‘Progressive politics’ means putting stones down

No-one cares who can lay claim to the title of most 'progressive' party - they just want a job.

By Liz Stephens

The Tories have released figures showing that poor areas have a higher crime rate - a statement in the same league of the bleeding obvious as "large numbers of media personalities appear to have 'had some work done'".

The correlation of crime figures with poverty is bandied about by one party or the other on a fairly regular basis to fit a policy here or an attack there, but rarely does anyone ever seem to ask why this is or, more importantly, offer suggestions for how the problem can be solved. Not when there's political capital to be scored off the back of 'progressive' politics.

The most, indeed the only, interesting thing about the Tories claims was that the most deprived areas were in Labour 'heartlands' which had received "billions of pounds" of government money. Much like overseas aid money, one has to wonder where those billions have gone and why they have failed to have an impact on crime in these areas. Is there a town counsellor somewhere now living in the Cayman Islands on a diet of orange M&Ms? Were they ploughed into misjudged, incompetent and ineffective schemes that were completely wrong for the people of that area? Or were those billions simply a drop in the ocean in dealing with the years of neglect and the decline in those areas?

I was born in an area of north east London. It doesn't make it into the top 20 most deprived wards but the local joke was that certain areas had been used by Stanley Kubrick to film "Full Metal Jacket" because the formerly proud manufacturing heartland formed a convenient likeness to war-torn Vietnam.

I have since defected like the class traitor I am to a leafy area of west London. My parents continue to live in my place of birth where they 'enjoy' a car crime and burglary rate three times higher than mine. The BNP circle the corpse of the area like an opportunistic buzzard while the main political parties are too busy arguing over 'whose fault' it is and who is the most 'progressive'.

Any political operative knows that statistics can be manipulated to show whatever you want - but they will never form the full picture. They will never show the deep-seated tragedy of individuals who have lost their jobs, of communities plunged into depression and sickness benefit.

Communities such as my home town or Harpurhey in Manchester - second in the government's indices of deprivation - where only 55.9 per cent of the population are classified as being in "good health" and barely a third of householders live in homes that they own. Only 8.6 per cent of adults living in Harpurhey have a university degree - could this be linked to the fact that the area has no secondary schools of its own? Harpurhey has recently received £17 million for redevelopment and a new undercover market and will get a (largely privately funded) city academy in 2010. It will be interesting to see what difference - if any - this will make in the following years.

Impoverished areas have high crime rates, they have done for hundreds of years. Maybe it's time we started asking the right questions and stopped casting stones.