘Last week I fell down on the stair and cut my leg. I went to the
hospital [the one in which I work, several of whose nurses were in
the congregation], and the doctor came, and he saw that I was
bleeding. And he said to me that he would sew it up, and he
sewed it up, but still it was bleeding.’ (That sounds like my hospital
all right, I thought.) ‘So the doctor said, “I will bind it up with a
bandage,” but still it bled right through the bandage. So I prayed a
little to the Lord Jesus to stop the bleeding, and do you know?
The bleeding stopped.’
The congregation was profoundly moved.
‘Doctor Jesus! Doctor Jesus! Doctor Jesus!’ exclaimed the old
lady.
An excited young man to the right of me – a bit of an
exhibitionist, I thought – stood up and spoke in tongues.
‘Garabalaga ingerolipola singapatola hamagaruga!’ he said (more
or less). The old lady let him have his say until he ran out of
steam, and when he had finished she resumed her testimony.
‘But we are all sinners, Lord. Therefore we pray for forgiveness.
We do not always follow Your ways, Lord; we are proud, we are
stubborn, we want to go our own way. We think only of ourselves.
That is why there is so much sin, so much robbery, so much
violence, on our streets.’
I recalled the faces of the young men in the prison now accused
of murder: their hard, glittering, expressionless eyes – young men
who recognised no law but their own desire of the moment. The
old lady described (and explained) their radical egotism in a
religious way. Murmurs of assent were heard everywhere. It
wasn’t the police’s fault, or racism’s, or the system’s, or
capitalism’s; it was the failure of sinners to acknowledge any
moral authority higher than their personal whim. And in asserting
this, the congregation was asserting its own freedom and dignity:

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poor and despised as its members might be, they were still human
enough to decide for themselves between right and wrong. And
they offered hope to others, too: for if a man chose to do evil, he
could later elect, by an act of will, to do good. No one had to wait
until there was perfect justice in the world, or all the circumstances
were right, before he himself did good.
A few hundred yards away is yet another Pentecostal church.
On its side wall, in letters three feet high, are painted the words
GOD’S LOVE IS NOT A LOTTERY. Inside, as if to emphasise that
God helps him who helps himself, a notice advises congregants
not to park in the street but in the church parking lot, where a
security camera is in operation. How necessary, alas, is that
advice! The kerbsides of all the local streets are sprinkled with the
sparkling shards of glass from a thousand thefts of (or from) cars
parked there. But such theft is the least of it around here, as I
know from my patients.
One of them lives in a house within sight of the church, where
she is virtually imprisoned by crime. Her car has been stolen, her
house broken into three times in the past year, and her daughter,
who visits her every day, has bought a mobile telephone in order
to call her mother from the bus when she is about to get off at the
bus stop. Her mother looks from an upstairs window for potential
muggers and gives her the all clear, but even so she runs the 200
yards between the bus stop and her mother’s front door. She has
been mugged at knife-point once before; and just as a French
victim of the German concentration camps observed that once
you have been tortured you remain tortured for the rest of your
life, likewise once you have been mugged at knifepoint you
remain mugged at knife-point for the rest of your life.
Also overlooking the church – towering above it, in fact – is a
20-storey block of public housing, to which the ironists of the

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Housing Department have assigned a name full of rural
connotations (the more rural the name given to such blocks, I
have discovered, the larger the surrounding area of concrete). I
know this particular block quite well, having paid two house calls
as a doctor there – accompanied by the riot police to protect me, a
very necessary precaution as it transpired. Another of my patients
who lives there has repeatedly stabbed herself in the abdomen
(five times so far) in an attempt, so far unavailing, to get the
Housing Department – whose concern for its tenantry makes the
average aristocratic landlord of the 18th century look positively
sentimental – to move her somewhere less violent. The
department has so far stuck to its opinion that she is adequately
housed, by which it means that she has four walls and a roof that
is impermeable to water, if not to noise or intruders.
So I think I know what Marx meant when he wrote that religion
is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, the
opium of the people. Of course, he misidentified the oppressor: in
present-day England it is not the bloated plutocrat; it is your drug-
dealing, rock-music-playing, baseball-bat- wielding neighbour. And
inside this Pentecostal church the pastor addresses a large
congregation that knows only too well what it is to live in the
shadow of lawlessness, where psychopathy rules. He quotes the
case of a seven-year-old girl, placed on a table in a pub by her
mother and sold to the highest bidder to abuse as he liked for the
night – a story I should be inclined to dismiss as apocryphal were I
not to hear equivalently dreadful tales every day in my hospital.
This congregation has one striking feature: it is half black and
half white. This is all the more remarkable because, within a few
hundred yards, there are pubs that are racially segregated, where
a man of the wrong race is as welcome as a blasphemer in Iran.
But in the church the races are united by their mutual experience

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of the moral squalor that surrounds them and by the failure of the
public authorities to tackle it in any way, or even to acknowledge
its existence. Once more they seek assurance that their suffering
is not without meaning. Congregant after congregant speaks of
delinquency and drug taking, of illegitimacy and domestic
violence, of criminality and cruelty. They all pray for the conversion
of the world and, exulting in its imminent prospect, speak in
tongues. This paralinguistic gibberish is uttered with the deepest
feeling: it is a catharsis, a release.
The desperate search for order in the midst of anarchy often
renders people vulnerable to self-proclaimed authorities who rush
in to fill the moral vacuum. A patient of mine recently revealed to
me the world of religious cults that flourishes, anonymously and
unseen by the rest of us, in the modern city. My patient was
brought to the hospital having very nearly succeeded in a suicide
attempt. Suicide was the only means, he thought, by which he
could escape the cult that he had embraced and that had
embraced him in his times of trouble.
‘If I couldn’t take the church out of my life,’ he said, ‘at least I
could take my life out of the church.’
He was an intelligent man who had left college to marry young.
A few years later his wife left him for another man. He began to
drink heavily, and before long he was in a desperate state. He had
lost not only his wife and child but his home and his job. His
parents disowned him because of his inclination to aggression
while drunk. He slid down the social scale very fast and soon
found himself in a hostel for men with similar stories. He was
contemplating suicide when he met a young missionary from a
cult called the Jesus Army on the street. She took him to a
meeting at one of the Army’s many communal homes in the city.
The people there seemed deeply contented, happy and laughing

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all the time; they clapped and sang at their daily meetings. They
displayed a profound interest in his welfare and seemed to offer
him their unconditional love, which only later was he to recognise
as highly conditional, manipulative, and false. When asked to join
one of the Army’s communal homes, he thought he had found his
salvation, and he readily agreed. Most of the other inmates of the
homes had been in similar situations, caused by drink or drugs.
And there was no doubt that by joining the Jesus Army they
overcame their addictions (thus demonstrating that, pace what
many experts aver, addiction is a moral, or at least an existential,
question).
But life-saving as the Army undoubtedly was, life-enhancing it
certainly wasn’t. It attempted to recreate primitive Christian
communities in the modern world, taking the Acts of the Apostles
as its fundamental text. All goods were held in common, their use
determined by the church hierarchs. No one was allowed any
money, and even the most minimal expenditure, such as bus fare,
had to be justified in theological terms. A request for a bar of
chocolate, for instance, would be greeted with the unanswerable
question, ‘What use is it to the redemptive work of the church?’
And thus the meaninglessness of precult existence was replaced
by the equally dispiriting deep meaningfulness of the most trivial
of desires and actions, and the request for a bar of chocolate
made the occasion of a battle between the forces of Good and
Evil. No entertainment was permitted: no radio, no television, no
games, no magazines or books. The church was called the
Kingdom, and everything that was not of the church was called
the World. Each member had his Shepherd, one stage higher up
the hierarchy, who acted as a spy for the church authorities, and
from whom nothing was to be hidden. In the Kingdom, no secrets
were allowed.

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 The Army ran its own businesses, including law and medical
practices, which outwardly appeared perfectly normal. A patient of
the Army’s medical practice (funded by the National Health
Service) would not notice any difference from any other practice.
But the wages paid to the staff of all such businesses and
practices, including to doctors and lawyers, went directly into the
cult’s coffers: the wage bills shown in the accounts were purely
nominal. And if an employee of one of the cult’s businesses
should backslide and opt to leave the Kingdom for the World, he
would at once lose his job. Considered by the state to have made
himself voluntarily unemployed, he would be offered the most
minimal assistance in the way of unemployment benefits, an
arrangement that suited the Army’s purposes admirably.
Of course, those who enter the Kingdom are encouraged to
sever ties with any members of their family who remain in the
World. Within a few months, therefore, the new entrant into the
Kingdom is enmeshed more thoroughly than any fly in a spider’s
web. With no money, belongings, job, or family to call his own, it is
difficult for a member of the church to leave the Kingdom,
whatever his reservations about it. Moreover, if his desire to leave
becomes known, he is immediately subject to Chinese thought-
reform methods to make him change his mind. He is made to feel
a member of Iscariot’s party. No one is freed of the cult’s power at
a stroke: there is always a lingering doubt that perhaps the cult
really is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, after all. And the
backslider has to believe tha t the cult is not all bad; otherwise he
is forced to conclude that he has been a gullible fool – which all of
us understandably are reluctant to do.
Several hundred people live in Jesus Army communities in my
city. The most visible signs of the Army’s existence are the large
buses in which its missionaries trawl the streets for the vulnerable.

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And it is by no means the only such cult in the city, or the most
extreme. Another cult sends its Shepherds directly into the sheep
pens themselves: a Shepherd is sent to live at a new adherent’s
house, and the family is held virtually prisoner by him until
adjudged sufficiently indoctrinated to be let out on their own.
Despite its appearance of religious indifference, then, our city
has an unexpectedly intense religious life. In an age of relativism,
people seek certainty; when violence strikes at random, they seek
transcendent meaning; when crime goes unpunished by the
secular power, they seek refuge in divine law; when indifference to
others reigns, they seek community. Everyone to whom I spoke
thought there was some kind of subterranean religious revival in
our slums. And as far as the Jesus Army is concerned, the more
degraded the World, the richer the harvest for the Kingdom. Like
Lenin and Mao, it knows the contradictions should be heightened.
As Lenin so charmingly put it, the worse the better.

1996

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 THERE’S NO DAMNED MERIT IN IT

THE BRITISH have a curious attitude towards wealth: they desire

it for themselves but wish to deny it to others. And so, not
surprisingly, there are very few methods of acquiring wealth of
which they approve. Among them is gambling.
When in 1991 the government instituted a National Lottery,
Britons were hooked at once. It seemed to them that buying a
winning ticket was a perfectly legitimate – perhaps the only
perfectly legitimate – way of acquiring a lot of money. After all,
everyone who buys a ticket has an equal chance: the effort and
talent usually necessary to accumulate wealth are redundant. A
mental defective has as much chance of winning as a genius, a
slothful spendthrift as an industrious saver. This is what the British
now mean when they talk of equality of opportunity – though they
have not yet quite descended to the level of the Nigerian author of
a self-help manual who, illustrating the need for hard work as a
prerequisite for success, asked rhetorically, ‘How can you win a
lottery if you do not fill the ticket in?’
Full-page ads in the British press recently trumpeted the
immense success of the National Lottery. In its short existence
(the ad boasted) it had raised more money than its longer-
established equivalents in Japan, France, and Spain, adding that
this success was ‘not by chance.’
No, indeed not: for the British population is universally
acknowledged to be the worst-educated of any Western country
and, as one commentator wrote, any National Lottery may be
construed as a tax on stupidity.
In fact, it is as such a tax on hopelessness and impatience as
stupidity. The poorest and worst-educated section of the

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population spends the most, both relatively and absolutely, on
lottery tickets. Those who feel that there’s no way to escape their
predicament through their own efforts are most inclined to resort
to the lottery; and every week – soon to be twice a week – the
selection of random numbers fans the embers of hope among
innumerable people in despair.
The National Lottery is both a form of gambling and a true tax,
by means of which the poor pay for the pleasures of the rich. A
committee awards the profits to orchestras, art galleries, dance
companies – even a theatre group composed of radical feminist
ex-prisoners. The largest beneficiary so far has been the Royal
Opera House, Covent Garden, where a heavily subsidised seat
can still cost £200. But like all gamblers, lottery ticket buyers think
not of where their lost stakes go but of how they will dispose of
their winnings.
If the British happily accepted inequalities of wealth as being in
the nature of things, indeed as both a precondition and a
consequence of a free society, the pernicious effect of the
National Lottery upon the morals of the nation would not be so
great. It would merely be a bit of fun. But most Britons equate
inequalities of wealth with inequity and injustice, and explain away
their own urge for sudden enrichment as a kind of poor man’s
revenge upon a system that allows men to accumulate an unfairly
large portion of the world’s goods by talent and hard work. Even
so, there is more rejoicing in Britain over the bankruptcy of one
self-made millionaire than over the enrichment of ninety-nine poor
men.
The social legitimacy of gambling in Britain is of relatively
recent origin. When I was a child, I heard dark hints that an uncle
of mine had wasted his substance upon the ponies; he had also
gone, in the words of Nicholas Nickleby’s Mr. Mantalini, to the

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demnition bow-wows and had wagered – and lost – a fortune
upon them. Off-track betting offices (delicately called Turf
Accountants in the early days of their legality to give them an air
of professional respectability) were illegal until 1963.
Indeed, my first contact with gambling as a child was in my
local barber shop, which ran an illegal book. The barber would
interrupt the progress of the clippers down my neck (I can feel the
tingling still) to rush to the telephone, down which, sotto voce, he
spoke an incomprehensible jargon – nine to four on, the going’s
soft, three to one each way, and so forth.
Meanwhile, I was left to contemplate the mysterious little
purple-and-cream envelopes on the shelf in front of me, which my
older and wiser brother later explained to me contained condoms.
Thus sex and gambling came alike to symbolise for me the illicit
and the forbidden. Even now, sex and gambling have a
connection in my mind: many of my younger female patients,
explaining the existence of an illegitimate child or two, use
expressions universally current hereabouts: ‘I caught pregnant,’ or
‘I caught for a boy.’ Unavoidably, an image rises to my mind’s eye
of a spinning roulette wheel revolving ever more slowly, until the
ball settles in a compartment that bears not a number but the
word ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’
Few social inhibitions against gambling remain: the Yellow
Pages now list casino and bingo halls in the same category as
veterans’ associations, political clubs, and voluntary societies to
provide amusement for the elderly. Bookmakers, however, have a
section to themselves: a considerably longer section than the one
immediately next to it listing booksellers.
Apart from the National Lottery and scratch cards, which have
turned every supermarket, convenience store, and gasoline
station in the country into a gambling hall, there are three main

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types of establishments for gambling in the city, each with its own
clientele, which I list in ascending order of unsociability: the bingo
hall, the betting shop, and the casino.
The bingo industry expanded in the ’60s, and what had formerly
been a game played once a year at the seaside while on holiday
became the focal point of the social lives of hundreds of
thousands of Britons. No town of any size is without several bingo
halls, almost always converted cinemas with names like Ritzy,
Rex, or Roxy. Like raspberries, which today are imported year-
round from the uttermost parts of the earth so that we should
never be without them, bingo is now perennial. Come rain or
shine, the players may be seen arriving at the bingo hall as
punctually as alcoholics arriving at the bars for opening time. Pink
and apple-green neon lights festoon the buildings on the outside,
lending an air of cheap and gaudy gaiety.
But the atmosphere inside, in the Art Deco auditorium, is quite
different. Demographically the crowd resembles the Russian
Orthodox congregations of Khrushchev’s day: preponderantly
elderly women, with a high concentration of widows and walking
sticks. All the men – not more than a fifth of the total – are old; a
glance shows that many suffer from that former bane of the
English working class, chronic bronchitis. No wonder: the air is
thick with cigarette smoke, so thick that I feel the back of my
throat seizing up, as if in a gas attack. My eyes begin to sting. I
haven’t seen or breathed air like this since my childhood, when
the London November pea-souper meant that men had to walk in
front of buses to guide them on their way, and it was too dark for
me to go to school. Medical correctness hasn’t reached the bingo
hall yet.
It is with a certain pleasure – no, joy – that I watch women with
the physiques and mobility of beached whales refresh themselves

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constantly (as they mark their cards) with large piles of
cholesterol-raising fried foods and large volumes of tepid, watery
English beer. Tomorrow, of course, they’ll go to their doctors and
tell them that, however hard they try, they just can’t seem to lose
weight: they only have to look at food, and the pounds go on.
I’m recognised at once as someone who doesn’t belong here,
both because of my comparative youth and my ignorance of what
to do and how to play. An elderly man, a widower, takes me under
his wing and shows me the ropes. He advises me to take only two
cards at a time: a tyro like me couldn’t manage more. He is happy
to induct the younger generation into the bingo culture, content
that bingo will live after him. To my shame, I see around me old
ladies of the type I would normally test for Alzheimer’s disease
were they to appear in my hospital sitting, with eight, ten, and
twelve cards that they mark simultaneously and with aplomb.
They even have time for humorous remarks to their neighbours.
They take in up to 180 numbers at a single glance, and mark off
the numbers as they are called with so little effort that they must
have memorised to perfection all the cards. Could it be that the
mental exercise, hour after hour and day after day, of marking the
cards keeps old brains young? Could it be that the hope, repeated
every day, of winning tonight’s jackpot – an all-expenses-paid
week for two in Tenerife or a complete set of Le Creuset
saucepans – is what keeps neuronal degeneration at bay?
The young man, dressed in a golden satin tuxedo, who calls out
the numbers randomly generated by the computer tries
desperately to infuse the process with human interest: some
numbers seem to surprise and others to amuse him. A few of the
numbers are known by their nicknames: legs eleven, for example.
The contestants greet them with murmurs of appreciation, as if
they were old friends.

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 Before long, someone calls ‘Bingo!’
I and all the others have lost, but the winner’s triumph seems to
arouse no envy, only genuine pleasure and even congratulation:
after all, it could have been anyone of us, and next time it
probably will be. As Lord Melbourne, the 19th century British prime
minister, put it when explaining the advantages of the Order of the
Garter, the highest British chivalric order, which was then awarded
exclusively to members of the upper aristocracy, ‘There’s no
damned merit in it.’
Triumph without merit: surely the dream of half of mankind and
three-quarters of the British. The first couple of rounds of bingo
just about hold my interest, but the charm soon wears thin and will
evaporate into tedium. As if sensing my incipient boredom after
the completion of the second round, the man who calls the
numbers declares that he has an important announcement to
make: it is Beryl’s birthday. Applause breaks out, and the man
leads us all in singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Beryl. He asks Beryl to
come forward and collect the champagne – actually, a cheap
imitation – with which the ever-solicitous management is pleased
to present her on this auspicious occasion. More applause.
Everyone is touched. Beryl takes a bow, as if she had achieved
something. In fact, the bingo hall celebrates at least one birthday
every day, sometimes as many as five or six, because to join the
club (you cannot by law walk straight off the street into a bingo
hall) you have to have given the management your date of birth.
The computer spews out birthday invitations to members to come
celebrate in the hall; since the club has more than 3,000
members, it finds at least one celebrant per day. Yet each
birthday, like each bottle of fake champagne, kindles not just
delight but surprise, and every birthday can be applauded with

153
gusto because there is no damned merit in it: everyone has a
birthday.
Beryl slides back into anonymity after her cometlike blaze
across the firmament of the bingo hall, and the serious business
of the day is resumed. I am now completely bored.
‘How often do you come?’ I ask my bingo mentor.
‘Three or four times a week,’ he replies. ‘But I’m not a fanatic,
like some of them.’
‘Is that common?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘It’s somewhere to go for them and something
to do.’
Life, in this view, is 70 years of tedium sandwiched between two
eternities of oblivion.
I leave the bingo hall with a strange amalgam of thoughts and
feelings: for the hall offers many elderly people the simulacrum, at
least, of a social life, and bingo, apart from those few who become
so obsessed with it that they waste their entire income upon it, is
harmless. The atmosphere in the hall is warm, welcoming,
reassuringly womb-like, and the players are decent folk intent on a
little fun. But the repetitious mindlessness of the game seems to
speak of a mental and spiritual void that, given the age of the
players, has evidently been present in England for many years.
We have a land not of bread and circuses but of crisps and bingo.
The betting shop, by contrast, is as exclusively a male preserve
as London clubs used to be. My hospital being in an area of high
unemployment (24 percent, in fact), there are several betting
shops within a few hundred yards of its main entrance. I have
never seen a female customer in any of them, and most of the
customers are poor and unemployed. You would hardly have to be
a revolutionary Marxist to observe how the poor are fleeced – with
their own eager cooperation, of course – of what little money they

154
have by the possessors of capital, in this case the owners of the
betting shops, which are affiliated with one of two large chains.
The poor, as a 16th century German bishop once remarked, are a
gold mine – though curiously, among my patients I meet only
those who claim to win on the horses, never to lose.
Inside the betting shop, whose windows onto the street are
always opaque (a residuum of the old taboo against betting),
knots of men gather to discuss local gossip and hot racing tips of
the day. Arguments break out about the relative merits of Kevin’s
Slipper and Aladdin’s Cave for the 3.30 at Utoxeter. They are the
kind of men I know well from my medical practice: men whose
chronic backaches prevent them from ever again undertaking
gainful employment, but who are capable of surprising feats of
physical endurance in the right circumstances, such as a pub
brawl.
Attached to the walls are today’s racing papers. Middle-aged
men read them with a studious air, peering at them with donnish
half-moon spectacles. I find it rather difficult to follow the technical
language, as in this description of a horse: ‘Dancing Alone: Out of
a winning sprinter but no sign of ability for Pip Payne at two when
well beaten in maidens and a seller (well backed for the latter); off
track since and first run for a new stable.’
The dog-racing language, terser, is almost as opaque: ‘Well-
placed on the stagger, sees out the trip,’ or ‘Operates well enough
from “red”, must respect.’
Even the forms on which the bets are placed require technical
knowledge of the different types of bet: the Round Robin, the
Patent, the Yankee and Super Yankee, the Tricast, and the
Alphabet. The betting shop is not so much a form of entertainment
as what American social anthropologists would call a culture. It is
a way of life: up and down the country thousands of people spend

155
the entire day, the entire week, in the betting shop. There are
never fewer than 15 people in the shops I have been into, and,
since there are at least 200 such shops in the city, there must be
at least 3,000 people in betting shops at any given moment in our
city of just under a million, or about one percent of the adult male
population.
Overhead televisions relay the races as they happen: a
cacophony of competing commentaries, mixed with
announcements over the public address system advertising new
types of bets – not just on horses or dogs – with prizes of
£100,000 for a stake of only £1. You can bet on anything, it
seems: the results of individual soccer and boxing matches, the
forthcoming election, the outcome of a debate in the House of
Commons, the number of winners on track number 3 this evening
at Small Heath Dog Racing Stadium, and even on the likelihood of
the end of the world happening by the year 2000, though
presumably collection in the event of being right would in this
instance prove difficult.
A man in a camel hair coat and with a spiv’s greased
moustache approaches me and points to one of the television
screens: a horse is winning the race by a mile. My interlocutor
holds himself as a cut above the rabble in the corner who are
smoking dope (the centre of crack dealing in a nearby area is the
local betting shop). That is why he has approached me.
‘That’s a good horse,’ he says, with an air of profound
cogitation. ‘He won like that last time out. I’m thinking of backing
him for the Classic. What do you think?’
‘I... er... ’
I’m not sure what to say: he’s being friendly and wants to start a
long and learned conversation about White Admiral’s chances in
the Classic, but it won’t take him long to discover that I know

156
nothing about it, that I am a complete stranger, a foreigner, in his
country.
‘Personally, I bet at random,’ I reply and wish him good luck –
probably considered the height of ill taste in these circles. A
winning ticket in the lottery is good luck; a win on the horses is the
result of long study of the form and superior perspicacity.
The study of the form is the betting man’s philology, philosophy,
science, and literary criticism all rolled into one. Such a betting
man invests immense effort and long periods of time in cogitating
permutations of variables – the going, the handicaps, past
performance, the jockeys, the position at the start, and so forth –
as alchemists devoted themselves with useless pedantry to the
transmutation of base metal into gold. And how many betting
widows do I meet in the hospital, who hardly see their husbands
while the betting shops are open!
The third type of gambling establishment in our city is the
casino. There are two within walking distance of my house, and I
am now a member of the more salubrious of them. Sometimes,
when I go for a walk, I pass the prostitutes who solicit nightly on
my street corner, and I continue past the casino, a renovated
Victorian building with a decor of bordello pink with a minor
Turkish pasha’s chandeliers.
In the car park, at all times of the day and night, Jaguars and
BMWs congregate, and their owners always seem to have one
last conversation on the mobile phone before going in to the
roulette tables. They are businessmen with money to throw away:
to lose a few thousand in front of their peers and retain their
sangfroid brings them prestige. They must be doing well if losing a
sum like that within a few minutes hardly affects them.
They are not the only customers. Smaller fry abound also,
dressed usually with a shabby gentility, who come to stake their

157
barely disposable income on the tables. No one is excluded: the
casino is a democratic institution. There are five casinos in our
city, and the law says you must have been a member for forty-
eight hours before you enter one of them. I show my passport and
am told the following rules of membership: 1) No T-shirts; 2) No
trainers.
I promise to comply, and two days later I receive my
membership card and a letter from something called the
Membership Committee, which sounds like an invention by G. K.
Chesterton: ‘The Membership Committee is pleased to inform you
that you have been elected to life membership of the ... Club.’
I can’t help feeling flattered: though, as I discover later, more
than three percent of the population of our city, or 30,000 people,
are likewise life members of this one casino alone. As the
manager of another casino put it to me, however, the real question
is, how many of the members are active? This is precisely the
question churches ask: baptisms and funerals are all very well,
but what happens in between?
Casinos haven’t changed very much down the ages. Everything
to be observed in the casino of which I am a life member is to be
found in a novella by Dostoevsky written in 1866. Casino
gambling is a solitary vice, asocial and atomistic: I watch a man
despairingly fling £30 to the croupier, who picks it up and inserts it
into the bowels of the table with lizard quickness, returning him
some chips. Within two minutes he has won – and lost – £1,000.
Like Grandmama in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, he has won twice
in succession on a single number; and like the onlookers when
the protagonist of The Gambler wins an immense sum, I want
desperately to urge the man to go, to leave while he is winning.
But no; in another minute he has lost everything. And, as
Dostoevsky remarks, no other human activity provides so many

158
and such strong emotions in so short a space of time: fevered
hope, despair, elation, joy, misery, excitement, disappointment.
This is crack cocaine without the chemicals.
Widows with large solitaire diamond rings walk round the tables
with their little notepads, supplied by the casino, recording
numbers and trying to work out a system. There is no system, of
course, and never has been, not since the women in The Gambler
walked round the tables with their little notepads, supplied by the
casino, trying to work out a system…
The best customers of casinos have changed: they used to be
Jews, then Greeks, then Chinese, and now increasingly they are
Indian. But the roulette table dissolves all racial and social
barriers: the Muslim and the Hindu, the businessman and the
unskilled worker, are rendered brothers and equals by the spin of
the wheel. If the lion and the lamb could play roulette, they’d lie
down together in perfect peace.
I watch a man in his 50s, obviously not rich and dressed
shabbily, buy chips for £20. He loses them all in a few minutes. He
takes £10 from his pocket and loses it even quicker. He searches
his pockets and comes up with £5. When he has lost that, he is
penniless. Despair and disgust – with himself, with the world – are
written on his face: but he’ll be back, probably tomorrow, or
whenever his pension arrives.
I went to a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous, held in a dismal
and cold community centre. There are five such groups in the city,
the same number as casinos. Most of the gamblers there had
been in trouble with the law: they had diverted funds from the
companies for which they worked; they had lied, cheated, stolen,
and defrauded even their own relatives and loved ones to fund
their habits. There was practically no depth to which they had not
sunk, that they might recover their losses with one last coup.

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 ‘As an organisation, Gamblers Anonymous has no position on
gambling,’ said one of them, a man ‘addicted’ to slot machines.
He had played them up to eight hours a day before coming – or
being forced by the threat of prosecution for embezzlement – to
his senses. ‘Millions of people gamble without coming to harm.’
‘But should gambling be officially encouraged or discouraged?’
Silence.

1997

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 CHOOSING TO FAIL

THE CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS from the Indian subcontinent

make up a quarter of all British medical students, twelve times
their proportion in the general population. They are likewise
overrepresented in the law, science, and economics faculties of
our universities. Among the Indian immigrants who arrived in the
country with next to nothing, moreover, there are now reportedly
some thousands of millionaires.
Despite its reputation for being ossified and class-ridden, then,
Britain is still a country in which social mobility is possible –
provided, of course, that a belief that Britain is an ossified and
class-ridden society doesn’t completely stifle personal effort. It is
the mind, not society, that forges the manacles that keep people
enchained to their misfortunes.
But where there can be upward social mobility, there can be
mobility in the opposite direction. And the children of Indian
immigrants are dividing into two groups: a segment that chooses
the upward path, and a segment that chooses descent into the
underclass.
Sometimes this division occurs within the very same family. For
example, last week I met two prisoners of Indian origin, all of
whose siblings had gone to college and become either
professional or business people. Their brothers and sisters had
chosen law, medicine, or commerce: they had chosen heroin,
burglary, and the intimidation of witnesses. The financial status of
their parents could not explain their choices: the father of one was
a bus driver, the second a successful travel agent, and both
fathers had been not only willing and able but longing to fund their
higher education, had they wanted it.

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 I first noticed signs of a developing Indian underclass a few
years ago in the prison in which I work, where there has been an
inexorable rise in both the absolute and relative numbers of
prisoners of Indian origin. In the last eight years the proportion of
Indian prisoners has more than doubled, and if it continues to rise
at the same rate for the next eight years, prisoners of Indian origin
will have surpassed their proportion in the general population. As
the proportion of Indians in the age group most likely to be
imprisoned has not increased, demography doesn’t explain this
shift.
Eight years ago, most of the Indian prisoners were guilty of
white-collar crime, such as tax evasion: not the kind of thing to
make you fear to walk the streets at night. All that has changed
now. Burglary, street robbery, car theft, and drug-dealing, with
their attendant violence, have become so commonplace among
them that mention of their seriousness elicits only a bored shrug
of incomprehension. Why make a fuss over anything so ordinary
as a street robbery? Everyone does it.
Liberals to whom I have mentioned the phenomenon applaud it
as representing the assimilation and acculturation of an ethnic
minority into the wider society. They are right to view this
development as a cultural phenomenon. There are many other
outward signs of the acculturation of Indians into the lower depths.
Although their complexions are by no means well adapted to it,
tattooing is fast on the increase among them. Other adornments –
a ring through the eyebrow or the nose, for example – are
membership badges of the clan. Gold in the front teeth, either
replacing an entire incisor or framing it with a rim of gold, is
virtually diagnostic of heroin addiction and criminality. Such
decorative dentistry is imitative of the black underclass and is
intended as a signal of both success and dangerousness.

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 Young Indians have adopted, too, the graceless manners of the
class to which they aspire to belong. They now walk with the
same self-assured vulpine lope as their white compatriots, not
merely as a way of locomotion but as a means of communicating
threat. Like the whites, they shave their heads to reveal the scars
upon their scalps, the wounds of the underclass war of each
against all.
They have made the gestures and postures of their white and
black mentors their own. When a member of the developing
Indian underclass consults me, he slouches in the chair at so
acute an angle to the floor that I would not have thought it
possible, let alone comfortable, for a man to retain the position.
But it isn’t comfort he is after: he is making a statement of
disrespect in the face of what he supposes to be authority. His
fragile ego demands that he dominate all social interactions and
submit to no convention. He also adopts a facial expression
unique to the British underclass. Asked a question, he replies with
an arching and curling of half his upper lip, part snarl, part sneer.
Expressive both of disdain and of menace, it is by no means easy
to achieve, as I proved to myself by trying it without success in the
mirror. It simultaneously demands, ‘Why are you asking me that?’
and warns: ‘Don’t push me too far.’ It is the response to all
questions, no matter how innocuous: for in a world in which every
contact is a jostling for power, it is best to establish straightaway
that you are not to be trifled with.
The growing Indian underclass adheres to the values of the
white underclass – values that are at once shallow and intensely
held. For example, I was once a witness in a murder trial of four
young Indians accused of killing their companion in the course of
a quarrel over the brand of trainers he wore. They mocked him
because his footwear was not of the latest fashionable brand, and

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eventually he lashed out at them in frustration. In the ensuing
fight, they killed him and left his body at the entrance to his block
of flats.
Illegitimate birth has now made its appearance among Indians.
Where once it was almost unknown for an Indian to have a child
out of wedlock, it is no longer even rare. The Indians have
reached the five percent level from which the rate of illegitimacy in
the home population grew exponentially in the 1960s, and there is
no reason why, in a few years’ time, they should not reach the
national average of 33 percent, for when history repeats itself, it is
usually at an accelerated pace.
At first, only Indian men produced illegitimate children; some of
those who had submitted to an arranged marriage kept a woman,
usually white but sometimes black, in concubinage elsewhere in
the city. Often the concubine – knowing nothing of the man’s
background, biography, or culture – had no idea that he was
married. She would then have his child under the disastrously
mistaken impression that it would bind his hitherto inconstant
attention more firmly to her.
More recently, however, the bearing of illegitimate children has
spread to young Indian women. An Indian girl runs away from
home after a long period of conflict with her parents over makeup,
dress, the hour at which she may return from night-clubs, and so
on. She soon falls into the embrace of a young man – white,
black, or Indian – all too willing to prove his masculinity by
impregnating her and then, of course, abandoning her.
From this experience she learns nothing. She is lonely, in need
of male company and – in the predatory world in which she now
finds herself – male protection. The cycle repeats itself until she
has three children by three different fathers, though by the end of

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her reproductive career she remains as isolated and friendless as
the day she left home.
One might have supposed that young Indian women would go
to almost any lengths to avoid so terrible and predictable a fate.
Not so: they are increasingly embracing it as if it were enviable.
Though their numbers are as yet small, they are the party of the
future.
How has an Indian underclass formed so quickly? And why has
a proportion of the Indian population embraced the life of the
underclass with such apparent enthusiasm?
These are important questions: the answers we give to them
both reflect and determine our entire social philosophy. The liberal
would no doubt argue that the formation of an Indian underclass is
the inevitable response to poverty and prejudice and the despair
they evoke. With the path to advancement blocked by a racist
society, young Indians drop out of school, shave their heads,
tattoo their skin, inject themselves with heroin, father children out
of wedlock, and commit crimes.
But if they are caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and
prejudice, why do so many of their compatriots succeed, and
succeed triumphantly? Why do the children of successful Indian
parents also choose the underclass way of life? And why may
stunning success and abject failure so often occur in the same
family?
The explanation must surely involve conscious human choice.
Young Indians do not join the underclass through inadvertence or
by force of parental example, as young whites – now into the third
generation of this way of life in England – often do. In no case
known to me have the parents of young Indians approved of their
children’s choices or been other than horrified by them. Such
parents frequently consult me after they have watched with

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growing dismay one or all of their children take the primrose path
to urban perdition. For example, a taxi driver who sometimes
drives me home begged me to talk to his son. The driver was, of
course, exactly the kind of petit bourgeois who, when not actually
hated by intellectuals, is despised as an uninteresting and
unimaginative menial, whose dream is what they have mocked for
so long – respectable independence. He is therefore beyond the
pale of sympathetic understanding: for the small man is to be
defended only so long as he consents to remain a victim, in need
of publicly-funded ministrations.
The driver’s son (alone of his five children) had taken to the
needle, and in doing so had caused him grief beyond his powers
to express it in English. His son now stole from the family home,
lied, cheated, cajoled, threatened, and even used violence to
extract enough money from his parents and siblings for his drugs.
The father didn’t want to turn him out of his house or over to the
police; but neither did he want to work his long hours merely to
supply his son with the drugs that might one day kill him.
I asked the son – complete with gold front dentistry, baggy
trousers, baseball cap worn backward even in my consulting
room, and the latest trainers – why he had started to take heroin.
‘There’s nothing else to do on the street,’ he replied. ‘That’s
society, what it puts you in.’
His attribution of his own choice to society was not unusual. I
asked him whether he had not known the dangers of heroin
before he took it.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘But you took it all the same?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’

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 ‘No offence, doctor, but the people who gave it to me know
more about life than you do. They know what it’s about, what it’s
like on the street. And they’re not prejudiced or racists.’
He was under the influence of the idea that some aspects of
reality are more real than others: that the seedy side of life is more
genuine, more authentic, than the refined and cultured side – and
certainly more glamorous than the bourgeois and respectable
side. This idea could be said to be the fundamental premise of
modern popular culture. As for his reference to racism, it was
clearly intended as an all-purpose self-justification, since his own
brother was now a tolerably successful lawyer.
Another set of parents consulted me about their son, 18, who
had chosen a similar path. Both his parents had white-collar jobs
and were neither rich nor poor. At about 13, their son had started
to play truant from school, smoke marijuana, drink alcohol, stay
out all night, and brush against the law. On the few occasions he
attended school, he argued with the teachers and was eventually
expelled for attacking one of them. He left home at 16 to live with
his pregnant girlfriend, whose name he tattooed on his forearm as
a preliminary to abandoning her altogether, having discovered that
he was not yet ready for a life of domesticity. Falling in with drug
dealers, he now lived an itinerant life, dodging the law, indulging in
crack, and occasionally ending up in the hospital with an
overdose, taken not so much to kill himself as to seek temporary
sanctuary or asylum from the consequences of his own style of
life.
The father said that his son had now become exactly what he
had hoped he would never be: a member of the English
underclass. He had watched him descend into barbarism, acutely
aware of his own impotence to prevent it. The Spanish Inquisition
could hardly have invented a worse torture for him.

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 His son was of high intelligence and had once been expected to
do well by his teachers. I asked him why he had had such a
rooted objection to school.
‘I wanted to earn some money.’
‘What for?’
‘To have a good time. And clothes.’
The clothes he wanted were the inelegant but expensive (and
ever changing) uniform of slum youth. The good time consisted
entirely of attendance at clubs with thousands of like-minded
young people. There was nothing in his conception of the Good
Life other than constant excitement and instant gratification. His
idea of paradise was life as MTV.
‘Did you not think you had something still to learn?’
‘No.’
In other words, he considered himself perfectly formed and
complete at 13. Precociously adolescent, he was trapped in
immaturity. In a sense he was a victim: not of poverty or racism or
a vicious cycle of deprivation but of a popular culture that first
attracted and then engulfed him, but always through the mediation
of his own choices.
There is a dreadful predictability to the explanation the young
Indians give for their descent into the underclass, identical to
those their white counterparts give.
‘I was easily led,’ they say. ‘I fell in with the wrong crowd.’
I have heard these things said hundreds of times. They pretend
not to notice the self-exculpatory nature of these answers, whose
truth they expect me to accept without further examination.
‘Why, if you are so easily led,’ I ask them, ‘were your parents
not able to lead you? And did you not choose the wrong crowd
rather than fall into it like a stone?’

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 As to why they started to take heroin, their standard reason is
the one that Sir Edmund Hillary gave when asked why he climbed
Everest: ‘Because it was there.’ But in the case of heroin, ‘there’ is
‘everywhere’.
‘Heroin’s everywhere,’ they say, as if it were the air they could
not help but breathe in.
‘Are you telling me that every last person in your area takes
heroin?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Then you chose to, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Why?’
Like the whites, they go to some length to provide an answer
other than that they liked it and found pleasure in doing what they
knew they ought not to do.
‘My grandfather died,’ or ‘My girlfriend left me,’ or ‘I was in
prison’: never do they avow a choice or a conscious decision. And
yet they know that what they are saying is untrue: for they grasp
the point immediately when I tell them that my grandfather, too,
died, yet I do not take heroin, as indeed the great majority of
people whose grandfathers have died do not.
In fact, they have assimilated to the local cultural and
intellectual climate: a climate in which the public explanation of
behaviour, including their own, is completely at variance with all
human experience. This is the lie that is at the heart of our society,
the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence
to flourish: for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from
without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby
awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus
we feel good about behaving badly.

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 This is not to deny that social factors in upbringing influence the
way people think and make decisions. If the negligent and
sometimes brutal incompetence of so much white British
parenting (solicitously justified by liberal intellectuals and
subsidised by the welfare state) explains the perpetuation and
expansion of the white British underclass, if not its origins, could it
be that the severity and rigidity of Indian upbringing, combined
with British culture’s siren song of self-gratification, explain the
development of an Indian underclass?
The fact that the Muslim population has a crime rate six times
that of the Hindu and three times that of the Sikh suggests that it
could, for the Muslim culture of the subcontinent has in general
much greater difficulty compromising creatively with Western
culture than the other two religions have. This startling difference
is a further argument against those who would see in the
development of an Indian underclass an inevitable response to
racial prejudice: for it is surely unlikely that the racially prejudiced
would trouble themselves to distinguish between Muslims, Sikhs,
and Hindus.
Muslim parents are more reluctant than Sikh and Hindu parents
to recognise that their children, having been brought up in a very
different cultural environment from that in which they grew up,
inevitably depart from their own traditional ways and aspire to a
different way of life. While many Muslim parents send their
daughters out of the country at the age of 12 to prevent them from
becoming infected with local ideas (but as the Jesuits would tell
them, it is already too late – they should send their daughters
away at seven), very few Sikhs do so and no Hindus at all.
Parental inflexibility is an invitation to adolescent rebellion, and
so it is hardly surprising that, in the developing Indian underclass,
Muslims should predominate so strongly. But there are more ways

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of rebelling than one, and alas, rebellious Indian adolescents have
an antinomian example to hand in the shape of the preexisting
British underclass. The popular culture tells them that to spit in the
eye of everyone they can reach is a sign of moral election –
insofar as it is possible to be morally elect in a world without moral
judgment. The underclass life offers them the prospect of freedom
without responsibility, whereas their parents offer them only
responsibility without freedom. They are left to discover for
themselves that the exercise of liberty requires virtue if it is not to
turn into a nightmare.
The development of an Indian underclass in Britain is a matter
of greater significance than the numbers involved might suggest.
For it is not a quasi-mechanical response to economic conditions,
to racial prejudice, or to any other form of oppression of the kind
beloved of liberal social engineers. It is a refutation of the infinitely
pernicious Marxist maxim, which has corrupted so much of
intellectual life, that ‘it is not the consciousness of men that
determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness.’
Men – even adolescent boys – think: and the content of what
they think determines in large part the course of their lives.

2000

171
 FREE TO CHOOSE

LAST WEEK a middle-aged man was brought to my hospital in a

desperate condition. He had discharged himself from a mental
hospital against medical advice three weeks before; arriving
home, he had found the prospect of life with his wife no more
inviting than that of life in the wards of an asylum. He had taken
himself to the centre of the city, where he camped out in the open
in a small public garden next to a luxury hotel. There he stayed,
eating nothing and drinking little, until he was eventually found
unconscious and so dehydrated that the blood had thickened and
clotted in one of his legs, which was gangrenous and therefore
had to be amputated.
What story could better illustrate the supposedly callous
indifference and cruel individualism of our society than that of a
man left nearly to die in the middle of the city, next to a hotel with
rooms at a hundred pounds a night, in the full gaze not only of the
guests but of thousands of his fellow citizens, all for the lack of a
little water?
But other interpretations of the story are possible. Perhaps the
thousands of passersby who saw the unfortunate man as he
declined slowly towards the verge of death were so accustomed
to the idea that the state would (and should) step in that they felt
no personal duty to do something on the man’s behalf. One does
not, after all, pay half one’s income in taxes in order to assume
individual responsibility for the welfare of one’s neighbours. One’s
taxes are supposed to ensure not only oneself, but everyone else,
against neglect. Just as no one is guilty when everyone is, no one
is responsible when everyone is.

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 Then again, perhaps the passersby thought the man was only
exercising his right to live as he chose, as championed by those
early advocates for deinstitutionalisation of the insane,
psychiatrists Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing. Who are we to judge
in a free country how people should live? Apart from a slight
measure of untidiness, the man created no public nuisance.
Perhaps the passersby thought, as they tolerated him nearly to
death, that he was merely doing his own thing, and in the conflict
between the imperative to act the good Samaritan and the
imperative to respect the autonomy of others, the latter prevailed.
In the modern climate, after all, rights always trump duties.
Still, the existence of people who live on the street, or who are
of no fixed abode, is generally taken, at least by liberals, as an
indication not of our society’s commitment to freedom but of its
injustice, inequity, and indifference to human suffering.
There is no subject more likely than homelessness to produce
calls for the government to intervene to put an end to the scandal;
and no subject is better suited to that most pleasurable of human
activities, compassionate handwringing. Yet as is so often the
case with social problems, the precise nature and location of the
alleged injustice, inequity, and indifference to suffering become
unclear when things are looked at close up rather than through
the lens of generalisations, either ethical (‘no one in an affluent
society should be homeless’) or statistical (‘homelessness rises in
times of unemployment’).
In the first place, it is far from evident that our society in the
abstract is indifferent to homelessness. Indeed, homelessness is
the source of employment for not negligible numbers of the middle
classes. For example, in one hostel for the homeless that I visited,
located in a rather grand but disused and deconsecrated Victorian
church, I discovered that there were 91 residents and 41 staff

173
members, only a handful of whom had any direct contact with the
objects of their ministrations. The homeless slept in dormitories in
which there was no privacy whatever. There was a rank smell that
every doctor recognises (but never records in the medical notes)
as the smell of homelessness. And then, passing along a corridor
and through a door with a combination lock to prevent untoward
intrusions, one suddenly entered another world: the sanitised, air-
conditioned (and airtight) world of the bureaucracy of compassion.
The number of offices, all computerised, was astonishing. The
staff, dressed in smart casual clothes, were absorbed in their
tasks, earnestly peering into their computer screens, printing
documents, and rushing off for urgent consultations with one
another. The amount of activity was impressive, the sense of
purpose evident; it took some effort to recall the residents I had
encountered as I entered the hostel, scattered in what had been
the churchyard, who were swaying if upright and snoring if
horizontal, surrounded by empty cans and plastic bottles of 9
percent alcohol cider (which permits the highest alcohol-to-pound
ratio available in England at the moment). Nero fiddled while
Rome burned, and the hostel administrators made pie charts
while the residents drank themselves into oblivion.
There are 27 hostels listed in the Yellow Pages of our city’s
telephone directory, and many known to me are unlisted. Some of
the hostels are smaller and have fewer staff members than the
one I have described; but clearly, some hundreds of people – and
possibly as many as a couple of thousand – owe their jobs to the
homeless.
Besides the employees of the hostels themselves, there are
social workers and housing officers for them; there is a special
clinic with doctors and nurses for them; and there is a psychiatric
team of five, headed by a doctor at a salary of £60,000, that cares

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for the mentally ill homeless. The doctor is an academic and
spends half his time on research; I would personally be prepared
to bet quite a lot of money that the scale of the problems of the
mentally ill homeless in our city will not decline in proportion to the
number of papers he writes or the number of academic
conferences he attends.
Since our city is in no way untypical and contains approximately
2 percent of the British population, it is a fair assumption that not
far short of 50,000 people earn their living from the homeless in
these islands. This may be a sign of inefficiency, of incompetence,
and even of profligacy, but scarcely of indifference in the liberal’s
sense of the word; and compassion for some is undoubtedly a
good career move.
Still, it might be argued that all this activity is but a Band Aid to
a fracture or aspirin to malaria. By the work of charitable and
governmental agencies, society assuages its conscience and
turns a blind eye to the fundamental causes of the plight of the
homeless. It is accepted as axiomatic, of course, that the plight of
the homeless is a desperate one. Who can look at the physical
surroundings of most hostels without revulsion, or contemplate the
food from their soup kitchens without nausea? Does it not follow
that those who spend their lives in these conditions are the most
hapless of beings and ought to be rescued?
As a child, whenever I saw a gentleman of the road who
dressed a little like Tolstoy playing at peasantry, with his tangled
grey beard, muttering his imprecations and calling down his
curses upon the world, I did not pity him but on the contrary
thought of him as a superior kind of being, a little like God of the
Old Testament, in fact, or at least like His prophets. These men
were schizophrenic, no doubt, and I soon enough lost the
preposterous idea that their strange behaviour was the

175
consequence of esoteric wisdom available to them but not, say, to
my parents. And even in these days of community care, so called,
of the mad, the schizophrenic make up only a minority of the
homeless; but I have learned by another route that the homeless
are not merely to be pitied, like injured hedgehogs or birds with
broken wings, to be healed by a little well-meaning intervention by
professional helpers, de haut en bas. The homeless suffer, all
right, but not always in the way or for the reasons we imagine.
A 55-year-old man who had spent half a lifetime traveling from
hostel to hostel round the country was admitted to my ward
suffering from delirium tremens. His condition then was indeed
pitiable; he was terrified of the small animals that he saw crawling
from the bedclothes and the walls, his tremor was so profound
that he could not stand, for him to hold a cup or cutlery was out of
the question, and looking at his bed one might have supposed
that a prolonged and serious earthquake was taking place. He
was incontinent of urine and had to have a catheter inserted;
sweat poured from him as rain drips from the foliage of a rain
forest. It took a week of baths to clear him of the smell of
homelessness and a week of tranquillisers to calm him.
Surely, you would have thought, any way of life was preferable
to the way of life that led to this.
Once restored to health, however, he was by no means the
pitiful creature he had been only shortly before. On the contrary:
he was a man of intelligence, wit, and charm. There was a roguish
twinkle in his eye. Nor had he emerged from the kind of family
background commonly (but erroneously) supposed to necessitate
a dismal future without prospects: his sister was a senior nurse,
and his brother was a director of a large public company. He
himself had done well at school but had insisted upon leaving at
the earliest opportunity, running away to sea. After an early

176
marriage, the birth of a son, and the irksome assumption of a
mortgage, he longed for the restoration of his premarital freedom
and rediscovered the joys of irresponsibility: he deserted his wife
and child and worked no more but rather spent his days drinking.
Before long he had descended the housing scale from flat to
rented room to hostel bed. But he regretted nothing: he said his
life had been fuller of incident, interest, and amusement than if he
had kept to the narrow path of virtue that leads straight to a
pension.
I asked him when he was fully recovered to write a short article
describing an incident from his past, and he chose his first night
ever at a hostel. It was raining hard, and a line of down-and-outs
waited outside the Salvation Army for admittance. A fight broke
out, and one man pulled another by the hair. There was a ripping
sound, and the assailant was left holding his victim’s scalp. Far
from so appalling him that he resolved at once to reform, my
patient was intrigued.
His temperament was that of a sensation seeker; he hated
boredom, routine, and being ruled by others. He joined the large
fraternity of wanderers who live on the margins of the law, ride
trains without tickets, taunt the burghers of small towns with their
outrageous behaviour, infuriate magistrates by confronting them
with their own impotence, and frequently wake a couple of
hundred miles from where they started out in the evening, without
any recollection of how they got there. In short, the life of the
chronic homeless is one of ups as well as downs.
Of course, the longer it is lived, the harder it is to give up, not
only because of habit but because it grows progressively more
difficult for the person who lives it to reinsert himself into normal
society. A 55-year-old man might have some difficulty explaining
to a prospective employer what he had been doing for the last 27

177
years. With age, however, the physical hardships of the existence
grow more difficult to sustain, and my patient said to me that he
thought that unless he gave up the wandering, he might not have
very long to live. I agreed with him.
I found him a hostel for alcoholics who had dried out and who
had undertaken not to drink again. At first he did very well: he kept
his appointments with me and was neatly turned out. He even
appeared happy and contented. He was surprisingly well read,
and we had pleasant literary conversations together.
After about three months of this stable existence, my patient
confessed that he was growing restless again. Yes, he was happy,
and yes, he felt physically well – much better, in fact, than he had
felt in years. But something was missing from his life. It was the
excitement: the chases down the street by policemen, the
appearances in the magistrates’ courts, the sheer warmth and
companionship of the barroom. He even missed that important
question with which he used to wake each morning: Where am I?
Waking in the same place each day was not nearly as much fun.
And sure enough, he missed his next appointment, and I never
saw him again.
This is not by any means an isolated case: far from it. People
like this patient are the most numerous category among the hostel
dwellers. At least two of them are admitted to my ward each week.
Today, for example, I spoke to a 45-year-old man who had once
held a responsible job as a store manager but who was admitted
a couple of days ago in delirium tremens. He agreed that his
wandering life, now of 12 years’ duration, had not been an entirely
miserable one. The patient, who drank as much as any patient I
have ever encountered, was proud of the fact that he had not
been in trouble with the police for the past seven years, though
not for lack of breaking the law.

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 His social security cheque was totally inadequate to his
consumption of spirits, and he had become a practiced thief,
‘though only for what I need, doctor.’ It was evident that the craft
of stealing without getting caught gave him much pleasure. He
admitted that he wasn’t driven to theft by necessity: he told me
that he was an accomplished portraitist and could earn enough
money in a few hours by his skill to keep himself drunk for a week.
‘I’ve had plenty of money in my time, doctor. Money’s no
problem to me. I could get plenty again. But the more I get, the
longer I binge.’
This patient, too, knew that he would return to the life he had
been leading, whatever we did for him, whatever we offered him.
These homeless men, then, have made a choice, which one
might even dignify as an existential one. The life they have
chosen is not without its compensations. Once they have
overcome their initial revulsion at the physical conditions in which
they have decided to live, they find themselves secure: more
secure, in fact, than most of the population engaged in a struggle
to maintain its standard of living and by no means guaranteed of
success. These men know, for example, that there are hostels
everywhere, in every town and city, that will take them in, feed
them, and keep them warm, whatever may happen and whether
the market is bullish or bearish. They have no fear of failure and
are utterly without the constraint of routine: their only daily task is
to appear on time for a meal, and their only weekly task is to
collect their social security. Moreover, they are automatically part
of a fraternity – quarrelsome and occasionally violent, perhaps,
but also tolerant and often amusing. Illness goes with the territory,
but a general hospital is never far away, and treatment is free.
It is difficult for most of us to accept that this way of life, so
unattractive on the surface, is freely chosen. Surely, we think,

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there must be something wrong with those who choose to live like
this. Surely they must be suffering from some disease or mental
abnormality that accounts for their choice, and therefore we
should pity them. Or else, as the social workers who arrive
periodically in the hostels believe, all who lodge there are by
definition the victims of misfortune not of their own making and
quite beyond their control. Society, as represented by social
workers, must therefore rescue them. Accordingly, the social
workers select a few of the longest-standing residents for what
they call rehabilitation, meaning rehousing, complete with grants
of several hundred pounds to buy those consumer durables the
lack of which nowadays is accounted poverty. The results are not
hard to imagine: a month later, the rent of the flat remains unpaid
and the grant has been spent, but not on refrigerators or
microwave ovens. Some of the most experienced among the
homeless have been rehabilitated three or four times, securing
them brief but glorious periods of extreme popularity in the pub at
taxpayers’ expense.
To say, however, that a choice is a free one is not to endorse it
as good or wise. There is no doubt that these men live entirely
parasitically, contributing nothing to the general good and
presuming upon society’s tolerance of them. When hungry, they
have only to appear at a hostel kitchen; when ill, at a hospital.
They are profoundly anti-social. And to say that their choice is a
free one is not to deny that it is without influences from outside. A
significant part of the social context of these homeless men is a
society prepared to demand nothing of them. It is, in fact,
prepared to subsidise them to drink themselves into oblivion, even
to death. And all of them, without exception, consider it part of the
natural and immutable order of things that society should do so;

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they all, without exception, call collecting their social security
‘getting paid.’
These gentlemen of the road are being joined in their
homelessness by increasing numbers of young people, fleeing
their disastrous homes, where illegitimacy, a succession of
abusive stepfathers, and a complete absence of authority is the
norm. We are constantly told by those liberals whose nostrums of
the past have contributed so richly to this wretched situation that
society (by which is meant government) should do yet more for
such pitiable people.
But is not homelessness, at least in modern-day society, a
special instance of a law first enunciated by a British medical
colleague of mine, namely, that misery increases to meet the
means available for its alleviation? And does not anti-social
behaviour increase in proportion to the excuses that intellectuals
make for it?

1996

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 WHAT IS POVERTY?

WHAT DO WE mean by poverty? Not what Dickens or Blake or

Mayhew meant. Today no one seriously expects to go hungry in
England or to live without running water or medical care or even
TV. Poverty has been redefined in industrial countries, so that
anyone at the lower end of the income distribution is poor ex
officio, as it were – poor by virtue of having less than the rich. And
of course by this logic, the only way of eliminating poverty is by an
egalitarian redistribution of wealth – even if the society as a whole
were to become poorer as a result.
Such redistribution was the goal of the welfare state. But it has
not eliminated poverty, despite the vast sums expended, and
despite the fact that the poor are now substantially richer – indeed
are not, by traditional standards, poor at all. As long as the rich
exist, so must the poor, as we now define them. Certainly they are
in squalor – a far more accurate description of their condition than
poverty – despite a threefold increase in per capita income,
including that of the poor, since the end of the last war.
Why they should be in this condition requires an explanation –
and to call that condition poverty, using a word more appropriate
to Mayhew’s London than to today’s reality, prevents us from
grasping how fundamentally the lot of ‘the poor’ has changed
since then. The poor we shall always have with us, no doubt, but
today they are not poor in the traditional way.
The English poor live shorter and less healthy lives than their
more prosperous compatriots. Even if you didn’t know the
statistics, their comparative ill health would be obvious on a
casual observation of rich and slum areas, just as Victorian
observers noted that the poor were on average a head shorter

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than the rich, due to generations of inferior nourishment and hard
living conditions. But the reasons for today’s difference in health
are not economic. By no means can the poor not afford medicine
or a nourishing diet; nor do they live in overcrowded houses
lacking proper sanitation, as in Mayhew’s time, or work 14
backbreaking hours a day in the foul air of mines or mills.
Epidemiologists estimate that higher cigarette consumption
among the poor accounts for half the difference in life expectancy
between the richest and poorest classes in England – and to
smoke that much takes money.
Notoriously, too, the infant mortality rate is twice as high in the
lowest social class as in the highest. But the infant mortality rate
of illegitimate births is twice that of legitimate ones, and the
illegitimacy rate rises steeply as you descend the social scale.
So the decline of marriage almost to the vanishing point in the
lowest social class might well be responsible for most of its
excess infant mortality. It is a way of life, not poverty per se, that
kills. The commonest cause of death between the ages of 15 and
44 is now suicide, which has increased most precipitously
precisely among those who live in the underclass world of
temporary step-parenthood and of conduct unrestrained either by
law or convention.
Just as it is easier to recognise ill health in someone you
haven’t seen for some time rather than in someone you meet
daily, so a visitor coming into a society from elsewhere often can
see its character more clearly than those who live in it. Every few
months, doctors from countries like the Philippines and India
arrive fresh from the airport to work for a year’s stint at my
hospital. It is fascinating to observe their evolving response to
British squalor.

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 At the start they are uniformly enthusiastic about the care that
we unsparingly and unhesitatingly give to everyone, regardless of
economic status. They themselves come from cities – Manila,
Bombay, Madras – where many of the cases we see in our
hospital would simply be left to die, often without succour of any
kind. And they are impressed that our care extends beyond the
merely medical: that no one goes without food or clothing or
shelter, or even entertainment. There seems to be a public agency
to deal with every conceivable problem. For a couple of weeks
they think this all represents the acme of civilisation, especially
when they recall the horrors at home. Poverty – as they know it –
has been abolished.
Before very long, though, they start to feel a vague unease. A
Filipina doctor, for example, asked me why so few people seemed
grateful for what was done for them. What prompted her question
was an addict who, having collapsed from an accidental overdose
of heroin, was brought to our hospital. He required intensive care
to revive him, with doctors and nurses tending him all night. His
first words to the doctor when he suddenly regained
consciousness were, ‘Get me a fucking roll-up.’ His imperious
rudeness didn’t arise from mere confusion: he continued to treat
the staff as if they had kidnapped him and held him in the hospital
against his will to perform experiments upon him. ‘Get me the fuck
out of here!’ There was no acknowledgment of what had been
done for him, let alone gratitude for it. If he considered that he had
received any benefit from his stay, well, it was simply his due.
My doctors from Bombay, Madras, or Manila observe this kind
of conduct open-mouthed. At first they assume that the cases they
see are a statistical quirk, a kind of sampling error, and that, given
time, they will encounter a better, more representative cross
section of the population. Gradually, however, it dawns upon them

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that what they have seen is representative. When every benefit
received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone
for gratitude. Case after case causes them to revise their initial
favourable opinion. Before long they have had experience of
hundreds, and their view has changed entirely.
Last week, for example, to the amazement of a doctor recently
arrived from Madras, a woman in her late 20s entered our hospital
with the most common condition that brings patients to us: a
deliberate overdose. At first she would say nothing more than that
she wanted to depart this world, that she had had enough of it. I
inquired further. Just before she took the overdose, her ex-
boyfriend, the father of her eight-month-old youngest child (now
staying with her ex-boyfriend’s mother), had broken into her flat by
smashing down the front door. He wrecked the apartment’s
contents, broke every window, stole £60 in cash, and ripped out
her telephone.
‘He’s very violent, doctor,’ she told me. He had broken her
thumb, her ribs, and her jaw during the four years she was with
him, and her face had needed stitching many times. ‘Last year I
had to have the police out to him.’
‘What happened?’
‘I dropped the charges. His mother said he would change.’
Another of her problems was that she was now five weeks
pregnant and didn’t want the baby.
‘I want to get rid of it, doctor.’
‘Who’s the father?’
It was her violent ex-boyfriend, of course.
‘Did he rape you, then?’
‘No.’
‘So you agreed to have sex with him?’

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 ‘I was drunk; there was no love in it. This baby is like a bolt out
of the blue: I don’t know how it happened.’
I asked her if she thought it was a good idea to have sex with a
man who had repeatedly beaten her up, and from whom she said
she wished to separate.
‘It’s complicated, doctor. That’s the way life goes sometimes.’
What had she known of this man before she took up with him?
She met him in a club; he moved in at once, because he had
nowhere else to stay. He had a child by another woman, neither of
whom he supported. He had been in prison for burglary. He took
drugs. He had never worked, except for cash on the side. Of
course he never gave her any of his money, instead running up
her telephone bills vertiginously. She had never married but had
two other children. The first, a daughter aged eight, still lived with
her. The father was a man whom she left because she found he
was having sex with 12-year-old girls. Her second child was a
son, whose father was ‘an idiot’ with whom she had slept one
night. That child, now six, lived with the ‘idiot,’ and she never saw
him.
What had her experience taught her?
‘I don’t want to think about it. The Housing’ll charge me for the
damage, and I ain’t got the money. I’m depressed, doctor; I’m not
happy. I want to move, to get away from him.’
Later in the day, feeling a little lonely, she telephoned her ex-
boyfriend, and he visited her.
I discussed the case with the doctor who had recently arrived
from Madras and who felt he had entered an insane world. Not in
his wildest dreams had he imagined it could be like this. There
was nothing to compare with it in Madras. He asked me what
would happen next to the happy couple.

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 ‘They’ll find her a new flat. They’ll buy her new furniture,
television, and refrigerator, because it’s unacceptable poverty in
this day and age to live without them. They’ll charge her nothing
for the damage to her old flat, because she can’t pay anyway, and
it wasn’t she who did it. He will get away scot-free. Once she’s
installed in her new flat to escape from him, she’ll invite him there,
he’ll smash it up again, and then they’ll find her somewhere else
to live. There is, in fact, nothing she can do that will deprive her of
the state’s obligation to house, feed, and entertain her.’
I asked the doctor from Madras if poverty was the word he
would use to describe this woman’s situation. He said it was not:
that her problem was that she accepted no limits to her own
behaviour, that she did not fear the possibility of hunger, the
condemnation of her own parents or neighbours, or God. In other
words, the squalor of England was not economic but spiritual,
moral, and cultural.
I often take my doctors from the third world on the short walk
from the hospital to the prison nearby. It is a most instructive 800
yards. On a good day – good for didactic purposes, that is – there
are seven or eight puddles of glass shattered into fragments lying
in the gutter en route (there are never none, except during the
most inclement weather, when even those most addicted to car
theft control their impulses).
‘Each of these little piles of smashed glass represents a car that
has been broken into,’ I tell them. ‘There will be more tomorrow,
weather permitting.’
The houses along the way are, as public housing goes, quite
decent. The local authorities have at last accepted that herding
people into giant, featureless, Le Corbusian concrete blocks was
a mistake, and they have switched to the construction of individual
houses. Only a few of their windows are boarded up. Certainly by

187
comparison with housing for the poor in Bombay, Madras, or
Manila, they are spacious and luxurious indeed. Each has a little
front yard of grass, surrounded by a hedge, and a much larger
back yard; about half have satellite dishes. Unfortunately the
yards are almost as full of litter as municipal rubbish dumps. I tell
my doctors that in nearly nine years of taking this walk four times
a week, I have never seen a single instance of anyone attempting
to clean his yard. But I have seen much litter dropped; on a good
day I can even watch someone standing at the bus stop dropping
something on the ground no farther than two feet from the bin.
‘Why don’t they tidy up their gardens?’ asks a doctor from
Bombay.
A good question: after all, most of the houses contain at least
one person with time on his or her hands. Whenever I have been
able to ask the question, however, the answer has always been
the same: I’ve told the council about it, but they haven’t come. As
tenants, they feel it is the landlord’s responsibility to keep their
yards clean, and they are not prepared to do the council’s work for
it, even if it means wading through rubbish – as it quite literally
does. On the one hand, authority cannot tell them what to do; on
the other, it has an infinitude of responsibilities towards them.
I ask my third world doctors to examine the litter closely. It gives
them the impression that no Briton is able to walk farther than ten
yards or so without consuming junk food. Every bush, every lawn,
even every tree is festooned with chocolate wrappers or fast-food
packaging. Empty cans of beer and soft drinks lie in the gutter, on
the flower beds, or on top of the hedges. Again, on a good day we
actually see someone toss aside the can whose contents he has
just consumed, as a Russian vodka drinker throws down his
glass.

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 Apart from the anti-social disregard of the common good that
each little such act of littering implies (hundreds a week in the
space of 800 yards alone), the vast quantity of food consumed in
the street has deeper implications. I tell the doctors that in all my
visits to the white households in the area, of which I’ve made
hundreds, never – not once – have I seen any evidence of
cooking. The nearest to this activity that I have witnessed is the
reheating of prepared and packaged food, usually in a microwave.
And by the same token, I have never seen any evidence of meals
taken in common as a social activity – unless two people eating
hamburgers together in the street as they walk along is counted
as social. This is not to say that I haven’t seen people eating at
home; on the contrary, they are often eating when I arrive. They
eat alone, even if other members of the household are present,
and never at the table; they slump on a sofa in front of the
television. Everyone in the household eats according to his own
whim and timetable. Even in so elementary a matter as eating,
therefore, there is no self-discipline but rather an imperative
obedience to impulse. Needless to say, the opportunity for
conversation or sociality that a meal taken together provides is
lost.
English meals are thus solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
I ask the doctors to compare the shops in areas inhabited by
poor whites and those where poor Indian immigrants live. It is an
instructive comparison. The shops the Indians frequent are piled
high with all kinds of attractive fresh produce that, by supermarket
standards, is astonishingly cheap. The women take immense
trouble over their purchases and make subtle discriminations.
There are no precooked meals for them. By contrast, a shop that
poor whites patronise offers a restricted choice, largely of
relatively expensive prepared foods that at most require only the

189
addition of hot water. The difference between the two groups
cannot be explained by differences in income, for they are
insignificant. Poverty isn’t the issue. And the willingness of Indians
to take trouble over what they eat and to treat meals as important
social occasions that impose obligations and at times require the
subordination of personal desire is indicative of an entire attitude
towards life that often permits them, despite their current low
incomes, to advance up the social scale.
Alarmingly, though, the natural urge of the children of
immigrants to belong to the predominant local culture is beginning
to create an Indian underclass (at least among young males): and
the taste for fast food and all that such a taste implies is swiftly
developing among them.
When such slovenliness about food extends to all other
spheres of life, when people satisfy every appetite with the same
minimal effort and commitment, no wonder they trap themselves
in squalor. I have little trouble showing my doctors from India and
the Philippines that most of our patients take a fast food approach
to all their pleasures, obtaining them no less fleetingly and
unstrenuously. They have no cultural activity they can call their
own, and their lives seem, even to them, empty of purpose. In the
welfare state, mere survival is not the achievement that it is, say,
in the cities of Africa, and therefore it cannot confer the self-
respect that is the precondition of self-improvement.
By the end of three months my doctors have, without exception,
reversed their original opinion that the welfare state, as
exemplified by England, represents the acme of civilisation. On
the contrary, they see it now as creating a miasma of subsidised
apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries. They
come to realise that a system of welfare that makes no moral
judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes anti-social

190
egotism. The spiritual impoverishment of the population seems to
them worse than anything they have ever known in their own
countries. And what they see is all the worse, of course, because
it should be so much better. The wealth that enables everyone
effortlessly to have enough food should be liberating, not
imprisoning. Instead it has created a large caste of people for
whom life is, in effect, a limbo in which they have nothing to hope
for and nothing to fear, nothing to gain and nothing to lose. It is a
life emptied of meaning.
‘On the whole,’ said one Filipino doctor to me, ‘life is preferable
in the slums of Manila.’
He said it without any illusions as to the quality of life in Manila.
These doctors have made the same journey as I, but in the
reverse direction. Arriving as a young doctor in Africa 25 years
ago, I was horrified at first by the physical conditions, the like of
which I had never experienced before. Patients with heart failure
walked 50 miles in the broiling sun, with panting breath and
swollen legs, to obtain treatment – and then walked home again.
Ulcerating and suppurating cancers were common. Barefoot men
contracted tetanus from the wounds inflicted by a sand flea that
laid its eggs between their toes. Tuberculosis reduced people to
animated skeletons. Children were bitten by puff adders and
adults mauled by leopards. I saw lepers with noses that had rotted
away and madmen who wandered naked in the torrential rains.
Even the accidents were spectacular. I treated the survivors of
one in Tanzania in which a truck – having no brakes, as was
perfectly normal and expected in the circumstances – began to
slide backward down a hill it had been climbing. It was laden with
bags of corn, upon which 20 passengers, including many children,
were riding. As the truck slid backward, first the passengers, then
the corn, fell off. By the time I arrived, ten dead children were lined

191
up by the side of the road, arranged in ascending order as neatly
as organ pipes. They had been crushed or suffocated by the bags
of corn that fell on top of them: a grimly ironic death in a country
chronically short of food.
Moreover, political authority in the countries in which I worked
was arbitrary, capricious, and corrupt. In Tanzania, for example,
you could tell the representative of the sole and omnipotent
political party, the Party of the Revolution, by his girth alone.
Tanzanians were thin, but party men were fat. The party
representative in my village sent a man to prison because the
man’s wife refused to sleep with him. In Nigeria the police hired
out their guns by night to the armed robbers.
Yet nothing I saw – neither the poverty nor the overt oppression
– ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality
as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of
dignity, the self-centredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or
the sheer ignorance of how to live that I see daily in England.
In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from
India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible
conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England – and it is not
material poverty but poverty of soul.

1999

192
 DO STIES MAKE PIGS?

UNTIL QUITE RECENTLY I had assumed that the extreme

ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe.
I imagined that the cheap and charmless high-rise buildings that
so disfigure the cityscape had been erected of necessity in great
gaping holes left by Heinkel bombers. I had spent much of my
childhood playing in deserted bomb shelters in public parks: and
although I was born some years after the end of the war, that
great conflagration still exerted a powerful hold on the imagination
of British children of my generation.
I discovered how wrong I was not long ago when I entered a
store whose walls were decorated with large photographs of the
city as it had been before the war. It was then a fine place, in a
grandiloquent, Victorian kind of way. Every building had spoken of
a bulging, no doubt slightly pompous and ridiculous, municipal
pride. Industry and labour were glorified in statuary, and a
leavening of Greek temples and Italian Renaissance palaces
lightened the prevailing mock-Venetian Gothic architecture.
‘A great shame about the war,’ I said to the store assistant, who
was of an age to remember the old days. ‘Look at the city now.’
‘The war?’ she said. ‘The war had nothing to do with it. It was
the council.’
The City Council – the people’s elected representatives – it
transpired, had done far more damage to the fabric of the city in
the 1950s and 1960s than had Göring’s air force. Indeed, they
had managed to turn it into a terrible visual ordeal for anyone with
the most minimal visual sensibility.
First among the reasons for this large-scale architectural
vandalism was the prolonged revulsion against all things

193
Victorian. In Britain this was particularly pronounced after the war
because for the first time it was unmistakably clear just how far
the country had declined from its Victorian apogee of world power
and influence: a decline made somewhat easier to bear,
psychologically speaking, by the consistent, unabashed
denigration not only of the Victorians themselves but of all their
ideas and works as well.
I witnessed a striking example of this revulsion in my own
household. My father, a communist and therefore predisposed to
view the past in a lurid light, especially by comparison with the
inevitable postrevolutionary glories to come, had bought several
Victorian paintings at Sotheby’s during the war for ten shillings
each. (Communists are not necessarily opposed to taking
advantage of a temporary depression in prices.) He kept them in
the loft of the house. Then, one day in 1960, quite arbitrarily, he
decided that they were taking up too much space – unlike the tins
of fruit he had stockpiled during the Korean War in the expectation
that it would escalate into the Third World War, and which were
now beginning to explode, but which he kept forever. He took all
the paintings except one and put them on a bonfire, an act that I
knew even at the age of ten to be one of terrible barbarism. I
begged him not to do it – to give the paintings away if he didn’t
like them – but no, they had to be destroyed.
Then there was the modernist arrogance about not only the
Victorian past but all the centuries that had gone before – my city
swept away many 18th century buildings along with Victorian and
Edwardian ones. British architects finally caught up with the Italian
futurist Marinetti, who condemned the past without exception, who
demanded a clean break with all that had gone before, who
ridiculed all previous styles, and who worshipped only those
attributes of modernity: speed and size. Among other schemes,

194
he wanted to fill in the canals of Venice and replace the palazzi
with modern factories. But just as the Italy of his day was
technologically backward, so the Britain of the modernising
architects was no longer in the vanguard, the palm for modernity
having long since passed to America. The architects thought that
modernity was a value that transcended all other virtues; they
thought they could wake the country from its nostalgic slumber,
dragging it into the twentieth century by pouring what seemed to
them the most modern of building materials – reinforced concrete
– all over it. Hence, among many other crimes, they tore down the
elegant Victorian wrought-iron tracery of my city’s main railway
station, with its splendid arched roof over platforms and tracks,
and built instead a brutalist construction of steel and soon-
discoloured concrete to a plan that proved no more practical or
functional than the old.
My city was far from alone in having suffered the Bakuninite
demolishing fervor of the modernisers (as Bakunin said, the urge
to destroy is also a creative urge). Even small country towns have
not escaped their notice: Huntingdon, Oliver Cromwell’s
birthplace, was provided with a ring road of such hideous and
dysfunctional design, simultaneously rendering exit from and entry
into the town difficult and dangerous, that architects and town
planners around the world now study it as a warning. Shrewsbury,
Darwin’s birthplace and a town that for several centuries managed
to combine the most diverse architectural styles, so that its
townscape as a whole was greater than the sum of its parts, has
been ruined as an aesthetic experience by a few visually
inescapable modern office blocks and multi-story car parks.
It would be too depressing to list the English towns and cities
marred by this treatment. But it is public housing that exemplifies
most clearly the ideas of those who transformed the British urban

195
landscape during the 1950s and 1960s. Here the new aesthetics
combined with socialist reforming zeal to produce a multi-layered
disaster.
After the war, bien pensants universally agreed that prewar
British society had been grossly unjust. The working class, it was
said, had been shamelessly exploited, as was manifest principally
in Britain’s great inequalities of income and its over-crowded
housing. A sharply progressive income tax (which at one point
reached 95 percent) would redress the inequalities of income
while slum clearance and the construction of large-scale housing
projects would alleviate the housing problem.
The middle-class reformers thought of poverty wholly in
physical terms: an insufficiency of food and warmth, a lack of
space. How, they asked, could people come to the finer things in
life if their basic requirements were so inadequately met? What
could freedom mean (I remember my father asking) in the
absence of decent housing conditions? Since social problems
such as crime and delinquency (which we were soon to discover
were in their infancy) were attributable to physical deprivation – to
the environment rather than the criminal or delinquent – the
construction of decent housing would solve all problems at once.
But what was decent housing? A civil servant, Parker Morris,
provided the answer: a certain number of cubic yards of living
space per inhabitant. The Ministry of Housing adopted the Parker
Morris standards for all public housing; they governed the size
and number of rooms – and that was all. In the circumstances,
who can be surprised that the architectural style, if style it can be
called, of Le Corbusier came to dominate the construction of
public housing, even though it had already proved disastrous in
the one place, Marseilles, where Le Corbusier had been given full
rein? It was the simplest and cheapest means of complying with

196
the now-sacrosanct Parker Morris standards. Besides, Le
Corbusier was a kindred spirit to bureaucrats and town planners –
not just an architect but a visionary and would-be social reformer.
Of Paris he wrote: ‘Imagine all this junk, which until now has lain
spread out over the soil like a dry crust, cleaned off and carted
away, and replaced by immense clear crystals of glass, rising to a
height of over six hundred feet!’
In this spirit, much of my city, especially the terraced housing of
the working class, was cleaned off and carted away, to be
replaced by Le Corbusier’s ‘vertical city... bathed in light and air.’
Some light, some air!
It occurred to no authority that perhaps more was being swept
away than a mere dry crust. If the reformers had been right, the
people who lived in such poor housing should remember the
conditions with bitterness: but they don’t. Even allowing for the
roseate glow that the passage of time lends to experience, what
my patients tell me of the streets where they grew up does not
vindicate the reformers.
True, the houses in which my patients lived often lacked the
basic amenities now taken for granted: proper indoor plumbing,
for example. They were cramped. And much of the terraced
housing – known as two-up-two-down – was aesthetically
undistinguished. But with imaginative adaptation and improvement
(now belatedly under way in what remains of such housing), more
than adequate, even pleasing accommodation could have been
produced without the wholesale destruction of communities that
resulted from the indiscriminate demolitions of the ’50s and ’60s.
For, as my patients tell me, a sense of community did exist in
these streets of little red houses, to such an extent that people
who came from more than a few streets away were regarded as
strangers, almost as foreigners. No doubt the community feeling

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resulted in a certain small-mindedness, but it also meant that life
was not then the war of permanently inflamed egos to be found in
Corbusian housing projects – egos inflamed by the fact that the
inhabitants have been, and continue to be, treated so
transparently by social policymakers as faceless, interchangeable,
passive ciphers that the only way to assert their individuality is to
behave anti-socially. I fight, therefore I am.
This sense of community, now destroyed, allowed people to
withstand genuine hardship – hardship that wasn’t self-inflicted,
like so much of today’s. I remember a patient who described with
great warmth the street on which he had lived as a child – ‘until,’
he added, ‘Adolf Hitler moved us on.’ What an admirable depth of
character, uncomplaining in the face of misfortune, those few
words convey! Nowadays the victim of such a bombing would be
more likely to blame the government for having declared war on
the Nazis in the first place.
The housing projects were built at what (for Britain) was record
speed, and whoever wants to see for himself the reductio ad
absurdum of the materialist and rationalist conception of human
life cannot do better than to visit one of these projects. The idea
that happiness and well-being consist of the satisfaction of a few
simple physical needs, and can therefore be planned on behalf of
society by benevolent administrators, is here bleakly mocked.
As the architects failed to foresee, the spaces between the
vast, geometric shapes of the Corbusian apartment blocks act as
wind tunnels, turning the slightest breeze into a hurricane. I know
an old lady who has been blown over so many times that she no
longer dares to do her own shopping. Nature itself is turned into
one more source of hostility. Walkways are isolated and ill-lit, so
that rapists may safely abduct: two of my patients were raped en
route to my clinic in a walkway not a hundred yards away.

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 Notices planted in the grass around the apartment blocks of
one housing project added to the Orwellian spirit of the place
before they were ripped out by residents: DO NOT WALK ON
THE GRASS. IT IS AN AMENITY TO BE ENJOYED BY
EVERYONE.
As for the buildings themselves, they are, with a vengeance, Le
Corbusier’s ‘machines for living in’ – though perhaps ‘existing in’
would be more accurate. The straight line and the right angle
reign supreme: no curves, no frivolous decorative touches, no
softening materials add warmth to the steel, glass, and concrete.
There is nothing that Mies van der Rohe, another dictator in
architect’s clothing, would have condemned as ‘aesthetic
speculation.’
What do the tenants think of their apartment blocks? They vote
with their urine. The public spaces and elevators of all public
housing blocks I know are so deeply impregnated with urine that
the odor is ineradicable. And anything smashable has been
smashed.
The people who inhabit these apartments are utterly isolated.
All that connects them is the noise they make, often considerable,
which permeates the flimsy walls, ceilings, and floors. They are
likely to be unemployed and poorly educated, socialised neither
by work nor by pastimes. Single mothers are housed here,
guaranteeing the impoverishment of their children’s social
environment: and in Britain we are now into the second generation
of children who know no other environment. No civic or collective
life is possible in such conditions, and so there are no standards
of conduct: every man’s whim is law, and the most physically
powerful and ruthless is the one who sets the tone and makes the
rules. When a patient of mine was suspended by her ankles from
the window of her 11th floor flat by her jealous boyfriend, no one

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noticed or considered it his duty to intervene. She herself was
unaware that there was anything morally reprehensible (as
against merely unpleasant) about her boyfriend’s conduct.
It is true that when another patient of mine mountaineered
down his apartment block from his 14th floor apartment, the police
asked me to visit to determine whether there was a medical
explanation of his behaviour. But what I found convinced me that
no desert hermit was ever more alone than the inhabitant of an
English housing project. My patient had spent the last few years of
his life sniffing glue in his flat. The water and electricity had been
cut off for non-payment. He lived in permanent darkness, his filthy
curtains always drawn. His apartment no longer contained a stick
of furniture, but in the middle of his living room – Parker Morris
standard – was an old oil drum that he had used as a brazier to
burn his furniture to keep warm. The embers of the last of his bed
glowed faintly.
Why, I asked, had he taken to the rope and climbed down the
outer wall of his building?
Because, he replied, he feared that his brazier might set fire to
his apartment, and he wanted to test his escape route.
And the other tenants of the block? I inquired.
A slightly puzzled look flitted across his face. What did I mean?
A dim apprehension that perhaps the Parker Morris standards
were not sufficient for gracious urban living eventually filtered into
the minds of British officialdom. Their response? Community
centres.
These too were built of concrete. Their large grey cheerless
rooms were radically unheatable, unpleasantly cool even in
summer. Their basements, which could have served as torture
chambers, housed ping pong tables. Anything stealable was
stolen, whether it was of use to the thief or not: more for the

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practice, really. What, after all, does one do with a table-tennis net
in the absence of a table-tennis table? It soon became clear that
the formula ‘Parker Morris plus ping pong’ did not work either. The
community centres became places where unemployed young men
and chronic schizophrenics went to exchange social security for
marijuana.
When I aired my thoughts about public housing to a British
architect – to whom, in my heart, I ascribed some of the collective
blame for the calamitous situation – he at once shot back, ‘Yes,
but do sties make pigs, or do pigs make sties?’
A profound question, perhaps the profoundest that can be
asked. After all, you can lead a mugger to a victim, but you can’t
make him rob.
In the midst of one particularly grim housing project to which I
once was called – a single mother was threatening to immolate
her infant – stood an apartment block conspicuously less
disgusting than the rest. It was inhabited entirely by old-age
pensioners: either they no longer had the energy for vandalism, or
they had not the inclination for it. If the Parker Morris standards
were not a sufficient condition of decent living, neither were they a
sufficient condition of its opposite.
What really made the difference, I concluded, was the policy by
which public housing, of which there was a limited supply despite
the building boom of three decades, was allocated. In conditions
of shortage, justice demanded that such housing as existed
should be allocated according to need: and what greater proof of
need could there be than social pathology? An unemployed single
woman with three children by three fathers, none of whom
supported his offspring in any way, could be said to be in greater
need than a fully employed married couple with one child, who
might reasonably be expected to look after themselves. Mirabile

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dictu, there was soon more than enough social pathology to fill the
space available for it. Indeed, a kind of arms race in social
pathology developed: my violence towards others outguns your
attempts to kill yourself.
The results of this policy have been truly bizarre. Because
public housing is subsidised, many desire it. Traditionally, city
councils as landlords have been reluctant to evict their tenants, no
matter what their behaviour is or if they fail to pay their rent, in part
to draw attention to the ideological difference between the public
and the private sectors, to the gain of the former. Unlike the hard-
hearted, exploitative private landlord struggling for private
advantage, the city council landlord benevolently provides a social
service. Thus a public housing tenancy is to psychopaths what
tenure is to academics: no better invitation to irresponsibility could
possibly be imagined.
Oddly enough, this encouragement of what was hitherto
considered anti-social behaviour was given in the name of a
supposedly tolerant refusal to make moral judgments. But since
those who put themselves in a position of need by their own
behaviour were favoured over those who failed to do so, an
implicit judgment was in fact made: a judgment whose perversity
is evident from the requests I receive from my patients for letters
to the housing authorities to strengthen their case for receiving the
tenancy of an apartment.
In these missives, my patients tell me, I should emphasise their
alcoholism or drug addiction, their bad temper and tendency to
assault those around them – the consequence, plainly, of a lack of
proper accommodation. I should mention their repeated
overdoses, the fact that they resort to tranquillisers obtained
illegally, that they have had several abortions and are now
pregnant for the fifth time, that they have had three violent and

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drunken boyfriends in succession, that they gamble their money
uncontrollably (or uncontrolledly).
In not a single case has anyone ever asked me to write that he
is a decent, hard-working, honourable citizen who would make a
good tenant. That would send him straight to the bottom of the
waiting list.
Indeed, the perverse criteria by which public housing has been
allocated during the past two or three decades has reinforced the
inexorable rise in the proportion of the young adult population
living alone, a tendency that many powerful currents in our culture
have encouraged. In the Thatcher years, the number of nonelderly
adults living alone or as single parents doubled in absolute terms
and almost as a proportion of total households as well. Hardly a
day passes when I do not meet an 18- or 19-year-old without a
job, without financial resources, without skills or training, without
family support, without mental accomplishments, who has been
given a flat at public expense. Housing is a right, and the
government therefore has a duty to provide it.
The possibility that it will do so if only one behaves badly or
impulsively enough acts as an irritant in domestic relations: for if a
move elsewhere is a real possibility, you can afford to let a minor
disagreement escalate into an irreparable breakdown.
So do pigs make sties, or do sties make pigs? I suspect that
there is, as my father used to say, a dialectical relationship.

1995

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 LOST IN THE GHETTO

ONE OF THE terrible fates that can befall a human being is to be

born intelligent or sensitive in an English slum. It is like a long,
slow, exquisite torture devised by a sadistic deity from whose
malevolent clutches escape is almost impossible.
Such was not always the case. My father was born in an
English slum in the years before the First World War. In the
borough in which he was born, one in every eight children died in
his first year. But in those benighted times, when some London
children, too poor to buy shoes, went to school barefoot, the
‘vicious cycle of poverty’ had yet to be discovered. It had not yet
occurred to the rulers of the land that the circumstances of a
person’s birth should seal his destiny. And so my father, having
been found intelligent by his teachers, was taught Latin, French,
German, mathematics, science, English literature, and history, as
if he were fully capable of entry into the stream of higher
civilisation. When he died, I found his school textbooks still among
his possessions, and they were of a rigour and difficulty that would
terrify a modern teacher, let alone child. But he, who was never
generous in his praise of others and often imputed the worst of
motives to his fellow beings, remembered his teachers with the
deepest respect and affection: for they had not only taught him his
lessons but had devoted much of their spare time to taking their
intelligent slum children, himself included, to museums and
concerts, to demonstrate to them that the life of the slum was not
the only life there was. In this way my father was awakened to the
very possibility of possibility.
A child born in a slum today with the same high intelligence as
my father would be vanishingly unlikely ever to find such mentors.

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After all, many of today’s teachers, steeped in the idea that it is
wrong to order civilisations, cultures, or ways of life hierarchically,
would deny either the existence or the value of a higher
civilisation, and would in any case be incapable of imparting it. For
them, there is no height or depth, superiority or inferiority,
profundity or shallowness; there is only difference. They even
doubt that there is a right and wrong way to spell a word or
construct a sentence.
Today’s teachers assume that the slum child is fully equipped
culturally by the environment in which he lives. His speech is by
definition adequate to his needs, his tastes by definition
acceptable and no worse or lower than any others. There is no
reason, therefore, to induct him into anything. A slum child would
find no mentors such as my father found also because the belief
in the equality of cultures that is a long-established pedagogic
orthodoxy has now seeped into the population at large. Today’s
slum dwellers are aggressively convinced of the sufficiency of
their knowledge, however restricted it might be, and of their own
cultural life, of whatever it might consist. My older patients use the
word ‘educated’ as a term of approbation; my younger patients,
never. When my father was a child, no one doubted what it was to
be educated, or questioned the value of an education such as the
one he received; but since teachers and parents now regard all
cultural manifestations and fields of human knowledge as of equal
worth, why waste the effort either to impart or to receive as
rigorous, difficult, and unnatural an education as my father
received, when any other training (or none at all) would be as
good? Worse, such an effort would be to impose an arbitrary
standard of worth – a mere disguise for the continuation of the
hegemony of a traditional elite – and would thereby undermine the
self-confidence of the majority and reinforce social divisions.

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 Unfortunately the culture of the slums is deeply unsatisfying to
intelligent people in the long run. The tragedy is that, even though
the average level of intelligence in the slums is probably lower
than elsewhere, very many intelligent people have the misfortune
to be born in them. And we do everything possible to ensure that
that is where they stay. They come to realise at different stages of
their lives that something is wrong with the culture by which they
are surrounded. Some realise it when they reach their teens,
others only when their own children go to school. Many are unable
to put their finger on what exactly is wrong: at 30, they are aware
only of an absence. This absence turns out to be a lack of any
subject for their minds to work upon other than the day-to-day flux
of their existence.
It is well recognised that intelligent children who are not
sufficiently challenged in school, and who are made to repeat
lessons they have already understood merely because others in
the class, slower to learn than they, have not yet mastered them,
frequently become disruptive, badly behaved, and even
delinquent; it is less well recognised that this destructive pattern
persists well into adult life. The bored – among whom are those
whose level of intelligence is grossly mismatched with the
requirements of their cultural environment – frequently solve the
problem by fomenting easily avoided and completely foreseeable
crises in their personal lives. The mind, like nature, abhors a
vacuum: and if no absorbing interest has developed in childhood
and adolescence, such an interest is soon manufactured from the
materials at hand. Man is at least as much a problem-creating as
a problem-solving animal. Better a crisis than the permanent
boredom of meaninglessness.
Despite official genuflections in the direction of diversity and
tolerance, the sad fact is that the culture of the slums is monolithic

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and deeply intolerant. Any child who tries to resist the
blandishments of that culture can count on no support or defence
from teachers or any other adult, who now equate both freedom
and democracy with the tyranny of the majority. Many of my
intelligent patients from the slums recount how, in school, they
expressed a desire to learn, only to suffer mockery,
excommunication, and in some instances outright violence from
their peers. One intelligent child of 15, who had taken an overdose
as a suicidal gesture, said she was subjected to constant teasing
and abuse by her peers. ‘They say I’m stupid,’ she told me,
‘because I’m clever.’
Teachers rarely protect such children or encourage them to
resist absorption into the culture that will all too clearly imprison
them in the social condition into which they were born: for
teachers have themselves generally absorbed uncritically the
notion that social justice – meaning little more than an equal
distribution of income – is the summum bonum of human
existence. I have heard two teachers expound the theory that as
social mobility reinforces the existing social structure it delays the
achievement of social justice by depriving the lower classes of
militants and potential leaders. Thus to encourage an individual
child to escape his heritage of continual soap opera and pop
music, tabloid newspapers, poverty, squalor, and domestic
violence is, in the eyes of many teachers, to encourage class
treachery. It also conveniently absolves teachers of the tedious
responsibility for the welfare of individual pupils.
Still, children arise in the unlikeliest places with ambitions very
different from their peers, and fortunately not all teachers believe
that no child can escape the slums unless all do. One of my
patients, for example, early conceived a passion for French
culture and literature (she never arrives in the hospital without a

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volume of Hugo, Balzac, or Baudelaire, which is a little like seeing
a polar bear in the jungle). She decided at an early age that she
would study French at university and was fortunate, considering
the school she attended, to find a teacher who did not actively
discourage her. But the cost to her in ordinary social relations with
her peers was incalculable: she had to sit apart from them in the
classroom and create her own enclosed little world in the midst of
constant disorder and noise; she was mocked, teased,
threatened, and humiliated; she was jeered at when standing at
the bus stop to go home; she was deprived of friends and sexually
assaulted by boys who despised, and perhaps secretly feared, her
evident devotion to books; excrement was put through her
letterbox at home (a common expression of social disapproval in
our brave New Britain). As for her parents – of whom she was
fortunate enough to have two – they did not understand her. Why
could she not be like everyone else – and leave them in peace? It
wasn’t even as if a taste for French literature led automatically to
highly paid employment.
She went to university and was happy for three years. For the
first time in her life she met people whose mental world extended
beyond their own very restricted experience. Her performance at
university was creditable, though not brilliant, for by her own
admission she lacked originality. She had always wanted to teach,
thinking there was no nobler calling than to awaken the minds of
the young to the cultural riches of which they would otherwise
remain unaware; but on graduation, lacking savings, she returned
to her parents for the sake of economy.
She found a job teaching French nearby, in the kind of school in
which she herself had been educated. She was back in a world in
which knowledge was no better than ignorance, and correction,
whether of spelling or of conduct, was by definition a personal

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insult, an outrage to the ego. Who was she – who was any adult,
in fact – to tell children what they should learn or do (a sensible
enough question, impossible to answer, if you believe in the equal
worth of all human activity)? Once more she found herself
mocked, teased, and humiliated, and was powerless to prevent it.
Eventually one of her pupils – if that is quite the word to describe
the youth in question – tried to rape her, and she brought her
career as a teacher to a premature end. Now she would consider
any paid employment that would take her away from the area in
which she was born, or any area like it: that is to say, at least a
third of Great Britain. Until her escape, however, she remains
trapped in her parents’ home, with no one to talk to about those
things that interest her, either inside the house or out. Perhaps,
she mused, it would have been better had she surrendered to the
majority while she was still at school: for her heroic struggle had
brought her little but three years’ respite from misery.
Hers is not an isolated case by any means. With Britain’s
immense apparatus of welfare, which consumes about a fifth of
the national income, there is little or nothing to spare for an 18-
year-old girl such as the one who consulted me last week, who is
making the most valiant efforts to escape her dismal background.
Her father was a drunk who beat her mother every day of his
married life, and quite often the three children as well, until finally
he decided that enough was enough and deserted them
altogether. Unfortunately my patient’s younger brother stepped
into the breach and became just as violent as the father had been.
He beat his mother and one day broke a glass and used its
jagged edge to inflict an extremely serious wound on my patient’s
left arm, from which she still, two years later, has not entirely
recovered and probably never will. Endowed apparently by nature
with a forceful personality, my patient insisted not only on calling

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the police but in pressing charges against her brother, who was 14
at the time. The magistrates gave him a conditional discharge. So
appalled was my patient’s mother at her lack of family solidarity
that she threw her out of the house, at the age of 16, to fend for
herself. This put an end to her plan – formulated under the most
inauspicious circumstances – to continue her education and
become a lawyer.
At 16, as she then was, she was deemed by social services to
be too old for an orphanage but not old enough to receive any
welfare benefits, and the only accommodation that the local
apparatus of welfare could find for her was a room in a house
used to resettle criminals. While her brother received every
attention from social workers, she received none at all, since there
was nothing wrong with her. Her criminal room-mate in the
halfway house was what she called ‘a baghead’ – a heroin addict
– and also a professional thief. As intelligent as she was forceful,
my patient found herself a job as a clerk in a local law office and
has worked there ever since. She was thenceforth charged the full
economic rent for her miserable room, and all pleas to the
authorities on her part to be relocated in public housing were
turned down on the grounds that she was already adequately
accommodated and in any case was unfit yet to manage her own
affairs. As to public assistance for further full-time education, that
was out of the question, since in order to pursue such full-time
education she would have to give up her job: and she would then
be considered to have made herself voluntarily unemployed and
thus unentitled to public assistance. But if she cared to become
pregnant, why then, public assistance was at hand, in generous
quantities.
The morals of her story could hardly have been clearer.

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 First, the inhabitants of the milieu from which she came
considered that her duty not to inform the authorities far
outweighed her right not to be maltreated.
Second, the authorities themselves considered the attack upon
her as unworthy of serious attention.
Third, she would receive no public help at all in escaping from
the circumstances into which she had been born. To treat her as
an especially deserving case, after all, would be to imply that
there were undeserving cases; and to say that there were
undeserving cases would be tantamount to admitting that one way
of living is preferable – morally, economically, culturally, spiritually
– to another. This is a thought that must at all costs be kept at bay,
or the whole ideology of modern education and welfare collapses
in a heap.
It might be argued, of course, that it was precisely the lack of
public assistance that put iron in my patient’s soul in the first place
(she was still determined one day to qualify as a lawyer): but that
is the answer to a different question, and is besides a little harsh
for my taste.
But at least these two girls, each remarkable in her way, had
somehow glimpsed the existence of another world, even if neither
had yet succeeded in fully entering it. Their awareness that the
culture of the slums was insufficient to sustain an intelligent
person came to them early in life – how or why they could no
longer remember.
This realisation comes considerably later to most of my
intelligent patients, however, who complain in their 30s of a vague,
persistent, and severe dissatisfaction with their present existence.
The excitements of their youth are over: in the culture of the
slums, men and women are past their prime by the age of 25.
Their personal lives are in disarray, to put it kindly: the men have

211
fathered children with whom they have little or no contact; the
women, preoccupied with meeting the increasingly imperious
demands of these same children, drudge at ill-paid, boring, and
impermanent jobs. (The illegitimacy rate in Britain has recently
passed the 40 percent mark, and while most births are still
registered in the names of two parents, relations between the
sexes grow ever more unstable.) The entertainments that once
seemed so compelling to both men and women – indeed, the
whole purpose of life – seem so no longer. These patients are
listless, irritable, and disgruntled. They indulge in self-destructive,
anti-social, or irrational behaviour: they drink too much, involve
themselves in meaningless quarrels, quit their jobs when they
can’t afford to, run up debts on trifles, pursue obviously disastrous
relationships, and move their home as if the problem were in the
walls that surround them. The diagnosis is boredom, a much
underestimated factor in the explanation of undesirable human
conduct. As soon as the word is mentioned, they pounce upon it,
almost with relief: recognition of the problem is instant, though
they had not thought of it before. Yes, they are bored – bored to
the very depths of their being.
But why are they bored, they ask me. The answer, of course, is
that they have never applied their intelligence either to their work,
their personal lives, or their leisure, and intelligence is a distinct
disadvantage when it is not used: it bites back. Reviewing their life
stories, they see for the first time that at every point they have
chosen the line of least resistance, the least strenuous path. They
never received any guidance, because all agreed that one path
was as good as another. They never awoke to the fact that a life is
a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less
pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one
imposes a purposive pattern upon them. Their education was an

212
enforced and seemingly interminable irrelevance: nothing their
parents or their teachers told them, nothing they absorbed from
the culture around them, led them to suppose that their early
efforts at school, or lack of them, would have any effect upon their
subsequent lives. The jobs they took as soon as they were able
were purely to fund their pleasures of the moment. They formed
relationships with the opposite sex whimsically, without thought of
the future. Their children were born as instruments, either to repair
troubled relations or to fill an emotional and spiritual void, and
were soon found wanting in either capacity. Their friends – for the
first time perceived as of lesser intelligence – now bore them.
And, for the first time wishing to escape the artificial, self-
stimulated crises that amuse them no longer, they suffer the
undisguised taedium vitae of the slums.
Intelligence is not the only quality that the modern culture of the
slums penalises, of course. Almost any manifestation of finer
feeling, any sign of weakness, any attempt at withdrawal into a
private world, is mercilessly preyed upon and exploited. A
cultivated manner, a refusal to swear in public, an intellectual
interest, a distaste for coarseness, a protest against littering are
the objects of mockery and obloquy: and so it takes courage, even
heroism, to behave with common decency.
One of my patients is a stout woman, aged 50, who would once
have been called an old maid. She is completely harmless and is
in fact a woman of the most delicate sensibility. She is so timid
that a harsh word is sufficient to reduce her to tears. She always
apologises to me for the inconvenience she believes that she
causes me by her very existence; I have never been able to
reassure her completely on that score. She is the Miss Flite of our
times.

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 Needless to say, the life of such a person in a modern British
slum is a living nightmare. The children in her street mock her
unceasingly when she leaves her house; they push excrement
through her letterbox as a joke. She has long since given up
appealing to their mothers for help, since they always side with
their children and consider any adverse comment on their
behaviour as an insult to them personally. Far from correcting their
children, they threaten her with further violence. The relentless,
gleeful revelations in the press, radio, and television of any
wrongdoing by the authorities and the professions, unbalanced by
any criticism whatever of members of the general public, have
caused an atrophy of the faculty of self-criticism and prepare the
mind always to look outward, never inward, for the source of
dissatisfaction and malfeasance. Vox populi, vox dei – with every
person a god in his own pantheon.
My patient is, of course, an easy target for burglars and
robbers. Her house has been broken into five times in the last
year, and she has been robbed in the street three times in the
same period, twice in the presence of passersby. Such a person
can expect no sympathy from the authorities. The police have told
her more than once that the fault is hers: someone like her should
not live somewhere like this. The streets, in other words, should
be left to the hooligans, the vandals, and the robbers, to ply their
inevitable trades in peace, and it is the duty of citizens to avoid
them. It is no part of the state’s duty to secure the streets against
them.
In such circumstances, decency is almost synonymous with
vulnerability: a quality with which the authorities have no
sympathy.
Another patient of mine, a younger woman of respectable
working-class background and unblemished character, despaired

214
of finding a compatible man, her experience in that sphere having
been uniformly disastrous. She decided thenceforth to live as a
spinster, devoting her life to the rescue of stray animals. Her
house, unfortunately, was in a street on a council estate, in which
all the other houses had been gradually abandoned after repeated
vandalism and were now boarded up. The street then became a
rendezvous and pickup point for drug dealers, who did not
hesitate to break into my patient’s house to make use of her
telephone (saving expenses on their own mobile phones) and
help themselves to whatever food was present. They broke into
her house even when she was in it, mocking her fear and taunting
her with her inability to do anything about it. Her largest expense
soon became the telephone bills they ran up. They threatened her
with death if she went to the police.
She did go to the police, however, and also to the housing
authorities. Their advice was the same: she should buy a guard
dog. She followed their advice, but it made little difference,
because the dog soon grew used to the drug dealers, who fed it
tidbits. But my patient grew to love her dog. My patient asked the
housing authorities to move her elsewhere. At first – that is to say,
for two years – her request was turned down, because she was
deemed to have insufficient reasons for wishing to move. When
finally the authorities agreed to find her somewhere else to live,
they offered her a flat, in which, however, it was forbidden to keep
animals. My patient pointed out that she had a dog, a creature
upon which she now lavished all her capacity for affection, a fact
perfectly obvious to anyone who spoke to her about her life for
even a few moments. The housing authorities were adamant: take
it or leave it. In vain did she point out that it was the housing
authorities who had advised her to get the dog in the first place.
The argument of the housing authorities was that if she were

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really serious about moving from her current inferno, she would
take whatever she was given. After all, hundreds of thousands of
British fathers abandoned their offspring without a moment’s
thought: what was all this sentimental fuss about a brute animal?
Life in the British slums demonstrates what happens when the
population at large, and the authorities as well, lose all faith in a
hierarchy of values. All kinds of pathology result: where
knowledge is not preferable to ignorance and high culture to low,
the intelligent and the sensitive suffer a complete loss of meaning.
The intelligent self-destruct; the sensitive despair. And where
decent sensitivity is not nurtured, encouraged, supported, or
protected, brutality abounds.
The absence of standards, as Ortega y Gasset remarked, is the
beginning of barbarism: and modern Britain is well past the
beginning.

2000

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 AND DYING THUS AROUND US EVERY DAY

THE TRIAL IN January of Marie Therese Kouao and her lover,

Carl Manning, for the murder of their eight-year-old ward, Anna
Climbie, caused a sensation in England: not merely because the
pathologist who performed the postmortem on the child said in
court that it was the worst case of child abuse he had ever seen,
but because of the depths of incompetence and pusillanimity it
revealed among the public servants charged with detecting,
preventing, and responding to such abuse.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the competence of our
public servants has declined along with our nation’s general level
of education; but in this case the authorities conducted
themselves with so stunning a lack of common sense that
something more must account for it than mere ignorance. To
paraphrase Dr. Johnson slightly, such stupidity is not in nature. It
has to be worked for or achieved.
As usual, one must look to the baleful influence of mistaken
ideas to explain it.
Anna Climbie died of hypothermia in February 1999. Her body
after death showed 128 marks of violence, inflicted with leather
belts, metal coat hangers, a bicycle chain, and a hammer. She
was burned with cigarettes and scalded with hot water. Her fingers
were cut with razors. For six months she had been made to sleep
in a black plastic rubbish bag (in place of clothes) in a bathtub:
sometimes she had been left in cold water, bound hand and foot,
for 24 hours. She was emaciated to the point of starvation; her
legs were so rigidly flexed that when she was admitted to the
hospital the day before her death, they could not be straightened.

217
 It was not as if there had been no warnings of Anna’s terrible
fate. She was admitted to the hospital twice during the months
before she died; doctors alerted the social service authorities to
the abuse she was suffering at least six times; and the police also
were alerted more than once. No one did anything whatsoever.
Marie Therese Kouao came originally from the Ivory Coast,
though she was a French citizen and lived in France for most of
her life. She would return to the Ivory Coast from time to time to
persuade relatives there to hand over their children to her, so that
she could bring them up in Europe, assuring them a brighter
future than West Africa offered, she said. She claimed to have a
highly paid job at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. She used
the children successively entrusted to her care to claim benefits
from the welfare system, first in France and then in England. She
moved to England with Anna because the French authorities were
demanding the reimbursement of £2,000 of benefits to which she
had not been entitled. On her arrival in England, she was at once
granted benefits worth, coincidentally, a further £2,000.
When the benefits ran out, she met the driver of a bus in which
she travelled, a strange and isolated young West Indian called
Carl Manning. He was almost autistic, a social misfit, whose main
interests were bus routes and internet pornography. She moved in
with him at once.
It is possible that they then developed together the strange
psychiatric condition known as folie à deux first described by two
French psychiatrists in the 19th century. In this condition, two
people who are mutually dependent and in unusually close
association come to share the same delusion. Usually the person
with the stronger character and greater intelligence is the
originator of the delusion, which he or she believes with
unshakable conviction; the other, weaker and less intelligent,

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character goes along with it because he or she has not the
strength to resist. When the weaker character is separated from
the stronger, he or she ceases to believe in the delusion.
Kouao – the stronger character of the two by far – needed
Manning because he had an apartment, and she had nowhere
else to stay; Manning needed Kouao because she was the only
woman, other than a prostitute, with whom he had ever had a
sexual relationship.
When Kouao began to believe that Anna was possessed by the
devil, Manning accepted what she said and joined in her efforts to
abuse Satan out of Anna. They took her to several fundamentalist
churches, whose pastors performed exorcisms: indeed, on the
very day before Anna’s death, it was the taxi driver who was
taking them to one such church for an exorcism who noticed that
Anna was scarcely conscious, and who insisted upon taking her to
an ambulance station, from whence she was taken to the hospital
in which she died.
The conduct of the two defendants in court supports the
diagnosis of folie à deux. Manning was subdued and accepted his
guilt. Kouao, however, kept a Bible in her hand always and
frequently had to be removed from the dock because of her
religious outbursts. She behaved as if truly mad.
Two distant relatives of Kouao’s who lived in England testified
that they drew the attention of the welfare authorities to Anna’s
condition. Nothing happened. A baby-sitter who looked after Anna
when Kouao found work was so horried by her general condition,
her incontinence of urine, and the marks on her skin that she took
her to a hospital. There Kouao managed to convince an
experienced doctor that Anna’s main problem was scabies, from
which everything else about her followed. Kouao claimed that the

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marks on her skin were the result of her own scratching to relieve
the irritation of scabies.
Nine days later, however, Kouao herself took Anna to another
hospital. There she claimed that the scalds from hot water to the
child’s head had been caused by Anna’s having poured the water
over herself in her frantic attempts to relieve the itching of scabies.
This time, however, the doctors and nurses were not deceived.
Not only did they note Anna’s injuries but also her state of
malnutrition and the gross discrepancy between the rags she was
wearing and the immaculate smartness of the woman they
assumed to be her mother. She ate ravenously, as if
unaccustomed to plentiful food – as indeed she was. Hospital staff
noted that she became incontinent at the prospect of this woman’s
visits to the hospital, and a nurse reported that she stood at
attention and trembled when Kouao arrived. The doctor in charge
of the case duly informed the social worker and the police of her
well-founded suspicions.
The social worker and the policewoman deputed to the case,
both of them black themselves, dismissed these suspicions out of
hand, however, without proper investigation, once again believing
Kouao’s account of the case – namely that Anna had scabies,
from which everything else followed. The social worker and the
policewoman neither looked at the child themselves nor at the
hospital photographs of the child’s condition. They insisted that
Anna be released back into the care (if that is quite the word) of
Kouao – the social worker explaining Anna’s evident fear of
Kouao as a manifestation of the deep respect in which Afro-
Caribbean children hold their elders and betters. The fact that the
Ivory Coast is in West Africa, not the West Indies, did not occur to
the social worker, whose multi-culturalism obviously consisted of
the most rigid stereotypes.

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 On discovering that Anna had been returned to Kouao, the
doctor in charge of the case wrote twice to express her grave
concern about the child’s safety to the welfare authorities, who
dispatched the same social worker to Manning’s apartment, which
she found cramped but clean. That was all she saw fit to comment
upon.
By then, Anna was kept in the bathtub at night and beaten
regularly, with (among other things) a hammer to the toes.
Manning was writing in his diary that Anna’s injuries were self-
inflicted, a consequence of her ‘witchcraft’. The social worker and
the policewoman never went back. They feebly pleaded fear of
catching scabies from Anna.
Finally Kouao visited the social worker and claimed that
Manning was sexually abusing Anna, withdrawing the claim soon
afterward. The social worker and the policewoman assumed that
the claim was just a ploy on Kouao’s part to obtain more spacious
accommodations for herself, and their investigations evidently did
not involve examining Anna.
Two months later, Anna was dead.
The case naturally provoked a lot of commentary, much of it
beside the point. The social worker and the policewoman had
been made into scapegoats, correspondents to the Guardian
suggested; the real problem was a lack of resources: social
workers were too overworked and poorly paid to do their job
properly. It is amazing how anything can be turned these days into
a pay claim.
A former social worker, however, wrote to the Guardian and
suggested that ideology, particularly in the training of social
workers, was the fundamental problem. Here, of course, he went
to the heart of the matter. The theme of race, and official attitudes
towards it, ran through the Anna Climbie case like a threnody. So

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rapidly has political correctness pervaded our institutions that
today virtually no one can keep a clear head about race. The
institutions of social welfare are concerned to the point of
obsession with race. Official anti-racism has given to racial
questions a cardinal importance that they never had before.
Welfare agencies divide people into racial groups for statistical
purposes with a punctiliousness I have not experienced since I
lived, briefly, in apartheid South Africa a quarter of a century ago.
It is no longer possible, or even thought desirable, for people
involved in welfare services to do their best on a case-by-case
basis, without (as far as is humanly feasible) racial bias. Indeed,
not long ago I received an invitation from my hospital to participate
in a race-awareness course, which was based upon the
assumption that the worst and most dangerous kind of racist was
the doctor who deluded himself that he treated all patients equally,
to the best of his ability. At least the racial awareness course was
not (yet) compulsory: a lawyer friend of mine, elevated recently to
the bench, was obliged to go through one such exercise for newly
appointed judges, and was holed up for a weekend in a wretched
provincial hotel with accusatory representatives of every major
‘community.’ Come the final dinner, a Muslim representative
refused to sit next to one of the newly appointed judges because
he was Jewish.
The outcome of the Anna Climbie case would almost certainly
not have been different had the policeman and the social worker
at its centre been white, but the reasons for the outcome would
have been slightly different. As blacks who represented authority
– in a society in which all serious thinkers believe oppressed
blacks to be in permanent struggle with oppressing whites – these
functionaries had joined forces with the aggressor, at least in the
minds of those who believe in such simple-minded dichotomies.

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Under the circumstances, it would hardly be surprising if they
exhibited, when dealing with other black people, a reluctance to
enforce regulations with vigour, for fear of appearing to be Uncle
Toms, doing the white man’s work for him.
In a world divided into Them and Us (and it would have been
difficult, given the temper of the times, for the social worker and
the policewoman to have escaped this way of thinking altogether),
We are indissolubly united against Them: therefore, if one of us
treats another one of us badly, it is a scandal that we must
conceal for our own collective good. A black African friend of
mine, who had been a refugee in Zambia, once published an
article in which he exposed the corruption of the regime there. His
African friends told him that, while nothing he said in the article
was untrue, he should not have published it, because it exposed
Africa’s dirty linen to the racist gaze of Europeans. In other words,
the social worker and the policewoman believed Marie Therese
Kouao because they wanted to avoid having to take action against
a black woman, for fear of appearing too ‘white’ in the eyes of
other blacks. Thus they resorted to the preposterous
rationalisations that the Ivory Coast is an island in the West Indies
and that West Indian children stand at attention when their
mothers visit them in the hospital.
The white doctor who was taken in by Kouao’s ridiculous story
of scabies (a diagnosis contradicted both by a dermatologist at the
time and at postmortem) was afraid to appear too harsh in her
assessment of Kouao, to avoid the accusation, so easily made in
these times of easy outrage, of being a racist. Had she not
affected to believe Kouao, she would have had to take action to
protect Anna, at the risk of Kouao’s accusing her of being racially
motivated. And since (to quote another memo from my hospital)
‘racial harassment is that action which is perceived by the victim

223
to be such,’ it seemed safer to leave Kouao to her coat hangers,
hammers, boiling water, and so forth. For this reason, also, the
outcome of the case would have been no different had the social
worker and the policewoman been white: their fears would have
been different from those of their black colleagues, but the
ultimate effects of those fears would have been the same.
Kouao, Manning, and Anna Climbie were treated not as
individual human beings but as members of a collectivity: a purely
theoretical collectivity, moreover, whose correspondence to reality
was extremely slight. No out-and-out racist could have suggested
a less flattering picture of the relations between black children and
black adults than that which the social worker and the
policewoman appeared to accept as normal in the case of Kouao
and Anna Climbie. And had the first doctor, the social worker, and
the policewoman been less fixated on the problem of race and
more concerned to do their best on a case-by-case basis, Anna
Climbie would still have been alive, and Kouao and Manning
would be spending less of their lives in prison.
I have seen such ‘racial awareness’ – the belief that racial
considerations trump all others – often enough. A little while ago I
was asked to stand in for a doctor who was going on prolonged
leave and who was well known for his ideological sympathy for
blacks of Jamaican origin. For him, the high rates both of
imprisonment and psychosis of young Jamaican males are
evidence of what has come to be known in England, since a
notorious official report into the conduct of London’s Metropolitan
Police, as ‘institutionalised racism.’
A nurse asked me to visit one of the doctor’s patients, a young
black man living in a terraced house near the hospital. He had a
long history of psychosis and was refusing to take his medication.
I read his hospital notes and went to his house. When I arrived,

224
his next-door neighbour, a middle-aged black man, said, ‘Doctor,
you’ve got to do something; otherwise someone’s going to be
killed.’ The young man, floridly mad, believed that he had been
cheated by his family of an inheritance that would have made him
extremely rich. Only later did I learn of this young man’s history of
violence. The last time the doctor for whom I was standing in
visited the home, the young man chased him away, wielding a
machete. The young man had attacked several of his relatives
and had driven his mother out of the house, which she owned.
She had been obliged by his threats to seek accommodation
elsewhere.
None of his propensity to violence, not even the incident with
the machete, appeared in the medical notes. The doctor felt that
to record the incidents would ‘stigmatise’ the patient and add to
the harm he chronically suffered as a member of an already
stigmatised group. Furthermore, to treat him against his will for his
dangerous madness – which English law permits – would simply
be to swell the already excessive numbers of young black men
requiring such compulsory treatment for psychoses caused (my
colleague would say) by English racism.
No such delicacy of feeling was wasted upon the young man’s
mother, however, she who had spent many blameless years as a
nurse, paying for the house from which her son had now driven
her. Sympathy went out only to the son, who fitted the mould of
someone in need of protection from an uncomprehending and
hostile society. The fact that, if no one intervened, he might well
kill or seriously injure someone and end up in an institution for the
criminally insane for life was of no particular concern. My
colleague would interpret it as further evidence of the oppressive,
racist nature of society, and of the need to treat such as he with

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even more delicacy of feeling. There are no episodes from which
the wrong conclusions cannot be drawn.
Even I, despite my staunch opposition to racialised thinking or
actions, have found it difficult to resist the spirit of the age entirely.
One of the worst mistakes I ever made was because I allowed
myself to give consideration to race where none should have been
given. A young black man, who still lived with his mother, began to
withdraw, as if into a shell. Never very communicative or outgoing,
he continued to work but not to speak. On one occasion he did
speak to his mother – about the disposal of his belongings if he
should die. One day his mother returned to find the house
barricaded. Her son was inside, having propped furniture against
the doors and windows. His mother called the fire brigade, who
had difficulty entering. They found the son unconscious, with his
wrists cut and blood everywhere. He had taken an overdose of
pills also. He had lost so much blood that he required a
transfusion before the surgery to repair his tendons could begin. A
more determined effort to kill oneself could hardly be imagined.
I suggested to his mother that, after his recovery from the
operation, he be transferred to a psychiatric ward. At first she
agreed, relieved at the suggestion. But then another of her sons
and a friend arrived in the hospital, and the atmosphere changed
at once. You might have supposed from their attitude towards me
that it was I who had cut the young man’s wrists, barricaded him in
the house, and nearly done him to death. My argument that his
conduct over the past weeks suggested that he had become
mentally disturbed in some way that required further investigation,
and that he was in grave danger of killing himself, was called
racist: I wouldn’t have argued thus if my patient had been white.
The hospital was racist; the doctors were racist; I in particular was
racist.

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 Unfortunately the mother, with whom my relations until the
arrival of the two other men had been cordial, now took their part.
Under no circumstances would she allow her son to go to a
psychiatric ward, where they routinely (and purposely) drugged
young black men to death. The brother and the friend warned me
that if I insisted, they would get their friends to create a
disturbance in the hospital.
The law allowed me to overrule the young man’s mother,
brother, and friend, but the scene was becoming ugly. I arranged
to meet them the following day, in the hope that their attitude was
but a manifestation of passing anxiety, but by then their attitude
had hardened. I caved in: but before doing so, I made the mother
sign a statement that I had warned her of the consequences of
refusing further investigation and treatment of her son, for which
she would hold neither me nor the hospital responsible. The
document was of no legal validity whatsoever; whatever force it
had was strictly moral.
I did not quite give up. I sent a nurse to the young man’s home,
but she was several times denied entry on the grounds that her
(racist) services were not required.
A few weeks later the young man killed himself by hanging.
At least the family did not have the gall to sue me for not having
invoked the full force of the law (as, on reflection, I should have).
They did not argue that I had failed to hospitalise him against his
will for racist reasons, not caring about the fate of a mere black
man – an argument that doubtless would have struck some
people as entirely plausible. Indeed, I did not invoke the law for
reasons of race, though not for racist reasons: for had the family
been white, I would certainly have overruled them. But I had
capitulated to the orthodoxy that avoiding race conflict must trump
all other considerations, including the mere welfare of individuals.

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For in our current climate of opinion, every white man is a racist
until proved otherwise.
No one doubts the survival of racist sentiment. The other day,
for example, I was in a taxi driven by a young Indian who disliked
the way a young Jamaican was driving. ‘Throw that man a
banana!’ he exclaimed unself-consciously. His spontaneous
outburst spoke volumes about his real feelings.
But the survival of such sentiment hardly requires or justifies
the presumption that all public services are inherently and
malignantly racist, and that therefore considerations of racial
justice should play a bigger part in the provision of services than
considerations of individual need. In this situation, black and white
are united by their own kind of folie à deux, the blacks fearing that
all whites are racist, the whites fearing that all blacks will accuse
them of racism.
And while we are locked in this folly, innocents like Anna
Climbie die.

2001

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 THE RUSH FROM JUDGMENT

NOT LONG AGO I asked a patient of mine how he would describe

his own character. He paused for a moment, as if savouring a
delicious morsel. ‘I take people as they come,’ he replied in due
course. ‘I’m very nonjudgmental.’
As his two roommates had recently decamped, stealing his
prize possessions and leaving him with ruinous debts to pay, his
neutrality towards human character seemed not generous but
stupid, a kind of prophylactic against learning from experience. Yet
nonjudgmentalism has become so universally accepted as the
highest, indeed the only, virtue that he spoke of his own character
as if pinning a medal for exceptional merit on his own chest.
That same week I was consulted by another patient who had
experienced even worse consequences of nonjudgmentalism,
though this time not entirely her own. Her life had been that of the
modern slum dweller: three children by different fathers, none of
whom supported her in any way and the last of whom was a
vicious, violent drunk. She had separated from him by fleeing with
their two-year-old to a hostel for battered women; soon afterward
she found herself an apartment whose whereabouts he did not
know.
Unfortunately, sometime later she was admitted to the hospital
for an operation. As she had no one to whom she could entrust
the child, she turned to Social Services for help. The social
workers insisted, against her desperate pleas, that the child
should stay with his biological father while she was in the hospital.
They were deaf to her argument that he was an unsuitable
guardian, even for two weeks: he would regard the child as an
encumbrance, an intolerable interference with his daily routine of

229
drinking, whoring, and fighting. They said it was wrong to pass
judgment on a man like this and threatened her with dire
consequences if she did not agree to their plan. So the two-year-
old was sent to his father as they demanded.
Within the week he and his new girlfriend had killed the child by
swinging him against the wall repeatedly by his ankles and
smashing his head. At this somewhat belated juncture, society did
reluctantly make a judgment: the murderers both received life
sentences.
Of course, the rush to nonjudgment is in part a reaction against
the cruel or unthinking application of moral codes in the past. A
friend of mine recently discovered a woman in her 90s who had
lived as a ‘patient’ in a large lunatic asylum for more than 70 years
but whose only illness – as far as he was able to discover – had
been to give birth to an illegitimate child in the 1920s. No one,
surely, would wish to see the return of such monstrous
incarceration and cavalier destruction of women’s lives: but it does
not follow from this that mass illegitimacy is a good thing, or at
least not a bad thing. Judgment is precisely that – judgment. It is
not the measure of every action by an infallible and rigid
instrument.
Apologists for nonjudgmentalism point, above all, to its
supposed quality of compassion. A man who judges others will
sometimes condemn them and therefore deny them aid and
assistance, whereas the man who refuses to judge excludes no
one from his all-embracing compassion. He never asks where his
fellow man’s suffering comes from, whether it be self-inflicted or
no: for whatever its source, he sympathises with it and succours
the sufferer.
The housing department of my city holds fast to this doctrine. It
allocates scarce public housing, it says in its self-congratulatory

230
leaflets, solely on the basis of need (give or take a nepotistic
connection or two – after all, even the nonjudgmental are human).
It never asks how the need arose in the first place: it is there to
care, not to condemn. In practice, of course, things are a little
different. It is true that the housing department makes no
judgments as to the deserts of the applicants for its largesse, but
that is precisely why it cannot express any human compassion
whatever. Its estimation of need is mathematical, based on a
perverse algebra of sociopathology.
To return to the case of my patient whose child had been
murdered: she was driven from her home by her neighbours, who
felt that she was responsible for the death of her child and
therefore acted as good, outraged citizens by twice attempting to
burn down her flat. Thereafter she found cheap lodgings in a
house where there also lodged a violent drug addict, who forced
his attentions upon her. When she applied to the housing
department for help, it refused her on the grounds that she was
already adequately housed, in the sense of having four walls
around her and a roof over her head (and it would be wholly
wrong to stigmatise drug addicts as undesirable neighbours), and
also because she had no young dependents – her only young
dependent having been murdered and therefore not part of the
equation. Stones might have wept at my patient’s predicament,
but not the housing department: it is far too nonjudgmental to do
so.
Curiously enough, my patient was perfectly able – with a little
encouragement – to accept that her misfortunes did not come
entirely out of the blue, that she had contributed to them by her
own conduct and was therefore not a pure or immaculate victim.
Taking the line of least resistance, as she had done throughout
her life, she had consented to have a child by a man whom she

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knew to be thoroughly unsuitable as a parent. Indeed, she had
known him to be violent and drunken even before she went to live
with him, but she still found him attractive; and she lived in a
society that promotes its own version of the Sermon on the Mount
– Sufficient unto the day is the attraction thereof. She had learned
now from experience (better late than never) – which she could
never have done had she refrained from making judgments about
both herself and others. As a result, she had rejected another
violent lover, abjured her own habitual drunkenness, and decided
to go to college.
In the clinic, of course, a kind of nonjudgmentalism does and
should hold sway: doctors ought never to refuse treatment on the
grounds of moral deficiency. Moses Maimonides, the 12th century
rabbi and doctor, wrote: ‘May I never see in the patient anything
but a fellow creature in pain’ – surely a noble aspiration, if
somewhat difficult of achievement in practice.
But medicine is not just the passive contemplation of suffering:
it is the attempt, by no means always successful, to alleviate it.
And it cannot have escaped the attention of doctors that much
modern suffering has a distinct flavour of self-infliction. I am not
talking now of the physical illnesses that derive from habits such
as smoking, but rather of the chronic suffering caused by not
knowing how to live, or rather by imagining that life can be lived as
an entertainment, as an extended video, as nothing but a series of
pleasures of the moment. The whirligig of time brings in its
revenges – at least in a cold climate such as ours.
If the doctor has a duty to relieve the suffering of his patients,
he must have some idea where that suffering comes from, and
this involves the retention of judgment, including moral judgment.
And if, as far as he can tell in good faith, the misery of his patients
derives from the way they live, he has a duty to tell them so –

232
which often involves a more or less explicit condemnation of their
way of life as completely incompatible with a satisfying existence.
By avoiding the issue, the doctor is not being kind to his patients;
he is being cowardly. Moreover, by refusing to place the onus on
the patients to improve their lot, he is likely to mislead them into
supposing that he has some purely technical or pharmacological
answer to their problems, thus helping to perpetuate them.
For example, I am consulted at least once or twice a day –
week in, week out; year in, year out – by women who complain of
anxiety and depression, whose biographies contain obvious
explanations for these unpleasant feelings. The women have
often endured more than one violent sexual relationship,
sometimes as many as four in succession, and have more than
one young child to bring up. While they fear the loneliness of
managing on their own, without help from another adult, they have
come to the conclusion that all men are unreliable, even
psychopathic. They are in an apparently insoluble dilemma: are
they better off battered or alone?
Aided by a few simple questions, it doesn’t take them long to
analyse their situation, though at the outset they invariably ascribe
their unhappiness to bad luck or fate. Such is the power of self-
deception that even the most obvious considerations escape
them.
A few weeks ago a woman came to see me complaining of
having been miserable and dissatisfied with her life for twenty
years. Her husband treated her like a slave, and when he was not
obeyed, he became aggressive, either throwing things about the
room, smashing windows, or beating her.
‘Why don’t you leave him?’ I asked.
‘I feel sorry for him.’
‘Why?’

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 ‘Well, because he’s not very bright, doctor, and he doesn’t know
how to read or write. He couldn’t manage on his own; he can’t do
anything for himself. I even have to dial the telephone for him
because he can’t read the numbers.’ ‘Does he work?’
‘Yes, he’s always worked.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s in charge of security at the Hall’ – a large Elizabethan
stately home on the outskirts of the city, owned by the
municipality.
‘How many people work in the security department there?’ I
asked her.
‘Sixteen.’
‘You mean, every time he has to make a telephone call there,
he asks one of his staff to do it for him because he can’t read the
numbers? Or every time he receives a letter, he has to have
someone read it out to him?’
My patient looked at me wide-eyed. Obvious as this was, she
hadn’t thought of it.
‘It’s not very likely, is it, that such a man would be made the
boss,’ I added.
She had failed, through cowardice and self-indulgence, to think
about the clear discrepancy between her husband’s career and
his supposed helplessness at home: for had she recognised it,
she could no longer think of herself as a victim (with all the
psychological comfort that victimhood brings) but rather as the co-
author of her own misery. She wanted to avoid a painful dilemma:
either to accept the situation as it was or to do something about it.
After two more conversations with me, she did something about
it. She delivered an ultimatum to her husband: either he must
modify his behaviour or she would leave him. Further, if ever he
laid a finger upon her again, she would call the police and press

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charges against him. Since then he has behaved and even done
what for 20 years she believed him incapable of doing: he made a
cup of tea for himself. Meanwhile she has gone to art classes
instead of imprisoning herself in their flat, awaiting his arbitrary
orders.
This patient had only one violent man to contend with; many of
my patients have had a succession of them. I ask where they met
them, and almost without exception it was in a bar or a nightclub
when they were both at a loose end, a previous relationship
having broken up the week, or even the day, before. I ask what
they had in common, apart from loss and loneliness. The
invariable answer: sexual attraction and the desire for a good
night out. These are not contemptible in themselves, of course,
but as the foundation of long-term relationships and parenthood
they are a little thin and soon wear even thinner. I ask what other
interests the women and their lovers have in common, and
invariably there are none. The day-to-day flux is their whole world:
a little shopping, a little cooking, a little tidying up, a lot of
television, a visit to the social security office, and a few hours in
the pub while the money lasts. This aimless routine soon palls but
nevertheless remains a subject for continual and acrimonious
disagreement. Moreover, there is no pressure – either moral
pressure from the community or economic pressure from the
system of taxation and social security benefits – to keep couples
together. Before long, neither necessity nor desire cements
relationships – only inertia, punctuated by violence. For the violent
man, to have a woman trembling in fear of him is his only
guarantee of personal significance.
But how, the women ask, are they to meet men who are not like
this? How is a woman to find someone who will not exploit her
alternately as a meal ticket and an object for the relief of sexual

235
tension, who will not spend his own social security money in a
single night out and then demand to be given hers as well, despite
the fact that this money is needed to feed the children? How is
she to find a man who will actually provide something in return,
such as companionship and unconditional support?
The answer necessarily involves an examination of how they
have lived, from their childhood onward. For if, as I contend and
they agree, it is necessary to have interests in common in order to
achieve some depth in a relationship, how are such interests
generated in the first place?
The woeful inadequacy of their upbringing, education, and
outlook becomes apparent to them, perhaps for the first time.
‘What are you interested in?’ I ask. The question comes like a
warning shot.
‘Well ... nothing, really,’ they reply.
They recognise the unsatisfactory nature of their answer –
which is all too truthful – at once.
Did you try hard at school?’
‘No.’
‘What did you do instead?’
‘Messed around, like everyone else.’
Their peers discouraged, sometimes by physical violence,
those few who showed some inclination to work. To have resisted
the prevailing ethos would have required exceptional courage, as
well as parental backing, which was invariably missing. It was
better to go along with the crowd and enjoy the illicit pleasures of
the moment. It didn’t really matter: after all, there would always be
enough to eat, a roof over one’s head, and a television to watch,
thanks to subventions from the state.
Besides which, it is a truth universally acknowledged in the
slums that there is nothing to be gained by individual effort, since

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the world is so unjustly organised. And in the absence of either
fear or hope, only the present moment has any reality: you do
what is most amusing, or least boring, at each passing moment. In
the absence of an interest or career, motherhood seems a good
choice: only later does it become clear just how entrapping it is,
especially when the father – predictably, but not predictedly –
takes no share of parental duties.
With no experience or knowledge of the worlds of science, art,
or literature, and deprived of the sheer necessity to earn their
subsistence, my patients are rich in nothing but time on their
hands, and so they embark upon the Liaisons Dangereuses of the
slums.
But the relationships in which they thus embroil themselves are
incapable for long of sustaining the burden placed upon them, and
the descent into misery, drudgery, squalor and fear is almost
immediate. In their late 20s the most intelligent among them say
to me, ‘There’s something missing in my life, but I don’t know what
it is.’
They remind me of the young people I met behind the Iron
Curtain, who had never known any other life than that under the
Communists, who knew little of the outside world and yet knew
that their way of life was both abnormal and intolerable.
My patients medicalise both their own misery and the terrible
conduct of their violent lovers, a way of explaining their existential
dissatisfaction that absolves them of responsibility. It takes little
time, however, to disabuse them of their misconceptions, and the
fact that I am often able to predict from very near the outset of our
consultation how their lovers have behaved towards them
astonishes them.
Last week I saw a patient who had taken an overdose after her
boyfriend beat her up. Our dialogue followed a set pattern.

237
 ‘And, of course, he sometimes grabs you round the throat and
squeezes and tries to strangle you?’ I ask.
‘How did you know, doctor?’
‘Because I’ve heard it practically every day for the last seven
years. And you have marks on your neck.’
‘He doesn’t do it all the time, doctor.’ This is the universal
extenuation offered.
‘And, of course, he apologises afterward and tells you it won’t
happen again. And you believe him.’
‘Yes. I really think he needs help, doctor.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, when he does it, he changes completely; he becomes
another person; his eyes stare; it’s like he has a fit. I really think
he can’t help it; he’s got no control over it.’
‘Would he do it in front of me, here, now, in this room?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Then he can help it, can’t he?’
The woman’s desire to avoid a painful dilemma – love him and
be beaten, or leave him and miss him – prevented her from asking
herself the very obvious question as to why the ‘fits’ happened
only in the privacy of their flat. suddenly, inescapably, the
responsibility for alleviating her misery became hers: she had to
make a choice.
‘But I love him, doctor.’
The triumph of the doctrine of the sovereignty of sentiment over
sense would have delighted the Romantics, no doubt, but it has
promoted an unconscionable amount of misery.
‘Your boyfriend is unlikely to change. He strangles you because
he enjoys it and gets a feeling of power from doing so. It makes
him feel big: “I strangle her, but she still loves me, so I must be

238
really wonderful.” If you leave him, he’ll find someone else to
strangle within the week.’
‘But it’s difficult, doctor.’
‘I didn’t say it was easy; I said it was necessary. There’s no
reason why what is necessary should also be easy. But you can’t
expect doctors to make you happy while your lover is still
strangling you, or to make him stop strangling you. Neither of
these things is possible. You must make a choice. There is simply
no way round it.’
To tell such a patient that she is responsible, both practically
and morally, for her own life is not to deny her help; it is to tell her
the truth. To force her to face her complicity in her misery is not to
abandon her to her fate. On many occasions I have put such
women in touch with lawyers, I have found them safe
accommodation, I have found them places in colleges. Nor do I
demand an immediate decision; what has taken years to develop
is rarely undone in an hour or two. But I stick to the fundamental
truth: that no doctor, no social worker, no policeman can improve
the quality of such a woman’s life unless she is willing to forgo
whatever gratification she derives from her violent boyfriend.
There is no painless way of resolving the dilemma.
In almost all cases the women return a few weeks later much
improved in their mood. The love they thought they felt for their
tormentors has evaporated; they find it difficult in retrospect to
distinguish it from the fear they felt.
What should we do now? they ask me.
How am I to answer them? Should I pretend to an agnosticism
about what might constitute a better life for them and their
children? Should I pretend that a promiscuous granting of their
favours to the first man they meet in a pub is as good as taking a

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little care over such matters? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate
betrayal?
I advise them that their first responsibility is to do everything in
their power to prevent their children from following in their
footsteps; they should try to open horizons to them beyond the
miserable and sordid ones visible from the slums. This will involve
spending time with them, taking an interest in their schoolwork,
learning to say no to them when the occasion arises, and, above
all, ensuring that they never again witness scenes of domestic
violence. As for themselves, they should try to go to college: for
even if it fails to render them more employable, they will at least
gain a sense of achievement and possibly an enduring interest.
And if that means they have to break the rules governing social
security – which decree that they should be theoretically available
for work and therefore not engaged in full-time education – well, I
am not going to inform the authorities, who (it seems) prefer their
dependents utterly passive.
They often take my suggestions. (One of my patients, beaten
for twenty years, has since become a nurse, and many others
work as assistants in nursing homes, the desire to help others
being a corollary of their desire to help themselves.) I am probably
the only person they have ever met to whom the violence of their
lives is not as natural as the air they breathe but the result of
human choices; I am the only person who has ever suggested to
them that they can behave otherwise than they do behave.
It would be vain to suggest that this approach works in every
case. Judgment is necessary, too, in selecting the cases; there
are those who are too old, too psychologically fragile, or too young
to bear the pain of accepting partial responsibility for their own
misery. Alas, there is a period during the downward spiral of self-
destruction when little can be done, as if self-destruction has a

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natural course of its own. Just as alcoholics and drug addicts may
take years to accept first, that they are addicted, and second, that
addiction is neither an excuse for their conduct nor a fate imposed
upon them by circumstances, so the wilful self-destruction that I
see around me often runs a prolonged course, thanks to the
powers of human self-deception. It can rarely be nipped in the
bud.
For example, in the week in which the woman whose child had
been murdered consulted me, two young women came to my
notice, neither of whom gave any thought to the future or to the
past, and both of whom sleepwalked through the present.
The first was barely 16, a white girl two months pregnant by a
Muslim burglar. She was covered in bruises. They had met when
he burgled her house, where she had been left alone for the night
by her single mother, with whom he fought like a cat and a dog
tied up in a sack over the time she should come home at night
from clubs and discotheques (her mother suggesting the
abominably early hour of midnight). The burglar asked her to
come with him, and she did; thenceforth he locked her up, never
allowed her out of the apartment, forbade all contact with others,
beat her black and blue, kicked her regularly in the stomach,
demanded her conversion to Islam (he himself was a drunk), and
in general expected her to be his slave. When he went into the
hospital for a small operation – the repair of a tendon in his arm,
injured in the course of house-breaking – she had an opportunity
to escape. I offered her every facility to do so, from a safe house
to the services of a lawyer paid for by the public purse.
‘I can’t leave him,’ she said. ‘I love him, and he said he’d kill
himself if I leave him.’
I know from experience that such a man might take an
overdose as a form of emotional blackmail: the vast majority of

241
male overdoses in my ward are of men who have beaten their
women – the overdoses serve the dual function of blackmailing
the women into remaining with them and of presenting themselves
as the victims rather than the perpetrators of their own violence. I
also know from experience that the Muslim burglar would never
actually kill himself. But then a young woman says she fears the
suicide of her lover, she is in effect saying that she will not yet
leave him, and nothing will induce her to change her mind. While
the Muslim burglar remained in the hospital, she appeared every
day, dressed in Punjabi costume, to tend her tormentor-lover, to
bring him his Indian delicacies and all the little comforts he lacked.
The second young patient was a black girl, now aged 17,
whose parents first knew of her liaison with a white boy a year
older than she when her teacher brought her home from school at
the age of 14, she having been beaten up by the boy in the
playground. A few months later she gave birth to his child, and
they went to live together. (No doubt future social historians will
find the contradiction between our concern about sexual abuse,
on the one hand, and our connivance at and indifference to
precocious sexual activity, on the other, as curious as we find the
contrast between Victorian sexual prudery and the vast size of the
Victorian demimonde.)
Fatherhood did not improve the young man’s conduct: he broke
her jaw, fractured her ribs, partially strangled her, punched her
regularly, and used her head to break a closed window before
pushing her out of it altogether. He did not work, took her money
for drink, went to spend nights with other girls, and demanded his
meals be ready for him to suit his convenience.
I offered her, too, every opportunity to leave, every legal
protection it was possible to provide, but her cup of bitterness, like
the first girl’s, was not yet full (‘It’s all right for you; you don’t love

242
him!’) and therefore not yet ready to be drained. All one could do
was offer to help whenever she was ready to ask for it.
Neither of these young women was deficient in intelligence, far
from it; and in a few years, when they appear again in my hospital,
as inevitably they will, they’ll be ready to examine the source of
their suffering, having wasted so much time. I hope someone will
have the courage and compassion to guide them to that source:
for only if the veil of self-deception is torn from their eyes can they
improve the quality of their lives. Experience has taught me that it
is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that nonjudgmentalism is
at best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised
form of sadism.
How can one respect people as members of the human race
unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness?
How can people learn from experience unless they are told that
they can and should change? One doesn’t demand of laboratory
mice that they do better: but man is not a mouse, and I can think
of no more contemptuous way of treating people than to ascribe to
them no more responsibility than such mice.
In any case, nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is
the judgment that, in the words of a bitter Argentinean tango, ‘todo
es igual, nada es mejor’: everything is the same, nothing is better.
This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged
from the fertile mind of man.

1997

243
 WHAT CAUSES CRIME?

AS I BROWSED in a bookshop shortly after my arrival in New

Zealand on a recent visit, I came upon a volume of national
statistics in which I discovered, to my amazement, that New
Zealand’s prison population is half as large again, per capita, as
Britain’s.
And suddenly that remote nation, so far from Britain
geographically and so close culturally, seemed an enormous
conundrum for someone like me, with an interest in crime.
After all, for more than a century we British have thought of our
former colony as a better, cleaner Britain. By 1900, New Zealand
was already the healthiest place in the world. Almost the same
size as Great Britain, it has a population equal to greater
Manchester’s alone. It is free of the squalor and decay so
prominent in all English cities and towns, and if there is no great
wealth there, neither is there much poverty. With one of the
earliest welfare states in the world, it has an egalitarian ethos, and
one can’t readily tell a mechanic from a neurosurgeon from his
manner of speech or of dress. The way of life is informal, the pace
relaxed. Add all this to the impressive per capita GDP figures, and
New Zealand has one of the highest standards of living in the
world.
Such a society – prosperous, democratic, egalitarian – should
be virtually free of crime, if the commonplace liberal explanations
of criminality were true. But they aren’t, and New Zealand is now
almost as crime-ridden as its mother country, itself the most crime-
ridden nation in western Europe (along with prosperous,
democratic, egalitarian Holland). Indeed, in the ever upward trend
in the crime figures, New Zealand is only a handful of years

244
behind Britain and, in point of homicide, a few years in advance of
it. This fact is of great theoretical interest, or ought to be: it is an
overwhelming refutation of the standard liberal explanations of
crime.
Browsing further in the bookshop, I wasn’t in the least amazed
to turn up a book by a liberal criminologist who explained the
startling imprisonment statistics by what he called the New
Zealand criminal justice system’s ‘obsession’ with punishment. In
fact, since the number of serious crimes in New Zealand (as
everywhere else) has increased at a vastly greater rate than the
number of prisoners, it would be more accurate to accuse the
system of an obsession with lax enforcement, pleas of mitigation,
excuse finding, and leniency – anything but punishment.
Shortly after my visit to the bookshop, my hostess in Wellington
recalled over dinner a curious episode from her Christchurch
childhood. When she was six, she recounted, her mother had
taken her on a kind of pilgrimage to see the very spot in a park
where the famous Parker-Hulme murder had taken place six
years earlier, in 1954. This murder is the subject of the recent
celebrated New Zealand film Heavenly Creatures, and in the last
two decades it has been the subject of much liberal – that is to
say, unctuously nonjudgmental – reinterpretation, which the New
Zealand intelligentsia now almost universally, and unthinkingly,
accepts. This acceptance is a phenomenon of great cultural
significance, and it begins to answer the conundrum that so
fascinated me throughout my New Zealand visit.
Gifted and intelligent, Juliet Hulme (pronounced ‘hume’) and
Pauline Parker had just finished their studies at Christchurch’s
most prestigious girls’ high school. Their relationship was
exceptionally close, but the Hulme family’s impending return to
England threatened them with separation. When Parker’s mother

245
refused to allow her daughter to follow Hulme, the girls decided to
kill her. They bashed her repeatedly over the head with a brick
wrapped in a stocking, having met her in the park ostensibly for a
cup of tea and a stroll. The murder was premeditated, as the
jocular tone in which Parker anticipated the happy event in her
diary proved.
The case transfixed New Zealand and a large part of the world.
My hostess’s mother took her daughter to the site of this
extraordinary murder because of the fascination that evil holds for
those who have little personal contact with it. Christchurch in
those days was a quiet, prosperous, provincial city that prided
itself on its English gentility, that did not have a single restaurant
outside the hotels, and that approached nearest to the excitement
of wrongdoing in the daily enactment of the ‘six o’clock swill’, that
strange institution brought about by a law forbidding the sale of
alcohol in public bars after six in the evening. Men would drink as
much and as fast as they were able between leaving their offices
and six o’clock, with sometimes unedifying results.
So uneventful was life in Christchurch that to this day all its
inhabitants over a certain age can point to the exact site of the
murder, despite the explosion of serious crime in the intervening
period.
The shift in the interpretation of the Parker-Hulme case signals
a sea change in New Zealand’s attitude toward crime in general, a
change that has occurred everywhere else in the Western world.
Public opinion at the time universally regarded the Parker-Hulme
murder as the evil act of evil girls acting in the grip of an evil
passion. Nowadays a different interpretation is almost as
universal. A well-known book on the case, Parker and Hulme: A
Lesbian View, by two lesbian academics, Julie Glamuzina and
Alison Laurie, sums up today’s prevailing opinion.

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 According to the reinterpretation, the Parker-Hulme case was
not a brutal and pointless murder but the natural, inevitable
outcome of a grand passion thwarted by narrow-minded social
prejudice and intolerance. New Zealand was then a repressed
and repressive society, and something had to give. The authors
unquestioningly accept the hydraulic model of human desire,
according to which passion is like the pus in an abscess, which, if
not drained, causes blood poisoning, delirium, and death. If
society prevented two lesbian adolescents from acting upon their
passion, therefore, it was only to be expected that they should
have done to death the mother of one of them. The primordial
wrongness of bashing people with bricks has vanished altogether.
In support of their hypothesis, the two authors asked a number
of lesbians who grew up at the time of the case for their reaction
to it. Yes, they replied, they understood the girls only too well, for
they themselves had sometimes harbored murderous feelings
towards their parents. Both the authors and the respondents
overlooked the significant moral difference between occasionally
wishing one’s mother would drop dead and causing her actually to
do so.
Nor is this obtuseness exclusive to lesbians. The Los Angeles
Times reported the film’s director, Peter Jackson, as regarding his
own film as nonjudgmental. This, of course, lays bare the curious
moral stance of our age: it is not wrong to bash an innocent
woman to death with a brick, but it is wrong to condemn the deed
and its perpetrators.
From being branded monsters of depravity, Parker and Hulme
now appear almost martyrs to a cause. Public opinion admires
them – not because they managed after their release from five
years’ imprisonment to make successful new lives for themselves,
thus pointing to the hope and possibility of redemption (Juliet

247
Hulme has become an internationally acclaimed crime novelist,
under the name Anne Perry). Instead it’s because they are
thought to have engaged in a lesbian affair at a time of extreme
primness and propriety in New Zealand – though Hulme explicitly
denies that this was the case. They are believed to have acted
upon forbidden desires, the greatest feat of heroism that the bien-
pensants of our age can imagine.
But of course, if repression of desire were truly the cause of
crime, one would have expected the crime rate to fall as social
and legal obstacles to the expression of desire were removed.
And there can be little doubt that New Zealand has become much
less straitlaced than it was in the 1950s. It is far more tolerant of
people doing their own thing than it was then. It is thus a natural
experiment for the verification or refutation of the hydraulic model
of desire.
When Parker and Hulme committed their murder, the whole of
New Zealand recorded annually about a hundred serious violent
offences. Indeed, it was the extreme contrast between the
brutality of the crime and the placidity of the country that made it
so startling: had it occurred in Colombia, no one would have given
it a moment’s thought. Forty years later, after continued loosening
of restraints upon the expression of desire, the number of violent
offences in New Zealand has increased by four to five hundred
times. The population has not quite doubled in the interval.
Perhaps reporting practices have also changed, but no one
could seriously doubt that violent offences had increased
enormously (by 400 percent between 1978 and 1995 alone), and
increased in viciousness as well. There is no genre of modern
crime – from serial rape to mass killing – from which New Zealand
is now immune. Gone forever are the days (within the memory of
people by no means old) when everyone left his house unlocked

248
and deliveries of cash to banks in country towns could be left
untouched overnight on the pavement outside.
The Parker-Hulme case is far from the only case in New
Zealand in which explanation has slid inexorably into moral
neutrality and then total exculpation of crime. This moral neutrality,
which begins with intellectuals, soon diffuses into the rest of
society and provides an absolution in advance for those inclined
to act upon their impulses. It acts as a solvent of any remaining
restraint. Criminals learn to regard their crimes not as the result of
decisions they themselves have taken but as the vector of
abstract and impersonal forces upon which they exert no
influence.
The most prominent New Zealand case now undergoing
exculpatory reinterpretation is that of a woman called Gay Oakes,
currently serving a life sentence for the murder of her common-
law husband, Doug Garden, father of four of her six children. She
poisoned his coffee one day in 1994, and he died. She buried him
in her backyard: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and Doug Garden
to dug garden, as it were.
The case has become a cause célèbre because Doug Garden
was by most (though not all) accounts a very nasty man who
unmercifully battered and abused Gay Oakes for the ten years of
their liaison. Oakes has now written and published her
autobiography, to which is appended a brief essay by her lawyer,
one of the best-known advocates in New Zealand, Judith Ablett-
Kerr. The lawyer, who is fighting to get her client’s sentence
reduced, argues that Oakes was suffering from what she calls
‘battered-woman syndrome’ and therefore could not be held fully
responsible for her acts, including poisoning. Women who
undergo abuse over so long a period, the argument goes, do not

249
think clearly or rationally and must therefore be held to a different
standard of conduct from the rest of us.
There is no doubt, of course, that women abused over a long
period are often in a confused state of mind. At least one such
woman consults me every working day of my life. But the idea that
a battered woman suffers from a syndrome that excuses her
conduct, no matter what, has a disastrous logical consequence:
that battering men also suffer from a syndrome and cannot be
held accountable for their actions. No one, then, is individually
responsible for what is done. This is no mere theoretical danger: I
have male patients who claim precisely this and ask for help in
overcoming their battering syndrome. Of the many indications that
their behaviour is under voluntary control, one is that they ask for
help only when threatened with a court case or a separation, and
resume their destructive conduct once the danger has passed.
The battered-woman syndrome concept is uncompromising in
its rejection of personal responsibility. The truth is that most
(though not all) battered women have contributed to their unhappy
situation by the way they have chosen to live. Gay Oakes’s
autobiography clearly, if unwittingly, illustrates her complicity in her
fate, though she artlessly records the sordid and largely self-
provoked crises of her own life as though they had no connection
either with one another or with anything she has ever done or
omitted to do. Even in prison, with a lot of time at her disposal,
she has proved incapable of reflection on the meaning of her own
past; she lives as she has always lived, in an eternal, crisis-
ridden, unutterably wretched present moment. Her life story reads
like a soap opera written by Ingmar Bergman. And the more that
people choose – and are financially enabled by the state – to live
as she has lived, the more violence of the kind she has

250
experienced will there be. The lessons to be drawn from her case
are myriad, but they are not those that the liberals draw.
Born in England, Oakes went to live in Australia in early
adolescence. Though not devoid of intelligence, she chose to
follow the crowd in not taking school seriously, and she married
thoughtlessly at the age of 16. The marriage didn’t last (‘we
weren’t ready for it’), and by the age of 20 she had two children by
different men. She claimed to love the second of the men but
nevertheless alienated him by a casual affair with yet another
man: her whim was law. Then, still in Australia, she met her future
victim. One of her first experiences of him was watching him
smash up a bar in a drunken rage. Before long, by her own
account, he was habitually drunk, jealous, and violent towards her.
He repeatedly cheated her of her money so that he could gamble,
told outrageous and transparent lies, and was lazy even as a petty
criminal. He broke his promises to reform time out of number.
Nevertheless, the question did not occur to her (nor has it yet
occurred to her, to judge from her memoirs) whether such a man
was a suitable father for her children.
Four years into their relationship, by which time she had had
two of his children, he abandoned her for his native New Zealand.
Some time later he wrote to say that he had abjured alcohol and
to acknowledge that he had treated her very badly. Would she
now rejoin him in New Zealand?
Although she had received innumerable such promises before,
although he had abundantly proved himself to be worthless, lazy,
unreliable, dishonest, and cruel – if her own account of him is to
be believed – she nevertheless entertained his proposal.
‘All this time, Doug had blamed me for his behaviour and his
admission that he was responsible for his own actions had me
fooled,’ she wrote. ‘I still loved him and I really believed he had

251
finally realised that the way he had treated me was wrong. I
struggled with myself over whether to go to New Zealand... In the
end, I had to admit to myself that I missed Doug and wanted to be
with him.’
Having poisoned her loved one six years and two children later,
she found he was too heavy to bury without help from a friend.
Halfway through the burial (which she revealed to no-one else,
until the police found the body 14 months later), she feared that
she and her friend might be caught in flagrante and was seized
with misgivings. ‘I was terribly sorry that I had got Jo [her friend]
involved,’ she recalled. ‘I had thought we should be just pushing
him over a cliff somewhere.’
This is the woman whom we (and the New Zealand courts) are
seriously invited to believe is a helpless victim, a woman who,
though not mentally deficient, seems never once in her life to have
thought more than ten minutes ahead, even about such matters
as bringing a child into the world. And in this, of course, she was a
true child of modern culture, with its worship of spontaneity and
authenticity and its insistence that the forswearing of instant
gratification is unnecessary, even an evil to be avoided.
In this sense – and in this sense alone – was she a victim.
While liberal intellectuals in New Zealand explain away such
crimes as hers in this frivolous fashion, the entire New Zealand
criminal justice system has come under attack in a kind of pincer
movement. Miscarriage of justice of two kinds – one that liberals
use for inflammatory and destructive ends, and the other that
casts doubt on the sanity of the courts – undermines confidence
that the enterprise of distinguishing guilt from innocence is even
worth undertaking. If guilt and innocence are so easily
confounded, so difficult to distinguish both in theory and in
practice, what is the point of self-restraint?

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 The miscarriage of justice that liberals wave as a banner is the
case of David Bain, a young man who languishes in jail, having
been found guilty of murdering his entire family one morning in
1994. An Auckland businessman, Joe Karam, has since devoted
his life and wealth to exposing the sloppy police work, the
weaknesses in the prosecution’s case, the incompetence of the
legal defence, and the immobility of the appeal system that have
resulted in the young man’s life sentence. Karam has quite
plausibly convinced many New Zealanders that he is right, and
that his alternative theory of the death of Bain’s family – namely,
that his father shot them and then himself – is far more credible
than the official police version.
Karam himself comes to the conclusion in the book he wrote
about it that the verdict proves the essential inadequacy of the
criminal justice system. This is an understandable, though
mistaken, reaction by a man who has immersed himself for years
in a single case of injustice. But his good faith conclusion is
echoed and amplified in bad faith by liberals. They maintain on the
basis of the Bain case (and one or two others) that New Zealand
wrongfully locks up thousands of people, and that therefore it
must change its criminal justice system completely. What they
know full well and artfully suppress, however, is that any system
that deals with a large number of cases will occasionally make
mistakes, even bad ones, since all human institutions are
imperfect. The new system that would replace the old would
likewise make mistakes, and not necessarily fewer. What liberals
object to in their hearts, therefore, is not this system of criminal
justice but any system of criminal justice. For in the liberal view,
we are all equally guilty and therefore all equally innocent. Any
attempt to distinguish between us is ipso facto unjust. Parker and

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Hulme were just innocent schoolgirls, after all, who did what any
such innocent schoolgirls would have done in their circumstances.
Another case of injustice, even more destructive in its effects
than the Bain case, is the case of Peter Ellis, a young man
accused and found guilty in 1996 of horrific sexual abuse of
children in a municipal daycare centre in Christchurch. The case
has many, and eerie, parallels with a notorious case that took
place in the town of Wenatchee, Washington. It was alleged and
supposedly proved in court that Ellis had strung children up,
sodomised them, and made them drink urine and have oral sex
with him. This continued for a prolonged period, without any
physical evidence of his activities ever having come to light. No
parent suspected that anything was wrong until the initial
accusation was made, and then accusations followed in epidemic
fashion.
It now emerges that much of the evidence was tainted. The
woman who made the first accusation was a fanatic who
possessed and had read a great deal of literature about satanic
abuse. The detective in charge of the investigation (who has since
resigned from the police) had an affair with her and with another
of the accusing mothers. The foreman of the jury was related to
one of the accusers. Many of the children have since retracted
their testimonies, which social workers had obtained by lengthy
interrogation. And now the homosexual lobby has alleged that
Ellis was accused in the first place because he was a
homosexual, and because it was unusual for a man to work in a
daycare centre. The controversy over the case threatens to
degenerate into an argument as to who is most politically correct.
A New Zealand court has given credence to accusations that
even the Spanish Inquisition might have found preposterous, a
sign oddly enough of how far the courts have come under the

254
influence of the bien-pensants, and how much they fear their
censure and crave their approbation. For sexual abuse is the one
crime that escapes the all-embracing understanding and
forgiveness of such liberals, being a crime whose supposed
pervasiveness in all ages exposes as hypocritical the pretensions
of bourgeois society to decency and morality and makes clear, as
well, that anyone of us, in the hands of a sufficiently sensitive
therapist, might discover his own secret victimhood, absolving him
of responsibility for his life and actions. Sexual abuse is thus an
intellectual battering ram with which to discredit the traditional
edifice of self-restraint and to wipe away the personal
responsibility of individuals, and no judge can do himself harm in
the eyes of the right-thinking by taking the hardest and most
punitive of lines towards it, whether it actually occurred in any
particular instance or not.
Where crime is concerned, then, New Zealand presents a
curiously familiar pattern to a visitor from Britain (and would, no
doubt, to an American visitor as well): a dramatically elevated
crime rate, a liberal willingness to explain away the worst crimes
except those relating to sexual abuse, and an assiduously
cultivated decline in public confidence in the justice system’s
ability to distinguish guilt from innocence. New Zealand, distant
but no longer isolated, is now fully incorporated in the main
current of modern culture.
Of course, New Zealand liberals still bang the old drums, too,
blaming crime on poverty and inequality. At first sight, the
disproportionate share of New Zealand crime committed by
Maoris and migrants from the Pacific Islands seems to come to
the rescue. The Maoris and islanders are relatively (though not
absolutely) poor, and they suffer discrimination (though not at the
hands of the government). Only an eighth of the population, they

255
commit half the crime. Ergo, poverty and discrimination cause
crime.
But this won’t wash. If the Maoris and islanders had the same
crime rate as the whites, total crime in New Zealand would still be
only one-third lower than it is today. Such a total would still
represent a dramatic rise in the rate over the last few decades.
Indeed, the removal of Maori and islander crime from the equation
would represent a delay of only a few years in the upward trend.
Moreover, there were almost as many Maoris, proportionately,
in the years when the crime rate was very low, and they were
poorer then and suffered more open discrimination. Poverty and
discrimination thus don’t account for the rise in New Zealand’s
crime rate.
This rise provides no support for liberal theories of crime, no
sustenance for the kind of person who proves the strength of his
compassion by conceiving of those less law-abiding than himself
as automata, mere executors of the dictates of circumstance. It is
true, of course, that the decision of criminals to commit their
crimes must have antecedents; but they are not to be found in
New Zealand’s poverty, unemployment, or inequality. Rather, they
are to be found in the prudential calculations such criminals make
(the likelihood of being caught, imprisoned, and so forth) and also
in the characteristics of the culture, particularly the popular
culture, from which they construct their thoughts about the world.
And this is a culture that not only despises the achievements of
past ages, inflaming ignorant egotism by teaching that we need no
connection with them, but is profoundly antinomian – of which
there could be no better illustration than the name of a rock band,
hundreds of posters for whose concerts were plastered
everywhere in Wellington and Christchurch during my visit: Ben
Harper and the Innocent Criminals.

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1998

257
 HOW CRIMINOLOGISTS FOSTER CRIME

LAST WEEK, in the prison, I asked a young man why he was

there.
‘Just normal burglaries,’ he replied.
‘Normal for whom?’ I asked.
‘You know, just normal.’
He meant, I think, that burglaries were like grey skies in an
English winter: unavoidable and to be expected. In an actuarial
sense, he was right: Britain is now the burglary capital of the
world, as almost every householder here will attest. But there was
also a deeper sense to his words, for statistical normality slides
rapidly in our minds into moral normality. The wives of burglars
often talk to me of their husband’s ‘work’, as if breaking into other
people’s homes were merely a late shift in a factory. Nor is only
burglary ‘normal’ in the estimation of its perpetrators. ‘Just a
normal assault,’ is another frequent answer prisoners give to my
question, the little word ‘just’ emphasising the innocuousness of
the crime.
But how has crime come to seem normal to its perpetrators? Is
it merely a recognition of the brute fact of a vastly increased crime
rate? Or could it be, on the contrary, one of the very causes of that
increase, inasmuch as it represents a weakening of the inhibition
against criminality?
As usual, one must look first to the academy when tracing the
origins of a change in the Zeitgeist. What starts out as a career-
promoting academic hypothesis ends up as an idea so widely
accepted that it becomes not only an unchallengeable orthodoxy
but a cliché even among the untutored.

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 Academics have used two closely linked arguments to establish
the statistical and moral normality of crime and the consequent
illegitimacy of the criminal justice system’s sanctions.
First, they claim, we are all criminal anyway; and when
everyone is guilty, everyone is innocent.
Their second argument, Marxist in inspiration, is that the law
has no moral content, being merely the expression of the power of
certain interest groups – of the rich against the poor, for example,
or the capitalist against the worker. Since the law is an expression
of raw power, there is no essential moral distinction between
criminal and noncriminal behaviour. It is simply a question of
whose foot the boot is on.
Criminologists are the mirror image of Hamlet, who exclaimed
that if each man received his deserts, none should escape
whipping. On the contrary, say the criminologists, more liberal
than the prince (no doubt because of their humbler social origins):
none should be punished. These ideas resonate in the criminal’s
mind. If his illegal conduct is so very normal, he thinks, what’s all
the fuss about in his case, or why should he be where he is – in
prison? It is patently unjust for him to be incarcerated for what
everyone still at liberty does. He is the victim of illegitimate and
unfair discrimination, rather like an African under apartheid, and it
is only reasonable that, on his release, he should take his revenge
upon so unjust a society by continuing, or expanding, his criminal
activity.
It is impossible to state precisely when the Zeitgeist changed
and the criminal became a victim in the minds of intellectuals: not
only history, but also the history of an idea, is a seamless robe.
Let me quote one example, though, now more than a third of a
century old. In 1966 (at about the time when Norman Mailer in
America, and Jean-Paul Sartre in Europe, portrayed criminals as

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existential heroes in revolt against a heartless, inauthentic world),
the psychiatrist Karl Menninger published a book with the
revealing title The Crime of Punishment. It was based upon the
Isaac Ray lectures he had given three years earlier – Isaac Ray
having been the first American psychiatrist who concerned himself
with the problems of crime. Menninger wrote: ‘Crime is
everybody’s temptation. It is easy to look with proud disdain upon
those people who get caught – the stupid ones, the unlucky ones,
the blatant ones. But who does not get nervous when a police car
follows closely? We squirm over our income tax statements and
make some adjustments. We tell the customs official we have
nothing to declare – well, practically nothing. Some of us who
have never been convicted of crime picked up over two billion
dollars’ worth of merchandise last year from the stores we
patronise. Over a billion dollars was embezzled by employees last
year.’
The moral of the story is that those who go to court and to
prison are victims of chance at best and of prejudice at worst:
prejudice against the lowly, the unwashed, the uneducated, the
poor – those whom literary critics portentously call the Other. This
is precisely what many of my patients in the prison tell me. Even
when they have been caught in flagrante, loot in hand or blood on
fist, they believe the police are unfairly picking on them. Such an
attitude, of course, prevents them from reflecting upon their own
contribution to their predicament: for chance and prejudice are not
forces over which an individual has much personal control. When I
ask prisoners whether they’ll be coming back after their release, a
few say no with an entirely credible vehemence; they are the ones
who make the mental connection between their conduct and their
fate. But most say they don’t know, that no one can foresee the

260
future, that it’s up to the courts, that it all depends – on others,
never on themselves.
It didn’t take long for Menninger’s attitude to permeate official
thinking. A 1968 British government document on juvenile
delinquency, Children in Trouble, declared: ‘It is probably a
minority of children who grow up without ever misbehaving in
ways which may be contrary to the law. Frequently, such
behaviour is no more than an incident in the pattern of a child’s
normal development.’
In a sense this is perfectly true, for in the absence of proper
guidance and control, the default setting of human beings is surely
to crime and anti-social conduct, and everyone breaks the rules at
some time. But in a period of increasing permissiveness, many
draw precisely the wrong conclusion from human nature’s
universal potential for delinquency: indeed, the only reason
commentators mention that potential at all is to draw a
predetermined liberal conclusion from it – that acts of delinquency,
being normal, should not give rise to sanctions.
In this spirit, Children in Trouble treats the delinquency of
normal children as if its transience were the result of a purely
biological or natural process rather than of a social one.
Delinquency is like baby teeth: predetermined to come and go at a
certain stage of a child’s development.
Not so very long ago, such an attitude would have struck
almost everyone as absurd. Everyone knew, as if by instinct, that
human behaviour is a product of consciousness, and the
consciousness of a child must be molded. I can best illustrate
what I mean by my own experience. At the age of eight, I stole a
penny bar of chocolate from the corner store. It gave me a thrill to
do so, and I enjoyed the chocolate all the more for the fact that it
had not made an inroad into my weekly pocket money (sixpence).

261
Unwisely, however, I confided my exploit to my elder brother, in an
attempt to win his respect for my bravery, which was much in
question at the time. Even more unwisely, I forgot that he knew
this incriminating story when, furious at him because of his
habitual teasing, I told my mother that he had uttered a word that
at that time was never heard in respectable households. In
retaliation, he told my mother that I had stolen the chocolate.
My mother did not take the view that this was a transient
episode of delinquency that would pass of its own accord. She
knew instinctively (for, at that time, no one had yet befuddled
minds by suggesting otherwise) that all that was necessary for
delinquency to triumph was for her to do nothing. She did not think
that my theft was a natural act of self-expression, or a revolt
against the inequality between the power and wealth of children
and that of adults, or indeed of anything other than my desire to
have the chocolate without paying for it. She was right, of course.
What I had done was morally wrong, and to impress the fact upon
me she marched me round to Mrs Marks, the owner of the store,
where I confessed my sin and paid her tuppence by way of
restitution. It was the end of my shoplifting career.
Since then, of course, our understanding of theft and other
criminal activity has grown more complex, if not necessarily more
accurate or realistic. It has been the effect, and quite possibly the
intention, of criminologists to shed new obscurity on the matter of
crime: the opacity of their writing sometimes leads one to wonder
whether they have actually ever met a criminal or a crime victim.
Certainly it is in their professional interest that the wellsprings of
crime should remain an unfathomed mystery, for how else is one
to convince governments that what a crime-ridden country (such
as Britain) needs is further research done by ever more
criminologists?

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 It is probably no coincidence that the profession of criminology
underwent a vast expansion at about the same time that criminal
activity began the steepest part of its exponential rise.
Criminologists in Britain once numbered in the low dozens, and
criminology, considered unfit for undergraduates, was taught only
in one or two institutes. Today hardly a city or town in the country
is without its academic criminology department. Half of the 800
criminologists now working in Britain got their training (mostly in
sociology) in the late ’60s and early ’70s, during the heyday of
radical activism, and they trained the other half.
Of course, it might have been that the problem of crime called
forth its students. But since social problems are often of a
dialectical nature, could it not also have been that the students
called forth their problem? (British economist John Vaizey once
wrote that any problem that became the subject of an ‘ology’ was
destined to grow serious.) Since the cause of crime is the decision
of criminals to commit it, what goes on in their minds is not
irrelevant. Ideas filter down selectively from the academy into the
population at large, through discussions (and often
bowdlerisations) in the papers and on TV, and become intellectual
currency. In this way, the ideas of criminologists could actually
become a cause of crime. In addition, these ideas deleteriously
affect the thinking of the police. In our hospital, for example, the
police posted notices everywhere warning staff, patients, and
visitors about car theft. Motorists! proclaims the notice. Your car is
at risk! This is a very criminological locution, implying as it does a
mysterious force – like, say, gravity – against which mere human
will, such as that exercised by thieves and policemen, can be
expected to avail nothing.
In the process of transmission from academy to populace,
ideas may change in subtle ways. When the well-known

263
criminologist Jock Young wrote that ‘the normalisation of drug use
is paralleled by the normalisation of crime,’ and, because of this
normalisation, criminal behaviour in individuals no longer required
special explanation, he surely didn’t mean that he wouldn’t mind if
his own children started to shoot up heroin or rob old ladies in the
street. Nor would he be indifferent to the intrusion of burglars into
his own house, ascribing it merely to the temper of the times and
regarding it as a morally neutral event. But that, of course, is
precisely how ‘just’ shoplifters, ‘just’ burglars, ‘just’ assaulters,
‘just’ attempted murderers, taking their cue from him and others
like him, would view (or at least say they viewed) their own
actions: they have simply moved with the times, and therefore
done no wrong. And, not surprisingly, the crimes that now attract
the deprecatory qualification ‘just’ have escalated in seriousness
even in the 10 years I have attended the prison as a doctor, so
that I have even heard a prisoner wave away ‘just a poxy little
murder charge.’
The same is true of the drugs that prisoners use: where once
they replied that they smoked ‘just’ cannabis, they now say that
they take ‘just’ crack cocaine, as if by confining themselves thus
they were paragons of self-denial and self-discipline.
Of course, the tendency of liberal intellectuals such as Jock
Young not to mean quite what they say, and to express
themselves more to flaunt the magnanimity of their intentions than
to propagate truth, is a general one. Not long ago I was involved
in a radio discussion with a distinguished film critic about the
social (or anti-social) effects of the constant exposure of children
to depictions of violence. He strenuously denied that any ill effects
occurred or were likely to occur, but admitted en passant that he
would not permit a diet of violence for his own children. He
perhaps did not notice that, underscoring his contradictory

264
attitude, was an unutterable contempt for half of mankind. In
effect, he was saying that the proles were so beyond redemption,
so immoral by nature, that nothing could make them either better
or worse. They did not make choices; they did not respond to
moral or immoral influences; they were violent and criminal by
essence. His own children, by contrast, would respond
appropriately to his careful guidance.
Criminologists, needless to say, are not monolithic in their
explanations of criminality: an academic discipline needs
theoretical disputes as armed forces need potential enemies. But
above the cacophony of explanations offered, one idea makes
itself heard loud and clear, at least to criminals: to explain all is to
excuse all. Criminological writing generally conceives of criminals
as objects, like billiard balls responding mechanically to other
billiard balls that impinge upon them. But even when they are
conceived of as subjects, whose actions are the result of their
ideas, criminals remain innocent: for their ideas, criminologists
contend, are reasonable and natural in the circumstances in which
they find themselves. What more natural than that a poor man
should want material goods, especially in so materialistic a society
as ours?
Recently, biological theories of crime have come back into
fashion. Such theories go way back: 19th century Italian and
French criminologists and forensic psychiatrists elaborated a
theory of hereditary degeneration to account for the criminal’s
inability to conform to the law. But until recently, biological theories
of crime – usually spiced with a strong dose of bogus genetics –
were the province of the illiberal right, leading directly to forced
sterilisation and other eugenic measures.
The latest biological theories of crime, however, stress that
criminals cannot help what they do: it is all in their genes, their

265
neurochemistry or their temporal lobes. Such factors provide no
answer to why the mere increase in recorded crime in Britain
between 1990 and 1991 was greater than the total of all recorded
crime in 1950 (to say nothing of the accelerating increases since
1991), but that failure does not deter researchers in the least.
Scholarly books with titles such as Genetics of Criminal and
Antisocial Behaviour proliferate and do not evoke the outrage
among intellectuals that greeted the 1964 publication of HJ
Eysenck’s Crime and Personality, a book suggesting that
criminality is an hereditary trait. For many years, liberals viewed
Eysenck, professor of psychology at London University, as
virtually a fascist for suggesting the heritability of almost every
human characteristic, but they have since realised that genetic
explanations of crime can just as readily be grist for their
exculpatory and all-forgiving mills as they can be for the mills of
conservatives.
Recently, an entire television series in Britain focused on the
idea that crime is the result of brain dysfunction. The book that
accompanied the series states that the two authors ‘believe that –
because we accept the findings of clinicians with no penal axe to
grind – many criminals act as they do because of the way their
brains are made. The past two decades have vastly extended the
horizons of knowledge, and we believe it is time to benefit from
that knowledge – the result of the work of endocrinologists,
biophysiologists, neurophysiologists, biostatisticians, geneticists
and many others.’
But despite the alleged lack of penal axe to grind, the ultimate
message is all too familiar: ‘What stands out from literally
hundreds of papers and studies of the various types of criminal is
widespread and cogent evidence of disordered minds resulting

266
from dysfunctional brains… But we do not recognise; we merely
condemn. Incarceration is an expensive and wasteful reaction.’
Both parts of this message are welcome to my patients in the
prison: that they are ill and in need of treatment, and that
imprisonment is not only pointless but cruel and morally unjustified
– less justified, indeed, than their crimes. After all, the judges who
sentence them to imprisonment cannot exculpate themselves by
virtue of their dysfunctional brains.
No wonder that each week prisoners tell me, ‘Prison’s no good
to me, doctor; prison’s not what I need.’
I ask them what they do need, then.
Help, treatment, therapy.
The idea that prison is principally a therapeutic institution is now
virtually ineradicable. The emphasis on recidivism rates as a
measure of its success or failure in the press coverage of prison
(‘Research by criminologists shows…’ etc.) reinforces this view,
as does the theory put forward by criminologists that crime is a
mental disorder. The Psychopathology of Crime by Adrian Raine
of the University of Southern California claims that recidivism is a
mental disorder like any other, often accompanied by cerebral
dysfunction. Addicted to Crime?, a volume edited by psychologists
working in one of Britain’s few institutions for the criminally insane,
contains the work of eight academics. The answer to the question
of their title is, of course, Yes; addiction being – falsely –
conceived as a compulsion that it is futile to expect anyone to
resist. (If there is a second edition of the book, the question mark
will no doubt disappear from its title, just as it vanished from the
second edition of Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s book about the
Soviet Union, The Soviet Union: A New Civilisation? – which
included everything about Russia except the truth.)

267
 Is it surprising that recidivist burglars and car thieves now ask
for therapy for their addiction, secure in the knowledge that no
such therapy can or will be forthcoming, thereby justifying the
continuation of their habit?
‘I asked for help,’ they often complain to me, ‘but didn’t get
none.’
One young man aged 21, serving a sentence of six months
(three months, with time off for good behaviour) for having stolen
60 cars, told me that in reality he had stolen more than 500 and
had made some £80,000 doing so. It is surely an unnecessary
mystification to construct an elaborate neuropsychological
explanation of his conduct.
Burglars who tell me that they are addicted to their craft,
thereby implying that the fault will be mine for not having treated
them successfully if they continue to burgle after their release,
always react in the same way when I ask them how many
burglaries they committed for which they were not caught: with a
happy but not (from the householder’s point of view) an altogether
reassuring smile, as if they were recalling the happiest times of
their life – soon to return.
Criminals call for therapy for all anti-social behaviour –
curiously, though, only after it has led to imprisonment, not before.
For example, a young man finally imprisoned for repeated
assaults on his girlfriend and his mother, among others, told me
that prison was not doing him any good, that what he needed was
anger management therapy. I remarked that his behaviour in
prison had been exemplary: he was always polite and did as he
was told.
‘I don’t want to be taken down the block [the punishment floor],
do I?’ he replied, rather giving the game away. He had been
violent to his girlfriend and his mother because hitherto there were

268
advantages, but no disadvantages, to his violence. Now that the
equation was different, he had no problem ‘managing’ his anger.
The great majority of the theories criminologists propound lead
to the exculpation of criminals, and criminals eagerly take up
these theories in their desire to present themselves as victims
rather than as victimisers. For example, not long ago ‘labelling
theory’ took criminology by storm. According to these theorists,
the quantity of crime, the type of person and offence selected to
be criminalised and the categories used to describe and explain
the deviant are social constructions. Crime, or deviance, is not an
objective ‘thing’ out there. So far, I haven’t tried this theory out on
my noncriminal patients whose houses have been burgled three
times in a year – or who have been attacked in the street more
than once, as is common among these patients – but I think I can
imagine their response.
For criminals, of course, a theory that suggests that crime is an
entirely arbitrary social category without justified moral content is
highly gratifying – except when they themselves have been the
victim of a crime, when they react like everyone else.
Since criminologists and sociologists can no longer plausibly
attribute crime to raw poverty, they now look to ‘relative
deprivation’ to explain its rise in times of prosperity. In this light
they see crime as a quasi-political protest against an unjust
distribution of the goods of the world. Several criminological
commentators have lamented the apparently contradictory fact
that it is the poor who suffer most, including loss of property, from
criminals, implying that it would be more acceptable if the
criminals robbed the rich.
In discussing the policy of zero tolerance, criminologist Jock
Young avers that it could be used selectively for ‘progressive’
ends: ‘One can,’ he says, ‘be zero-tolerant of violence against

269
women and tolerant about the activities of the dispossessed.’ One
might suppose from this that among those tolerable activities of
the dispossessed there was never any violence against women.
Moreover, the very term ‘dispossessed’ carries its own
emotional and ideological connotations. The poor have not failed
to earn, the term implies, but instead have been robbed of what is
rightfully theirs. Crime is thus the expropriation of the
expropriators – and so not crime at all in the moral sense. And this
is an attitude I have encountered many times among burglars and
car thieves. They believe that anyone who possesses something
can, ipso facto, afford to lose it, while someone who does not
possess it is, ipso facto, justified in taking it. Crime is but a form of
redistributive taxation from below.
Or – when committed by women – crime could be seen ‘as a
way, perhaps, of celebrating women as independent of men’, to
quote Elizabeth Stanko, an American feminist criminologist
teaching in a British university. Here we are paddling in the murky
waters of Frantz Fanon, the West Indian psychiatrist who believed
that a little murder did wonders for the psyche of the downtrodden,
and who achieved iconic status precisely at the time of
criminology’s great expansion as a university discipline.
‘Justice’ in the writings of many criminologists does not refer to
the means by which an individual is either rewarded or punished
for his conduct in life. It refers to social justice. Most criminologists
cannot distinguish between unfairness and injustice, and they
conclude that any society in which unfairness continues to exist
(as it must) is therefore unjust. And the question of social justice
usually boils down to the question of equality: as Jock Young puts
it starkly: ‘Zero tolerance of crime must mean zero tolerance of
inequality if it is to mean anything.’

270
 Since one of the inhibitions against crime (as crime is
commonly understood, by people who have suffered it or are likely
to suffer it) is the perceived legitimacy of the legal system under
which the potential criminal lives, those who propagate the idea
that we live in a fundamentally unjust society also propagate
crime. The poor reap what the intellectual sows.
No one gains kudos in the criminological fraternity by
suggesting that police and punishment are necessary in a civilised
society. To do so would be to appear illiberal and lacking faith in
man’s primordial goodness. It is much better for one’s reputation,
for example, to refer to the large number of American prisoners as
‘the American gulag’, as if there were no relevant differences
between the former Soviet Union and the United States.
In fact, criminals know all about the power of punishment: both
its deterrent and rehabilitative effect. For prison is a society
divided clearly in two, between wardens and prisoners. Prisoners
maintain the rigid division by their own extremely severe code of
punishment. Should an individual prisoner try to break down this
division, other prisoners will inflict immediate, severe and public
punishment. The division therefore holds, even though many
prisoners would prefer to side with the wardens than with their
peers.
Criminology is not monolithic, and there are more dissenters
now than there once were, as Jock Young recognises: ‘This recent
pattern [of criminologists who believe in detection and
punishment] is in contrast to a generation of liberal opinion and
scholarship whose aim was to minimise police intervention and
lower police numbers. One might even say that this has been the
hidden agenda of academic criminology since the Nineteenth
Century.’

271
 From the criminal’s point of view, criminology has served him
proud.

1999

272
 ZERO INTOLERANCE

AMONG THE POOR, the police have never been popular. But
interestingly, today the all-coppers-are-bastards view of the police
has spread to a large section of the bourgeois intellectual class.
Not long ago, for example, a journalist told me, en passant, that
he hated the police. I asked him why: had they falsely arrested,
unjustifiably manhandled, brutally interrogated him? No, he
replied, he had no personal reason; he just hated them for what
they were.
Well, as King Lear said, nothing comes of nothing: and the
journalist’s hatred of the police was unlikely to have sprung
completely at random and fully formed from his consciousness. I
suspected, as is so often the case with opinions lightly adopted
but firmly held, that this one was forged from a combination of
ignorance, dishonesty, and fashion. By expressing a dislike of the
police, a bourgeois intellectual is thereby establishing his solidarity
with the poor. In an age of empathy, you can’t claim to wish
anyone well unless you fully share his feelings.
But the bourgeois intellectual needs to find reasons for his
opinions: rationalisation is, after all, his métier. And it isn’t difficult
for him to think up such reasons with regard to the police. Their
function is to defend the social order: and since the social order is
widely held to be responsible for the poverty of the poor, it follows
that the police are in part responsible for that poverty. They are a
part not of the criminal justice system but of the social injustice
system.
The intellectual never acknowledges how much of his liberty he
owes to the existence of the police – a humiliating thought, to
which he prefers the idea that the comparative peace and

273
tranquillity in which he lives, and that make his work possible,
emerge spontaneously from the goodwill of his fellow men,
requiring no external coercion to maintain them. Since – in the
opinion of the intellectual – the poor hate the police, and moreover
as victims can think no wrong, it follows that weak policing would
be of benefit to the poor.
It so happens that something close to a natural experiment in
weak policing is under way in my district of the city, where the
police are a minimal presence and intervene only in the very
gravest of situations. Far from having adopted a policy of zero
tolerance, as in New York, they have adopted one of zero
intolerance; and their approach to crime is almost as abstract – as
ethereal – as that of liberal criminologists. It is therefore of some
interest, both practical and theoretical, to examine whether the
quality of life of the poor has improved or deteriorated under this
lax police regime.
The policy of zero intolerance appears to have sprung from the
brains of the city’s most senior policemen, increasingly
indistinguishable in their public pronouncements from senior
social workers. Their constituency is not the people of the city but
the liberal intelligentsia. A policeman on the beat who had
occasion to visit my ward recently told me that he and his
colleagues were under orders not to arrest and charge anyone
who was previously unknown to the police for serious crimes. As
an old hand nearing an eagerly anticipated retirement from a job
he had once loved, he found this instruction deeply demoralising.
It was, he knew, a virtual incitement to crime.
The policy of zero intolerance is no mere local aberration. The
chief constable of police of another force explained recently in an
essay why it was necessary to keep arrests to a minimum. It takes
four hours to process each one, he wrote, and therefore such

274
arrests distracted the police from their other duties. He never
explained what police duties could be more important than the
apprehension of lawbreakers, nor did he call for a streamlining of
the process of arrest (which requires, on average, 43 forms).
Besides, he added, mere repression of criminality, whenever the
police chanced to catch a criminal, would never on its own put an
end to crime. Much better, he seemed to imply, to let the criminals
get on with it.
And get on with it they have, not surprisingly. I encounter
instances of police inaction in the face of crime every day. For
example, a man in his early 30s arrived in the emergency
department of my hospital recently, having taken a deliberate but
not life-threatening overdose of tablets. His wife arrived while he
was awaiting further medical attention. The pair resumed the
quarrel that had been the occasion of his overdose, and before
long he employed his usual final, irrefutable argument: his fists.
The sound of his blows raining down on her head alerted the
nurses to the situation. By the time they came to the wife’s rescue,
she was on the floor, vainly trying to avoid his kicks to her face
and stomach. The nurses called the police, two of whom duly
arrived (an eventuality by no means guaranteed). They left soon
afterward, without even having requested the husband not to
behave in this fashion again. They told the nurses that it was a
‘domestic’, and that therefore they were powerless to act. An
Englishman’s emergency room, apparently, is his castle – and his
wife his property.
That a crime is domestic – or, in the words of those who commit
such a crime, ‘just’ a domestic – has long been the most
frequently cited of many police excuses for folding their hands and
doing nothing. Their habitual reluctance to intervene in what they
regard as essentially private disputes is the result, no doubt, of

275
several considerations: among them, a laudable, if imperfectly
thought-out, desire to separate the realm of personal morality from
that of law. There should be a limit to state supervision of the
relations between people, and not every morally reprehensible act
should draw a legal sanction. The police view intervention in
domestics (quite apart from its practical futility, for victims often
balk at testifying in court) as an almost totalitarian extension of
their powers. But even on the most generous interpretation of the
scope of the private – a senior British policeman once famously, or
infamously, remarked that a certain murder was not serious: it was
only a man killing his wife – what happened in the emergency
room was not domestic, or even a domestic. It was an offence not
merely against the victim but against public order. Yet still the
police failed to act.
In one respect the police were correct in their understanding of
the situation: the man’s wife had forgiven him by the time she was
picked up off the floor, and she would have refused to testify
against him in court. She likewise refused all offers of help to
obtain accommodation away from him (he would find her anyway,
she said), and she didn’t want a lawyer. Her only concern now
was to bring him the things he said he would need during his stay
in the hospital. But the police didn’t need the wife’s testimony to
bring a successful prosecution. The nurses had heard and seen
enough to convict him 20 times over. The officers’ final words of
self-justification as they departed the scene were that they were
too busy to deal with so trivial a matter. They did not mention what
they were busy with.
The effect on the nurses of this dereliction of duty was – at least
for a time, until further emergencies occupied their attention –
profound and demoralising. Not only did they feel, rightly, that the
police considered valueless the evidence they could so easily

276
have given, as if they were not trustworthy witnesses, but they felt
that their position as law-abiding citizens anxious to do their duty
was devalued too. Moreover, many of the nurses inhabit a world
not so far removed, physically or morally, from that of the abused
wife in the emergency room. Many of them consult me about their
problems: one of the nurses in the emergency room that day had
a drug-taking daughter whose various boyfriends were violent
towards her; another had asked me earlier what to do about her
violent common-law husband. So when they see a man beat up a
woman in a public place with complete impunity, indeed with what
amounted almost to police protection, they catch a horrifying
glimpse of their own vulnerability.
And finally, the incident took place in the emergency
department of a large inner-city hospital, in which a considerable
proportion of the patients present were, almost by definition, of the
same cast of mind as the violent husband. They could have
remarked on the impotence of the police in the face of this
conduct and would have drawn the appropriate conclusion: that
you can get away with anything short of murder.
In addition, the culprit himself would soon, no doubt, be
spreading the good news in the pubs he frequented, embellishing
the tale to present himself to his listeners as even more heroic in
his defeat of the police than he already believed himself to be.
When I spoke to him after the policemen left casualty, he told me
that he was himself astonished that he had never once been
called to account by the law for his numerous assaults, not only
on his wife but upon many others. (His first assault on his wife had
been at their wedding reception, in front of the guests.) One of the
criteria for diagnosing psychopathy is an individual’s failure to
learn from experience: but thus far this man had not had the
experience from which he might have failed to learn.

277
 The police display perverse ingenuity in concocting reasons for
nonintervention in domestic violence. A recent patient of mine had
finally broken away from the jealous, drunken, and violent father
of her three illegitimate children. She had found her own
apartment and had lived there quietly for some time when she
held a birthday party for one of her children. But somehow her
former boyfriend had discovered where she lived and, on that very
afternoon, had rung at her door. She answered; he barged his
way in. He dragged her by the hair into the room where the party
was taking place and punched her to the ground, kicking her in
front of the terrified children. Then he left. She called the police.
She was battered and bruised, and the children who had seen the
assault were still there. The police said there was nothing they
could do, because she had opened the door to her assailant. And
they left. The police opinion in this case appeared to be that, once
you let a man into your house, he is free thereafter to behave in
any way he likes. Even after her physical recovery, my patient was
in no position to dispute this extraordinary police doctrine: she
belonged to that vast class never taught to read or write properly.
Unable to set out a letter – not knowing even that the first-person
singular pronoun is written in the upper case (I tested her) – she
was obliged to take the police at their word.
When I put this case to the police force’s second-in-command,
he expressed surprise. The only explanation he could think of for
his policemen’s conduct was that the woman had taken out a
restraining order against the man and in effect nullified it by
opening the door to him. It was this nullification, he hypothesised,
that led to the police’s failure to act. That so high-ranking a
policeman (transparently a decent man) could have so deficient
an understanding should terrify the law-abiding and comfort the
wrongdoer.

278
 In their struggle to stay inactive, the police often make a point I
hear with some sympathy: that prosecution isn’t worth the effort
because of the inadequate sentences that follow conviction. For
example, a prisoner I know, who had many times beaten up and
half-strangled his girlfriend – and who had three times threatened
to kill her and had once kidnapped her – received a sentence that
meant he’d serve only 15 months in jail (nine of them already
served while awaiting trial) instead of the ten years’ imprisonment
the law allowed. He had made it crystal clear that he would keep
pursuing his girlfriend, whatever sentence he received; and his
previous record – he had burned the car of another girlfriend, then
pregnant, who had tried to leave him – would have suggested to
anyone except the judge that he would pose a threat to his former
girlfriend and to any other woman he might meet in the future.
The judge’s leniency was therefore callous in the extreme
towards the well-being of society. But it would compound the
damage to make the argument that, because a 15 month
sentence was inadequate, it would have been better for this
prisoner to have received no sentence at all. Nonetheless this is
precisely what the police implicitly do argue, and it remains one of
the cornerstones of their edifice of passivity.
A drunk deliberately stubbed out his cigarette on the face of a
senior nurse in our emergency department, burning her cheek.
The police came but, having inspected her injury, declared that it
was not severe enough for the crime to be worth prosecuting.
Perhaps they reasoned that the drunk, not remembering what he
had done after he had sobered up, would therefore not learn a
lesson. As agents of the state, however, they had made clear
what value the state placed on the physical safety of the nurse:
zero.

279
 Another standard excuse for police inaction is that the offender
is mad, or at least is a psychiatric patient (not quite the same
thing, of course). The merest hint of a psychiatric history – a
single consultation with a psychiatrist five years previously is
enough – will explain and excuse almost anything in the eyes of
the police, and justifies a failure to prosecute. Not long ago I was
called to a police station to examine a man arrested after
attempting to kill his lawyer. He had a long history of psychosis –
caused or exacerbated by taking drugs – and lawbreaking. He
had gone to his lawyer with a hammer with one end sharpened
into a pick, had shouted, ‘You have to die!’ and had aimed a blow
at the lawyer’s head. Fortunately the lawyer saw the blow coming,
twisted out of the way, and received only a slight injury. His violent
client tried again to hit him, but having missed, fled the office, after
which the lawyer called the police.
It was clear that the man was mad; but I knew from experience
that if I recommended he be admitted straight to the hospital, the
police would forget the whole matter of the attempted murder. I
insisted that charges be filed: but the police refused, saying –
falsely, of course – that they were not permitted to prosecute
madmen. They said that if he were not hospitalised, they would
have to release him – which they did: first giving him back his
hammer, for they had no right to deprive him of his property. Thus
an attempted murder did not reach the crime statistics, and the
police could congratulate themselves on the maintenance of
public order.
Needless to say, the mad understand the impunity of madness
well. Twice I have heard schizophrenics exclaim to the police, ‘You
can’t touch me, I’m a schizophrenic!’ On the very day on which I
wrote this, I interviewed a patient - an alcoholic – who sometime
before had, while extremely drunk, tried to strangle his girlfriend.

280
He had smashed her car, wrecked her flat, and threatened to kill
her daughter. By the time the police arrived, he had started to
attack his girlfriend’s neighbour, who had come to help. The police
concluded that no sane man would behave like this, took him to
the hospital, and left him there. As far as they were concerned,
the incident was closed. And these crimes also did not reach the
crime statistics.
This is how we now control criminality in England.
Domestic crimes are not alone in getting such lighthearted
treatment. In the last two weeks the following three cases have
come to my notice. An acquaintance of mine, a dealer in antique
jewellery, exhibited at an antiques fair. Overnight a thief broke into
the exhibition hall and stole her jewellery, worth £16,000, as well
as that of other exhibitors, worth a further £60,000. In this instance
the police caught the thief the following day: he was on bail for
eight country-house burglaries, itself a sign of police frivolity, for,
had they objected strenuously enough to the setting of bail, he
would still have been in custody. Despite their swift apprehension
of the culprit, however, the police had not recovered a single piece
of jewellery (something a private detective surely would have
been able to do); indeed, they claimed to be too busy to make the
effort. Little wonder that the insurance premiums on antique
jewellery are too high for most small dealers to pay. So my
acquaintance must swallow the whole loss – to her, a catastrophe.
A patient of mine became severely depressed after some
young thieves, well known in the area, broke into the shed in her
garden and stole her children’s new bicycles. Her neighbours, it
so happened, were able to make a clear videotape of the thieves
as they stole, but – two weeks later – the police still had not
responded to either my patient’s or her neighbours’ request for
assistance. Bicycle theft, after all, is not a serious crime.

281
 A prisoner with a long history of violent crime as well as theft
and burglary was coming to the end of his most recent prison
sentence. He frankly admitted to me that he was much happier in
prison than at liberty: the enforced discipline of prison life enabled
him to live at peace. He came to me in desperation: could I do
something to prevent his release, for he knew he would soon
commit a dangerous offence again, possibly even a murder. He
had gone to the prison warden, asking not to be released. The
warden told him there was no legal way to do that. In an attempt
to stay in prison, he then confessed to several serious crimes,
with which he had never been charged. Corroboration of his
confession would have been possible, and the warden called in
the police. But they declined to take the matter further, saying that
it was not in the public interest to do so. The prisoner then
assaulted and seriously injured another inmate to receive more
prison time. Again the police came but declined to take the matter
further, saying that it was not in the public interest to do so. The
prisoner was released.
The loss of nerve or will on the part of the police has occurred
at precisely the same time as a weakening, almost to the point of
extinction, of the informal but strong social restraints upon
personal behaviour that once made England so civil a country –
restraints such as fear of what the neighbours will say. The lack of
either internal or external restraint has allowed ‘natural’ man to
emerge: and far from being a delight, he is a charmless
psychopath. Man is a wolf to man, and more particularly to
woman. Naturally, social trends do not affect all sectors of society
equally. Weak policing affects principally the poor – the very
people whose welfare the intelligentsia claimed weak policing
would benefit. It is true that the middle classes haven’t been
unscathed: they pay ever-higher insurance premiums for their

282
homes and cars, and they worry as never before about burglary.
There is scarcely anyone in the country – even among the
burglars themselves – whose first thought on returning home is
not, ‘Have I been burgled?’ But these are trifling concerns beside
my patients’ pervasive and permanent sense of personal
insecurity wherever they may be. They fear lawbreakers because
they know the police offer no protection.
The degree to which fear of crime rules the lives of people in
poor areas is something that my middle-class friends find hard to
believe, let alone understand. Scores of my patients have told me
that they leave their homes as rarely as possible for fear of being
attacked or of having their homes broken into. Every week I meet
patients who have been mugged or burgled three times or more in
a year; last week I had a patient whom the children next door
stone – literally shower with stones – whenever she leaves the
house. They have broken her windows on innumerable occasions
and have smeared the walls of her house with faeces while she
was out. No-one has ever been apprehended for these offences,
and she has given up informing the police of them.
The pretence by intellectuals – which, alas, has not been
without its practical effects in the real world – that the police are
but the executive arm of a hypocritical bourgeoisie determined to
preserve its ill-gotten gains at the expense of the poor, is
terrifyingly shallow when tested against the experience of people
who suffer weak policing. The idea that a juster social order would
render the police redundant is utopian nonsense. A reliable and
trustworthy police force is not a denial of freedom but a
precondition of its exercise.
For those who doubt it, I can only recommend the last lines of
Pablo Neruda’s poem of the Spanish Civil War:
Come and see the blood running through the streets!

283
 Come and see the blood running through the streets!
Come and see the blood running through the streets!

1998

284
 MORE FROM MONDAY BOOKS

Thank you for buying and reading Life at the Bottom. We are a
very small family publishing company and rely on our customers
recommending our books to their friends and family so please
spread the word if you enjoyed it.

You might also like some of the other titles published by Monday
Books and available from Amazon on Kindle.

For more information read on or log on to

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285
 BLACK BOX
Inside the World’s Worst Air Crashes

A STATE-OF-THE-ART Airbus simply vanishes somewhere over

the Atlantic… A Concorde goes down in a fireball seconds after
take-off… 583 people die when two 747s collide on a fog-bound
runway… A rogue passenger shoots his boss – and then the
pilots – at 30,000ft over the USA, killing everyone aboard… A
tired and confused crew fly their jet straight into a mountain… A
flock of swans at 6,000ft brings down a United Airlines flight over
New Jersey…
In the air, disaster strikes in many ways and at unexpected
moments – and when it does there is often no escape.

In this masterful re-telling of the worst disasters in aviation history

Nicholas Faith painstakingly recreates the accidents and explains
what went wrong. It's a gripping, fascinating and chilling book.

Nicholas Faith is a highly-respected writer who has worked for

The Sunday Times, The Economist and The Financial Times.

286
 SICK NOTES
True Stories from the GP’s Surgery

'We wanted to thank you for all you did for mum over the last 14
years,' said Mrs Cobham.
Excitedly, I peered into the plastic bag. Inside was one small loaf
of sliced bread.
'Er...' I stammered. 'Well, that's lovely.'
She nodded and smiled. 'It was the least we could do, doctor,' she
said.

Welcome to the bizarre world of Tony Copperfield, family doctor.

He spends his days fending off anxious mums, elderly sex
maniacs and hopeless hypochondriacs.
The rest of his time is taken up sparring with colleagues, battling
bureaucrats and banging his head against the brick wall of the
NHS.
If you've ever wondered what your GP is really thinking, why you
can’t get an appointment when you need one, or what that funny

287
buzzing noise in your ear is, Sick Notes is for you.

'Copperfield is simply fantastic, unbelievably funny and

improbably wise... everything he writes is truer than fact.' - British
Medical Journal.

'A mix of the hilarious, the mundane and the poignant. Dr

Copperfield reveals what goes on behind those surgery doors.' -
The Daily Mail

'A wonderful book, funny and insightful in equal measure.' - Dr

Phil Hammond, Private Eye’s MD

288
 TALKING BLUES
The Police in their own Words

THE NO-HOLDS-BARRED classic about policing in the strife-

ridden 1980s.
Respected filmmaker Roger Graeff interviews hundreds of officers
from all over the UK - the result is a fascinating and absorbing
picture of life in the thin blue line at a time when every nick had its
own, real-life Gene Hunt.
Modern-day officers will be astonished at the latitude and attitude
of their forebears - and retired cops will love this window on their
past.

289
 THE LITTLE GIRL IN THE RADIATOR
Mum, Alzheimer’s and Me

‘Deeply loving yet wryly comic... The most moving portrait of this
cruel disease you'll ever read’ - The Daily Mail

THE LITTLE GIRL IN THE RADIATOR is a tale of love, loss and

family: the touching, sometimes hilarious and occasionally
heartbreaking story of a man’s struggle to care for his mother after
her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease.
Martin Slevin’s mum was a highly active, very intelligent and
fiercely independent woman who ran her own business and ruled
Martin and his father with a rod of iron. But after Martin’s dad dies,
her life crumbles, and she becomes listless and forgetful.
Eventually, she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and Martin puts his
own life on hold to care for her. Together, they embark on a
journey through the various stages of the condition; the
destination is never in doubt, but along the way there are many
lighter moments, as she watches TV with a frozen goose, shaves

290
the dog’s bottom, holds sing-songs with an imaginary Irish band
and pins all of Martin’s socks to the wall. And all the time, the
question nags away at him: who is the little girl in the radiator, with
whom his mum has urgent, whispered conversations each day?

291
 DIARY OF AN ON-CALL GIRL

PC Bloggs is a serving British police office and Diary of an On-call

Girl is a true account of her working life.
Diary of an On-Call Girl was dramatised for BBC Radio 4, was
serialised in the Mail on Sunday and is currently in TV
development with scripts being written by the writer of the hit TV
comedy Rev.

‘’The tapes are on, the interview begins, and I ask my standard
opening question: ‘Do you understand why you have been
arrested?’ Believe it or not, sometimes these words alone can
prompt a confused confession.
‘I ain't been arrested,’ says Shimona.
Not exactly a confession.
‘Well, you have, because you’re here.’
‘I was never arrested, though. No-one never put no handcuffs on
me.’

292
I put down my pen. Somehow, I don’t think this is going to be the
level of interview for which I need to make notes.
‘You actually don’t need to be handcuffed to be under arrest,’ I
say.
‘Yeah, I do. Right, Sonia?’
Sonia nods emphatically. ‘You do need it, me Ma said so.’
In an attempt to steer the interview back on track, I look down at
PC Cansat’s statement. ‘Look, it says here, “I then said to
Shimona O’Milligan, ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of assault
and criminal damage.’ I cautioned her to which she replied,
‘Whatever’.” Does that ring any bells?’
Shimona titters. Then she gets serious again. ‘Does he say he
handcuffed me, though? Cos he’s a liar.’
‘No, he says he arrested you.’
‘Well, I wasn’t listening.’
‘This may surprise you,’ I say, ‘but you can be arrested even if you
aren’t listening.’
‘No, you can’t. Not if you’re inside a house. I know the law.’
If there is one thing I like more than a gobby teenager, it is a
gobby teenager who knows the law.
‘Shimona, you are going to have to take my word for the fact that
you were brought here under arrest and you are still under arrest
now. Let’s move on.’
‘Whatever.’’’

‘Belle de Jour meets The Bill … sarky sarges, missing panda cars
and wayward MOPS (members of the public).’ - The Guardian

‘Part Orwell, part Kafka and part Trisha’ - The Mail on Sunday

293
 SO THAT’S WHY THEY CALL IT GREAT BRITAIN

Did you know that chocolate bars, fizzy drinks and the flushing loo
are all British inventions?
We also gave the world computers, the iPod and the cash
machine, as well as text messaging, the light bulb and the
collapsible umbrella.
There were more serious inventions like ibuprofen, anaesthetics,
innoculations and antibiotics. We unlocked the DNA code,
produced the world's first test tube baby and invented ultrasound.
Trains, planes and automobiles revolutionised the way we travel
and our advancements with computer technology gave everyone
the world wide web.
Not bad for a country which covers less than half of one per cent
of the earth’s land mass.
Most of the world’s major sports originated here and the television
set that they are watched on was also invented by a Brit.
In this quirky new book, Steve Pope reveals the stories behind
some of the world's most remarkable inventions and discoveries -

294
and all of them are British.
Presented in an easy to read A-Z format, So That's Why They Call
It Great Britain is quite simply crammed full of fascinating facts.
This book shows –with tons of humour, unknown facts and weird
stories – just why our country is called GREAT Britain

295
 IT’S YOUR TIME YOU’RE WASTING
A Teacher’s Tales of Classroom Hell

The eye-opening No1 best-seller about teaching in an ordinary

British school: a school where the kids get drunk, beat up the
teachers and take drugs – when they can be bothered to turn up.
It's Your Time You're Wasting is the blackly humorous diary of a
year in Frank Chalk’s life. He confiscates porn, booze and errant
trainers, fends off angry parents and worries about the
conscientious pupils whose lives and futures are being
systematically wrecked, recording his experiences in a funny and
readable book.
He offers top tips for dealing with unruly kids, is open about the
shortcomings of the staff and even spots the occasional spark of
hope amid all the despair.
Prepare to be horrified and amused by the unvarnished truth
about the bottom end of Britain’s state education system.

‘Addictive and Ghastly’ - The Times

296
‘Frank Chalk's witty warts-and-all descriptions have won him
thousands of teacher fans’ - Times Educational Supplement

‘A searing first-hand account of what teachers have to contend

with every day’ - Emma Lee-Potter, Sec Ed Magazine

297
 GENERATION F

THE LONG-AWAITED BOOK by the award-winning writer

Winston Smith.
As a youth worker, Smith deals with deprived and difficult
youngsters and hopes that he can make a difference to their lives.
Given his own background (he suffered from drug addiction and
near-alcoholism in his teenage years and early 20s) it ought to be
a match made in heaven.
But then reality intrudes.
Generation F is the first book to reveal the unvarnished truth
about life in Britain's care homes and supported housing projects.
Winston Smith spends his working day wrestling with the
problems of damaged youngsters, violent thugs and teenage
criminals. He is confronted at every turn by irresponsible parents,
incompetent police officers and pointless, expensive bureaucracy.
His writing is controversial, angry and edgy - and it made him the
runaway winner of the 2010 Orwell Prize.

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‘A devastating book exposing the truth about the anarchy in this
country’s care homes’ - The Daily Mail

‘Incisive and caustic’ - The Guardian

'We could have agonised for hours and then passed Winston
Smith over as too difficult, too dark, too much of a risk but we
were charged with judging the best. …What carried the day was
his passion and conviction that we should know what wrongs had
been done in our names in some of those places where most of
us choose not to look.’ - Orwell Prize Judges

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 PERVERTING THE COURSE OF JUSTICE
The Hilarious and Shocking Inside Story of British Policing

ARRESTING 10-YEAR-OLDS for pinching sweets… Nicking

adults for denying the existence of Santa Claus… Investigating
Kelly's ex's new girlfriend's sister's boyfriend's ex for sending her a
nasty message on Facebook.
These are the things the cops spend their time on (as well as
fighting drunken thugs, finding toddlers dead in car crashes and
cutting down men who have hanged themselves in public parks).
Controversial, gripping, authoritative and, occasionally, very funny
- this book takes readers where the powers-that-be don't want
them to go. Forget everything you know about law and order: this
is the truth.

Inspector Gadget is a serving senior police officer. He has written

for the New Statesman, The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph,
and has been praised for his bravery and honesty by everyone
from The Sun to The Guardian.

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Read the Inspector Gadget Blog which has had more than 11 million
hits and was named one of Britain's Top 40 blogs by The Times
stating that his writing is 'provocative stuff, and as an insight into
life on the policing front line, it’s invaluable.'

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