Today, we've learned that Mrs May is allocating £1.6 billion "to boost struggling towns and communities in England after Brexit". The "left-behind" they are being called, the civic equivalent of "just about managing" which is usually code for "not managing at all". This fund is made up of £1 billion shared out on the basis of perceived needs, and £600 million that local communities can bid for. More than half of it will come to the Midlands and the North of England. It will be targeted on "coastal and market towns, and de-industrialised communities".
It sounds like a lot of money, even when it's spread over six years. It isn't. Not at all. It's no more than a tiny drop in a vast ocean of need. Of this total, the North East is allocated £105 million, so £17 million a year. Anna Turley, MP for Redcar and Cleveland, says that her local authority alone has had £90 million taken from its budget by austerity cuts. One estimate of the cost of offsetting the impact of austerity across England is calculated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) at £19 billion per year alone. And that doesn't include the impact of Brexit!
When I was a cathedral dean in both Sheffield and Durham, I used to meet regularly with CEOs and other senior leaders of Sheffield Council and then Durham County Council. In retirement, I've got to know the chief executive of another big urban North Eastern local authority. I have to say I am full of admiration for the way in which these councils are run. My Sheffield days were pre-austerity, but in Durham, I would listen to colleagues tell me of their dire forebodings about the future impact of austerity cuts. I was told that it would take years to recover from this attrition, and even when I retired in 2015, we were a long way from being able to say that the end was even in sight. When you consider that the amount of money on offer today amounts to less than two percent of local authority spending in England, you'll see how derisory it really is.
As we know, the majority of these communities, places like Sunderland and Hartlepool, voted decisively for Brexit in the 2016 referendum. In many of them, elected members feel honour-bound to respect that outcome even if they don't personally agree with it. But Mrs May needs their votes if she is going to get her negotiated Brexit deal across the line before B-Day on 29 March. Without them, the risk that the UK will crash out of the EU looks perilously high, well and truly in the red-for-danger zone.
It's hard not to suspect that the parliamentary votes she needs have something to do it. It's crude to speak about "buying votes". But the timing of the announcement looks remarkably like that when local authorities have for years been beseeching the Conservative Party to restore their funding status quo ante. This isn't because they are profligate as some people in the south seem to assume. They simply want to get on with the jobs we elect them to do, which is to deliver local services at a level that does not severely penalise their neediest and most deprived communities. The proliferation of food banks across the country is an apt commentary on the state we're in. It's always the poorest who suffer most. Watch I Daniel Blake.
Again, let's put this £1.6 billion in perspective. Mrs May famously allocated £1 billion to Northern Ireland in return for her "confidence and supply" agreement with the DUP. That money (which I don't at all deny is desperately needed there) is going towards the welfare and support of a population of 1.8 million. Compare that with today's promise of £1.6 billion to help communities across England with a combined population of - well, I don't know exactly but it must be in the region of twenty times the NI figure. (Perhaps someone can give us a more precise estimate and I'll include it in a revision of this blog.)
Put like that, you can see why people outside London and the South East can see straight through today's announcement. It goes nowhere near making a difference to the attrition central government has relentlessly imposed on local authority spending during austerity, let alone mitigating the impacts of Brexit which will be especially hard on the North East. You may have heard the CEO of the North East Chambers of Commerce speak robustly on Saturday's Radio 4 Today programme about the effects of Brexit on trade and employment in North East England, facing as we do our biggest export market in the EU across the North Sea. This was before today's annoncement was made. His point was the planning blight that is already making itself felt across the region because of endless uncertainty about where this nation will find itself in less than a month's time. A paltry £105 million for the North East just rubs salt into these already festering wounds.
I thought of the gospel story of the Syrophoenician woman when I heard this news today. In St Mark's Gospel (7.24ff.) she came to Jesus in desperate need, and at first, it looked as though he was going to refuse to help this non-Jew towards whom, perhaps, his first thought was that he had no special obligation. But she reminded him that even the little dogs ate the children's crumbs that fell from the table. Well, I suppose we must be grateful for these crumbs of comfort that are being spilled our way from the banqueting tables of affluent London. But knowing what I do about the North East and its needs, I have to say it's shameful. I despair of this hard-edged Conservatism that is such a denial of the compassionate, one-nation version of it that I grew up to respect. It mocks the dignity of what the Hebrew Bible calls "the people of the land". It's heartless. It's cruel.
Yes. I'm sorry to say it, but despair is the right word to use. It's the right word because it is simply unreal to think that it can make any lasting difference. Put a couple of zeros on the end of this promised amount and we’d sit and up and think, yes, that could be truly transformative. That would make inroads into poverty, social care, education, transport infrastructure, libraries, culture and recreation. Best of all it would empower local communities to grasp hold of and reshape their futures. That would bring about change.
You have to ask whether our leaders "get" what is going on in the regions of England that are less than a three hour train journey from the capital. London feels a hundred times further away from the North East than it did even before. And I say that as a Londoner. Three degrees of latitude overturns all ideas about what is kindly, compassionate and fair. Is this the nation we have allowed ourselves to become? Has affluent England stopped caring about the rest of us? However can this have happened in our green and pleasant land?
MPs of the North East, don't be taken in!
Is it Easington - Billy Elliot country?
ReplyDeleteWell spotted. The image at the end is Hartlepool, looking across the Tees estuary to the steel works at Redcar.
ReplyDeleteThe pursuit of happiness at the expense of meaning! The complacent Tory at its old tricks: Social engineered enclosure movement!!! Save as house's?
ReplyDeleteBrilliant Michael. May your words be heard and taken to heart. I fear that the current state of affairs may come to be seen as some kind of norm. But I remember how much better things were in the early 1970's when I spent a few years working for the Supplementary Benefits Commission. Things were far from perfect but nothing like the situations depicted in I Daniel Blake, or that TV series, the name of which I forget, about the Catholic Priest, would not have been possible. There was real support, financial and otherwise.
ReplyDeleteI was talking about this with a friend recently. It seemed to us that it was also in the 1970's that things started to go wrong, when Mrs Thatcher put the 'market' and individualism first, saying 'there is no such thing as society'. Perhaps the way forward must include a change in consciousness, as advocated by Sue Gerhardt in her book The Selfish Society. But how? I admire those Evangelical Christians who commit themselves to living amongst the poor, but I cannot follow them in their theology and churchmanship.