Let's level the playing field.

• Author: Daniels, Anthony
• Position: Political Landscape - Essay

I WORKED FOR 15 YEARS as a doctor and psychiatrist in a general hospital in a poor area of a British city and in the prison next door, where I was on duty one night in three. The really dangerous people were in the hospital, perhaps because of the presence in the prison next door of very large uniformed men who exerted a strangely calming effect on the prisoners. In the hospital, I personally examined many thousands of patients who had attempted suicide or at least made a suicidal gesture (not quite the same thing of course). They were overwhelmingly from poor homes, and each patient told me of the lives of the three, four, or five people closest to them--and I spoke to many of those people as well. I could not, of course, have spoken to so many people, and heard about so many others, without some general impressions forming themselves in my mind. One abiding impression was of the violence of their lives, particularly that between the sexes--largely the consequence of the fluidity of relations between the sexes--and also of the devastating effect of prevalent criminality upon the quality of daily existence.

Before I did this work, I had spent a number of years working as a doctor in Africa and in other places in the Third World. I also crossed Africa by public transport, such as it was, and consequently saw much of that continent from the bottom up. These experiences also helped me in my understanding of what I was later to see in England. Bear in mind that I had returned from some of the poorest countries in the world, where--in one case--a single hen's egg represented luxury and the people wore the cast-off clothes of Europe that had been donated by charity.

When I returned to England, I naturally was inclined to think of poverty in absolute, rather than in relative, terms--as people not having enough to eat, having to fetch water from three miles away, and so forth, but I soon ceased to think of it in that fashion.

In the course of my duties, I often would go to poor patients' homes. Everyone lived in households with a shifting cast of members, rather than in families. If there was an adult male resident, he generally was a bird of passage with a residence of his own somewhere else. He came and went as his fancy took him. To ask a child who his father was had become an almost indelicate question. Sometimes the child would reply, "Do you mean my father at the moment?" Others simply would shake their heads, being unwilling to talk about the monster who had begot them and whom they wished at all costs to forget.

I should mention a rather startling fact: by the time they are 15 or 16, twice as many children in Britain have a television as have a biological father living at home. The child may be father to the man, but the television is father to the child. Few homes were without televisions with screens as large as a cinema--sometimes more than one--and they never were turned off, so that I often felt I was examining someone in a movie theater rather than in a house, but what was curious was that these homes often had no means of cooking a meal, or any evidence of a meal ever having been cooked beyond the use of a microwave, and no place at which a meal could have been eaten in a family fashion. The pattern of eating in such households was a kind of foraging in the refrigerator, as and when the mood took, with the food to be consumed sitting in front of one of the giant television screens. Not surprisingly, the members of such households often were enormously fat.

Surveys have shown that one-fifth of British children do not eat a meal more than once a week with another member of their household, and many homes do not have a dining table. This pattern is concentrated in the lower reaches of society, where so elementary but fundamental a means of socialization now is unknown. Here I will note in passing that, in my hospital, the illegitimacy rate of the children born in...