It was revealed today that Margaret Thatcher was advised to abandon Liverpool to “managed decline” by Geoffrey Howe in 1981; Gavin Knight looks at her legacy.
By Gavin Knight
It was revealed today that Margaret Thatcher was advised to abandon Liverpool to “managed decline” by her chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, in the wake of the Toxteth riots of 1981.
In his memo to the cabinet he is quoted as saying:
“We must not expend all our limited resources in trying to make water flow uphill.”
Thirty years on, in the wake of similar riots, residents of UK inner cities feel rising anger they have been abandoned.
It’s as if the policy of the last 30 years were implemented on Howe’s advice.
I spent two years researching life in the deprived inner city areas of Manchester, Glasgow and London for my non-fiction book ‘Hood Rat’ (published July 2011) and spoke to young people, youth workers, social workers, and residents as well as spending time with frontline police units in Moss Side, the East End of Glasgow and deprived parts of London.
They told me they had been abandoned by politicians, the media, and social infrastructure and were left to forge their own violent alternative world.
Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy meant upwardly mobile residents could leave estates; while the collapse of manufacturing in favour of a service-based economy meant the heart was torn out of many communities.
As Owen Jones points out in CHAVS, you can’t build a community around call-centre and supermarket jobs. In Glasgow I spoke to former welders and platers from Clydebank whose offspring were now struggling to find jobs in the fitting room at TK-Max in the retail parks that replaced the steelworks in places like Park Head.
In the vacuum left behind only one thriving, entrepreneurial business presents the younger generation with opportunities to make cash: the UK’s £4.5 billion drug trade. It has a dynamic recruitment structure, cash incentives and training programmes all in place.
The results of this “managed decline” are that government has effectively retreated from these areas and the residents feel completely disenfranchised.
The result is simmering violence and resentment.
Steven Pinker, in his recent book, says the most violent places are ones where no form of government exists: failed states, drug cartel territories. British inner cities are increasingly violent places to live for the same reason: they have been abandoned by successive governments.
In Easterhouse in Glasgow one 13-year-old was given a machete by his own mother on his 13th birthday. When Karyn McCluskey, the co-director of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, arrived in Glasgow there were 170 gangs with 3,500 members aged 11 to 23. Trauma doctors handled one facial injury every six hours and 70% of the violence went unreported.
I spoke to charming, baby-faced teenagers who talked about the pitched battles with machetes they had every Saturday like it was a weekend football game. I also went out with the cops in B Division in Shettleston who were weary of chasing gang members through the parks.
Shettleston is one of the most deprived wards in the UK. Life expectancy for a man is 14 years below the national average and the same as Baghdad or the Palestinian territories.
In Southall, London, I talked to a 14-year-old, former child soldier from Somalia, whose gun-toting skills were in great demand amongst the local elders, looking to enforce the drug trade. Southall also saw riots 30 years ago. Now it’s the cheapest place to buy heroin in the UK.
Three hundred and fifty thousand kids grow up with drug-addicted parents. I spoke to one mother, an aspirational middle class woman whose young son was killed in broad daylight by a drug addict out on bail.
There is a shocking human cost to the decline and abandonment of UK inner cities; we read far too many stories of teenagers, even children, being killed or killing each other in our forgotten inner cities. In Liverpool, 11-year-old Rhys Jones was shot by an 18 year old in August 2007 on the Croxteth Park Estate.
In recent weeks we’ve heard of a brazen stabbing of a teenager amid Oxford Street Christmas shoppers and the shooting of a Salford student, allegedly by teenage gunmen.
The newly revealed memos of Thatcher’s cabinet show they grudgingly pledged £10 million to regenerate Liverpool. The Tory coalition’s latest gangs report, published in the wake of the August riots, also pledges £10m. For that amount the coalition ambitiously promise to turn around 120,000 dysfunctional families by the end of Parliament. That’s £83 per family.
The third sector is key to the Tories’ regeneration strategy: mentoring and early years interventions are both highlighted as policies that Ian Duncan Smith has championed for some time at the Centre for Social Justice. The key issue around these policies is a question that lies at the heart of the Tories’ localism agenda: without the dynamic individuals to run the programmes, can they be replicated countrywide, in all inner cities ?
The flagship early years nursery in Castlemilk, Glasgow, the Jeely Piece Club, is a testament to 35 years’ work of exceptional individuals. Will similarly dynamic individuals be able to replicate it in other deprived parts of Glasgow like Easterhouse, Shettleston, Barrowfield and Mary Hill?
Similarly, Cameron and IDS have often praised the CIRV anti-gang model used by Strathclyde Police, but its success is largely the result of the extraordinary drive of the co-directors of the Violence Reduction Unit, Karyn McCluskey and Detective Superindendent John Carnochan. The model was piloted in Manchester and some London boroughs but fizzled out.
One thing I heard time and time again was that nothing saves a young person from a downward spiral into gang crime more than a stable job. There is also a proposal that the chancellor, George Osborne, will follow Michael Heseltine’s example and create enterprise zones to regenerate deprived areas.
The Work Foundation argues that enterprise zones do not work, they are gimmicks and already-deprived areas will not escape their cycle of deprivation.
They advocate that government should focus on:
The long-term drivers of economic growth: innovation, trade, skills, infrastructure and entrepreneurship. The recovery will be led by innovation, with a small proportion of high growth firms producing the majority of all jobs.
There is an enormous human cost to abandoning our deprived inner cities; government needs to find a way to regenerate these areas, ideally through stimulating small and medium-sized entreprises.
With soaring youth unemployment it also needs to re-engage the disenfranchised, disaffected youth who live there and help them back into education and training. This needs a proactive, inventive youth policy.
Sending vulnerable youngsters into lengthy custodial sentences at critical turning points in their lives is not the way forward. The young people who I spoke to all believed they have been not just been abandoned by politicians, but criminalised for being young.
See also:
• Unemployment: How Cameron and Clegg are letting the next generation down – Rachel Reeves MP and Stephen Timms MP, December 14th 2011
• Thatcher was every bit as bad as we remember – Kevin Meagher, November 26th 2011
• Everything you know about the ‘Thatcherite consensus’ is wrong – Stewart Lansley, October 6th 2011
• A crowd psychology analysis of the riots – Dr Clifford Stott, August 9th 2011
• Enterprise Zones are the dusting down of a failed Thatcherite policy – Tony Burke, July 29th 2011
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36 Responses to “Thatcher’s corrosive legacy: The UK’s abandoned inner cities”
Mr Roshan
Nick Leaton gives you the sense of reality that the left truly ignore when they engage in hysteria.
Your article is a great case of what I define as ‘flatus inhalation’ – i.e. when you love the gas content from your backside so much you inhale it.
It starts off, ‘It was revealed today that Margaret Thatcher was advised to abandon Liverpool to “managed decline” by her chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, in the wake of the Toxteth riots of 1981.’
You omit the fact she ignored his advice, which is ‘sort of’ important.
It continues: ‘I spent two years researching life in the deprived inner city areas of Manchester, Glasgow and London for my non-fiction book ‘Hood Rat’ (published July 2011) and spoke to young people, youth workers, social workers, and residents’.
This is unfortunately non-scientific and no doubt you had a preconceived opinion anyway. You preface your article with the ‘inner city riots’ (really mass lawlessness), yet fail to mention that the AVERAGE number of convictions of those caught was FIFTEEN.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8764809/London-rioters-had-average-15-previous-offences-figures-show.html
I stress ‘those caught’ because the police were told to stand down early on, and many better thieves with probably more experience and more crimes got away.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2024412/London-riots-Police-soft-looters-ordered-stand-observe.html
The illogical left then presuppose that this is ‘evidence’ that jail does not work, when actually it is evidence that sentences are too light and jails are not austere enough, although I guess this is the closest the left will get to being correct on the riots.
You then state, ‘Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy meant upwardly mobile residents could leave estates; while the collapse of manufacturing in favour of a service-based economy meant the heart was torn out of many communities.’.
Manufacturing was collapsing before Margaret Thatcher and in fact collapsed more under the ensuing Labour governments:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1232897/Manufacturing-decline-Labour-greater-Margaret-Thatcher.html
No doubt, the likely reason being the government’s stupidity in bankrupting it’s youth through expensive pointless degrees, regulations (partly fed through unionisation and socialised labour) which have pushed up costs and made it cheaper for such industries to go the China – all supported in complete ignorance by the left.
You continue: ‘As Owen Jones points out in CHAVS, you can’t build a community around call-centre and supermarket jobs. In Glasgow I spoke to former welders and platers from Clydebank whose offspring were now struggling to find jobs in the fitting room at TK-Max in the retail parks that replaced the steelworks in places like Park Head.
In the vacuum left behind only one thriving, entrepreneurial business presents the younger generation with opportunities to make cash: the UK’s £4.5 billion drug trade. It has a dynamic recruitment structure, cash incentives and training programmes all in place.’
Once again, you miss the entire point. We created jobs here under Labour – almost 2 million of them, but where did they go? To cheap labour from overseas:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1325013/Migrants-took-9-10-jobs-created-Labour.html
Again – a policy completed supported by the left that kills the ‘working class’. Again another fact which the left ignores or just ‘overturns’ by interviewing some social worker.
Now, with regards to drugs, I invite you to visit the Peter Hitchens blog:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/drugs/
where he documents in meticulous detail how police and the law turn a blind eye to drug use – so in effect incentivising it, or failing to de-incentivise it. Again, this is a policy supported by the left that kills the poor.
You state: ‘Steven Pinker, in his recent book, says the most violent places are ones where no form of government exists: failed states, drug cartel territories. British inner cities are increasingly violent places to live for the same reason: they have been abandoned by successive governments.’
On the contrary, the inner city poorer areas (we have no poverty here) are beset by welfare dependency, lax policing (violence and drugs), fatherless families incentivized by the state (with proven statistical evidence that such offspring are more likely to live worse lives than otherwise is the case) amongst others – all supported by the left. So, rather, it is not absence of government, but the effect of government.
You then continue with the strawman:
‘Shettleston is one of the most deprived wards in the UK. Life expectancy for a man is 14 years below the national average and the same as Baghdad or the Palestinian territories.’
A bit like the sink estates in Glasgow where people get free money, free education, free housing, free methadone and are dying of self inflicted diseases. Why? Because welfarism kills, but you fail to see this point:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/mar/31/is-britain-broken
So again, you conflate the effects of government with there being an absence of government which is clearly not the case.
You then conclude that the solution is more government – when it has been demonstrated clearly by this post and others that government is the cause. The fallacy of your crime ideas has been well proven. I hope that through reading this, you may consider your opinions more carefully in the future.
As for solutions, I would say (general points):
1) Out of the EU
2) Stop unskilled migration
3) End minimum wage
4) Reduce welfare
5) Build more AUSTERE prisons
6) Lengthen sentences and consider a ‘3 strike rule’
7) Harsher penalties for drug use and possession
8) Get government out of industry
p.s. The left’s favourite city – Liverpool (ironically where none of the left wing elites actually live) was ruined by militant trade-unionism and left wingism – how ironic.
Mr Roshan
#Leftwing bile on #Thatcher and inner city 'poverty' meets reality. #leftwingfallacies #socialism #welfare http://t.co/WCwEljv6
Oliver
Much cheaper to send in the army and cleanse the whole area, what-what? I doubt there are enough Scottish islands for every drug addict, and the locals might object, and all those armed guards and patrol ships to stop the buggers coming back cost even more. You need to dump your namby-pamby left-wing rhetoric and get down to brass tacks and bayonets!!!
Cel
Back to the Victorian era when there was no crime whatsoever and everyone lived in peace and hard-working prosperity. Just like in those Mr Dickens programmes on the telly. A grand program, sir, I salute you.
Damien Short
Thatcher’s corrosive legacy: The UK’s abandoned inner cities: http://t.co/adsej3Iq by @GavinKnightHood