In Britain, Maggie Thatcher (hoick phtoooey) introduced the 'Right to Buy' - council tennants could buy their homes rather than rent them. Consequently, the houses with multiple bedrooms, bathrooms and indoor lavatories (the council house I lived in until 1982 still had an outside toilet), had gardens and were well built, were sold off. They tended to be in the nicer areas - places where there were schools, shops, a good social infrastructure and a "community". They were nice places to live and people wanted to stay there.

This left the less salubrious areas, the smaller houses, the high rise flats and the badly designed estates for the councils to house those for whom buying was not an option. Many estates were designed with the object of getting as many people into as small a space as possible, to generate greater income through rents. They forgot about simple amenities. An example can be seen in Glasgow. They cleared one of the slum tenements and moved the inhabitants to a block of flats on the outskirts of Glasgow. The flats were brand new and had lovely views of the city and the docks. What they didn't have were any shops, no school, no bus service, no medical care or banks or all the other facilities that people need just to live - they were all nearly a mile away, on the opposite side of a busy dual carriage way that had no footbridge, underpass or pedestrian crossing. When isolated like that, it's no wonder people want to lash out.

To qualify for a council house you need to fit several criteria, of which, being on benefit and having children were two. Thus you get council owned estates populated by low or no income families, youngsters who have been in council foster care until 16, teenagers who have been thrown out of homes and those who choose to get pregnant soley so they can get a council flat away from their homes (and yes, it does happen). You end up with a fairly small section of population for whom work has never been available. To put them all into the same estate is just putting all the rotten eggs into one basket. If you have no money to care for yourself, you are certainly not going to waste any on a building that someone else has a duty of care to look after.

Consequently, you've got a culture of not caring, which extends to the surrounding area and pretty soon, you've got a no-go area where not even DHL will go (Canning Town, London - DHL will no longer deliver packages there, they're fed up with being mugged and having their vans stolen).

The look of ill health goes with lack of proper diet, little excercise and a fairly depressing, hopeless future, all associated with low or no wage families.

LTS