Walsall

By
Garry Newman
 – August 23, 2009

NOTE: I’ve been writing this over a few days so please excuse me if it has no point, or if I’m making a point then in the next sentence make the exact opposite point.

I was talking to a friend the other day about the town in which we live, Walsall. Which is in the West Midlands of England, north of Birmingham. We were talking about which pubs/clubs we liked, and why we did or didn’t like them.

We agreed that we both liked Revolution, because there weren’t any scrubbers – probably because it’s relatively expensive compared to the rest of town. The cheapest probably being Chicago’s, which offers cheap drinks – including £10 in and all you can drink on a Thursday night.

If you’re looking for women, in Chicago’s you will find fat, beaten up looking women, with tattoos on their arms bearing the names and dates of birth of their 6 kids. In Revolution you will find professional women, nurses, students, posh birds from the south of Walsall (I come from the North of Walsall).

This is like a metaphor for how Walsall runs. Maybe how England runs.

You got two types of people, scrubbers and workers.

Scrubbers don’t work. They don’t have a legitimate reason for not working. You see them all the time in Walsall. They’re the people that are sitting outside their houses around a 4×4 revving the engine but never actually going anywhere. They’re the people you see at 11am walking down the street with a crate of beer on their shoulders. They’re the problem.

It’s easy to look at them and think, lazy cunts, get off your arse and do something. But that doesn’t get you anywhere to think like that. They probably don’t know any better. Their parents did that. They don’t know what it’s like to have a job.

I went to school with people like this. I know a girl, she was 16, she’d just left school. She was telling me how she didn’t want to end up like everyone else, working all week in a shitty job to pay the bills. I explained that all great journeys start with a first small step. You have to start somewhere. You’d have to start with a shitty job that you probably don’t like, if only to get money and experience, for something like £150 a week. “£150 a week?”. Her eyes bulged out of her head with surprise. “There’s no way I’d get a job making that much”. That’s minimum wage. And I remember when I was under 16 and that was an insane amount of money. She had no idea how much jobs paid, and how much she was losing by sitting around on her arse all day.

She’s 19 now. She has never had a job, she’s pregnant, probably alcoholic. Her friend is an alcoholic, and has a baby. It’s easier to stick together than to strive out and break away. She didn’t want to make a decision that would define the rest of her life, and by not making that decision she’s had it made for her. No more jobs, no money. 16 years of benefits. Probably more kids, more benefit. Easier to do nothing.

It all boils down to one thing. Confidence, self esteem. She didn’t have any confidence. She didn’t know how to apply for jobs. She had the wrong attitude towards non scrubbers. She felt like they saw her as a scrubber. Stupid. Unemployable. So she was defensive, to the point of being aggressive. Her friends didn’t want her to get a job and move on, they were alcoholics, they had babies, they weren’t going anywhere, so she wasn’t going to get any encouragement from them. Her family wasn’t so much interested in helping, as making fun of her under-age park bench drinking and her love bites.

And that’s the biggest problem with Walsall.

If you ask a scrubber in Walsall what the problem is, they’ll probably tell you there’s too many Polish people, too many Muslims. They’re what’s ruining the town. You go to the job centre, there’s not one Muslim or Polish face there. There’s plenty of pale white lads wearing addidas tracksuit bottoms and baseball caps, leaving their cider cans outside while they go to sign on. The Polish and Muslims are paying their taxes, they’re adding to the town. Scrubbers are just taking from it.

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