Generation F

by Winston Smith

Winston Smith is young, idealistic and desperate to make a difference.
As a youth worker in Britain's care homes and supported housing projects, he's well-placed to do so... he's dealing with some of the country's most damaged, deprived and difficult youngsters.
Given his own background (he suffered from drug addiction and near-alcoholism in his teenage years and early 20s) and his liberal disposition (he's a Guardian-reading vegetarian socialist with a first-class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Sociology and a Masters in International Relations) it ought to be a match made in heave.
But then reality intrudes.

Generation F is the first book to reveal the unvarnished truth about life in Britain's care homes and supported housing projects.
Winston Smith spends his working day wrestling with the problems of damaged youngsters, violent thugs and teenage criminals. He is confronted at every turn by irresponsible parents, incompetent police officers and pointless, expensive bureaucracy.
His writing is controversial, angry and edgy - and it made him the runaway winner of the 2010 Orwell Prize.

â A devastating book exposing the truth about the anarchy in this countryâ s care homesâ

The Daily Mail

'We could have agonised for hours and then passed Winston Smith over as too difficult, too dark, too much of a risk but we were charged with judging the best. Winston Smithâ s blog was the clear and unanimous choice of the judging panel.
There is a directness and clarity to his philippics that left them in our thoughts long after we had finished reading, but that was not enough. What carried the day with us was his passion and conviction that we should know what wrongs had been done in our names in some of those places where most of us choose not to look.

Orwell Prize Judges

Genres: Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2011

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now some of the people are poor in the purse
They don't have the cash at the ready
And some of the people they're crippled and lame
They can never stand up true and steady
And some of the people they're poor in the head
Like the simpleton fools that you see
But most of the people they're poor in the heart
It's the worst kind of poor, it's the worse kind of poor you can be

(Richard Thompson)


First, an apology. This will be another long one. It can’t be helped, this book is a Pandora’s Box of horrors, fears, self-doubt, it’s about whether Jesus was right, what view we take of human nature, how much we are part of John Donne’s continent, how much the bell tolls for us, what is common humanity, who is my brother, who is my sister, who are my children? And, what’s going wrong? given that many things appear to have gone wrong, of that one thing we may be sure, here, in the heart of the rich part of the world, where all poverty is relative, where there is a safety net beneath the safety net you fall through.

So, here we have “Winston Smith” (not his real name), a 34 year old guy who works in the supported housing sector in England. His particular project houses 50 kids of various ages (16-24). If you’re in a care home (formerly known as an orphanage) you have to leave it at the age of 16 and you then live in a bedsit in a house with similar kids. This is where “Winston” has worked for some years. He’s a reformed drug abuser, his heart’s in the right place, and he’s howling in pain. This book is his howl. Winston is determined to tell it like it is about the life of the kids in these homes and what the state, on behalf of its citizens, does to them. He began a blog, and this book is the best of the blog. In bloggy fashion, it’s a string of typical days-in-the-life.


Okay, a lot of the young kids he deals with are wild, a lot are physically dangerous, a lot are heavy drug users, all of them have chaotic family backgrounds which in turn feature violence and drug dependency as a matter of course; this is not Little House on the Prairie. We are not expecting sweetly smiling Olivers asking for just one more bowl of gruel please. We are expecting 6 feet 2 inch tall 15 years olds demanding a tenner so they can score some skunk and if they don’t get it now they might smash up your office.

THE CASE OF ZOE PARKER

As well as being an orphan, you can get into supported housing if you are estranged from your family and in danger of becoming homeless. To prove you are estranged you need an Estrangement Letter signed by a parent or guardian. Zoe Parker was a 16 year old girl who applied for a flat in Winston’s project. There were no allegations of familial abuse, just complaints that she and her mum weren’t getting on. Winston thought she was

a fairly typical rebellious teenager who wants to find somewhere to live where she can do what she wants. Somewhere being a room in our dysfunctional project where we can watch as she drops out of college and descends into a half-life which involves her sitting around all day eating junk food, smoking dope and drinking WKD.




Her mother, fearing this, did not want her to leave home. But Winston then finds out, to his surprise, that if the young person has a youth worker, then the youth worker can write an Estrangement Letter on behalf of the kid.

A mother who is doing her best to keep her daughter on the straight and narrow is being actively sabotaged by a cabal of state bureaucrats who want the girl to move out of the family home and start claiming benefits – a process which any number of academic studies show will dramatically reduce her life chances (and cost the rest of us thousands of pounds into the bargain). To make matters worse, they aren’t even bothering to discuss it with the mother, or to make any attempt to ascertain the truth of her daughter’s complaints. It’s literally crazy.

Result : just as Winston thought. She gets her flat, she descends into her private hell.


THE CASE OF LEE

Lee is caught doing drugs in his room, against the rules – sorry, no, we don’t call them rules, that would be oppressive language, we call them agreed policies – against the agreed policy of not doing drugs on the premises; so he’s given an eviction notice as it's his second offence. His response is to come into the office, violently abuse the workers there, and smash up the computer. All caught on CCTV. But his social worker protests the eviction vehemently :

“Clearly Lee has done wrong in relation to the computer monitor and he acknowledges this, but he’s a 16 year old lad who has had a very troublesome and chaotic family background and he has never gained the tools to deal with his anger.”

Result : Lee stays.

THE CASE OF RACHEL

Jo is explaining why she left the supported housing sector :

“Then there was the time she smashed up the widescreen tv in her lounge. I told her as a consequence I would not replace the tv for a month. She phoned head office and complained and they telephoned me and ordered me to replace the tv immediately as it was Rachel’s right to have one. This even though she had one in her bedroom as well. It was then that I decided I had to get out.”


EDUCATION

We don’t want no education
We don’t need no thought control
Oy, teacher! Leave those kids alone!

Pink Floyd

These kids, sinking fast, in their mid to late teens, into the underclass, don’t do education. That’s what they tell you : “I don’t do education.”

It baffles me how so many kids can revel in their own ignorance. There was a time when people were ashamed of failing at school, or not having a job. They see failure as a badge of honour and the three Rs have been replaced by the three Is : ignorance, indolence and illiteracy. Generation F you might call them : failed, failing and fucked up.

One of the college teachers Winston knows lays it out like this:

Most of our students say the reason they can’t get work is because the Eastern Europeans or the Africans are taking all the jobs. I challenge that view. I say ‘No mate, the reason you can’t get a job is because you can barely read or count your own fingers and have no skills whatsoever.’

Well, you get the picture. Reading 250 pages of this, it just seems that if even 50% of what he says is true, the people who work in this sector must themselves be loonies. If they had any brains they’d leave for anything else, anywhere else. Why - then – in the name of Ozzy Osbourne – does he do it?

What really motivates me, if I’m honest, is the genuine adrenaline rush I often experience when working with wild and unruly adolescents. In a weird kind of way, someone threatening to kill you is exciting.


GRISLY SPECTRE OF JEREMY CLARKSON

This book fits right into the grand tradition of “everything’s gone to the dogs, it wasn’t like this in my day, policemen used to know who you were, a clip round the ear would sort it all out, but they’re not allowed to touch ‘em any more, it’s political correctness gorn maaad, everything modern is crap especially the music, call that music? These kids get everything spoon fed to them intraveinously these days, ipads and hard core porn before they’re eight, my name is Jeremy Clarkson” – and there are several books of telling-it-like-it-is-and-it’ain’t-a-pretty-sight from such figures as teachers, policemen and doctors. And blow me down, Monday Books, Winston’s publishers, does all of those too – adverts in the back for “Sick Notes” by Dr Tony Copperfield; “It’s Your Time You’re Wasting : A Teacher’s Tales of Classroom Hell” by Frank Chalk and “Wasting Police Time” by PC David Copperfield. All telling us that every public service in Britain is on its knees, traduced, despised, underfunded and rogered into imbecility by faceless dragoons of doublespeaking loony left sociology graduates who live in a self-reflecting bubble of leftery and who mouth insane platitudes about empowerment and institutional racism and inclusion and disadvantage and abuse this and abuse that.

Winston hates all his bosses, and he also hates most of the kids he works with, chavvy scumbags all; occasionally he’ll say there are a handful who are okay, but these, as in any classroom, are the ones who keep a low profile. Winston also comes within a pamphlet’s-breadth of advocating social Darwinist eugenics – he obviously thinks the wrong people are breeding and that chav girls should have their tubes tied at age 12. One can’t tell him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because, he does. He describes himself as someone from the sensible left, but is constantly throwing out jeremyclarkisms – ADHD and dyslexia are probably real afflictions, but every second or third kid who he meets claims to have both – he suggests they’re just the modern euphemisms for “stupid”. It’s hard not to find Winston’s constant heavy handed sarcasm and fountains of bile tiresome. But alas, I think he’s more right than wrong. And that’s why you should never vote for me! I think the whole matter could be solved by an inclusive programme of practical family planning for the socially disadvantaged, backed up by the establishment of a few life enrichment and re-advantagement camps – no, let’s say parks – dotted around in the further reaches of northern Scotland. That could work.

But seriously - this is a huge huge problem, the kids Winston discusses are the ones who a few years later cram the jails with illiterate drug users, we read about them occasionally with a shudder when one of them commits some awful crime or another - it's like there is a great swathe of working class/underclass kids who - I suppose - used to be the cannon fodder in the constant wars Western society liked to indulge in up until 1945 - but now, there's no role for them, they simply can't cope with modern life where 95% of heavy manufacturing jobs have been exported to China and India. What are they supposed to do? there aren't enough Macdonalds. Maybe we are all going to hell in a handbasket and maybe some people have already arrived there before the rest of us.

**

Update -

So we have had four days of riots in England (August 6th to 9th) in various cities, including my own, Nottingham, where they firebombed a police station and trashed some shops and cars in the centre.

These riots were downright weird. We're in J G Ballard territory here. I get the impression that maybe two thirds of the rioters were the expected Generation F underclass, and the other third were not, like the trainee ballerina and the student stealing a telly to help finance her gap year. The underclass elements appear to have been made up principally of gang members who organised the riots in specific areas at specific times via Twitter & Blackberry messaging, and furthermore organised truces between their rival gangs for the period.
The twitter/blackberry aspect of it is fascinating. The rage element of it is horrifying. Riots burn themselves out along with the buildings, it seems, and they don't sustain, but four successive days and nights were enough to get everyone's attention. In the past the rapacity of the underclass has been kept in check by their inability to organise - perhaps we see that modern technology has liberated them. We must see what now follows.

I'm glad that the massive issue of the underclass has risen up the political agenda. Cameron is now saying that the "slow motion moral collapse" of sections of our society has been ignored for too long. Yes, he's right, but lord help us if he's the guy who's going to try to fix it.

In 2008 we had the spectacle of the the credit crunch and the banks nearly collapsing due to their own out-of-control greed. So then it turned out that they were too big to fail and the government handed out brain-bleedingly huge loans. Then we saw that this massive incompetence did not deter the bankers one moment in awarding each other billions in bonuses, wreathed around with the usual excuses. Then, in the UK, we had the unedifying spectacle of the scandal of MPs' expenses, which led several of them to a court appearance and a few weeks in jail, and the rest of them writing cheques out and saying sorry. In fact all the money fiddled by all the MPs wouldn't make a tenth part of your standard bank annual bonus, but the message was clear - your leaders, your betters, are screwing as much as they can, they have no morals, they have no shame - so, my brothers and sisters, why should you?

Are we then surprised that some fairly poor young people think - yeah, I'll grab a telly.

Looking around for other books on the underclass, I find that you get heartfelt rants like Generation F and scholarly sociology and hardly anything in between. I think the book writers turn away in horror - they come from education and the middle class, they can't cope with the awfulness of the lives which turn up on the Jeremy Kyle Show and in the tabloids as another abused dead child floats from the social workers' casebooks into the tv news, or as another random guy walking home gets kicked to death by some 15 years olds whith brains full of White Lightning and frustration. We the educated have been thinking that the underclass can stew in its own juice, spray them with enough benefits to keep them from dying and leave the rest to God or the Devil. Well, that's not working any more.

[John Dow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Utterly depressing and soul-destroying.

[Paul Holden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jesus. I don’t want want to repeat the other reviews, so read them. My God this was depressing. They also work in a place that hopes to encourage young people to get ready for living in the real world.

Instead, those kids expect everything to be done for them while they abuse the staff as much as they like, because nothing will come back to them. It’s all about the needs of those kids. Never mind they are getting stoned and drunk during the day when they are supposed to be looking for a job or getting an education, as long as the key worker fills in a form to prove they’ve tried it’s all fine. No one cares about how the staff feel. What an absolute joke. I really hope things have changed since this book came out, but I’m not about to hold my breath.

[Mr S Jarvis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sorry full read, I felt, where bureaucracy and the rights of the individual in some circumstance allow people to fall into traps that could we have been avoided.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a true front line account of an individual, Winston Smith, working in the social housing sector in Britain mainly at the Emmanuel Goldstein Project owned by the Ocenia Housing Association. Dealing with all types of characters, mainly youths, including late night party goers, high strength lager and cannabis loving aficionados and if there was ever a swear jar installed on the premises, they would be millionaires. On top of all this he also has to put up with a very flawed bureaucracy in the project of consistently rewarding residents for bad and unruly behaviour and bending the rules to placate them to avoid an escalated confrontation of verbal and sometimes physical abuse.

I always enjoy reading a book published by Monday Books and this one is no different. They like to tackle very bold and shocking subjects but at the same time make them very informative and sometimes add a touch of humour.

[Jess · Rating 1 out of 5]

This may in some ways be a realistic portrayal of this man's experience of working within the social housing sector in the UK and he makes some valid arguments. Some of what he describes does sound like bureaucracy and 'rights culture' gone mad BUT that didn't take away the pessimism and negativity I felt permeated this entire book. Point made! I couldn't wait to finish this book... but maybe I'm just a left-wing do-gooder want-to-change-the-world liberal like he used to be before he wised up...

[Joanna b · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having worked in children's social care I can say that everything here regarding the cult of form filling and rampant enabling is more true than not. Thank christ I left.

[Joely Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

This really was good. Occasionally funny, but eye-opening, and a challenge to all left-wing individuals (such as myself) about how we think about the youth of today.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing! Perhaps my favourite book I've read all year. Hilariously funny in parts, but with a serious message too. Absolutely brilliant :D Would recommend it to anyone!

[Frenzal06 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anybody living in the uk. Needs to read this book it's so eye opening and written in a way that gets to the point but is very humorous

[Jayne Evanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book gives the inside truth to working in supported housing. the upsand downs of working with young people

[M.k. Yost · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shocking. Unremittingly depressing.