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/diary0015
Thursday 17 January 2002
The War on Poverty "Social exclusion" is a slippery
concept. The term has entered English politics from French usage. L'exclusion
sociale has a heavyweight ring to it, which is seductive. With l'exclusion sociale firmly entrenched in Brussels (where French and English still battle for bureaucratic and linguistic supremacy) importation proved irresistible. Yet in English, its flavour misses all the subtlety of the French original. And the English term has acquired some very misleading overtones of its own. In French, the term describes an abstract process. The word seeks to encapsulate the many ways in which social conventions and practices tend to exclude certain people from the equal enjoyment of society's advantages - no gypsies, no hawkers, no beggars, no immigrants, no pieds noirs, no blacks, no coloured.
The emphasisis on "social", meaning other than legal or statutory. An example
of such a process in an English context would be the "institutional racism", said to
exist in the Metropolitan Police. In English, the term
has acquired a class connotation, which is missing in the French. Ever since the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1894, the politics of English housing has been dogged by class, on both sides of the political divide. And there is a further English gloss which is even more unfortunate: the "excluded ones" are immediately perceived as those living in the poor parts of town, the "sink" Council estates. These are the areas of deprivation, particularly in our bigger towns and cities, which have been targeted for forms of "area improvement", from Michael Heseltine's battle-bus to Liverpool onwards. Urban Programme has followed programme, Labour has followed Tory, Urban Renewal has followed renewal, as central government has
striven to repair
the
bald patches in the fabric of our towns, and to claim the credit for the repairs. Now, an
elegant French abstraction has come to mean a depressing litany of old problem areas.
And now, here we go again! New Labour theory
insists that only the worst-off should be benefited, necessitating a form of area-based
collective means test. Specific "communities" are targeted, for the most part the same
communities that have been targeted for the last twenty-five, even fifty, years. Each
Department has it own criteria of deprivation, and for the most part they converge. The
Regional Government Offices can be authorised to get to work, by-passing local politicians.
If Government focuses on these "bald patches" for long enough (so the theory goes), they
will eventually disappear. And Ministers will get the credit.
| | This is all very superficial.
The growing
tenacity of these bald patches is attributable to the dismantling of urban government generally.
These are problems which, within the admirable Continental tradition of urban government, are taken
quickly and easily in hand, by the town authorities. Central government simply does not get
involved. As a matter of experience, urban growth
has always produced bald patches, pinch-points in the urban fabric which are adversely affected
by the processes of change, and which need transitional remedial attention, "regeneration". That
can only be done by a form of government with jurisdiction over the whole of the real city or city region, capable of taking account of wealth transfers, community priorities and inter-community rivalries. What matters is the overall urban economy, the overall system of transportation, the overall educational system, the overall waste management system, the overall distribution of employment. To create
"special measures" to repair bald patches is like treating measles by attempting to cauterise
the pimples. It has not worked, and it will never work. The
greater truth is that we have so emasculated urban government that local authorities
are no longer capable of looking after their own bald patches. With certain exceptions,
authorities facing bald patches lack the resources, the tax-base,the forward momentum and
local pride, and the calibre of professional staff to tackle them. And increasingly, they
lack the necessary political leadership. Local government in
our cities is in decline. That's the real problem. And the superficial
"reforms" of the Local Government Act 2000 will do nothing to retrieve the situation,
rather the contrary. Elected mayors will not arrest the cycle of decline. Modern city
government needs the highest skills, the most powerful motivation, exceptional energy, and
the most
creative
imagination that any community can muster. Few of our cities can claim government of
that calibre. Local government has been systematically
undermined, first by the Tories, and since 1997 by Labour. There is no sign of a change
of heart. The process of decline has become a grim self-fulfilling prophecy, a self-proving
proposition. But never say never. As Director of
the City Region Campaign (which I formed in 1995), my guess is that, within the next
five years, the penny will drop, and all Parties will come tounderstand the seriousness of
the mistake they have all made, and the intractable nature of the damage that has been done.
As a Labour loyalist, I hope that my own Party will be the first to come to its senses. We
should strengthen urban government, within the context of regional devolution. For my
part, and as Director of the City Region Campaign, I shall be working for that.
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