June 1
When you’re approaching people on the streets in areas with heavy immigration from third-world countries, high crime-rates and a lot of drug- and alcohol-abuse, it’s hard to filter the alarms going off in your head; when is it a prejudice you may have and when is it your brain rightfully doing its job to keep you safe? That was Birmingham today. Of course it didn’t help – on the way to Stratford Road Sparkbrook – having Scotty read ‘Dodgy areas of Birmingham’ from the Virtual Tourist; recounting all the muggings and bashings people have enjoyed, as he listed all the destinations that matched the ones that had been chosen for us.
I don’t want to be unfair to Birmingham. We did something different today; we got a cabbie – a Pakistani that had lived here for 18 years – and asked him to take us to the most ‘interesting’ places in Birmingham, and he really delivered.
What we saw was often hard, dirty and rough. People being taken advantage of and people taking advantage of others. A dog-eat-dog world, fuelled by poor and sometimes desperate immigrants; that I thought was more part of the UK during the industrial revolution than now.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure you can find areas like this in most big cities. It’s just that today, that’s mainly what we did.
But as confronting as some of what we heard was – and this was mainly off-camera – in most areas, after walking around and talking to people, we felt safer and more comfortable than when we did when we arrived. I think people were more suspicious of us than we were worried by them.
So here’s my thing from today: heaps of people are struggling, fighting for survival or for a better life; and a tough life in the UK is way better than the life many people have come from. But with limited education (and English), as marketers I think we’re letting down a proportion of the population, or worse, we’re taking horrible advantage of them. With fine print, misleading claims and overly-aggressive and incentivised sales forces, some companies are willingly or negligently taking advantage of the most vulnerable people in society.
It’s hard to imagine anyone feeling right or good about high-cost lending to the people we met today; or tricking people into phone contracts they can’t afford; or selling them alcohol – dressed up to represent a glamorous, successful life – at 8.00am.
Is Birmingham a place I look forward to visiting again? To be honest it’s not; but we were treated well. We were confronted with some realities that were pretty hard to see, and we learnt a lot.
I’m grateful to the people of Birmingham for what they taught me today.
talledsmith 