There we go, there's a bit Tangled Up in Blue from the legendary Bob Dylan.
Right, I'm very pleased to say that we should have Mr John Harris on the other end
of the line, is that correct?
I hope so. —Thank you very much for coming on the show,
it's really appreciated.
Tell us about Anywhere but Westminster.
I mean, our job formally is political journalists but we had a crack at being sort of normal political
journalists go into party conferences and chasing after politicians and all that,
and it drove us mad really, so what we started to do instead was just sort of
go out into the world and talk to people about the reality of their lives ...
You're gonna get a soundscape of people's personal truths ...
I'm a massive Søren Kierkegaard fan, so you know, personal truths being subjective, I think
it's so powerful.
Let's go to the town centre.
Middlesbrough. What street are you on?
Going to Linthorpe Road ...
Where's the street view option?
You've not done this before? — I've got better things to do than this, go on.
It's a familiar feeling, man, it's a hot afternoon and I'm wandering down an unfamiliar High Street.
Let's see what's around.
Daisy's Flower Boutique.
Hello, Daisy speaking.
Oh, hello, I'm sorry to bother you, my name is John Harris,
I'm a journalist, I work for the Guardian, the newspaper.
Middlesbrough is one of the most disadvantaged places in Britain and one of the hardest hit by austerity.
It's had one of the highest rates of the Covid-19 infection in the country.
You just see some very, very sad stories ...
You know, about the way people are struggling and everything.
And yeah, my heart just goes out to everybody,
I wish everything would go back to normal.
You know, it won't for a long, long time if ever.
And just worried how many businesses are actually going to get through this.
Do you think you will?
It looks like I will but it's by the absolute skin of my teeth.
Have you been following the Dominic Cummings story?
Well ...
I do think that the too strong on this, that's my opinion.
You didn't vote Conservative in the last election?
No, I didn't.
I haven't voted for quite a few years because I am so fed up with politics.
So we are going down a little further.
Where are you going? What direction?
Longlands Travel, a mini bus company.
Are you from the mini bus company?
I am, I'm the owner, yes.
and then I have got vulnerable people in my household.
I said I am not going to send my children to school.
It's funny because the government talks as if somehow it's on its way out
and we sort of taking steps out of it ... Does it feel like that in Middlesbrough?
No, not at all.
Where is that?
Another barber shop, just behind that van.
Let's find the van.
Since it changed to be, stay alert ...
And what do you make of the way the government's handled it?
It's not that out in the proverbial country the Cummings thing is insignificant, it's not you know,
people have noticed it.
But I think this idea, 'everyone's furious, everyone's full of rage', it's not that.
It's just the latest sort of distant letdown, isn't it?
It's another reason to disbelieve.
More and more people we got the sense we are brassed off
with how things were being run and how distant they felt from people in power.
Disconnect is really apparent, I mean, but that's happened for a lot of the time
and that has increased over time ...
We came to Middlesbrough five years ago and ended up in South Bank,
three miles from the centre where one of my granddad's came from.
And how is South Bank doing?
What do you say?
Dying. — Dying?
And work wise?
A lot of people around here get sanctions? — A lot a lot of people have to go out
and make their own living.
It's like no one there believed in the state, did they?
Well, the people we spoke to didn't believe in the state ...
The condition of South Bank, it seemed to me,
was it in the worst way it had been left alone, it had been neglected.
There was no no real sense that anyone had even tried to sort of lead the
people there or the place in towards anything better.
But it's how the whole country's feeling at the moment, do you know what I mean?
We all feel a bit like that now, don't we?
You know something John, there's a perception about this area which is always about
like being like really impoverished and really down but there's masses of
people in Middlesbrough doing amazing things, they truth are, you know, really
inspirational stuff going on.
Hi everyone. So we've just been to Hemlington to collect the washing machine.
Tonia runs a local organization that
began by working on period poverty.
Since Covid-19 struck, she's been filling all sorts of gaps and supplying everything
from fridges to incontinence pads.
What's life like in South Bank in the midst of this crisis would you say?
We're struggling now, it's the people who've been self-employed, the people who have
always worked which are humiliating from because the lads around here, the families around here
always find a way to make money but they have had the legs chopped off.
One of the people Tonia's helped is Aaron. When lockdown began he was laid off from
his job as a roofer and ended up homeless.
The boss has had to lay me off because there was not enough work to put me out
and I couldn't follow my bills at my flat anymore.
I just had to leave it because I was that stressed out, I felt like I was alone.
I just didn't know who to turn to, and it was someone that gave me Tonia's number number
and she came and met me and she said straight away, like, I know like you're
in desperate need and she actually bought me a bed up for the night.
She got me all sorted, do you know what I mean?
She fed me
and she's actually managed to get me ...
The first place didn't work out for Aaron.
It didn't feel safe there, like people banging on doors, I couldn't sleep.
Hey Tonia, I am just taking a little
video of this room that you've put me in.
I've got no light bulb.
The heater is not working.
I wouldn't expect a TV, but it would be nice.
... pretty cold, dark, lonely.
Again it was Tonia who stepped in and helped him find a B&B.
Now he's got a job.
I work at Tesco Warehouse, eating properly, I'm sleeping properly now,
my mental health is sort of like balancing ...
So you sometimes worry, you're talking in abstract terms,
about, oh you know, an incipient social catastrophe and the sort of economic
disaster of this crisis or social disaster of this crisis, but there it is, right?
If you sort of take it face value what ministers say,
oh he should have been all right, been furloughed or, you know, there's a
moratorium on evictions and all ...
But as you and I both know, millions of people in this country sort of live in a space
where none of that counts for very much, right?
That's the nature of being precarious.
And it's only people like Tonia picking up the pieces, right?
Thank you to everybody who has funded us and helped us.
And people like Pip.
Hello, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you too. How are you?
Pip is a disability activist
and when Covid struck, she sprang into action to pretty much set up a food co-op from
her bedroom.
Basically I logged on to my online shopping account,
and I couldn't get food delivery.
So then I was like, what are we going to do?
And what are my friends going to do, who are disabled?
And that's sort of where I came up with the idea of, well what if I order wholesale?
And we just, you know, buy 25 kilograms of rice, bag it up in the kilogram bags and
distribute it between everybody who can't get online shops.
So, you're in the storage which is in your house?
Yeah.
Give us a sense of your surroundings ...
I can't really walk around because I'm disabled and I don't want to fall over ...
We've tried to empower people who receive our help
to help other people and so for example the girls that take the orders for
everybody, receive parcels themselves so they give back to the project.
The care sector, I think, there's another thing that really needs to change.
We saw ... gone are the days where people think that disabled people are somebody that needs
to be fed and changed and got up at 7 o'clock in the morning
and put to bed at 6 o'clock at night and left ...
We spoke to Middlesbrough's independent Mayor who's also determined not to be
passive about the town's situation.
Today there's a press release going out,
we are announcing and confirming that and we're putting up the tallest commercial
building between Leeds and Glasgow and we're creating a 21st century city from
scratch in the oldest part of Middlesbrough.
We're really optimistic, we're very confident ...
Remarkably positive.
But what I don't want you to think is that we're fucking deluded because we are not.
We need more money and if, you know,
if Boris Johnson's watching this ...
I'll text him in a minute, we text him every night.
Boris, mate, we need money and I'm not dicking about,
I'm not saying that it's not a, you know, a 1980 style flag-waving thing
but God if you want to look at us to look after people, Boris, and the government,
give us some more money.
I think getting us is get on a spotlight on all the amazing things that's going on in Middlesbrough against the
struggles I think he can only be a positive thing all around.
I regret I see that we came to Middlesbrough five years ago and did a film about
Middlesbrough then and a lot of it was ...
a lot of it was set in South Bank ...
That is one of the maybe more like traditional ...
It's one of the more deprived areas ...
If we knew then what we know now we would have really really gone looking for people doing
community-based things.
Well, you know, serendipity, I sort of feel that everything's on a timeline and doors open, doors close
and, you know, like maybe the right time wasn't then, the right time is now.
It's where those guys ... who said about the ghost town.
That was the alleyway you came up.
See where the two men are rolling a barrel?
Wait, that's the same guy. It's pretty much the same guy sitting in that doorway smoking.
Look at this, I found this gallery Saabat.
Hello?
Hello. You can't see me ...
I can't see you, no.
Asad came here as a refugee from Iraq and set up Saabat about six years ago.
When I started people were laughing at me
people were confused, how are you gonna open art gallery in South Bank?
The industry has declined, people has just left and culture is going down ...
Austerity, inequality, we try to highlight all this through the our work in the gallery.
We tried to get some help fund, special from the Arts council.
It's been rejected.
The gallery became the useless and I became useless.
I asked if there was someone interested in the building during this Covid-19 ...
Hi everyone, this is one of my donations to the charity.
Enters Tonia.
Well, this is what we are going to be doing,
Her next venture is the setting up of a clothing bank.
These are the donations I've collected today.
Now we've got the clothing,
we've got the volunteers,
we haven't got any storage or sorting space.
If there's anybody out there who's got a unit, a room ...
There's a respond, from a lady, she's working with a charity.
Yes, I am more than happy, these people can use it.
Boys, we are going to South Bank, we've got a van loaded with clothing ...
We are literally going into this building, can you see that?
Yeah.
The statues and stuff, look.
And this would have been the art space, where all the artists worked.
You're meeting a need there but your aim is something that looks a bit
or a lot nicer than your average charity shop or clothing bank, aren't you?
You can tell.
Yeah, what we want ... So this is the end goal.
It has always been the end goal.
People shouldn't been treated like scum.
We will invite them into this space, the kids will go through the rails,
pick the clothing they want and the shoes that they want,
and they're just take it away for free.
It's adapting and changing with the times.
Covid-19 made us all look further out and think, right what can we do
to bring everything back in? Even if it's people who are the purest
people are coming to get free clothing, once they realise that it is more than a
clothing bank, it is an art gallery, it is a space, it's a community space,
we can start building on that.
It's self renewance, like Nature,
it's self-renewing. Nature has come back.
Look what Nature has managed to do in ten weeks and that's what people are doing.
People are starting to build community from the bottom down.
We are going back to grassroots and that's where we should have been all the time.
All we can think about is the return of the state, right?
From people who report from on the high, right, about the broad currents of politics
and government you keep hearing about, oh, the big state's back and all the rest of it, right?
And that's true in the sense that Rishi Sunak spent all this money on furlough schemes and
all the rest of it.
That's right, doesn't feel like that though, does it?
The state that we found in South Bank with a sort of feeling that
we found in South Bank in 2015 is sort of spreading out across the country.
A lot of people are having this experience of a safety net not being there some how.
The safety nets are in the hands of people like Tonia.
Is it enough?
No, it's not enough.
But doesn't mean it's not absolutely vital and necessary ...
Maybe it's a sort of start for whatever comes, you know?
Yeah, maybe,
that's the point, isn't it?
Right, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to play it out with a song
and I think I should play a song from Elliott Smith, Figure 8.