The Selfish Giant – Director Clio Barnard

Watched a great film at the weekend. Clio Barnard’s , The Selfish Giant, a story of two young lads from the north of England who struggle to survive at school, at home and in the world at large. They may be from a traveller’s family or they may not. What is certain is that they and their respective families are desperately poor and generally desperate. That desperation led our two central protagonists, who incidentally both played a blinder, to drop out of school (or were they excluded) and get caught into the trap of petty thieving. They specialised in scrap metal and cables and are soon being manipulated by a ruthless scrap metal merchant, who has a side line in illegal pony and trap racing.

The film was captivating. It didn’t moralise, it didn’t lecture and it didn’t provide neat and easy solutions. (Unlike too many Ken Loach films). It simply portrayed a slice of British life as it really is; brutal, tragic and grindingly poor. And while I was watching all this bleakness unfold before my eyes, I got to thinking about the toxic polemic that is gaining a head of steam around Britain’s growing Roma community.

So guess what? Shock, horror! The British population is learning an unsavoury truth there are still large pockets of desperately poor and marginalised people living in 21st century Europe. Some of these desperately poor people are already living in England. More are expected to arrive. Soon. With this poverty and marginalisation come all the usual stuff petty criminality, stunted educational aspirations, long term unemployment and family breakdown. Nothing new here though. England has always had plenty of its own home grown impoverished communities to which to scapegoat, marginalise and demonise. Our deeply entrenched class system breeds it by the bucket loads. But the toxic Tory press like to paint a different picture. They prefer the lie that England never suffered from petty crime until the East European Roma turned up on our shores. For the Tory class ridden bigots that edit our tabloids, England was a socio-economic paradise until those lumpen, free-loading petty thieves descended on our shores. I think not.

Read the first 70 pages of Charles Dickens Oliver Twist and you get a sharp reminder of what 19th century Britain was all about, complete with barbaric child labour, soul destroying poor houses, dark satanic mills and routine executions for daring to steal some bread. The first half of the 20th century wasn’t a whole lot better, notorious for its slum housing, its grim factories and mines, and its endemic, debilitating unemployment. All of this has been very thoroughly airbrushed out of our history.

But today Britain needs a scape-goat. One to draw attention away from real hardened criminals in our society, the ones who wear sharp designer suits and live in luxurious apartments overlooking the Thames. They manage, or should I say mismanage our banks, our insurance companies, our socially useless hedge funds, and our privatised public utilities. Yes, that’s right, that cabal of gangsters who just a few short years ago brought the entire world economy to its knees are now free to do it all again while citizen Joe is busy demonising European Roma communities. It’s all too easy, too predictable. It’s happened before it’s happening again. Blaming the victims of the system rather than the perpetrators.

Still, we are faced with a clear choice, an increasingly stark choice. Either we continue to bail out the feral banks and pay their CEO’s obscene bonuses, or we fund the social programmes necessary to wipe our poverty for ever and to work towards a genuine inclusivity. But we can’t do both. It’s a simple choice but you can bet your last euro that it won’t be a choice put to the European electorates at the next round of elections. Not by Cameron, not by Clegg and not even by Miliband. What we can expect is a further demonisation of the Roma in the exact same way as that the European Jews of the 20th century. Vigilantes, draconian legislation and deportations. It’s already started in France. Britain won’t be far behind.

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