A week ago, I found myself in the suburb of London where the 2011 riots kicked off. And then last week, by coincidence, I visited the suburb of Paris where that country’s 2005 riots began.
And this is what I can tell you: London is better than Paris. It’s as simple as that. Sure, Paris has its boulevards, its whole quartiers of intact 19th-century architecture and the kind of cheese shops that can clog an artery at a hundred yards. There are trottoir cafes, I’ll admit, and steak frites and tartes aux fraises and heartstopping glimpses of the Eiffel Tower.
But there’s no point in judging a city by the bits in which rich people live. The Marais, Chelsea, St Germain, Kensington… they’re all pretty nice if that’s your thing. If you want to drink overpriced cappuccinos in the company of people worrying about the colour of their next Range Rover, any of them will do.
But by your outcasts shall you be known. Where your poor live. Where your riots start. And here there’s no contest. Call a taxi in Tottenham and the driver probably won’t assume you’re a victim of violent crime, as happened to me two days ago in its Parisian equivalent of Clichy-sous-Bois. “Are you OK?” he asked. “Stay right where you are!” And he rang back every five minutes or so to check we weren’t dead in a ditch. “It’s not normal,” he explained when he arrived. “Foreigners don’t come here.”
The suburb is where two teenagers died in an electricity substation in 2005 after being wrongfully pursued by the police. It set off a wave of violence that engulfed the country’s banlieues: 9,000 cars were torched and 3,000 people arrested. Ten years on, not an awful lot has changed. Unemployment stands at over 20%. A massive new police station has been built but there’s still no actual infrastructure. You can’t even get there. There’s no railway station, no highway. In traffic, it took nearly as long to get to Clichy from Paris (about 11 miles) as it took to get to Paris from London.
Its inhabitants are poor, black, Arab. How many white people live here? I asked one long-time resident. “Less than half a per cent,” he said. It’s a ghetto. A sink hole. A dumping ground where the lack of infrastructure looks like public policy. A way of keeping the centre of Paris racially and socially homogeneous. Tottenham, by comparison, looks like a racially integrated paradise. Despite the two major riots that started here – one in 1985 on the Broadwater Farm estate and again in 2011 – compared with Clichy it’s a booming economic success story.
A fast underground ride from central London, the high road is no 19th-century Haussmann boulevard – it’s full of pound shops and bookmakers and fried chicken takeaways. But at least it has pound shops and bookmakers and fried chicken takeaways.
In Clichy-sous-Bois, there’s not even a high street. There’s a McDonald’s on a roundabout. I know all this goes against our national expectation to see ourselves as a bit crap. (Who among us thought the Olympics was going to be anything other than a complete shambles?)
But when you start looking for evidence that London is actually better than the City of Light – of all places – you don’t have to look very far. Fight your way past the taxi touts at the chaotic Gare du Nord and you’ll disembark in the graceful, light-filled expanse of St Pancras where a line of Boris’s ambassadors will greet you with maps and directions.
Even the over-priced coffee has a higher chance of being actually drinkable in London. But then, we have more beards here. In the world’s beard index, we lead the world, second only to Brooklyn. And though they have downsides, hipsters, their ability to brighten up previously unloved neighbourhoods with their chalkboards and handlebar moustaches is without precedent. They are arriving in Clichy-sous-Bois no time soon.
But it’s so much more than that. Whatever you think of him, it’s a testament to what makes London great that Sadiq Khan, the son of a Pakistani bus driver, won Labour’s mayoral nomination last week. In France, there are just nine non-white deputies in the entire national assembly. Before the last election, there was only one.
There probably is racism in Tottenham. I live in another racially diverse bit of London and I don’t see it. But maybe I wouldn’t. But there’s also the Marcus Garvey library, and the Bernie Grant arts centre and David Lammy as MP. Our high streets full of pound shops and bookmakers and chicken takeaways should actually be a point of pride.
Once you’ve been to Clichy-sous-Bois, central Paris feels like Marie Antoinette’s fake farm at Versailles where she used to play at being a milkmaid: a simulacrum of city life just minus the actual life. An ersatz play city laid on for the rich and deluded.
W while any sane person should worry about what will become of those who can’t afford to drop half a million quid on a one-bedroom flat and where on earth the doctors will live, let alone the nurses and bus drivers, at least we’re throwing infrastructure, such as Crossrail, at the problem.
When the Economist soberly quantified the advantages of seeking asylum in Britain over France, it found almost no difference. And yet look at the Jungle in Calais. Look at the risks that people run to get here. It should be an enormous point of pride that they’re so desperate to reach our shores. It’s got nothing to do with the benefit system – you can’t get much more motivated or dynamic than wanting to fling yourself on a moving train, all to claim jobseeker’s allowance. It’s to do with perception. You can make it as an immigrant here in a way that you can’t in France.
It’s this that has made London what it is: great, thriving, full of Somali taxi drivers and Romanian baristas and French bankers. If I was a Syrian refugee, I’d throw myself on a moving train to get here too.
