The north: from ‘managed decline’ to election victory3 May 2021 12:59
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In 1981 — after a summer of inner city riots — the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher considered abandoning parts of the north to what the then chancellor Geoffrey Howe described as “managed decline”.
In a letter dated September 4, and only released by the state archives in 2011, Mr Howe, a Cambridge-educated classicist, asked: “Should our aim be to stabilise the inner cities?.?.?.?or is this to pump water uphill? Should we rather go for ‘managed decline’?” He realised how controversial the approach would be. “This is not a term for use, even privately,” he counselled cabinet colleagues. “It is much too negative.”
The causes of the Toxteth riots in Liverpool and those in Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol and London were manifold. Racial harassment of young black people by the police was the spark, but unemployment rates of as much as 50 per cent in some places had robbed many people of hope as well as money.
Thatcher blamed the poor. “We have a whole generation brought up on five hours a day of TV,” she told the cabinet on July 9. “We have poured money into big employments in Merseyside; a failure.”
As her government cut subsidies and sterling soared, allowing a flood of cheap imports, industry across the north of England and the Midlands collapsed. More than 1m manufacturing jobs were lost between 1979 and 1981. Almost one in five people in the north-east were jobless, compared with one in 10 in the south-east. Hundreds of thousands of people moved south for work.
Michael Heseltine, the then environment secretary, accused his own government of “tactical retreat, a combination of economic erosion and encouraged evacuation”.
Three years later the fight moved from the cities to the coalfields. A plan to shut up to 75 pits over three years sparked a year-long strike across Yorkshire, Durham, Lancashire, South Wales and Scotland. More than 160,000 coalfield jobs were lost in the decade after 1981. By 1996 Grimethorpe, once a thriving pit village in South Yorkshire, was the most deprived area in the UK. And some coalfield communities are still struggling to find a new purpose.
But with memories fading, these are some of the places that overturned 40 years of enmity to vote Conservative at December’s general election, while big cities in the north such as Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and central Leeds remain Tory-free zones. Andy Bounds - FT
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