Cities and social problems - 8 May 1992

When they were warming up the presidential plane last Wednesday for Mr Bush's flight to look over the damage in Los Angeles, somebody noticed there was a seat near to the president that was marked, reserved. Reserved for Mr Kemp. When Mr Kemp was asked about this, he said, "nice to be needed", a sentence of bitter restraint that could yet go down in the history books. Mr Jack Kemp was one of President Bush's first appointments as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

It was a happy choice, in the sense that Mr Kemp, alone among the top men and women in the Bush administration, has had for years a stinging bee in his bonnet about the condition of the inner cities of America. Neither his passion nor his anxiety about them was shared, not publicly anyway, by Mr Bush or any of his close advisers and for the past three years reporters with a morbid interest in political loners have remarked from time to time, how Mr Kemp was very soon relegated, figuratively speaking, to his monk's cell, there to spend all the time he cared to on his odd obsession. He kept shooting plans and memos to the president. They were either ignored by the boss or ridiculed by his director of the budget.

In one specially tense exchange in the spring of 1990, Mr Kemp sent a letter up to an amorphous and not very active presidential body called the Domestic Policy Council. He drafted plans for an anti-poverty campaign and warned that the condition of the inner cities has now reached a critical mass. The White House responded with a blueprint for a series of technical studies on how this poverty programme and that and the other are financed. Mr Kemp, breaking away for once from the allegiance all cabinet officers owe to their president at all times, Mr Kemp exploded in an angry retort. He accused the White House of studying the problem to death and throwing up its hands. That's not a vision, he wrote, you're bureaucratising the effort and sending it to oblivion. Meanwhile, what's going on in our neighbourhoods and our streets?

I don't suppose there's a living American who has seen more, more continuously, of the sums of the cities, the mixed ethnic ghettoes, the barrios of the Hispanics, the rotted residential neighbourhoods that once housed whites and blacks but have not been deserted as a kind of pale by all the whites who could afford to escape to the suburbs. However, since that crackling exchange two years ago, Mr Kemp has been left to work out plans and proposals to go and beg and preach about them before committees of Congress with no visible support from his own president or the bulk of his party – nor, it has to be said, from the Congress which for 38 years has been almost a legislative extension of the Democratic party.

Briefly what Mr Kemp has been pleading for is what he calls enterprise zones in the inner cities, to be financed partly by Congress, by private citizens and by corporations, to help the poor residents own their business and houses and apartments and start them off with big tax breaks. He wants tenants in public housing to have a chance to buy their units, to let parents choose their children's schools. In short he wants to rehabilitate the slums so that people will want to work and live there. He wants the administration of such programmes to be done by people on the spot and not by visiting federal or state politicians. From the Congress all he sought was money. He got a little for buying your own apartment. He's had nothing for the rest. But, came the dreadful explosion of 29 April and somebody in the White House must have sheepishly concluded that Jack Kemp after all had not been crying wolf all this time. On the president's plane going to California, consequently, he had that seat close by the president.

Well ever since those dreadful events, as you can imagine the media have been arguing and pounding away the theories and explanations, confessionals, grievances and much blame delivered by every sort of public and private figure. Most people still are thrashing and arguing over why, why did it happen? This is particularly true of some foreign reporters here and from prominent European politicians, who tended to ask why and in the same breath make a rush to judgement. They took two lines, one like M Mitterrand – how appalling, thank god nothing like that could happen with our police. M Mitterrand has evidently talked to many poor North Africans lately. Apart from this familiar European line – why aren't you more like us – there is theory which is a mainstay of the Democrats' tack against President Bush, that he and Ronald Reagan are most responsible because they drastically cut or repealed President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. To which the administration responds: no, you've got it the wrong way round. LBJ's war on poverty failed, it didn't work.

Both these explanations are quick and easy and both are wrong. Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty is still being fought by his means and, during the Reagan 1980s, the change in spending on social services was an increase in real dollars over the 1970s of 20%. The Republican move on from this fact to say that far from eliminating poverty, LBJ's war – they mean welfare – has subsidised it.

The truth is that some parts of LBJ's war have succeeded very well and some have failed very badly. The great and continuing successes are food stamps, a record 25 million people use them today, they've been a bulwark against hunger, Head Start and the Job Corps. Head Start enlists toddlers and prepares them for their first school better than they'd be prepared at home or unprepared and starting cold. It more often than not sets a small child on a lifetime habit of study. The Job Corps takes teenagers out of the slums, puts them in rural camps, to train them intensively for jobs.

The signal failures of the poverty war have been Community Action, so-named, where the federal government tried to improve the ghettos with outside politicians helping individuals. Apart from antagonising local politicians and breeding much pay-off corruption, it maintained the ghetto as an isolated slum. The other big failure is Affirmative Action, a federal law with a noble purpose which requires employers to bear in mind the peculiar servitude of the blacks over two, three hundred years and in handing out jobs, to see that all things being equal, the minority, usually black, is given preference. If the qualifications aren't equal, then, alas too often, marks may be added to the less qualified blacks, in order to respect, if not to represent, the proportion of blacks and other minorities in that community.

Now you can see that this is a prescription for mischief, of unfair preference, one way or another, for reverse discrimination, for observing in fact, if not in theory, quotas. Well, it seems to me that what to do is linked with the answer to why it happened and before anybody can find an effective, workable answer, Mr Bush, Governor Clinton, H Ross Perot, the Democratic majority in Congress, whoever, there are many unrelated facts that have to be borne in mind. Perhaps only Mr Kemp is aware of most of them. Because many of them are irreconcilable, I make no attempt to weave them into a pattern or a plot. They are some things to bear in mind.

That Los Angeles, like New York, like Miami, like many cities in the south and south-west, is not a city of whites and blacks. Only eight years from now more than 50% of all Californians will be non-whites – blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and a little later on this mixture will be the main workforce that the whole nation has to depend on. At the moment they live in much friction, together because they mostly live in slums which we've come to call ghettoes. They live cheek by jowl with the scum of the slums, with well-paid teenage runners for the drug pushers. Their apartment houses are riddled with crack. Incidentally the high-rise public housing tower has been a disaster, requiring patrols on every floor to safeguard women and children.

The most significant and dangerous element of city slums, that has emerged and proliferated in the past 20 years is the gang. Gangs of teenagers, well-disciplined, living by a pathetic loyalty code, pledged to shoot, kill if need be, other gangs, not expecting to live beyond the age of 15. It was from these vicious elements that the arsonists and the vanguard of the looters were recruited. Item: Welfare cheques are a lifeline for many millions. They're also permanent cushions for the lazy. Item: Yes, there is police brutality. Item: The police who tour these ghettoes face hideous social problems and threats every night of their working lives

One black Congresswoman made a point I've not heard from a person, indeed of any colour, that the recognition of class has now entered into the consciousness of poor blacks. Class among their own meaning that when you point to the hundreds of thousands of blacks who in the past 30, 40 years, have graduated from college, turned into professionals, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, administrators, politicians, the poor black does not necessarily feel proud and say, look, we have come through, he's one of us, he sees a man who escaped. So, said this thoughtful black woman, you point to a Supreme Court justice, who is black, to Mayor Bradley of Los Angeles, to General Colin Powell, the top soldier of the United States, as far as the ghetto black is concerned, they might just as well be white. Now that is a social psychological problem never anticipated in all the laws for welfare, student loans, affirmative action, all the brave efforts to lift the black man up and take him away from his poverty. Many at any rate, if not most, it seems, surely want to be lifted up, but then put down to a better life in their own, much improved neck of the woods.

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