"I live in Stoke Newington and you ought to try taking a trip to Clissold Park after about 4pm without feeling pretty bloody intimidated." What a wimp, there are far rougher places than Stoke Newington and even then they are certainly not no-go areas.

Er, no, it's not meant to be funny - it's a depressing account of the pitiful state those inner cities have been left in by the failure of governments of both colour to address entrenched poverty and low educational attainment.
Your post is from the school of thought which seems to believe that if a Tory says something it must be spoken with ill intent.

yes it is an effing joke - but come to Hackney because we're not laughing.

Except kids that speak like that will never get the fancy jobs so necessary for social mobility, will they? And why is it a bad, bad Tory thing to say there are too many fried chicken places making inner city kids fat?

What you call stereotype is what I saw. I'm unclear what your suggestion is. Should I not transcribe it? I don't know where you live (I am the opposite of Peter Mandelson) but I live here. In the place I describe. It is- with respect and due attention to my no doubt many failings as a nonprofessional writer- how I described it.

GraemeArcher. Your utter contempt for the people you seek to represent is astonishing. If you want to be a modern day (sub-standard) Hogarth, good luck. But your little vignettes give more insight into their writer than their subjects. It sounds like Hackney isn't the place for you.

Daniel, since you live here and since you don't deny the veracity of what I've written, why don't you redraft your chosen section in a form you consider acceptable. It's flattering to have one's style picked over, I suppose; but ultimately irrelevant.

You can have the final word. I'm off to the Lido.

@GraemeArcher - "What I write is just stuff I see. You don't have to like it, but please don't imply I make things up."

So this bit here......

"Her friend's eyebrows knit. There's a better answer than that, she thinks, something she's been taught. I can see the moment of triumph when she remembers:

- You'll take away our EMA innit.

She's so happy to have remembered the reason not to vote Tory, which someone has carefully taught her, ...."

This bit....where you read her mind - that's all just you documenting the facts, is it? Nothing "made up" there

Having read the entire of the linked article I cannot find a single 'case study' that is not steeped in gross caricature or even remotely objective.

Taking the piss out of people's accents to denote stupidity is the lowest and most desperate form of insult, and appears to be the author's entire literary arsenal. Oh, other than assigning his own imagination and opinions to people with no evidence.

So yeah, disdain and contempt for everything other than a lido. That's a sad life, man. Why don't you move to my Tory village of Knebworth? You'd be happier here.

@Daniel: Even allowing for a little bit of journalistic licence in the passage you cite from Graeme's original piece, I struggle to see where the evidence is of 'contempt' for the people of Hackney.
What truly represents contempt, surely, is the apparent belief that it's OK, even somehow noble, for working-class communities to go through life like this with little or no hope of escaping from the cycle of poverty and low attainment that exists in parts of some cities.
You can't do anything to tackle a problem until you've correctly identified it.

@GraemeArcher

'What I write is just stuff I see.'

'Gangs of fatherless, swaggering, out-of-control (mixed-race: this is a multicultural phenomenon) youths take ownership of the park as soon as night falls.'

How do you know these youths are fatherless!?

Is it a guess based on your own grubby prejudice by any chance?

Graeme: inequality, deprivation. What has the Conservative Party ever done to deal with these? Is it not failures on the part of Labour to deal with these, plastering over with welfare? The Conservatives introduced right to buy; Labour did little to ameliorate it. The Conservatives took us into the EEC/SEA/Maastricht i.e. the necessary moves towards an open borders policy; Labour did nothing to ameliorate it. Both parties support an authoritarian education system, designed to be slavish to business, certainly with few inducements to be a good citizen, which is intended to divide between the 'good' and 'bad' pupils (this occurs within the public-private divide and within schools themselves). Both of your parties are anti-trade union and support 'flexible' i.e. weighted in favour of business working practices. They might vote Labour because it's seen as the 'moral' thing to do - but why not? There's no real difference between the parties - http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18948. You reap what you sow. Your piece is as much evidence of class divide (you seemingly have little desire to engage with these people) as it is illustrative of their stupidity.