IT’S THE RESILIENCE, STUPID

Our streets are full of fear (India Knight, The Sunday Times, October 8th, 2006)

In the week when the word “yob” was banned by Scotland Yard because it might “alienate” teenagers and injure their tender feelings (oh boo hoo), Stevens Nyembo-Ya-Muteba, 40, was murdered by a gang of “youths” outside his flat in Hackney, east London. Stevens, a married father of two little girls, was an émigré from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Britain, where he held down two jobs — delivering food for Tesco during the day, night portering at a restaurant in the evenings — to pay for his education. He was in the third year of a maths and finance degree at the University of Greenwich, having turned down a place at Cambridge so as to stay closer to home. A 17-year-old “youth” has been charged with his murder.

Stevens lost his life because he had had the temerity to ask the gang to keep the noise down after they broke into the communal area of the council estate where he lived. It was about 10pm. “Some of us have work in the morning,” he’d reportedly said which, as rebukes go, is both polite and mild. He was stabbed for his pains and left to bleed to death on a stairwell.

It has since emerged that Stevens and other residents had repeatedly urged the police and the council to do something about the appalling goings-on at the estate. “Prostitutes, smackheads, people having sex on the stairs,” one resident said. Another mentioned gangs of youths congregating in stairwells, taking drugs, urinating and trying to start fires. “The police and the council had been aware of it all for some time,” a relative of Stevens said last week.

I used to live in Hackney opposite two crack houses. The phone box in our road was regularly used as a (rather snug) boudoir by stoned — and not in a benign way — prostitutes. There were needles in the local park and crack-smoking paraphernalia littered the pavements. We were once woken in the night by two dozen armed police who explained that there had been a burglary and that the burglars, who had guns, had taken refuge on our roof.

I took my sons for a walk in the park a couple of days before we moved out of Hackney. It ended abruptly when we saw a young boy being cut down from a tree; he had tried to hang himself.

This in an area, by the way, which was last week described by a London newspaper as up-and-coming and made to sound rather charming and cosmopolitan, with bars and cafes open until 5am (I rather wonder who the paper thinks goes drinking at 5am. Schoolteachers? Yummy mummies? Or — here’s a thought — a feral underclass celebrating the night’s pickings?) It made no mention of the gun crime, the stabbings, the drugs or the desperate, crazed £5 whores.

What is especially depressing about this whole depressing story, which took place in a depressed area full of depressed people doing depressing things, is that I imagine Stevens himself knew a thing or two about deprivation; and that what he knew would put his assailants’ poxy little gripes to shame. Originally from Kinshasa, which is a horrible city in a grim country, I don’t expect the offer of a place at Cambridge exactly fell into his lap. “I believed in myself and got what I wanted,” he once told his college newsletter.

Anyone who regularly tracks the British press can be forgiven for imagining the country is becoming one ever-expanding dysfunctional council estate spreading tentacles of social pathology across the width and breadth that green and pleasant land. Whatever the reality, there is clearly a growing problem but what is equally striking is the equanimity about it all behind the alarmist headlines. Despite Blair’s efforts, it is as if most of the political leaders are content to respond to each disturbing study or crime by just funding a few more counselors or education initiatives and then retiring to their clubs to console themselves with tales of how much worse it was in the time of Dickens.

Excuse the self-reference, but a colleague of mine was chief advisor to a Canadian minister charged with some public inquiry into urban renewal in the mid 80's. The boondoggle involved lots of travel, including several days in New York City. I recall my friend telling the tale of how they met at length with one of those middle-aged activist/advisors in community planning who manage to earn a living as both protestor and “expert” on the taxpayers’ dime. The Minister was a sunny type and was repeatedly asking whether this or that policy would succeed in curing what then looked like a downward spiral into the terminally feral. The advisor, no doubt wearied by his sad wisdom and impatient with this Canadian bumpkin, looked at him with all-knowing eyes and said: “You don’t understand. There is nothing that will work.”

And then along came Rudy.