By Frank Noakes
LONDON — Shattered glass underfoot, the muffled explosion of another car igniting, the sound of running feet, the smashing of a Molotov cocktail; more fire; shouts and the smell of fear; the baton charge. Next night, the same. Next week, somewhere else. Summer months punctuated by inner-city riots. Not in the smouldering heat of a Los Angeles night, but in the temperate weather of the dirty northern English town of Burnley in July.
"Minor riots have become an almost routine feature of life in many British cities." says the Financial Times stating only the obvious. "Law and order" cry the politicians, "unemployment and social crisis" replies a senior police officer and the liberal media. As the local McDonalds restaurant burns unemployed young people tell of lack of amenities, no jobs and police harassment.
The old refrain, of "it was different in my day" is trotted out by the law and order brigade — in the Great Depression young people didn't riot, they trumpet. No, they didn't. But then, they fail to mention, youth unemployment was virtually non-existent because the carnage of the First World War meant fewer young people of working age in the 1930s.
Not all of the riots are set against the backcloth of an inner-city slum. Although most are, some are in outwardly neat semi-detached suburbia. The story here is often the same: unemployment, youth despair and suicide.
But Britain's social crisis, born of callous and brutal Thatcherite economics, is not confined to the young. In Greater London alone, there are 43,000 homeless families, some 100,000 people, at the beginning of the Thatcher era the figure was 2,300. This winter hundreds of pensioners will die of hypothermia whilst private fuel companies reap big profits. People suffer and die on interminably long waiting lists for a bed in an understaffed and overcrowded run down hospital. Even now the government is planning further hospital closures.
Even in the relatively more prosperous south of England, one child in four lives on or below the poverty line. More people in Britain live in poverty than in any other European state; of Europe's poor, one in every four lives in Britain. And so on, and so on.
The horror of the city landscape, is matched in a quieter and more anonymous way in many rural areas, particularly in the north. The idyllic scenery of the Yorkshire Dales, made popular to the world in the TV series All Creatures Great and Small, is under attack. Farmers there are often earning less than £100 a week; many are now being forced to dismantle and sell their centuries old dry stone walls and barns. Human survival and environmental integrity dictated to by the magical and supposedly infallible market.
This is Thatcher's eighties' "economic miracle" and prime minister "British decade". So what of it? There is no such thing as society, according to Thatcher and her acolytes in the Tory Party. After all, they might cynically remind us, an individual's suffering is a tragedy, whereas mass misery is a mere collection of statistics. And statistics abound.
Economic 'take off'?
The Chancellor of the Exchequer (treasurer), Norman Lamont, once said that unemployment was a price worth paying, and there's plenty paying: 10,000 people lose their jobs every week. But for what? The government says for a leaner and meaner business sector that will make Britain great again. So how are the free marketeers faring on this score and how much longer before the economy "takes off"?
Last point first: the British economy is going to need a very long runway for take-off.
First, Britain starts from further behind than most European economies. Only Ireland and Spain, in Europe, have more unemployment. The Tories have fiddled the unemployment figures 30 times since 1979 to lower the statistics, for example 16- and 17-year-olds are not even counted as they can't claim the dole. But on pre-1979 figures there are now more 4 million people unemployed in Britain. This reduces people's ability to spend and also it saps people's confidence. "Am I going to have a job next week ?" they ask. So any consumer-led recovery is going to be slow and a long way off, as the government optimistically predicts that unemployment will continue to rise in 1993-94 and stabilise only in 1995-96.
Secondly, there is a massive personal debt overhang, that is, people are deeply in debt. Its most profound impact has been in housing; Thatcher's project of privatising housing saw the level of home ownership soar, and now many are paying a heavy price. Most houses bought in the south-east of England since 1987 are now worth much less than the amount owed on them, "negative equity" is the sanitised term.
Last year 75,000 people had their homes repossessed and as many will lose their homes this year, these houses only further flood the already "oversupplied" housing market, depressing prices further (There are now 100,000 unoccupied houses whilst hundreds of thousands are homeless).
Because of the government's success in convincing people to buy their council houses and preventing councils from using money from these sales to build new homes, there is a shortage of rented property. Therefore, the thousands of people who are kicked out of their repossessed houses, having nowhere else to live, are subsidised by the government to stay long term in "Bed and Breakfast" establishments. Here they are expected to be out of the B&B accommodation after breakfast, not to return until evening, forcing parents and children, the young and old alike, to walk the streets each day; with the northern winter fast approaching this is going to cause even greater hardship and deterioration of health. Personal bankruptcies have increased five fold in the past two years. As with personal debt so to with small business debt, 75 companies go to the wall every day as they are unable to reschedule debt payments. This debt overhang will again prevent consumer spending pulling the economy out of recession for some years; it also stifles investment in small business.
Stagnant production
So much for economic recovery, what about industry?
The much vaunted increased productivity of the manufacturing sector, crucial to the economy, accounting for 22% of Gross Domestic Product, GNP, and 62% of overseas trade, is heralded as a triumph of Thatcherism, 4% annual growth during the late eighties'. Little is said of the decline of the industry in real terms. Production is down 8% and more importantly investment is down a staggering 30%, with shareholders paying themselves around 75% of after tax profits compared to a little over 30% in Japan and Germany. Banks increased property lending by 800% in the '80s and at the same time only 50% to manufacturing.
Essentially, manufacturing has virtually stagnated. Productivity gains came about because the industry now produces the same amount of produce but with 2.5 million less workers. It now employs about one in five British workers.
Capital spending in Britain per worker is roughly £20,000 whereas its main competitors spend between £33,000 and £54,000 for each employee. The Confederation of British Industry claims that Britain is in danger of becoming an "impoverished offshore island". Big business is reluctant to invest in the "British decade".
In the chancellor's Autumn Statement, delivered to parliament on November 12, the government, under pressure from business and growing protests from disgruntled workers, took a more "interventionist" approach to the economy. It directed money into some infrastructure projects and, in a significant departure from economic Thatcherism, agreed to buy 20,000 homes from the market for rental, a move exaggeratedly described by one commentator as "nationalisation". None of the measures announced in the statement went any where near far enough, and of course they wouldn't, but nonetheless they do indicate a belated and unspoken recognition that free market, monetarist economics has very definite political limits.
The Autumn Statement continues the slow strangulation of Coronation Street style inner-cities by cutting back on spending for projects to alleviate distress. More riots next summer, if not sooner.
Privatisation, the cornerstone of the Thatcher regime, has resulted in higher prices and worse services in most cases. Water quality does not meet with European standards a court ruled recently in 21 areas in the south of England. Electricity prices are 25% higher than they would have been if the industry had remained in government hands. And for all the talk of Britain becoming a land of shareholders, only 6.5% of the population earn money from shares.
Thatcherism has failed abysmally. Or has it?
If the project was all along to effect the biggest redistribution of wealth since the reign of Queen Victoria, it can be judged as a resounding success. Consider the following statistics: the pay gap, between the highest and lowest paid, is the widest since figures have been kept, dating from 1886. Government figures confirm that the rich are richer and the poor poorer. Four in 10 British workers earn less, excluding overtime, than the Council of Europe's "decency threshold". There are 12 million people living below the poverty line and the poorest in society have lost 6% of their real income since 1979.
Now the Tory government has run up against real limits, and is facing an unrelenting political crisis; John Major is the most unpopular British prime minister ever. Yet the Tories face an opposition every bit as bankrupt as itself. Labour's shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown, has proposed a grandiosely named recovery program: the British New Deal that begins "the difference between Labour and the Tories is not a dispute about the importance of the market". Labour shares in the political crisis.
Meanwhile, more people continue to take to the streets in an effort to save not only mining jobs but their own, and good Queen Lizzie moans that it has been a difficult year for her. Now, under mounting pressure she has "volunteered" to pay tax (she chooses how much), and to keep most of the royal hangers-on out of her billions. The times, they are a changing!