Mark Simpson on how steroids got into the culture’s bloodstream and changed the shape of masculinity (Guardian CIF, 6 Dec, 2007)

‘Roids may sound as Eighties as Cher’s black-lace bodice. But they’re back, even bigger and bustier than ever.

According to a series of recent reports, steroids, or ‘juice’ or ‘gear’ to the initiated, once an exotic drug of cheating athletes and freaky bodybuilders have entered the mainstream and have become just another lifestyle product for young men (some boys as young as 12 are reportedly taking the drug).

And this despite the frightening possible side-effects meticulously listed in these press reports, including liver, heart and kidney damage, atrophied testicles, erectile dysfunction, depression and raised aggression. (Though, arguably, you could also experience most of these simply by following Arsenal FC.)

The key to this main streaming of steroids is vanity. If you want to get into people’s bloodstream these days, promise to make them like what they see in the smoke-glass gym-mirror. According to the surveys, the large majority of young men using the gear are not doing so to be stronger or faster or scarier - all traditionally acceptable ‘masculine’ ambitions - but to look more attractive. To look shaggable. Or just make you look.

In other words, young men are taking steroids the way that many gay party boys have taken them for years: to look good on the beach or dance floor or webcam. ‘Muscle Marys’ (as they’re called by envious, less-muscular gays), are apparently no longer a strictly gay phenomenon. Muscle Marys are where masculinity is at, Mary.

It shouldn’t be so surprising. We don’t really need surveys to tell us this. It has, after all, happened right before our eyes. It’s the media that has mainlined steroids into the culture and our kids. Unlike, say, very skinny girls, very muscular boys are very popular. An anti ‘Size Hero’ campaign like that we’ve seen against Size Zero is somewhat unlikely. Steroids are an essential, prescribed even, part of the way that the male body has been farmed and packaged for our consumption since it was laid off at the factory in the1980s.

A generation of young males have been reared on irresistibly - and frequently chemically - lean and muscular images of the male body in sport, advertising, magazines, movies and telly, even in the cartoons they watch and the computer games or toy dolls (or ‘action figures’) they play with. It seems all that’s left of masculinity in a post industrial, post paternal world, apart from a science-fiction-sized penis, or a right foot good enough to get you into the Premier League, is a hot bod. Men and women - but especially men - will give you kudos for that. So will people casting reality TV series.

Even Action Man (GI Joe in the US) is now a Muscle Mary. Perhaps because he’s only twelve inches tall, Action Man seems to have been hitting the ‘juice’ big time. He’s also got himself a nice deep all-over tan - to better show off his pumped muscles.

Since the 1960s his bicep measurements have more than doubled from a (scaled up) 12″ to 27″ and his chest from 44″ to 55″. His current ‘cut’ physique would be rather difficult to achieve just by eating corned-beef hash rations - especially since, as far as I’m aware, a portable plastic gym isn’t yet one of his basic accessories. In an example of life imitating art, or at least squaddies imitating dolls, steroid abuse by soldiers is increasingly common: US soldiers in Iraq have been caught ordering steroids online, and it was recently alleged that a sizeable proportion of Blackwater mercenaries are on ‘the gear’.

Muscle Marys aren’t just for Xmas - they’re also for High Office. Arnold ‘Commando’ Schwarzenegger, seven times Mr Olympia, who has admitted using industrial quantities of steroids since he was in his teens (though denies he takes them now) is today the walk-on-water Green Governator of California and Republican inspiration to David Cameron - after a successful Hollywood movie career playing an under-dressed heavily-muscled male masseur pretending to be an action hero. Quite an achievement when just walking without painful chafing must have been difficult.

Partly because of Arnie’s 80s ‘special effects’, Muscle Marys are de rigeur in the movies today - even in middle-age. The ageing star of a recent epic blockbuster whose career has largely been built on his six-pack was widely rumoured to have been on so much ‘gear’ trying to look ‘invincible’ that he frequently had to be stretchered off the set at the end of the day, poor love. Meanwhile ‘Comeback Kid’ Sylvester ‘Rocky’ Stallone (aged 60) was caught by Australian customs with several vials of his ‘Comeback’ secret earlier this year.

The ailing James Bond franchise successfully re-launched Bond and made him more attractive to younger viewers by reincarnating him in the pneumatic form of Daniel Craig - Bond became his own big-chested Bond Girl - and last year’s smash hit film ‘300′ featured ‘Spartans’ who looked less like ancient warriors than Muscle Marys at a Toga Party. Or the “juiced-up” professional wrestlers in Speedos that so many boys today have on their bedroom walls.

WWE wrestler Chris Benoit’s recent murder-suicide of his wife and child and intense media speculation about whether it was steroid-related (steroids were found at his house and his post mortem testosterone level was ten times normal) has caused a major scandal in the US. But it has been as obvious for many years that most of these guys were sprinkling more than sugar on their Cocoa Pops (and Benoit was actually relatively scrawny compared to some wrestlers).

That’s, after all, what people were looking at. What they were paying to see. Pro wrestling is showbusiness, and steroids are the business - at least when it comes to making spectacular bodies.

As a result of this and other recent steroid scandals in American football and baseball - including at High School level - a panic has emerged about the use of steroids by US athletes. But this has tended to obscure how mainstream steroids already are in the US and how, as in the UK, they’re principally (ab)used by non-athletes (only 6% of users played sports or considered themselves bodybuilders).

In the UK there have been calls to ban the sale of steroids online, crackdown harder on gyms selling them and educate young people about the dangers. Well, everyone is in favour of education, and no one is in favour of teens using steroids, but it’s unlikely that any of this will seriously reverse the Muscle Mary/Size Hero trend.

Steroids can’t be uninvented - or filtered out from the culture’s bloodstream. They’ve already changed the shape of masculinity. What’s more, unlike most if not all of the expensive supplements advertised in FHM, Men’s Health and Nuts as ‘muscle-builders’ and ‘fat-burners’, they actually work. And I know whereof I speak: I dabbled with the ‘juice’ myself briefly, 17 years ago as a callow youth (I’m such an early-adopter). They certainly did what they said on the tin: I only stopped because they made me even spottier and angrier than I already was.

In an age when what’s authentically masculine is unclear, but what’s hot is as in-yer-face as a nice pair of pecs, injecting synthetic manliness, despite the possible risks to your actual man-bits, is not going out of fashion anytime soon. The only effective way to discourage their use will be to come up with a new generation of muscle-building drugs that work as well as steroids but have fewer side-effects. I’d certainly take them.

Steroids are the metrosexual hormone - they make men saleable and shaggable in an age that doesn’t have much idea what else to do with them.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

Next month sees the 40th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. To celebrate, I thought I’d post this piece about the pre-gay Good Old Days which appeared in the IoS a couple of years ago (and which seems to have mysteriously disappeared from their website).

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Trading in the past
Once upon a time the streets of the capital heaved with jolly sailors and guardsmen just looking for gentlemen to have fun with. Then gay liberation came along and ruined it for everyone, complains Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday - 11 September, 2005)

I consider myself something of a traditionalist. I enjoy traditional activities, such as cruising the Dilly, picking up guardsmen, sailors, dockers and young working men.

I am, in other words, a hopeless romantic. For trade, the masculine erotic economy which girded the loins of the greatest city in the world, lubricated the pistons of the greatest Empire and made saucy sense of the British class system is gone forever. The docks have gone, the sailors and guardsmen are all but gone - and, criminally, don’t wear their uniforms on the street any more, making them very difficult to spot. And as for the working men, well, they all live so far out of town these days and drive so fast in their white vans that it’s almost impossible to collar any.

All that’s left is a gay disco in the East End called Trade, where you can find shirtless gay lawyers on horse-tranquillizers eyeing one another up while dancing frantically at 5am. If you really want to.

Gone too are the painted queans, such as Quentin Crisp, and the respectable gentlemen in evening dress who pursued trade - who, for sex, for violence, for love, for money, for a few beers, for something to tell their mates about, frequently allowed themselves to be caught. Gone are the jostling, smoke-filled “known” (not “gay”) pubs. Gone is the whole vibrant and complex pre-gay bachelor world of male-male intimate relations that meant that perhaps most sexual activity between men before the 1967 decriminalisation involved men who were not queer. What we now call “homosexuality” or “the gay scene” was a much, much bigger business before so-called liberalisation.

Contrary to received wisdom, today’s out-and-proud gay world is in many ways a marginalised, airless, incestuous one compared to what went before in the “bad old days”. It’s only in the last 30 years or so, in other words, the period corresponding to the rise of “gay liberation”, that we have begun to believe that to have sex with another male you have to belong to a separate species; that, regardless of your interest in the ladies, if you wake up in bed with another male you have to move to Old Compton Street or the Castro.

As Houlbrook’s Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis 1918-1957 makes remarkably clear, just a few decades ago, significant numbers of (working-class) young men were not only moving freely between male and female partners but were happy to brag about it. So long as they were “butch” and active - or claimed they were - it would merely enhance their reputation with the lads. It certainly didn’t mean that they were “confused about their sexuality”.

Though you, dear reader, may be about theirs. It is, after all, a world that is almost unintelligible to us today. Even my nostalgia for “traditional” activities is precisely that: nostalgia. A slightly perverse, contemporary projection on to the past - a past that is now too “queer” and unfamiliar to grasp fully, possibly even by those who are still alive to remember it. As Houlbrook puts it: “Working class encounters with the queer transcended contemporary understandings of ‘homosexuality’ or ‘homophobia’. Intimacy, sex, blackmail, theft, and assault constituted a continuum…” A rather more exciting continuum than most homos today can handle - or would want to.

Perhaps this is why many gays today simply refuse to believe such a world existed, except as some failed prototype for the wonderful, self-contained, self-centred gay world they now live in: “God, all those poor oppressed self-hating homos chasing after straight men - why didn’t they get themselves down to the gym and buy some camouflage trousers?”

Thankfully, Houlbrook isn’t one of those gays. He’s a historian. “The world mapped out in this book is not a ‘gay’ world as we would currently understand it,” he writes. “The places are different. Soho has retained its importance, but today it seems almost impossible that Waterloo Road or Edgware Road could have been the site of equally important, diverse, extensive, and vital queer enclaves between the wars.” Edgware Road was the site of a large barracks; Waterloo Road the home of the Union Jack Club, a hotel for hundreds of randy young sailors on leave. As one contemporary put it: “The Waterloo Road was awash with seamen, most of whose bodies… were not only able but willing.”

Queer London, with chapters on “Geographies of Public Sex” and “Piccadilly Palare: the world of the West End poof” (spot the Moz reference) goes out of its way to present a map of London’s queer past that doesn’t merely see it as a world that was struggling to turn into Soho during Pride Week: “In exploring the history of queer London in the first half of the 20th century, we should lament possibilities long lost as we celebrate opportunities newly acquired.”

Obviously, it is the lost possibility of sex - and loving relationships - with sailors, soldiers and young working men men that I most lament. So does Houlbrook; or, at least, he sees this as the crucial difference between London’s contemporary gay world and its queer past. Unlike many other recent urban gay historys, this book gives equal attention to those who considered themselves “normal” but nonetheless socialised with, had sex with, and often loved other men. In other words: trade. The men who were at the very centre of the queer erotic economy and without whom Saturday nights in 1930s Soho would have been very dull indeed.

So we learn that “the most distinctive venues” were either military pick-up joints like the Grenadier (Wilton Place), Tattershalls Tavern (Knightsbridge Green), the Alexandra Hotel (Hyde Park Corner), and the Packenham and Swan (I’ll be visiting them all very soon, just to make sure they’re no longer “in business”); or those in working-class neighbourhoods in east and south London: dockside pubs like the Prospect of Whitby (Wapping Stairs), or Charlie Brown’s (West India Dock Road). In these venues, dock labourers, sailors from across the world, and families “mingled freely with flamboyant local queans and slumming gentlemen in a protean milieu where queer men and casual homosexual encounters were an accepted part of everyday life”. Perhaps Houlbrook is a little nostalgic too, after all.

To regard London’s trading scene as merely “prostitution” or “exploitation”, as many are inclined, is again to impose modern, patronising values on transactions: “Working men’s desires were more complex than the term ‘prostitution’ allows.” Money was not always exchanged (especially with sailors), but even when it was, most of the “normal” men trading themselves had jobs. For the most part, trade was an enjoyable and rewarding past-time activity that could also become a lasting emotional attachment.

Guardsman were notoriously rough renters (very capable of blackmail and violence, which was perhaps part of their appeal), but as one interviewed in 1960 admitted: “Some of us get quite fond of the blokes we see regularly… they’re nice fellows… and interesting to listen to. As for the sex… some of the younger ones aren’t bad looking…”

Or like the newly married Jim writing rather sweetly to his gentleman friend, John Lehmann: “I wish I was still seeing you Jack as you were the best friend I ever had… you were always such a good friend to me we had good times together Jack and I hope I shall see you some time.” Trade was a young man’s game, which usually lasted only for the period between adolescence and marriage. Once married, working-class men and their unruly erections would “move on”.

Why did the world of trade end? In part, because, like Jim, it got married. The post-war years saw a rise in prosperity which not only undermined the economic rationale for trade, it also made marriage possible much sooner. Rather than getting married in their late twenties and early thirties, young men were marrying in their late teens and early twenties. The rough and tumble world of “raucous male homosociality” was disappearing. Young men were socialising much more with women, who were now entering public life with money to spend themselves (and today, if the tabloid stories are to be believed, are lining up to be smuggled into Knightsbridge Barracks). Trade ended because the bachelor-culture of pre-war London ended.

Ironically, the final blow to trade and the public world of queer sex was delivered by Wolfenden Report of 1957 and the Act which decriminalised sex between consenting adult males in private 10 years later.

Key Wolfenden witnesses, Patrick Trevor-Roper (a Harley Street consultant) and Peter Wildeblood (diplomatic correspondent for The Daily Mail) pleaded for homosexual respectability in the language of the private middle-class home (sounding uncannily like gay marriage lobbyists today). Wildeblood claimed: “I seek only to apply to my life the rules which govern the lives of all good men; freedom to choose a partner and… to live with him discreetly and faithfully… the right to choose the person whom I love.”

However, as Houlbrook points out, both witnesses glossed over the queer spaces in which they were going to meet that partner. Wildeblood famously met the airman McNally in a Piccadilly Circus subway; Trevor-Roper was cautioned by a policeman in St James’s Park, a veritable bazaar for strapping Guardsman during the war.

To which I might add that for Wolfenden the “real perverts” were not the “congenital inverts”, but the “otherwise normal men” who took part in these aberrant activities, often in public. This is why prosecutions for indecency actually doubled in the 10 years following “decriminalisation” in 1967 (many of those convicted were married). Wolfenden, which was also a report into street prostitution, encouraged the law to go after the “real perverts”. All male sexual contact involving those under 21, those staying in hostels or hotels, rooming houses or prison, meeting in parks and pubic toilets (they were not “in private”), or while serving in the Armed Forces and Merchant Navy, remained illegal. In other words, probably the vast majority of homosex in the earlier part of the 20th century.

Even the consensual activities that led to the Montagu Scandal and public backlash which prompted the Wolfenden Report and eventually the 1967 reform itself would still have been illicit after ‘decriminalisation’ as they involved members of the RAF and were not conducted ‘in private’ - and would remain so for much of the next 40 years.

It’s probably just more sour grapes on my part, but it’s tempting to conclude that the law reforms of the last few years, such as the equalisation of the age of consent, ending the ban in the Armed Forces and Merchant Navy, and relaxation of the laws against “indecency” in public, happened not so much because of the tireless campaigns by gay equality reformers, or even the intervention of the European Court of Human Rights, but simply because, one or two cruisey parks aside, most “traditional activities” in London had already come to an end.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

You may have seen the reports in the British press that large numbers of white working class voters are disillusioned with the mainstream parties and are considering voting for the (until now) lunatic fringe British National Party in this May’s Local Elections: ‘More people considering BNP protest vote‘ (The Times, April 17, 2006), and ‘White voters are deserting us for the BNP says Blair ally’ (Sunday Telegraph, April 16).

New Labour big hitter Margaret Hodge has admitted that eight out of ten white voters canvassed on their doorsteps in her own working class East London constituency for the May Local Elections have told her to her face and without any embarrassment that they are considering voting BNP.

To her credit – perhaps because she can see the writing on the wall – she doesn’t claim that they have been ‘brainwashed’ by the BNP, but instead acknowledges that this has happened for a very simple, very democratic reason: New Labour have not listened to the concerns of white working class voters, in particular they have refused to address their worries about the large numbers of immigrants arriving on their doorstep - rather than Guardian readers’ - and its impact on their lives, communities, jobs and local resources. No one has, apart from the BNP.

In fact, none of the mainstream parties in the last ten years have even admitted the existence of the white working class. It is almost the defining feature of New Labour that it has turned its back on them. A smokescreen of multicultural sanctimoniousness has been used to make them invisible as New Labour got on with the business of moving up in the world and becoming cosmopolitan. Worse, subsidized mass immigration (which is what much so-called ‘asylum seeking’ has amounted to in this country) often looks like a deliberate plan to obliterate the white working class. Along with EU enlargement into Eastern Europe and the subsequent influx of millions of East Europeans (which happened after this review was written - and contrary to the assurances of New Labour), it’s helped destroy any chance of decent pay for unskilled work.

By threatening to vote BNP the white working class has forced the political class – and the media – to acknowledge they actually still exist. That’s already a result.

Look what happened when Michael Collins tried to remind the world of their existence and their history in his important 2004 book The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working class (see review below). Amongst other things, he was accused on Radio Four of being an ‘intellectual outrider for the BNP’.

The reality of course is that all those do-gooding right-on middle class types were the real recruiting sergeants for the BNP. By telling the white working class that anyone or anything that acknowledged they even existed - let alone that they had a right to - was ‘racist’ they immunized them to the charge of ‘racism’ and pushed them into the hands of a straightforwardly racist party.

It’s the English middle classes who persuaded the English white working class to vote BNP.

To their manor born

Before the Thames-side inner London boroughs became places of lattes and loft apartments, they were the ancestral domain of the white working class. But as ‘The Likes of Us: a history of the white working class’ points out, it’s not fashionable to acknowledge that.

By Mark Simpson

(Originally published Independent on Sunday, 25 July 2004)

Southwark, the deprived south London Borough that gazes across the Thames at the bright lights and easy money of the City and the West End, has a long and proud “previous” when it comes to producing ruffians. The word “hooligan” itself has its origins there: an unruly teenager by the name of Patrick Hooligan killed a policeman in the 1890s and began a media panic about the scrappy working classes that shows no signs of abating. In the post-war period there were the Teds who, with their Edwardian frock coats, DAs, pocket-watches and knuckle-dusters were possibly invented there, and what the press dubbed the “cosh-boys”, who by the 1970s had become “muggers”. Also in the 1970s, according to my friend James who was, as he likes to say, “born and braised” in Southwark, there were the Elephant and Castle Boot Girls: a gang of working-class male teen queens who used to loiter with intent, terrorising passing males for sexual favours and roughing up people in moon-boots.

Now Southwark has produced a new kind of hooligan, one swinging his laptop like a bicycle chain around his head, if you are to believe the scandalised notices in some of the broadsheets. South-east London-born writer Michael Collins has provoked a major breach of the peace. The Independent decried his “low blows” and a guest on Start the Week denounced him as an “intellectual outrider for the BNP”. A statement which is as despicable as it is laughable and one clearly designed to bring about the transportation of the author to Siberia or Australia. Or at least Essex.

What was Collins’s terrible crime? How did he épater les bourgeois d’Islington? Well, he has written a book called The Likes of Us: a biography of the white working class. The subtitle alone is enough of an outrage. “White” and “working class” are, after all, expletives these days, of a kind that even a Gordon Ramsay would think twice about using. Throw in the unstated but implicit word “English” and you have the metropolitan middle classes calling for smelling salts and making for Sainsbury’s continental deli counter. “White working class” summons up everything the metropolitan middle classes loathe and fear: patriotism, community, vulgarity, insularity, pride, sentimentality, plain-talking, violence and compassion. Or as Collins puts it: “They love Gucci and hate the Euro.”

The white working class is not supposed to exist anymore, except as a social problem caused by over-exposure to tabloid newspapers, sportswear and satellite TV. It invokes the ancestral guilt of the British middle classes - real, criminal, uneasy guilt, rather than the kind of pseudo public self-flagellation they like to go in for over asylum-seekers, foxes and greenhouse gases.

In the capital, it also invokes the spectre of the people to whom London belonged for generations - they owned nothing except their community - but who have been driven out to Kent and Essex by post-war “redevelopment”, mass immigration (which arrives, strangely, in places like Southwark, never Richmond) and, in recent years, gentrification, making London safe for media types, property-developers and financiers, the global super-rich and the global super-poor. London is booming, but London is also dying - a virtual, rootless city that has no room for its real, lived history as it gets in the way of what everyone is here to do now: make a splash and plenty of cash. Today’s “Londoners” were born anywhere but London, and many live in properties that are worth a king’s ransom, but whine that they can’t get their milk or mail delivered, or their leaking bidets fixed for love nor ready money.

This is probably the reason why middle class people in London are often so discomfited by the appearance of the Cross of St George on taxis and builders’ vans during international football tournaments: it reminds them that the English working classes still exist and are still sentimental and passionate about place, and are only an hour’s drive from central London.

Open Collins’s book, and you find a courageously clear-headed indictment of the press riot that was the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry at the Elephant and Castle. The country as one bayed for the blood of the “murdering racists”, the white working class - or, as they were frequently described in the “quality” press, “white trash” - south London hooligans whom everyone had apparently decided were responsible for the death of Stephen Lawrence (and perhaps for all racism everywhere, including our own). This despite their acquittal in a court of law - everyone was angry with the police not just for bungling their investigation (Macpherson notwithstanding, this is a service they will generally provide to you regardless of your race), but because they didn’t do what they used to do in the good old days - fit ‘em up. As Collin dryly notes: “Paradoxically, those notorious for making their feelings known about false convictions had shifted the focus to false acquittals. But for one case only.”

He draws a parallel with the panics about “hooligans” in South London from the past, arguing persuasively that in the aftermath of the inquiry, reports on racism had segued into a more general demonisation of the white working class. Historically, the right harboured desires to keep the white working class below stairs. “There they could use the wrong knives and drop their aitches to their hearts’ content, until trenches needed manning and flags waving in the name of patriotism.” Now, middle-class progressives “who had traditionally come out fighting these underdogs’ corner, or reporting their condition as missionaries or journalists, were keen to silence them, or bury them without an obituary… They were racist, xenophobic, thick, illiterate, parochial. They survived on the distant memory of winning one World Cup and two world wars… All they represent and hold dear was reportedly redundant in modern, multicultural Britain.”

Perhaps you can understand now why it is was necessary to call the author a crypto-fascist on Radio Four.

The Likes of Us is part personal memoir, part family history, part sociology, part class defence, part coshing of the do-gooding middle classes: a slightly confused mixture but one that on the whole works rather well. Collins’s family had lived in Southwark for generations until they were displaced to Welling and Eltham by the post-war apocalypses that turned it first into a windswept gyratory system overlooked by Stalinist barracks-blocks, then a clearing house for mass immigration and now a place of lattes and loft apartments for media types.

The Likes of Us is also an exercise in nostalgia. But why not? Why should the working classes be denied the drug that the middle classes inhale deeply every time they watch Inspector Morse? Some of the best passages here are sharply evocative of what has been lost, what has been erased, both culturally and personally for the author, describing a world of working-class thrift and dignity: “Antimacassars kept the chair-backs clean, rent money was kept in the teapot… and stair treads held down a strip of linoleum so used, so old, so polished, its pattern had faded into the blur of a bruise.”

However, some warts are allowed into this reverie of communal loveliness. Collins and his family were greeted by one of their new neighbours after moving in the 1960s to make way for the tower blocks: “A dishevelled nest of hair badly underpinned by kirby grips, and an apron worn like armour. She announced to my mum: ‘I’m telling you now, before you start, if any of your kids lay a finger on mine, I’ll be over here. Mark my words.’” (She had seven kids and they terrorised the street for years.)

At the risk of sounding like a chippy northerner, I must point out that this is not really “a biography of the white working class”, but of a south London working-class community. Collins, in keeping with Londoners of whatever class or ethnicity, assumes that London is the centre of everything and betrays something of a snobbish attitude towards the other end of the country, the actual home of the vast majority of the working class. In one of the rare mentions of its existence, writing about the early part of the last century, he writes of the “sooty little towns of the north”. The great industrial cities of Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham and Leeds were sooty certainly, but hardly “little towns”.

Collins is at his best when he’s doing what south Londoners have been doing so well for centuries: taunting the middle classes. He tells a story of the woman at a party in the early 1990s who had just moved to Elephant and Castle (one of the advance party of gentrifiers from north of the river) who complained that she couldn’t find any aubergines in the local markets, and that this was a symptom of the “fear of diversity”, declaring finally that the root of the problem was that “the street is very white.” Of course, she meant white working class: “Her multiculturalism made her colourless; her class made her superior.”

Not to worry, as the area has changed beyond recognition in the last 10 years, aubergines and halal meat are readily available and most of the white people around there under 65 are middle class.

Collins recounts an old timer perusing a glossy brochure extolling the Elephant’s attractions to outsiders. It listed the various immigrants over the centuries, including Germans, the Dutch, the Flemish, Irish, Afro-Caribbeans, West Africans, Chinese, Cypriots, Vietnamese, Somalians, Ethiopians, Bosnians and Croats, and boasted that “over 100 languages are spoken by our children”. The old fella remarks: “They don’t mention us English. You wouldn’t think we’d ever existed would ya?”

A spokesman for a 1997 New Labour-commissioned survey on race is quoted in the book: “I feel ‘multicultural’ wrongly meant non-white culture. Anybody who tried to assert white culture was automatically a member of the BNP. That was wrong. We’re going to have to look at people being proud of being British and white without them necessarily being the enemy.”

Shame no one listened to him.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2004