Like many people, I am a big fan of The Wire. So I have been watching with interest as reaction to Chris “the Wire has become part of real life in this country” Grayling’s comments has spread around the blogs and comment pages. The Shadow Home Secretary wanted to draw attention to the parallels that exist between Baltimore’s projects and some of the UK’s inner city council estates, specifically citing a “culture of deprivation, harm, addiction and failure”.
Some have predictably jumped on these comments, showing statistics that rubbish any direct comparison between Baltimore and Manchester. Some have been more forgiving, providing editorial space for the non-enlightened to get up to speed on the Wire’s gritty realism. And whilst its always a bit cringeworthy watching politicians wading into the cultural zeitgeist (Brown and the Arctic Monkeys? Blair and Jackie Milburn? Hague at the Notting Hill Carnival?), this time warrants a bit more thought. So here goes…
The first thing you notice is that it feels a long way from Michael Howard in the mid 90s – “lets take the handcuffs off the police and put them back on the criminal where they belong..” One of the central messages of the Wire is of the interconnectedness of the street, the Police Departments, City Hall and the upper reaches of politics. Self-interest and dependency is intertwined at every level.
The Wire might also reinforce the notion that a fish rots from the head – it is corruption of political leadership that sets the (im)moral tone for the strata of society below it. By this argument, MPs fiddling their expenses might be as culpable as the ‘criminals’ in the piece.
Thirdly, the Wire doesn’t necessarily reinforce a message of underachievement – rather it’s a sense of dignity, achievement and individual gain that often drives the kids on the corner – marginalised as they are from mainstream education and social care. Maybe an allegory on the natural endpoint of liberal individualism – or at least a strong suggestion that society is important, and we should emphasise the responsibility we have collectively, as well as to ourselves.
Finally – there is brutal irony in our politicians (though not all of them) experiencing the problems experienced in our inner cities via DVD box set. It doesn’t necessarily follow that awareness of a complex and deep-seated set of problems will lead to well-thought out and meaningful strategies to deal with them. And without this commitment, citing the Wire is as meaningless as a baseball cap.
While there are clear problems with Chris Grayling’s theory that the streets of Britain are like “The Wire” it’s an interesting example of effective political communication. One of the problems politicians face is to describe and explain the problems they want to solve. That’s one reason why it has been hard for Labour to make efforts to reduce child poverty into a national moral campaign. It is tricky to explain succinctly what child poverty looks or feels like in a way that people understand instantly and emotionally. So, for Grayling to characterise his view of problems in the inner cities in a way that has led to real public debate is, I would argue, extremely admirable.
The hope has to be that this leads to a real discussion of how to solve the problems he has managed to characterise so effectively. However the prevailing vision of “The Wire” is one of hopelessness. Over five seasons it shows that while faces change on the corner or in City Hall the problems of Baltimore remain unaltered and unsolved. “The Wire” does not support a view of collective social responsibility to achieve real change that the Conservatives hope to drive forward in government. Instead, it teaches that redemption comes only to the fortunate, not the deserving.
So, well done to Chris Grayling for making his case so effectively. But let us all hope that there is more hope for Leed, Manchester or London than the crumbling city of Baltimore.
DF
Comment by David Furness — August 26, 2009 @ 10:35 am
The problem here is that Grayling went for a soundbite, the task at hand will clearly require more than the press hits he was going for, but I also think Britain’s inner cities are along way from what is depicted in the wire.
On a funnier note Grayling let slip on the BBC News Channel yesterday morning that he in fact has only seen bits of the first series, there are five seasons of the award-winning programme – the first thought that came to mind was that it seems sensible not to comment on a programme you haven’t watched…
Comment by Ashish Prashar — August 26, 2009 @ 11:28 am
Mischa Glenny of the Guardian writes a very interesting analysis on Grayling’s artistic licence/political rhetoric. Presentation of simple statistics wins the argument.
Inner-city Baltimore – population 630,000; recorded murders (2008) 234.
England and Wales – population 52 million. recorded violent deaths (year ending March 2009)624.
As Glenny rightly calculates, Baltimore has just over 1% of our population but over a third of the whole country’s murder rate. If we are going to speak of ‘Broken Britain’, let’s think about precisely what we mean. Thankfully, we’re still hard-pressed to paint an image out of The Wire.
Comment by Charlotte Alldritt — August 26, 2009 @ 2:09 pm
[...] town halls (though not in the inner cities which Grayling had in mind) whilst Henry Kippin of the 2020 Public Services Trust reminds us that politicians and popular culture do not [...]
Pingback by What Britain can’t learn from The Wire « Matthew Cain’s blog — August 27, 2009 @ 7:05 am
I welcome unreservedly the introduction of the Wire as a central matter for debate in British politics. But how symbolic of the failings in our national political discourse that Grayling’s engagement with it was only on a superficial level, comparing surface details of life on Baltimore’s corners with Britain’s council estates.
What makes The Wire so engaging is its portrayal of failing institutions, and those struggling against them; all the characters with the most resonance are those in some way fighting the system. So Grayling would have done better to use The Wire as a starting point for discussing models of political reform. He could have pointed to Conservative plans to return responsibility to front-line service professionals, inviting the audience to imagine McNulty or Freamon free to pursue the good police work that comes naturally to them. He could point to Colvin’s experiments in season three as the need to allow local experimentation and regional variation in public services. The Wire makes a great starting point for engaging the public in debates about political accountability. This isn’t about dumbing down, it is about conducting political debate in the terms of reference familiar to the public.
Grayling was hampered by not having seen most of The Wire. What to conclude? Politicians need more spare time to connect with popular culture/watch DVD box sets?
Comment by Lester Freamon — August 27, 2009 @ 10:24 am
Liberal Conspiracy notes that maybe we should look closer to home for our cultural references – http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Satellite/9476/bodycount.htm
Comment by Henry Kippin — August 27, 2009 @ 10:22 pm