Who has a Voice in Modern Britain?

Shady Lewis "On the Greenwich line".

Service User A lives in a mouldy, badly ventilated basement hotel (read dormitory) room. She is 65 and has not seen anything an average person would call a “decent life” since the day she was born. Still, the unnamed housing officer, whose job it is to assess whether Service User A qualifies for urgent permanent accommodation, calmly concludes the following:

“Nothing about the case caught my eye. It contained the usual mix of trauma, language barriers and communication issues, domestic violence, bureaucratic delays, poor interagency coordination, and the inevitable culmination in psychiatric hospital or prison—in this case, both.”

Just another day at the office in the UK’s welfare department. Nameless people, traumatised by families, friends, or states - come and go, all carrying interchangeable tragedies. What remains consistent is the endless paperwork that has to be done to lengthen the application processes and make the council stuff remain necessary. After all, “there are no social houses left, and a million people are already on the waiting list.”

So what?

Doctors, over time, may develop indifference toward patients, their illnesses, or even death itself. Why, then, should not a council worker cultivate professional numbness toward their clients?

The difference is obvious, though inconvenient. In most cases, doctors fail because they lack medication, technology, or viable treatments. The welfare state, on the other hand, fails by design. Bureaucracy here is not a flaw - it is the product. Those at the top decide who receives support, when, and under what impossible conditions.

If a doctor deliberately delayed treatment, public outrage would be swift and loud. So why does society so willingly accept the total dehumanisation of people in urgent need of housing or social benefits? Perhaps because patients in hospitals might be wealthy, insured, and armed with competent lawyers, while those begging the state for help are safely categorised as the bottom of society —people whose suffering is inconvenient but affordable.

Shady Lewis, an Egyptian writer who spent years working in UK council departments, puts the answer in the mouth of Kayode, a Nigerian psychiatric nurse lead:

“The truth is what we want it to be. The truth is what everybody agrees on for the sake of the greater good.”

The most vulnerable have no voice. Whether mentally or physically ill, newly arrived migrants, too young or too old - it doesn’t matter. The rule is simple: their stories are always told by someone else. Mainly by people in power who have no other interest than to preserve their position.

Kayode is firmly grounded in reality. Both feet on the ground, no illusions. He knows his place in society. He knows that in the UK he is Black, and he knows exactly under what circumstances he would be White: if he returned to Nigeria and bought a large, fancy house. Kayode harbours no malice. He understands Service User A’s struggle. He knows what it means to be a lesbian who grew up in care in the UK - it means they are Black. He knows being an Irish in the UK means being Black, and anyone who looks Muslim is Black too.

To Kayode, the social hierarchy is simple and logical. He stopped fighting it long ago and accepted the terms. It is the narrator who still struggles, who insists on making the job unnecessarily complicated. He knows Kayode is right, understands it deeply but some stubborn part of him still wants to do good.

That is why he tries to arrange a burial and organise a funeral of a boy he never knew.

A first time mourner 

To an attentive reader, it is obvious from the very beginning that he will fail. He will never obtain the body. He will never attend the funeral. The boy was Black, a nameless migrant who died without money or relatives. And the unnamed narrator is also Black, a Coptic Egyptian who stopped drinking because correcting colleagues who assumed he was Muslim became more exhausting than abstaining.

These two will never meet, dead or alive. The same rules apply: tests to pass, documents to submit, papers to fill out - before one can claim responsibility for a body the UK government has already forgotten. If the narrator were rich, armed with expensive lawyers or decorated relatives, things would be different. But he isn’t.

Service User A will, tragically, die before she ever finds a permanent home. Kayode, despite his realism, will never retire in Nigeria because, as with Odysseus, loyalty, in the end, belongs only to dogs.

And as for the narrator, from the very beginning, his attempt to do good is doomed, politely, legally, and with all the required forms completed in triplicate.

Reviewers’ note: The term Black is used as per the author’s concept and carries no personal sentiment.