The east end of London has for centuries been one of the poorest, most marginalised corners of Britain. A new book by researchers attached to the Young Foundation, The New East End, explores 50 years of social change in Tower Hamlets from the 1950s to the late 1990s. The story is one of heavy population turnover, conflict between newcomers and old-timers—relieved to some extent by personal ties and friendships—and above all the betrayal of poor people by those in positions of power over them.
Our story begins with the world explored by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in their famous book Family and Kinship in East London (1957). The book described a community that was closely knit, primarily by mothers and by the kinship networks that helped people to cope with adversity.
Young and Willmott's research was done at a time of great optimism. The east end had suffered acutely during the depression and the war. But its very visible role during the blitz made local people national heroes. The sense of wartime solidarity and the promise of a new society, with the establishment of the welfare state, gave eastenders a feeling that they were at last being admitted into the nation as full, equal citizens.
Half a century later, however, it is clear that these hopes were never realised. Our research, based on many hundreds of interviews with eastenders, reveals disappointment and resentment, especially among older people. The old class regime in which eastenders had worked in small factories, workshops and the docks had indeed disappeared. But it had not dissolved into an open, classless society, as many had hoped. Instead it was replaced by new forms of inequality. Some of these are the result of a new global division of labour that has left the cleaners of Canary Wharf and the textile-packers of Hackney arguably more powerless than the working class of the early 20th century. And some divisions have been produced by an interventionist, centralised state machine whose policies had effects opposite to those intended.
The postwar welfare state aimed to open up British society with a programme of redistribution to promote opportunity. But labour shortages led to a surge of immigration during the 1950s, as industries struggling to survive took on migrant workers prepared to accept low wages. This added a new dimension to redistribution. Britain as a whole gained from this migration, but locally it created both winners and losers in the competition for jobs and opportunities and added to feelings of insecurity among the poorest.
The subsequent economic downturn, which started in the 1970s and intensified in the 1980s, left many low-skilled migrants unemployed and dependent on the welfare state. They thus became direct competitors with local people, not just for jobs but for scarce public resources and services.
Our research found this competition over public resources was felt particularly acutely in the east end, where a small settlement of Bengali ex-seamen acted as a magnet from the 1970s for family members and for compatriots made redundant elsewhere in the country. A combination of factors, including more restrictive immigration laws, war between West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the promise of greater welfare security in Britain encouraged New Commonwealth migrants to bring their families to join them in Britain. This contributed to a rapid growth in the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets from fewer than 3,000 in 1971 to nearly 10,000 in 1981 and over 65,000 in 2001—slightly over one third of the borough's population. This growth was a result largely of family reunion rather than the demands of industry, and was helped by public officials sympathetic to the plight of Bangladeshi men separated from their families.
In the British empire's heyday, the middle and working classes benefited from it together. Nowhere was this connection more evident than in the east end, where the jobs of so many workers were created and sustained directly by trade. Labourers turning up every day to sign in at the East India or West India docks could not fail to be aware of the shared imperial dividend. But when citizens of the former colonies came to live in Britain on equal terms with the locally born population, the old working class began to see themselves less as joint beneficiaries of empire and more as losers from its demise. As in the past, immigration was seen as a threat to jobs and wage rates. Not surprisingly, eastenders were among the first to experience this in the late 1950s, and strongly supported the Conservative bill in 1962 to limit the inflow of migrants.
Eastenders had been promised a new social order to reward them for their heroic efforts in keeping the docks working during the war. But the nationalised docks were relocated further down the Thames, and many local industries followed. Some people were rehoused in the new towns outside London, and by the time new social housing was put up to re-accommodate the shattered community in the heart of the east end itself, the rules of the welfare state had been amended to give priority to people's objective state of hardship over any local or family ties. As a result, it was often migrants and the homeless families joining them who benefited when housing was allocated. This focus on addressing objective needs was mirrored in the education system, as schools were given additional resources to help them cope with newcomers with little English. In other words, the very people who thought that they had struggled to achieve the welfare state believed themselves to be taking second place to outsiders. Needless to say, it never felt like this to the outsiders.
What made this loss of position harder for the working class to accept was that, while they felt they were paying a heavy price, the middle class were coming out quite well, with an increase in cheap labour and the cultural benefits of a more diverse city. There was an undeclared, cross-party alliance which accepted the need for immigration and sought to foster a multicultural and open metropolitan society. Yet working-class Britons were largely left out of the discussion and, when asked, tended to be hostile.
The interviews conducted for this book reveal the depth of these feelings. But they also show that while objecting to welfare policies which were seen to benefit newcomers, many white people had good personal relationships with Bangladeshis, and did not usually blame them for the contests over public resources. What they resented was the way that things were done to them without consultation. And they are particularly upset by how discussion has often been discouraged, with any dissent being labelled as racist.
Policies that were shaped by good intentions have had, as so often, perverse consequences. They have created a favourable environment for far-right parties, amplified tensions between different communities, and yet still left Tower Hamlets relatively poor.
Some of these tensions have abated in recent years. East London has avoided the stark segregation of parts of the northwest. By many standards the integration of Bangladeshis has been a success, with Bangladeshi girls the best performers in Tower Hamlets schools. But the difficult intersection of race and class in east London is a story that has not been fully worked out. London still often provides more opportunities for outsiders than insiders, with a booming economy but 660,000 inactive or unemployed.
A welfare state based primarily on need represented great progress for many poorer Britons. But policies that focused too narrowly on needs and ignored the importance of family ties and community support carried a heavy cost. So did policies that ignored how things looked to people at the bottom of the heap. We need to ensure that these mistakes are not made again. Diverse societies have no choice but to take extra care about how resources are allocated so that they don't reinforce resentment and competition within, between and across different racial groups and classes.
