Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone. I’ve got to admit I’m falling victim, just like everyone else, to the massively uninspired ‘what have I learned this year?’ post. My only excuse is that the five day long eating marathon has somewhat dimmed my capacity for originality.
Despite my dislike of New Year’s Eve parties, I’m pretty glad to be seeing the back of 2010. In Britain the Conservatives are driving a truck pretty much every civilising advance of the past seventy years. Secondary education, heathcare, childcare, local government, not to mention the poor bedraggled universities, are all financially cut and circumscribed in their remit. Despite the protestations of Clegg and Cameron and the rest of them that this is merely a financial shake up, the ideological overtones are obvious. Moreover, the very notion of the British citizen is being reformulated as the sometime-pillars of the welfare state are redefined as luxuries or ‘choices’ rather than rights. But as gloomy as things are even here, things are even worse in Ireland as all the words (emigration, IMF, unemployment, and most of all, ‘failure’) of the 1980s return. I’m not saying I’ve high hopes for 2011, but at least it’s a fresh start.
The ideological tensions of coalition policies are beginning to play out in British cities. The anti-student fees protesters, UK UnCut as the trade unions did a pretty good job of getting their voices heard and getting their point across through taking to the streets in pretty large numbers. I suppose the most worrying tendency which arose out of the month or so of almost daily demonstration is ‘kettling’, which is now seen to be the police’s stock answer to any protest, however peaceful. I suppose I should hardly be surprised. Since the government appears to have removed our rights to many of the services of the welfare state, I don’t know why I thought for an instant that they might respect our right to protest. Instead they immediately label every single demonstrator as a troublemaker, and immediately create an unnecessary antagonism between peaceful protestor and so-called guardian of the peace. The landscape of the city once again becomes an ostensible devise of vigorous state control, and the links between capitalism and urban space are reinscribed.
But over-enthusiastic state policing is merely a small part of the prospective future of the majority of Britain’s cities. Many of Britain’s cities were built by, for, and in response to, a Victorian industrial boom, and ever since the end of that long era of manufacturing in the 1970s, they have been struggling to readjust and reinvent themselves. That there has been a long, slow malaise in many of Britain’s northern towns which is taking years to improve is hardly surprising when everything from the skills of the population to the layout of the streets is orientated towards industry which no longer exists. During the noughties the previous administration poured a huge amount of money into conteracting the problems of these post-industrial cities. Gateshead, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow and Belfast among others all had their town centres rebuilt, in some fairly problematic alliances between commercial developers and the state (leading in many cases to the privatisation of the very heart of the city). Even more offensive was the use of cowardly words like ‘urban renewal’ to mean ‘social elevation’ when failing council housing was cleared to create pristine owner-occupier apartment blocks. Nevertheless, the sad truth is that the Labour government’s urban policies were far more successful than anything that had come before, and overall the improvement of quality of life in many inner city areas is clear to see. Although we once sneered at the post-modern architecture and grandiose projects of the Blair years, they were hugely important interventions into landscapes which were physically crumbling and socially deprived due to the long impact of industrial decline.
Back in the good old days, I thought this was an immensely stupid looking building
Although its still early days, it seems pretty clear that the days of large-scale flagship projects for the inner cities are over. Local government has already had its funding slashed (n.b. ‘cuts’ have been renamed ‘savings’), leaving it all the more exposed to the lure of capital from private contractors and unable to provide the basic amenities and services which are essential for a functional urban environment. PFI projects for social housing refurbishment have already been scrapped in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Hull, Nottingham, Northampton among others. If the state-sponsored social and cultural projects which did so much to reinvigorate the inner cities during the last ten years are dumped by this administration, then it seems to be fairly sensible to predict a return to the urban malaise and discontent which characterised the Thatcher years. At their best, British cities are places of culture and opportunity but they also require an interventionist state to keep them this way.
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