"The Angel's Share"

Sometimes a piece of fiction captures exactly a situation that no academic research can accurately depict. Seeing ‘The Angel’s Share’ at the cinema recently brought home to me the background and lives of many of the offenders we meet through our work on healthy prisons. In a mirror of the film’s story, the lead actor is also an ex-offender; the film’s scriptwriter  (Paul Laverty) met him  (Paul Brannigan) at the Strathclyde police unit for violence reduction. Brannigan was jailed aged 16 for four years, after being involved in a gun battle involving family members. Both his parents were drug addicts and he was brought up in a tough part of Glasgow. That he has turned into an actor, and is now involved in another film, is a fantastic success story. He commented, “It probably saved my life. I’d nowhere to turn, got a kid; who knows what I’d have done for money”. That sense of having nowhere else to turn except to do something illegal is a feature of the film. A group of people meet by chance at the courts, all having escaped custodial sentences but being required to do community service.  What they contrive to do together does involve some illegal acts but it’s a really heartwarming story and also extremely funny. It has a happy ending and remains an uplifting film. Directed by Ken Loach, it is in his tradition of an honest, gritty, almost documentary style that captures the bleakness and brutality of life on some of the poorest estates in Britain. It really did seem that for the main characters, they would have been safer in prison than on the streets where they lived. This is also a sentiment echoed by some of the prisoners interviewed over the years by us, including those in a major study by my colleague James Woodall for his PhD.

That offenders come from these kinds of backgrounds is well known. Offenders are not typical of the general population - they are more likely to be drawn from sub-sections of the population regarded as marginalized and with a complex set of needs. 27% of offenders were taken into care as children (compared with 2% of non-offenders) and the statistics for other social problems run the same pattern: 49% of male and 33%  of female offenders were excluded from school (3% non-offenders); 52% of male and 71% female offenders have no qualification (15% non-offenders); 67% of offenders were unemployed before offending and 32% were homeless. Two thirds of male and just over a half of female offenders used drugs in the year before offending.

The low educational attainment and limited life chances are evident whenever you meet prisoners. This isn’t true of all offenders and it also isn’t the case that all those with poor life chances turn to crime. However, just as some environments are salutogenic or pathogenic, so too are some environments more or less criminogenic. Life can be toxic in parts of poor Britain; children too, simply learn whatever is around them, and up to a half of people in prison also had a father who went to prison. Paul Brannigan, who could play the lead role so convincingly because in essence it was his story, said, “In Glasgow, there’s no work. There’s no ships or houses getting built. No opportunities, no hope. And when you’ve no hope you can’t get your motivation up, your self-confidence goes down and you turn to drink and drugs. It’s a downwards spiral”.

So “The Angel’s Share” is a story about the social determinants of health, about what it means when someone takes you under their wing, shows faith in you and when someone offers you a chance to make a new start, with practical help – a job, a house. It’s also a story of how people can use their own imagination, ingenuity and talent to seize that opportunity once presented. And the angel’s share is that part of the whiskey that evaporates when it’s maturing inside the barrel……

Social mobility and 'jubilee'

Health promotion celebrates the possibility of change; it sees change as a force for good. People can change their lifestyle, their mindset, can get out of a health-harming situation – given the right kinds of social support. And societies can change – clearly history tells us this.  Thus the importance of people being able to change their social status is central to health promotion, given how much health inequalities are related to it. So the recently published report on social mobility in Britain makes depressing reading for anyone in health promotion.

Alan Milburn is the government’s Independent Reviewer on Social Mobility and Child Poverty, and in the report on social mobility and the professions, he suggests that social mobility has stagnated: http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/IR_FairAccess_acc2.pdf

It appears that people in their 40s today are less socially mobile than people born in the 1950s (which includes me).  I benefitted from the greater access to education, including University, but that possibility has now ground to a halt, meaning that the biggest predictor of how well a child will do in life is the socioeconomic circumstances he or she is born into. The idea that birth determines life chances is of course, what a monarchy rests on. Having life chances determined by birth is seen as antithetical in a democracy, which is why the UK government has set out 17 indicators for social mobility or ‘life chances’ through childhood. Some of these indicators aim to decrease the huge gap in educational resources and attainment, with a stress on the early years, or pre-school interventions. Some of this may mean that the previous government’s measures will be continued, such as the Sure Start initiatives, many of which our Centre for Health Promotion Research evaluated. Now Children’s Centres, it will be interesting to see if they survive the ‘austerity cuts’ of the present regime. 

Milburn’s report highlights how educational attainment is so important to gaining professional employment – although only 7% of the population is privately educated, 70% of high court judges and 54% of FTSE 100 chief executives and top journalists, and 22% of medical and dental school students went to fee-paying schools. Our government and civil service are disproportionally run by the privately educated and privileged. In 2010, the Higher Education Funding Council for England reported some substantial increases in the number of youngsters from the poorest areas going into higher education from 2005 onwards, fueled by Labour’s investment. This appears to have ended with the switch to the coalition government; the class divide at the heart of our country, fueled by private education, has always been replicated in the tertiary sector, but this source of social mobility seems to have been shut off.

Birth as destiny is all around us this ‘jubilee’ week; that it is 'natural' to be born into one’s station in life appears to be a part of the British psyche. The royal family appears more popular than ever. Polls tell us that only 22% of the population wants the monarchy to be replaced by something more democratic. The monarchy, defending as it does class divisions, hierarchy, unearned wealth, militarism, and inherited privilege remains powerfully at the centre of ‘British’ life. To be born into fantastic privilege – and stay there - legitimates the fact that people can be born into deprivation – and stay there. It legitimates the 'naturalness' of social immobility. 

The ‘jubilee’ is heralded as a unifying pageant across all sectors of society; this version of ‘jubilee’, as a sharing of a popular culture, is far from the original meaning as set out in Judeo-Christian traditions, where it was meant as the cancellation of debts, freeing of slaves, sharing out of land, and equalization of resources. Biblically, it asked people to challenge the rights of the wealthy, to side with the poor and disadvantaged. This is the meaning adopted by the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which is still attempting to reduce the debts of the poorest countries whilst also highlighting the workings of the global finance system, tax evasions and lack of accountability of corporate capital. It has recently called for a new justice jubilee:

http://www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk/Launch3720of37203727Jubilee3720for3720Justice37273720call+7668.twl

The campaign asks us to remember the original meaning of jubilee, as, essentially, a call for economic and social justice.  Health justice, the key value at the heart of health promotion,  is contingent on these other forms of justice.