Excerpt from "White Tribe", Channel 4 Television, broadcast January 2000.

[Darcus Howe presents 'White Tribe']

Produced and presented by Darcus Howe


[Darcus Howe inspects his burnt out car]Darcus Howe (DH) has just recovered his burnt out car, which was stolen earlier.

DH: All I could think about was the car and my things. But I told myself "OK, this is all part of the journey. Let's get on with it".

I thought about places I'd seen on the news, on "Crimewatch", places where stealing cars is a way of life. And I decided - that's where we'll go next...

DH: We're on our way to a part of England that doesn't appear on any tourist guide. All around me, factories and steel works where machines and computers have replaced men on the shop floor.

(Caption- Grangetown, Cleveland)

DH: I wanted to come somewhere which is white and poor, to then see what life was like on a sink estate. I chose one of the worst - Grangetown.

The only people who visit it, it seems, are sociologists researching the white underclass.

[A camera on every street corner]On every corner of every street, a great camera hits you like a slap in the face.

Man 1: This town was built for the workers from the steelworks. Grangetown was built for the steel workers.

Woman 1: That's finished now. All the men are just there, aren't they, all day, hanging around doing nowt

When I can remember us being a kid, then men weren't there through the day. The men were always at work.

Young man 1: If you live round here, you should be all working down the steel works. It's your birthright, sort of, but it's not like that now.

It's just getting lucky, and it's knowing people in there. If you know someone in there, you're usually alright, but, I've never got in there.

DH: (to man 2 at gate) So, what do you do?

Man 2: (laughs) Nowt.

DH: Nowt?

Man 2: Nowt at all, mate, at the moment. But I'm a good lad. If I can find work, I'll work. It's as simple as that.

[Inside the CCTV control room]DH: (approaching door) This is the CCTV room.

Operator 1: (in control room) We have in Grangetown 21 cameras that are strategically placed all round the Grangetown area, to virtually cover the whole of the district."

DH: So this is the kind of "big brother" studio.

Operator 1: Yeah, you could say that. We had a lot of public meetings with people. In the meetings the people were all for the cameras being installed in the Grangetown area.

The men that were installing them were attacked and we had to have a police escort. But now I think they just accept them as a way of life.

Woman 2: (on street) It flashes, so it obviously knows what it's doing, and I'm not happy about it, at all!

Woman 3: (at door) Well they are good really. You can walk out of your house and know it's going to be safe.

Man 3: (in house) It's like George Orwell, isn't it, in 1984.

Woman 4: (at door) They are a deterrent though, aren't they. They definitely stop a lot. They know if they do anything, they'll get it on camera. It does make them think twice.

Man 2: They're beaming on your fucking houses and everything.

Woman 5: I think, if you've got nothing to hide, then so be it. If they go, then I just think it will end up like it was.

DH: (in control room) Let's say I'm being unfaithful to my wife. You would see me like, kissing a girl, or some woman, on a bus. What happens?

Operator 1: Anything that's sensitive, if we see anything like that, then we totally ignore it.

DH: If you see your wife on that, would you ignore it?

Operator 1: I'd probably clip her when I got home, then ignore it (laughs).

Youth 1: (on street) They're watching you, 24 hours a day. If you stand on the corner, with your mates and that, having a laugh and they're there, watching you. You can't do fuck all.

Operator 2: (showing clip of group of youths on the street) What you'll see now, is just attacking one another. Gangs, marauding around. And in a minute I think you'll see...., here's one, ....it's a deadly blow if he could have caught him. And this was regular. You can walk down the streets now and there's none of this.

[They're watching you, 24 hours a day]Youth 2: Instead of spending the money on the cameras, they should have spent the money for us, to do something. If there was something there for us, we'd go home at the end of it.

Youth 3: Get a couple of cans, get a bottle of cider and you sit around here and you do nowt, 'cos there's nowt to do.

DH: Not for the first time on our journey, I wondered if there'd be hostility to me, a black man hanging around a white ghetto.

DH: (on street amongst kids) They're following you in crowds, babbling inanities, interrupt what you're doing. No sense of order, nothing at all. It's just a bunch of urchins really. No future.

DH: (approaching wall across road) And all these walls are built, for what?

Kid 1: Stopping cars. Twockers.

DH: Twockers?

DH: (in control room running clip) This area has been known for, what do you call it - twocking?

Operator 2: Twocking.

DH: What does twocking mean?

Operator 2: It's "taking without owners consent". What we've got here, going back about 2 years ago, is a stolen car, which we see on the monitor there. And the car's actually coming down towards Grangetown. It's got no lights on. It's being followed by the police there, you can see. The car's going to go across a dual carriageway without stopping. There it goes.

DH: That's him in front?

Operator 2: That's what is actually a barrier, a low brick built barrier with a metal top and it's just driven through that. And that was the flames that you're seeing.

DH: I wonder if he's dead.

Operator 2: No, actually, he does get out. The police go in and pull him out.

DH: Lucky.

Operator 2: Yes, very. He has whiplash injuries.

DH: Because, if the car went up in flames, and they don't drag him out, he's dead meat.

Operator 2: That's the driver there.

DH: That's the driver. He's been taken out. Oh dear...., Oh dear... This is quite something, isn't it?

Man 1: (in house) It's exciting sometimes. All the mam's used to go out and watch. Take the kids out to watch all the joy riders and the car thieves. But all that's calmed down now.

Young man 4: There were some riots, by the shops.

Man 1: Oh yeah, there were a few riots wasn't there.

DH: I detected a pride in the past. I don't mean the industrial past. I mean the past before the cameras arrived. When this place had a claim to fame. And every night they were on the news.

"The car crime capital" they used to say.

"The most dangerous estate in England" they used to say.

That's when they got that glint in their eye. They'd achieved something they talked about with intense excitement.

Now the authorities have banned their sport.

DH: This is a definite assault on the Englishness I grew accustomed to when I first came here. The kind of trust that established Englishness.

There were newspapers left unattended on the streets. No newspaper sellers. You walked up, you bought the newspaper, you left the money and went your way.

[Barricaded shops]DH: (in shop) Hello, hello. You're well barricaded here, aren't you?

Shopkeeper: Oh yes. We had a problem in the past, that's why it's all barricaded.

DH: And you have a huge steel door.

Shopkeeper: Yes. Steel doors you'll see everywhere.

DH: You never lift the (window grill)?

Shopkeeper: No, I don't.

DH: And where do you live? You live in the area?

Shopkeeper: In the premises, upstairs.

DH: And what do they buy?

Shopkeeper: Oh, they buy bits and bobs, what they need. It's a convenience store. Mostly it's alcohol.

DH: (outside) This is a ghetto in the true sense. In that people have nowhere else to go.

The cameras aren't here to keep people out. They are here to control those who are stuck here.

DH: (in house) If round here was built because of the factory. And now the factory don't need you anymore, what's going to happen?

Woman 6: I don't know. I'm like you, I sometimes sit and I think "Where do you go from here? What happens now? What about the kids? What about the young ones?"

I mean, I look at my own 2 daughters - I've got one 18 and one 14. They don't know where they're going to go, what they're going to do. What's going to happen to them.

I think they're just going to be on Social Security and pushing prams about. That's all I can see for my two. Or drugs, or both.

[I would never, ever live under that regime]DH: I would never, ever live under that regime.

It's an assault on the freedoms that I've enjoyed in this place.

The terror of the time is that all of inner city England is going to go that way.

I would prefer to see cars stolen and burning. Anything would be preferable to the deathliness of these streets.

I don't care how many cars they steal from me. I would rather pay that price than live under the eye of the camera.

If this is the shape of the new England, I don't want it!


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