As a long time ‘sub’, I watched Bald’s video last week. Yes, it made me cringe, especially when the woman offered him a quickie. And it’s clear that, although he is sympathetic to people wherever he goes in the world, he was concerned that a major shopping street in Birmingham has been taken over by ethnic minority businesses.
But I have to argue with Darren’s view that everything needs some kind of contextualisation. We can see with our own eyes. We can make our own judgements. We don’t need someone with inevitable biases to tell us what to think.
As Darren notes, B+B has travelled around the world documenting the plight of marginalised people, especially those in the post Soviet republics who believe they were better off in the good old days. Is he supposed to offer a solution to their concerns – or should we just look after our own?
AH
Andrew H
2 months ago
An excellent article overall. Having initially eviscerated Bald and Bankrupt’s recent videos on Britain’s dilapidated town centres for their superficiality, I was pleased to see the author highlighting Bald’s genuine warmth and desire to meet people, as demonstrated throughout his countless videos from all over the world.
His recent videos on Plymouth, Weston-Super-Mare and Birmingham do indeed lack analysis, depth and context, but to a large degree I think this has more to do with his own personal approach than any specific fascination with poverty per se. To my knowledge he has spent decades mainly outside the UK and now that he’s back he is genuinely shocked at the dilapidated state of so many towns and cities in the UK. Does he go into the reasons why? No indeed. And the “offered business on Britain’s worst street” is pure clickbait, I agree.
However, when Bald travelled around deeply authoritarian Belarus a few years ago I remember being fascinated at this insight into a country few westerners see and impressed by the way he built up a genuine rapport with the locals, but somewhat mystified by his failure to provide any comment whatsoever on the political context. On the whole, this is just what you get from his channel, although the videos on his migrant journey on foot through the Darien Gap en route to the US are quite different in both tone and content. Anyway, excellent stuff from Darren again.
MD
Mike Downing
2 months ago
There’s a whole host of these on YouTube; t**d towns, the worst town in Britain etc. IPhones and the Internet mean anyone can now be a ‘content creator ‘.
But predictably, there is no guarantee to quality of content or approach towards the subject matter.
Much the same applies to pornography, the bulk of which is now uploaded by ‘private’ individuals to often hilarious effect.
But in both spheres, you occasionally get something truly different which would never have made it past a content moderator. And there are lots of genuinely thought-provoking creators out there; you just have to sort out the gems from the dross.
I did happen across one who had a genuinely sympathetic approach for the residents of towns that have fallen victim to a decade or more of basically no investment, but he’s outnumbered by the ‘look how shit this place is’ lot. I’ve given up on YouTube now.
RS
Ruthven sweet
2 months ago
Is Bald and Bankrupt a journalist? Or is he just a bloke with a phone, a stick and a YouTube account? His work would be far less compelling if he called himself a ‘journalist’. The minute he believes he should be doing some sort of social commentary is the minute everybody loses interest. People are sick of others telling them how things are, in their own self-absorbed, backslapping words. Show, don’t tell. Bald and Bankrupt does this well. We don’t need him to affect faux-concern for the toothless, feckless simpletons of Britain’s streets. Then he just becomes another posh wanker. Continue with your warmth Baldy. Most people love the fleeting interactions and at times condescension towards these people. At least we know it’s real.
I had exactly the same thoughts whilst reading the (far too long) article.
I’ve seen many of B&B’s Soviet videos and he’s got millions of subscribers not because he’s peddling poverty porn. He’s giving people a genuine and unaffected view into the lives of others. And he does this in an entertaining, genuinely curious and empathetic way.
His point about beautiful but rotting Victorian buildings is as well-made as it is a damning indictment of us – the inheritors of this investment. We don’t care, society doesn’t care. It seems that at least B&B does.
TM
T M Murray
2 months ago
Loki’s writing is razor sharp in deconstructing the exploitative hypocrisy of the MSM’s little entertainment programs and how they deftly sidestep any analysis of the subjects they so love to fetishise. His comic flourishes had be rolling. More from Loki please!
GK
Geoffrey Kolbe
2 months ago
“…prints of Eighties kids with rickets playing at the foot of boarded up tenements, in the UK…”
Are we talking about the 1880s? The 1980s was a low point of rickets in the UK
“Bald”, as we internet addicts know him, is an internet treasure. His travels through India, Russia, and the former Soviet ‘stans in Central Asia are simply marvelous. As for poverty, every society has its poor. And those who want to rise above their station in life. I remember some years back a video about a Muslim woman in an Indian slum neighborhood who started her own trash recycling business, on her own, with her husband just looking on, and eventually grew it into a business employing several dozen men from her neighborhood and encompassing three large warehouses. And her saying that her proudest accomplishment was being able to install an indoor toilet in her dwelling so that her daughters did not have to go to the dangerous public toilets anymore. Poverty is a state of mind. No one forces you to drink, do drugs, keep popping out fatherless offspring, or live a dissolute life.
I don’t quite get that, Unherd. “As if 20 ppl upvoted this”. Well 26 ppl upvoted it so far which I find alarming, but I can’t figure out if you find it alarming, also.
HS
Howard S.
2 months ago
Spiro Agnew, a former (disgraced) American Vice-President did say one thing that rang true then and still does today: “Once you’ve seen one slum, you’ve seen them all”.
I enjoyed this despite too much palare di cazzi if you will. Also redacting the place names would bolster a critique of poverty porn, naming them looks like the writers doing it too – albeit last in the line at the gang bang. IMO there’s a main pair of symptoms in waveform hitting each other to create a rip-tide: “nostalgie de bou” (SP? IKFE what pedants you unherders are!) meeting a wave of leftist hysteria. The former works with the realitive “wealth” of UK poor as well as the true poor in Haiti, Peru, Bangla etc. The latter only works with the faux poor – (¿dia de pologloto. eh?). The true poor are too poor to work in porn – they are the bush hookers and if they are lucky they get a plastic chair in the shade when its their turn to show their wares to the passers by. Ppl like the bbc, lewis, and whoever the article focusses on, yemak shmoy, should be deported, penniless, to Caracas or Port Au Prince. That’ll learn ’em.
AL
Alex Lekas
2 months ago
The truth is poverty porn is big business.
So is poverty itself, particularly the pretense of doing something about it. In the US, we have a massive poverty-industrial complex that includes roughly 100 programs at the federal level alone. Which ones work? Don’t know. Which do not work? Don’t know that either. Which duplicate others? Same answer and why are you asking such impertinent questions?
This industry is designed to perpetuate poverty, not reduce it. If it were reduced, then some of those 100+ programs would have to go away. Think of the poor bureaucrats would be displaced and forced to find meaningful work. Every one of those programs and the people in them have an incentive to NOT reduce poverty. Their survival depends on it.
Indeed, the same goes for the race crusaders. They can’t actually end racism and the smart ones know it, but they can gain profit, status, fame, and votes from pretending they can and spend so much taxpayer money on it that it creates an almost self-sustaining ecosystem of race based policies, ideology, programs, etc..
The last time I checked the US had spent $22 trillion on what began as the War on Poverty under the LBJ administration. That was years ago, so the total is far higher now.
The well-off dehumanize the poor so they can shirk their responsibility in building a better society. Instead of mocking these people, civic minded people would be thinking about how we can elevate these people in order to increase overall prosperity.
DC
David Collier
2 months ago
Ben Rich (Bald and Bankrupt) has a worldwide following. On my travels I so often hear people talking about how they watch and enjoy his videos on YouTube, people from many different countries.
Had he done wants Darren wishes he had, i.e. focused on the self-help and self-reliance of communities where people have little material wealth, which unquestionably exists in spades, would that have done anything at all to counteract poverty porn? My intuition is that it would exacerbate it.
Ben Rich tends not to get into social solutions, which given where he’s reported from is very wise. If Darren wants to make a YouTube vlog, I’m sure Ben would advise him on how best to hold a GoPro.
Money where yer mouth is mate! Grumbling never does nuffin!
CB
Chuck Burns
2 months ago
Hip Hop “artist” provides social commentary. I thought the article was well written and was surprised that it was written by a Hip Hop artist. I guess my bias is showing. I am an American living in the United States. I don’t always agree with Bald and Bankrupts politics but I for one appreciate his mini “documentaries”. This one in particular strikes a tender spot because I never realized how far the Leftist politicians and globalists, with their out of control immigration, have drug the UK into utter despair. It is just a matter of time before the replacement strategy, along with a declining birth rate, turns the indigenous Brits into a minority on a path to extinction.
Haven’t you gotten over such quibbles yet?
*Of course if prejudicial preferences or punctilious pedantry were felonies I’d be hung out to dry, or even hanged.
It’s the near total lack of investment in public services and infrastructure – at least outside London – for a decade that’s done it. Not immigration.
EB
Eleanor Barlow
2 months ago
I never watch programmes about poverty. They are always devised and run by people who have had no personal experience of poverty, so however well-meaning they are, the programmes come across as middle class do-gooders dabbling in the lives of their inferiors. They also remind me too much of the time when I was employed as an advice worker by a mental health charity. There, I saw more than enough poverty and misery every day of my working life. There were some uplifting moments, but not many. And in the background, the DWP was a malign presence in the lives of our clients with its casual cruelty towards those who were unfortunate enough to have to claim state benefits.
Bald tends to portray people and places just as they are, without delving too much into their past or potential improvements.
It seems that while the author finds this approach interesting when applied to places other people live, he didn’t appreciate the same reflective scrutiny directed at his own surroundings.
Moreover, his expectations for an indie travel vlog may have been a bit too high – it’s not a “film” or “documentary”, and shouldn’t be evaluated as such.
It is what it is, in terms of both the vlog itself and the realities it captures.
AD
Albireo Double
2 months ago
Governments and civil servants rely on problems or crises, because otherwise what is the point of them?
The last thing they want is a problem that can be solved, because then they have to find a new problem. Ideally, they want an insoluble problem.
The NHS is a good example of a problem that can never be solved and can always be claimed to require government intervention in the attempt to solve it.
“Poverty” is just more of the same. Displacement activity for people whose lives would otherwise be empty, and whose “work” would otherwise not exist.
AD
Albireo Double
2 months ago
The author wants “context and analysis”. But only, one suspects, that of an agreeably modish and Left wing flavour.
He seems well disposed to the concepts of self-reliance and fortitude, but rather less so, to the opposite traits of fecklessness and idleness. You can’t really lionise one and seek to deny the other as “unkind or unfair”. They come as a package.
DE
Dillon Eliassen
2 months ago
Jeez, did the writer have to convey these points in such a gross way? LOL
AM
AJ Mac
1 month ago
I think “Loki” McGarvey actually has a little something to say, but is still caught up in the punk/hip-hop attitude exemplified by his picture above. I listened to some of his rap act on YouTube for a few minutes just now. Reminds me of his contributions to UnHerd in a way: hints of a message drowned out by harsh noise. I was gonna guess that he’d calm down and get less rude with age, but he turned/turns 40 this year, so maybe not.
I’d estimate that he means well, but he’s angry and a bit mean. I know first hand that good intentions wrapped in anger and self-importance don’t pave good roads, nor reach the ears you’re shouting at, at least in the way you hope.
When I grow up, I hope to stop confusing passion and intellect with goodness or wisdom. I could stand to quit using such insight as I seem to have as a license to judge and condemn others, sometimes at little more than a glance. And to be less impressed by the eloquent rage or posturing of other wayward seekers. Pretty sure I’m not alone on that.
I’ve cut down on meanness and rage in my middle age, so as long as life is at least 200 years long I’ll–wait what?
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
The wider left/liberal left has largely abandoned the poor, etc, I can’t think when the last national rally/march on economic inequality/poverty was, huge amount on global issues though.
JB
jane baker
1 month ago
I’ve just read this mans book Poverty Safari. He certainly knows first hand about life as a poor person. But his ending remarks about how the poor support and care for each other. No,I don’t think so.
J
Jae
1 month ago
To me the author sounds quite green-eyed about Bald and Bankrupt. I’ve only watched B&B once or twice, never thought he was about solving society’s ills. It’s quite an odd observation from ‘Loki’.
J
Jae
1 month ago
Poverty comes in all shapes and sizes, one size does not fit all. But there is one common denominator in certain people who wallow in poverty and that’s a poverty of spirit.
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As a long time ‘sub’, I watched Bald’s video last week. Yes, it made me cringe, especially when the woman offered him a quickie. And it’s clear that, although he is sympathetic to people wherever he goes in the world, he was concerned that a major shopping street in Birmingham has been taken over by ethnic minority businesses.
But I have to argue with Darren’s view that everything needs some kind of contextualisation. We can see with our own eyes. We can make our own judgements. We don’t need someone with inevitable biases to tell us what to think.
As Darren notes, B+B has travelled around the world documenting the plight of marginalised people, especially those in the post Soviet republics who believe they were better off in the good old days. Is he supposed to offer a solution to their concerns – or should we just look after our own?
An excellent article overall. Having initially eviscerated Bald and Bankrupt’s recent videos on Britain’s dilapidated town centres for their superficiality, I was pleased to see the author highlighting Bald’s genuine warmth and desire to meet people, as demonstrated throughout his countless videos from all over the world.
His recent videos on Plymouth, Weston-Super-Mare and Birmingham do indeed lack analysis, depth and context, but to a large degree I think this has more to do with his own personal approach than any specific fascination with poverty per se. To my knowledge he has spent decades mainly outside the UK and now that he’s back he is genuinely shocked at the dilapidated state of so many towns and cities in the UK. Does he go into the reasons why? No indeed. And the “offered business on Britain’s worst street” is pure clickbait, I agree.
However, when Bald travelled around deeply authoritarian Belarus a few years ago I remember being fascinated at this insight into a country few westerners see and impressed by the way he built up a genuine rapport with the locals, but somewhat mystified by his failure to provide any comment whatsoever on the political context. On the whole, this is just what you get from his channel, although the videos on his migrant journey on foot through the Darien Gap en route to the US are quite different in both tone and content. Anyway, excellent stuff from Darren again.
There’s a whole host of these on YouTube; t**d towns, the worst town in Britain etc. IPhones and the Internet mean anyone can now be a ‘content creator ‘.
But predictably, there is no guarantee to quality of content or approach towards the subject matter.
Much the same applies to pornography, the bulk of which is now uploaded by ‘private’ individuals to often hilarious effect.
But in both spheres, you occasionally get something truly different which would never have made it past a content moderator. And there are lots of genuinely thought-provoking creators out there; you just have to sort out the gems from the dross.
I did happen across one who had a genuinely sympathetic approach for the residents of towns that have fallen victim to a decade or more of basically no investment, but he’s outnumbered by the ‘look how shit this place is’ lot. I’ve given up on YouTube now.
Is Bald and Bankrupt a journalist? Or is he just a bloke with a phone, a stick and a YouTube account? His work would be far less compelling if he called himself a ‘journalist’. The minute he believes he should be doing some sort of social commentary is the minute everybody loses interest. People are sick of others telling them how things are, in their own self-absorbed, backslapping words. Show, don’t tell. Bald and Bankrupt does this well. We don’t need him to affect faux-concern for the toothless, feckless simpletons of Britain’s streets. Then he just becomes another posh wanker. Continue with your warmth Baldy. Most people love the fleeting interactions and at times condescension towards these people. At least we know it’s real.
Yeah totally agree. The crass hip hop guy has gone big attacking a video blogger for not having the answers to Britain’s post industrial decline.
I had exactly the same thoughts whilst reading the (far too long) article.
I’ve seen many of B&B’s Soviet videos and he’s got millions of subscribers not because he’s peddling poverty porn. He’s giving people a genuine and unaffected view into the lives of others. And he does this in an entertaining, genuinely curious and empathetic way.
His point about beautiful but rotting Victorian buildings is as well-made as it is a damning indictment of us – the inheritors of this investment. We don’t care, society doesn’t care. It seems that at least B&B does.
Loki’s writing is razor sharp in deconstructing the exploitative hypocrisy of the MSM’s little entertainment programs and how they deftly sidestep any analysis of the subjects they so love to fetishise. His comic flourishes had be rolling. More from Loki please!
“…prints of Eighties kids with rickets playing at the foot of boarded up tenements, in the UK…”
Are we talking about the 1880s? The 1980s was a low point of rickets in the UK
I was wondering that too. I don’t remember anyone with rickets in the 1980s.
Exactly.
“Bald”, as we internet addicts know him, is an internet treasure. His travels through India, Russia, and the former Soviet ‘stans in Central Asia are simply marvelous. As for poverty, every society has its poor. And those who want to rise above their station in life. I remember some years back a video about a Muslim woman in an Indian slum neighborhood who started her own trash recycling business, on her own, with her husband just looking on, and eventually grew it into a business employing several dozen men from her neighborhood and encompassing three large warehouses. And her saying that her proudest accomplishment was being able to install an indoor toilet in her dwelling so that her daughters did not have to go to the dangerous public toilets anymore. Poverty is a state of mind. No one forces you to drink, do drugs, keep popping out fatherless offspring, or live a dissolute life.
Poverty is a state of mind? As if 20 ppl upvoted this.
I don’t quite get that, Unherd. “As if 20 ppl upvoted this”. Well 26 ppl upvoted it so far which I find alarming, but I can’t figure out if you find it alarming, also.
Spiro Agnew, a former (disgraced) American Vice-President did say one thing that rang true then and still does today: “Once you’ve seen one slum, you’ve seen them all”.
That was Reagan talking about Redwood trees.
“Cum-shots”. “Cream his y-fronts”. A hip hop guy tut tutting the insensitivities of “smut”.
In full agreement with you on Loki’s obscene hypocrisy.
Loki?
recently
I enjoyed this despite too much palare di cazzi if you will. Also redacting the place names would bolster a critique of poverty porn, naming them looks like the writers doing it too – albeit last in the line at the gang bang. IMO there’s a main pair of symptoms in waveform hitting each other to create a rip-tide: “nostalgie de bou” (SP? IKFE what pedants you unherders are!) meeting a wave of leftist hysteria. The former works with the realitive “wealth” of UK poor as well as the true poor in Haiti, Peru, Bangla etc. The latter only works with the faux poor – (¿dia de pologloto. eh?). The true poor are too poor to work in porn – they are the bush hookers and if they are lucky they get a plastic chair in the shade when its their turn to show their wares to the passers by. Ppl like the bbc, lewis, and whoever the article focusses on, yemak shmoy, should be deported, penniless, to Caracas or Port Au Prince. That’ll learn ’em.
The truth is poverty porn is big business.
So is poverty itself, particularly the pretense of doing something about it. In the US, we have a massive poverty-industrial complex that includes roughly 100 programs at the federal level alone. Which ones work? Don’t know. Which do not work? Don’t know that either. Which duplicate others? Same answer and why are you asking such impertinent questions?
This industry is designed to perpetuate poverty, not reduce it. If it were reduced, then some of those 100+ programs would have to go away. Think of the poor bureaucrats would be displaced and forced to find meaningful work. Every one of those programs and the people in them have an incentive to NOT reduce poverty. Their survival depends on it.
Governments love their victims.
That’s a great observation, really
Indeed, the same goes for the race crusaders. They can’t actually end racism and the smart ones know it, but they can gain profit, status, fame, and votes from pretending they can and spend so much taxpayer money on it that it creates an almost self-sustaining ecosystem of race based policies, ideology, programs, etc..
The last time I checked the US had spent $22 trillion on what began as the War on Poverty under the LBJ administration. That was years ago, so the total is far higher now.
testing
Me too.
The well-off dehumanize the poor so they can shirk their responsibility in building a better society. Instead of mocking these people, civic minded people would be thinking about how we can elevate these people in order to increase overall prosperity.
Ben Rich (Bald and Bankrupt) has a worldwide following. On my travels I so often hear people talking about how they watch and enjoy his videos on YouTube, people from many different countries.
Had he done wants Darren wishes he had, i.e. focused on the self-help and self-reliance of communities where people have little material wealth, which unquestionably exists in spades, would that have done anything at all to counteract poverty porn? My intuition is that it would exacerbate it.
Ben Rich tends not to get into social solutions, which given where he’s reported from is very wise. If Darren wants to make a YouTube vlog, I’m sure Ben would advise him on how best to hold a GoPro.
Money where yer mouth is mate! Grumbling never does nuffin!
Hip Hop “artist” provides social commentary. I thought the article was well written and was surprised that it was written by a Hip Hop artist. I guess my bias is showing. I am an American living in the United States. I don’t always agree with Bald and Bankrupts politics but I for one appreciate his mini “documentaries”. This one in particular strikes a tender spot because I never realized how far the Leftist politicians and globalists, with their out of control immigration, have drug the UK into utter despair. It is just a matter of time before the replacement strategy, along with a declining birth rate, turns the indigenous Brits into a minority on a path to extinction.
Your US grammar is showing. Have “drug” should be have dragged.
Haven’t you gotten over such quibbles yet?
*Of course if prejudicial preferences or punctilious pedantry were felonies I’d be hung out to dry, or even hanged.
It’s the near total lack of investment in public services and infrastructure – at least outside London – for a decade that’s done it. Not immigration.
I never watch programmes about poverty. They are always devised and run by people who have had no personal experience of poverty, so however well-meaning they are, the programmes come across as middle class do-gooders dabbling in the lives of their inferiors. They also remind me too much of the time when I was employed as an advice worker by a mental health charity. There, I saw more than enough poverty and misery every day of my working life. There were some uplifting moments, but not many. And in the background, the DWP was a malign presence in the lives of our clients with its casual cruelty towards those who were unfortunate enough to have to claim state benefits.
Great succint post
Bald tends to portray people and places just as they are, without delving too much into their past or potential improvements.
It seems that while the author finds this approach interesting when applied to places other people live, he didn’t appreciate the same reflective scrutiny directed at his own surroundings.
Moreover, his expectations for an indie travel vlog may have been a bit too high – it’s not a “film” or “documentary”, and shouldn’t be evaluated as such.
It is what it is, in terms of both the vlog itself and the realities it captures.
Governments and civil servants rely on problems or crises, because otherwise what is the point of them?
The last thing they want is a problem that can be solved, because then they have to find a new problem. Ideally, they want an insoluble problem.
The NHS is a good example of a problem that can never be solved and can always be claimed to require government intervention in the attempt to solve it.
“Poverty” is just more of the same. Displacement activity for people whose lives would otherwise be empty, and whose “work” would otherwise not exist.
The author wants “context and analysis”. But only, one suspects, that of an agreeably modish and Left wing flavour.
He seems well disposed to the concepts of self-reliance and fortitude, but rather less so, to the opposite traits of fecklessness and idleness. You can’t really lionise one and seek to deny the other as “unkind or unfair”. They come as a package.
Jeez, did the writer have to convey these points in such a gross way? LOL
I think “Loki” McGarvey actually has a little something to say, but is still caught up in the punk/hip-hop attitude exemplified by his picture above. I listened to some of his rap act on YouTube for a few minutes just now. Reminds me of his contributions to UnHerd in a way: hints of a message drowned out by harsh noise. I was gonna guess that he’d calm down and get less rude with age, but he turned/turns 40 this year, so maybe not.
I’d estimate that he means well, but he’s angry and a bit mean. I know first hand that good intentions wrapped in anger and self-importance don’t pave good roads, nor reach the ears you’re shouting at, at least in the way you hope.
When I grow up, I hope to stop confusing passion and intellect with goodness or wisdom. I could stand to quit using such insight as I seem to have as a license to judge and condemn others, sometimes at little more than a glance. And to be less impressed by the eloquent rage or posturing of other wayward seekers. Pretty sure I’m not alone on that.
I’ve cut down on meanness and rage in my middle age, so as long as life is at least 200 years long I’ll–wait what?
The wider left/liberal left has largely abandoned the poor, etc, I can’t think when the last national rally/march on economic inequality/poverty was, huge amount on global issues though.
I’ve just read this mans book Poverty Safari. He certainly knows first hand about life as a poor person. But his ending remarks about how the poor support and care for each other. No,I don’t think so.
To me the author sounds quite green-eyed about Bald and Bankrupt. I’ve only watched B&B once or twice, never thought he was about solving society’s ills. It’s quite an odd observation from ‘Loki’.
Poverty comes in all shapes and sizes, one size does not fit all. But there is one common denominator in certain people who wallow in poverty and that’s a poverty of spirit.