EVERY time I hear an Old Etonian pledge to fix broken Britain, my first response is always to ask who broke the country in the first place. My firm belief is that the roots of every single one of the UK’s pervasive social problems can be found in the vindictive policies enacted by post-1979 Tory governments.
At this point, the intelligent rightwingers that sporadically pop-up in my comments box – and as I a political writer, I welcome sensible critique from all directions, not least because it enables me to sharpen my thinking – usually start to protest.
Thatcherism can’t be to blame for everything, they insist. And indeed, New Labour have had the best part of 12 years to put things right, although its inability to break with Thatcherism has meant that it has not on the whole been successful.
The most popular counter-explanation on the right is the application to Britain of a thesis imported from the US, which maintains that the welfare state has created a benefit-dependent underclass.
It seems fatuous to deny that this social layer exists, but the real question is how it came into being. Call me an economic determinist if you like, but the answer is chiefly to be found in the Thatcherites’ calculated and callous twin decision to deindustrialise and to ditch social democracy.
Nowhere has this process crystallised to such an extent as in Britain’s former coalfields, which have become by-words for deprivation on an inner city scale, on almost any yardstick available.
Now research into erstwhile mining areas, carried out by the Financial Times, underlines the point. All of them ‘lag behind the rest of the UK in levels of wealth creation’, despite New Labour’s serious and costly attempts at urban regeneration, the newspaper has discovered.
At first the strategy even seemed to work; by 2007, unemployment rates in the former coalfields were close to the UK average. But that was largely a statistical illusion, generated by the large numbers of people on Incapacity Benefit claimants.
Moreover, these regions remain structurally weak in economic terms, and are unable to cope with the current recession. While the increase in the number of men claiming unemployment benefits has risen by an average of 56% since August 2007, in Durham, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire the figure has risen by about 80%, and in the Welsh valleys, by almost 90%. In Leicestershire and Warwickshire, it has more than doubled.
Further additions to the joblessness tally - in places already suffering from de facto longterm mass unemployment - will add to every social evil the moralistic right attribute to the wilfulness of the feckless underclass, from teenage pregnancy to heroin addiction.
If you want to see the real impact of a 30 years of uninterrupted pursuit of free market dogmatism, check out your nearest former coalfield, and ask yourself how it got to be in the state in which it currently finds itself.
Posted at 14:58, 12 March 2009
Comments (10)
Er - aren't 'decision to deindustrialise' and 'free market dogmatism' mutually exclusive?
Anyway, what about this recent quote from the Adam Smith Institute blog:
'The first question has to be whether there has been a destruction of our manufacturing industry, whether wilful or not. Looking at the index of production, we see that it stood at 75.9 in 1984 and at 97.9 in 2008. A rise in output of some 29 % really doesn't sound like "destruction" to me. In fact, claiming that manufacturing has been destroyed would lead me to accusing you of being ignorant of the facts.'
Granted the end of 2008 is some eleven years after the Conservatives lost power, but the growth was certainly not all in the recent past. Whatever the problems of the old coalfields - and there certainly are problems - they're not caused by national deindustrialisation or free market dogma.
Alf
Those good people at the ASI are using selective base years here. 1984 was the nadir of the 1980s recession.
I suspect the story would be very different if the comparison was with 1979, or indeed if manufacturing is considered as % of GDP. Don't have stats to hand, but if memory serves, the decline has been constant since the 1970s.
The most popular counter-explanation on the right is the application to Britain of a thesis imported from the US, which maintains that the welfare state has created a benefit-dependent underclass.
And that theory has underpinned every welfare "reform" of the past 25 years, to the point that welfare is now virtually nonexistent in the UK. And yet we still get Thatcherites from both parties talking about armies of single mothers being somehow lavished by the state. After two decades, that line has worn very thin.
The truth is that we don't have an underclass that is dependent on benefits. Benefits are far too low for anyone to be dependent on them. We do have people abusing the benefits system, usually whilst working illegally or being involved in other criminal activites - that's not indicative of a problem with welfare itself, any more than credit card fraud is indicative of a problem with buying stuff on credit. The real question is what extent this problem has been created by the hare-brained run of "get tough" benefit slashing since the mid-80s - just as the very real problem we have had in recent years with illegal immigration, is the unintended consequence of serial attempts to slash immigration to the UK as much as possible. The harder you squeeze, the more slips through your fingers.
EVERY time I hear an Old Etonian pledge to fix broken Britain, my first response is always to ask who broke the country in the first place. My firm belief is that the roots of every single one of the UK’s pervasive social problems can be found in the vindictive policies enacted by post-1979 Tory governments.
Really? I blame them all on the left-created welfare state.
And if the left hadn't nationalised the coal mines, they'd still be going.
In fact, if the brothers had any pride in their work, British Leyland might still be a going concern.
But no, it's easier to blame the nasty, vidictive Tories, who have nothing better to do all day than think of new ways to do the worker down.
What are you suggesting should have been done about the coalfields then? Should those fields that were making massive losses and only operated due to large subsidies, (that have to come from everyone else), have remained open?
Yes I know, the whole Thatcher = Evil thing but how should the inevitable decline in the coal industry have been managed? The Unions, Scargill in particular, would never have allowed a sensibly managed change. So how could it have been done better?
As for the benefits side of things, we do have a situation where it can be a rational decision to stay on benefits. I think the citizens basic income, (as the only form of unemployment etc benefit), is the way forward.
Obnoxio:
And if the left hadn't nationalised the coal mines, they'd still be going.
No, they wouldn't. As with the rail network, the coal industry had been operating at a loss for years by the time it was nationalised. Most mining companies would not have been able to sustain the loss much past 1950.
If mine owners had gone along with amalgamation in the 1930s the industry might have still been profitable, as was the case on the continent (though that didn't work for rail in this country). But they didn't. Subsidising the mines as private concerns under their existing formation had been tried and failed. The only other alternative to nationalisation was protectionism (and not just on coal imports but on oil imports as well), and by that time the Conservatives had abandoned its traditional polity and joined Labour in being ideologically opposed to protectionism, so that wasn't an option.
Those few mining fields that could have remained open would have only been able to do so through swingeing pay cuts, and would have remained extremely unsafe and without the provision of even basic compensation for miners. The chances are they would then have been shut down by strikes anyway. The industry would not have become potentially profitable again until the oil disputes of the early 1970s, by which time the costs involved in re-opening mines after twenty years would have been prohibitive.
The only reason those towns were there is because of the coal fields. Without them they have no economic reason for being. Since the pits were uneconomic they had to close and with them the reaosn for being for these towns. It is not surprising that the numbers of economically inactive is so high. There will never be jobs there. It isn't down to Thatcher or New Labour, it is just geography.
We shouldn't write these people off but we should write the old mining villages off. We should give every inhabitant the offer of a decent rate for the house they live in and a relocation grant to anywhere in the UK. Then buldoze the towns. These places have become ghettos. People should move to where the jobs are (or will be). We should not sit around waiting for jobs to come to them when there is no reason for them to.
What about the deep water fishermen from our once great fishing ports? Grimsby was once the biggest fishing port in the world. Now there are NO deep water trawlers sailing from Grimsby because the government gave away our rights to fish in our own waters. Many ex-fishermen are still waiting for their compensation payments after 30 years, and the town has received negligable economic help to retrain or re-employ the fishermen. Mining towns have had a far better deal!
Completely spot on. As I wrote earlier this week after watching the BBC4 doc:
Thatcher’s victory over the miners was partly a victory for individualism over community. Thatcher’s successors like to point to our working class communities and the social fragmentation there – “Broken Britain”; but what broke these places? Thatcher’s war on the unions, with the confrontation with the miners as the central theatre of battle, broke the institutions of self-help and mutual aid, destroyed the culture of solidarity that bound such villages, devastated a working class moral economy which sustained these communities.
http://brockley.blogspot.com/2009/03/miners-strike.html
Re DevonChap: "The only reason those towns were there is because of the coal fields."
That statement just shows your ignorance. The expansion of some of the towns may have been due to the presence of coal, but many coalfield villages in South Yorkshire have documented history back to Domesday and earlier. Mining in the South Yorkshire coalfield can be traced back to the 1300's, the Fitwilliam Estates were granted rights to mine coal at Elsecar as far back as 1367. And the Don Navigation and Dearne and Dove Canal are more than 200 years old, and they were built to transport coal out of the region.
But hey, don't let that get in the way of the bulldozers. But be careful just where you draw the line, or you may discover that very few towns and cities in this country retain their historical industries, and your bulldozers will be extremely busy.
Just remember that the communities pre-dated the coal industry, but like many parts of post-industrial Britain, the industry was destroyed with no thought for the lives that would be destroyed with it.