Introduction
In 1985, the prime minister Margaret Thatcher personally drove the bulldozer that inaugurated the demolition of the Victorian Broad Street Station in the City of London, making way for new modern office development. In a speech on the occasion, she lamented that ‘we live in an era of conservation’ and hoped that we might come to ‘build the best of our own time to match the achievements of Adam and Inigo Jones’. In the very same week that she was driving a bulldozer into the 1860s ironwork of Broad Street Station, Thatcher also purchased a new neo-Georgian Barratt Home in Dulwich, described in the Spectator as ‘vulgar and incompetently designed’.Footnote 1 What to make of these two seemingly opposed actions by the same woman in the same week? Perhaps nothing but philistinism links these two events. Then again, perhaps this dichotomy of capitalist ruthlessness and bumptious nostalgia is revealing of an uneasy synthesis of the ideals of heritage and enterprise at the heart of Thatcherism.
That cities might provide the key to understanding Thatcherism was a driving force behind three of the most illuminating observers of Thatcher's Britain. Patrick Wright's Journey through Ruins, which is ironically dedicated to Lady Margaret Thatcher herself, saw Dalston Lane as ‘an open archaeological site in which the story of the nation's post-war history can be traced out in unexpected detail’.Footnote 2 In Theatres of Memory, Raphael Samuel tried to wrest the concept of heritage away from Thatcherism, seeing it instead as a potentially radical force.Footnote 3 Lastly, Patrick Keiller's film London, as he put it himself, viewed ‘changes in the detail of the landscape, as spectators at some sporting event might watch the opposition winning’.Footnote 4 His narrative was one in which a suburban Conservative party was effectively at war with cities. It is perhaps peculiar then that in the extensive scholarship on the meaning and progenitors of Thatcherism urban issues are seen as far less central than, first, its economic approach, and, secondly, its sense of moral crusade.Footnote 5 The 2012 book of essays, Making Thatcher's Britain, for example – has no urban element. A recent four-volume collection presenting the most significant writing about Thatcher also ignores urban issues.Footnote 6 This is despite the fact that the repercussions of Thatcherism on cities and urban communities remain deeply controversial; a recent ‘non-partisan’ academic conference titled ‘Thatcherism Now’ held in Liverpool received protests and physical threats.Footnote 7
This article reintroduces the issue of the inner city into the project of understanding the Thatcher government. Through exploring how the Thatcher government formed urban policy in the 1980s, I want to make a contribution to the debate of whether 1979 saw a definite break with past approaches, or whether it is better seen as a continuation of the period of confusion and retreat which characterizes much of the 1970s. Furthermore, I want to ask how much new policy ideas really did amount to a particularly Thatcherite, or indeed a neo-liberal, urbanism, or whether it was more a case of returning to the admixture of dirigisme and deregulation that had long been at the heart of Tory approaches – albeit dressed up with new terminologies and often in new neo-vernacular styling. These questions are important for a broader issue of how we periodize changes to cities in the post-war period.
In asking the question of whether there was such a thing as a Thatcherite urbanism, this article reopens a debate, ongoing during the period itself. Many argued that there was a radical break towards a new market-orientated approach in dealing with cities; but other commentators held that whatever the government's ideological commitments, these were soon abandoned in the face of the difficulties, and therefore stressed a period of consolidation and continuity with the whole post-war period.Footnote 8 Now is a good time to re-ignite this debate, not least because of the benefit of opened archives. There was a large scholarly literature dealing with the Thatcher government's inner-city policy, published through the 1980s and into the 1990s.Footnote 9 This tended to be written from a social sciences background, aiming to assess the effectiveness of urban policy in resolving inner-city issues. The cumulative message of these texts was that urban policy had pursued an ideologically driven agenda that had exacerbated the inner-city problem. This article uses the archives that have been opened since this first wave of scholarship to explore what role the concept of the ‘inner city’ had in structuring the government's policy and self-presentation – regardless of the putative efficacy of interventions.
The inner city
The inner city is an exceptionally fruitful vantage point from which to try and understand the Thatcherite project, as it was an issue that touched upon so many of the central anxieties about the state and society during the period. The concept of the inner city was a spatially manifested locus for arguments about physical, social and economic decline; a prism modulated by issues ranging from race,Footnote 10 the north–south divide, the persistence of poverty and social polarization,Footnote 11 to de-industrialization, and increasingly to law and order,Footnote 12 and the perceived breakdown of civil society and the family. Its very indeterminacy as a term made it peculiarly able to act as a shorthand, magnetically drawing to it a whole host of issues. A report on the issue by the Department of the Environment (DoE) civil servant Eric Sorensen highlighted the definitional issue of the term ‘inner city’:
‘Inner Cities’ has become the generic term for urban areas with problems. It is often applied to areas which are neither in cities nor in their inner core. It covers a multitude of problems – e.g. environmental decay, rundown housing estates, industrial decline, very high localised rates of unemployment, social and racial deprivation, drugs and crime. Moreover, the public focus can change, sometimes very quickly as, for example, when there are ‘riots’ and the media seek to identify the ‘underlying causes’. The term ‘inner cities’ has however taken such firm root in the panoply of journalistic clichés that we are probably stuck with it.Footnote 13
Like the word ‘slum’ in previous decades, the term ‘inner city’, through its very indeterminacy, could act both as a rallying cry to galvanize action directed at urban poverty, but it also had the potential to act as a slur, anathematizing sections of the population, especially black and Asian ethnic minorities. Increasingly ‘inner city’ referred not only to the ‘traditional core areas of cities’, but also to what were described as ‘the many large and badly designed council estates’.Footnote 14 ‘The period was part of a long-term shift in the perceived location of urban problems – from ‘Victorian slums’ and ‘twilight areas’ to ‘concrete jungles’, a shift that arguably culminated in prominent and repeated use of the term ‘sink estate’ by the future Labour prime minister, Tony Blair.Footnote 15 As will be seen, that urban modernism could be construed as amongst the key culprits for urban deprivation was useful for the Conservative party, as it added ammunition to its attack on local authorities.
There were three key moments during the 1980s when the issue of the inner cities flared into national consciousness: following the 1981 and 1985 riots, the former leading to an official report by Lord Scarman and the latter provoking the archbishop of Canterbury's 1985 Faith in the City report; and after the 1987 election victory, when Thatcher took personal responsibility for the inner cities and inaugurated the Action for Cities policy drive. Searching for the term in Hansard shows its growing pervasiveness from the mid-1970s onwards, reaching its apogee in the mid- to late 1980s with Action for Cities, and then dropping off in the 1990s (Figure 1).
Discussion of inner cities in parliament, 1971–2004
The issue had gained in influence throughout the 1970s, with cross-party initiatives culminating in the 1977 Inner Area White Paper, and subsequent 1978 Inner Urban Areas Act.Footnote 16 During the 1980s, there was a continuation of the long-term decline of many of these areas, made more precipitous by the intensification of de-industrialization following monetarist policies and an inhospitable international economy, and the subsequent spiralling levels of unemployment. Nevertheless, the Thatcher administration was perhaps surprisingly willing to confront issues of the inner city. This was in part because it was construed as a long-term, inexorable and remorseless issue, on which the opposition were relatively weak. It therefore diverted attention from issues on which the Conservatives were more vulnerable such as the economy and unemployment. As a Conservative party research department memorandum put it, ‘I have not noticed any great desire by the Opposition to debate the inner cities, and what a mess some Labour councils are making of them.’Footnote 17 The inner city was a useful concept for the Conservatives, as it did not restrict debate to mono-causal or macro-economic issues: ‘The Labour Party wish to restrict discussion to unemployment and Government spending. I feel that we should keep the debate as wide as possible, in order to show there are no easy solutions, and also to force attention away from our obvious Achilles’ heels.’Footnote 18 It is notable that the Church of England's report Faith in the City was a far more sustained and damning indictment of government action and inaction in inner-city areas than anything that came from the political Left.Footnote 19
All in all, the inner-city issue dominated a vast amount of legislative and ministerial effort, taking up a significant proportion of the intellectual energy, if not necessarily the resources, of most domestic ministries. As New Society argued,
The political will to do something we must assume to be real enough. However uninterested ministers might sometimes appear to be to the plight of the urban poor, the government has no vested interest in the continuation of inner city deprivation and decline. Indeed, Mrs Thatcher at least has vested considerable personal capital in her crusade to do something about the inner cities.Footnote 20
Nicholas Ridley made a similar point when he argued that ‘Even those who cannot find it in their hearts to credit us with good intentions might at least rise to the cynical view that no political party deliberately sets out to alienate vast chunks of the electorate by pointless exercises in malign neglect.’Footnote 21 Inner-city effort was spread across central government, so that by 1989 it was possible to identify at least 35 separate schemes impacting on the inner city – administered by at least 9 departments or quangos.Footnote 22 Although the multiplicity of departments involved was open to criticism for the lack of co-ordination it entailed, it is also evidence that the issue ran through all domestic areas of Thatcherite policy.
Neo-liberalism
Much writing on British neo-liberalism has been concerned with exploring its intellectual roots. Keith Joseph is a key figure for many such narratives, which seek to understand the intellectual constellation of ideas leading to Thatcherism – due to his somewhat unusual interest in ideas and his demonstrable influence. There is a case to be made that he had something of this role in the field of urban policy. It is remarkable that Joseph had been minister of housing and local government from 1962 to 1964, overseeing the move to more high-rise flats and radical city centre redevelopment.Footnote 23 His conversion against urban modernism paralleled his conversion against Keynesianism. He congratulated Michael Heseltine on being appointed to the Department of the Environment with the words, ‘Well done. You'll find lots of problems in your new job. I caused many of them.’Footnote 24 Issues of urban planning and architecture had been crucial for many on the New Right during the 1970s, and the rejection of architectural modernism was often proclaimed as exemplary of larger battles.Footnote 25 Joseph's 1980 Bibliography of Freedom contains a prominent section on urban policy. Urban policy was an area in which, according to Joseph, ‘the failure of interventionist policies and planning has been conspicuous’.Footnote 26 The list of books is heavily weighted towards titles from America, notably two books by Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities, described by Joseph as ‘two brilliant studies of the failure of central planning and the virtues of the decentralized and spontaneous order’.Footnote 27 It also included books such as Martin Anderson's Federal Bulldozer Footnote 28 and Edward Banfield's The Unheavenly City Revisited.Footnote 29 Cumulatively, the list shows how the perception of the failure of transatlantic modernist urban renewal policy helped to delegitimize a whole gamut of approaches.Footnote 30
An indicative book on the list, and one that would be echoed in many texts issuing from British right-wing commentators, was Edward Banfield's The Unheavenly City Revisited.Footnote 31 It is well known in the field of economics how a set of radical ideas emanating from a transatlantic coterie of academics entered the blood stream of British mainstream political thought.Footnote 32 Edward Banfield is perhaps now a peripheral figure in the pantheon of the New Right, but he was deeply embedded in the academic networks of the period.Footnote 33 His diagnosis of the American urban crisis in Unheavenly City (1970) and its revision, Unheavenly City Revisited (1974), can be seen to have acted as a blueprint for the way many in the Conservative party talked about urban issues. Banfield was sanguine about a supposed urban crisis in American cities, pointing to the much worse poverty in the countryside, and argued that any inequalities or problems of urban life in cities would resolve themselves naturally, and that government intervention, far from resolving issues, actually served to exacerbate them. He also, controversially, argued that African Americans were not substantially the victims of racial prejudice.
Although Banfield's ideas came from a different context, they found an echo in a wide range of Conservative publications, across the 1980s.Footnote 34 Perhaps it was Alfred Sherman who first applied such arguments to a British context.Footnote 35 We might take Anthony Steen's New Life for Old Cities as indicative of these kinds of arguments. In the book he argued:
Nor should we presume that the inner cities’ problems have arisen because of previous benign or malign neglect – for they haven't. On the contrary the cities have been recognised for a long time as posing special political, social and economic problems. It was because of these that increasing sums of money were pumped into declining areas, in the erroneous belief that this would provide the answer – but it didn't. It has merely led to further problems and a mistaken diagnosis which ensured the wrong medicine continued to be administered in ever increasing doses and not surprisingly the patient has now taken a turn for the worse.
Arguments like this were especially adept at gaining traction amongst commentators because they fitted into two other metanarratives about the post-war period. One was the perceived failure of urban modernism; the other was the purported sclerosis, venality and inefficiency of local government. Steen outlined a narrative where the ‘initial culprits’ had been the planners, ‘whose sheer folly it was to have believed that wholesale clearance of inner-city neighbourhoods could bulldoze away the city's problems’.Footnote 36 Policies of dispersal and slum clearance had led to ‘the Exodus’ of people and jobs. Meanwhile, local authorities had stockpiled local land, and encouraged small businesses to move out of the inner city to greenfield sites. The case against urban modernism and local authorities, whether it was accurate or not, carried huge force, because such arguments were pervasive and largely unchallenged, and were as likely to come from left-wing as right-wing sources. At the heart of a neo-liberal attitude to cities, then, was a belief that the very process of government intervention was the culprit for urban decline. ‘Benign neglect’ might therefore be ‘less wasteful and damaging’ than costly intervention as it risked destroying ‘an area's “immune system” and thus its ability to recover on its own accord’.Footnote 37 Such arguments were increasingly enunciated in the moral terms of how ‘dependency culture’ was caused by state intervention, and how an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ would flourish when it was taken away:
For in my opinion it is precisely in our inner cities that free market solutions have not been properly applied for fifty years. It is in those areas more than any other where the elements of individual enterprise, competition and consumer choice have been most lacking. It is there more than anywhere else that the culture of dependence has survived under the dead hand of municipal socialism.Footnote 38
Enterprise zones, development corporations and right to buy
That such neo-liberal ideas were certainly being discussed is clear, but how far they succeeded in gaining traction presents a messier picture. After the 1979 election, Keith Joseph pushed for a wide-ranging rethink of inner-city policy. But Joseph was unable to steer the course of government so easily towards new ideas – and we should be cautious about seeing too direct an influence of neo-liberal ideas in this area. The government were unwilling to move away from the approach set down by the 1977 White Paper, especially as this itself had grown from a bipartisan movement, having been initiated by Peter Walker in the early 1970s. As it was argued against Joseph, ‘Any new review of the interaction of public policies in the context of the inner cities would be complex and prolonged.’Footnote 39 Michael Heseltine's first statement on inner-city issues was written in direct contradistinction to Joseph's suggestion for a ‘thorough review’Footnote 40 and in spite of Geoffrey Howe's protestations that Heseltine was proposing an ‘uncosted extension of public sector activity’ that was out of tune with the ‘thrust of our philosophy’.Footnote 41 Heseltine argued that in most cases ‘existing machinery, streamlined and adjusted, will be capable of carrying developments forward in the inner cities’Footnote 42 – but in special cases, most notably in Liverpool and the London Docklands, enterprise zones and urban development corporations would be deployed.
In common with many other areas of the welfare state where expenditure continued to expand under Thatcher's auspices, many of the interventionist policies inaugurated in the Inner Urban Areas Act (1978) continued to grow during her premiership. The Urban Programme had an increase in funding from £93 million in 1978–79 to £338m in 1984/85, whilst overall the programme cities receiving funding doubled from £1 to £2 billion between 1979 and 1985, an increase of 6 per cent in real terms even taking inflation into account. The money directed to partnership areas similarly increased from £700 million to £1,400 million in those six years. The derelict land grant doubled in size – and could show off that it reclaimed an area the size of Grimsby every two months. There was also a very significant increase in the granting of housing improvement grants – 105,000 houses belonging to councils were improved in 1984 compared with 74,000 in 1978.Footnote 43 Even taking into account the fact that the rate support grant was being dramatically reduced at the same time, all of this suggests that the government were not abandoning many of the interventionist policies of the previous administration.
The problem was that the goal was ever receding, as jobs drained out at an ever-more precipitous rate, much quicker than any intervention could keep up with. In many ways, inner-city aid ended up functioning as a stand in for the regional policy of the post-war period.Footnote 44 As a review of the interventions of the Thatcher period summed up, ‘It is a curious comment on Thatcherism, however, that the administration most committed to a reduction in the role of the state, and in the need for an independent private sector, has spent more on specific urban regeneration and employment schemes and incentives to private investment in urban areas than any other in recent history.’Footnote 45 Within this expenditure, there was a perceptible shift in focus, away from financing social projects, towards those intended to stimulate the economy and job creation, as for example in the Urban Programme (Figure 2).Footnote 46 Nevertheless, in doing so, the government were not diverting from the thinking developed during the 1970s, which stressed that inner-city decline resulted from external economic processes, and not because of changes happening to the population.
Balance of expenditure in the Urban Programme, 1979–85
The difference with the approach set out in the 1977 White Paper was not in the commitment to area-based programmes of economic renewal, but in a pronounced effort to bypass local authorities. It was acknowledged, at least behind the scenes, that ‘the major change from the 1977 Inner Cities White Paper which saw local authorities as the key agents in the delivery of urban policy. They are now, in some areas, part of the problem.’Footnote 47 The other difference was that there was an acknowledgment, at least behind closed doors, that money spent was not necessarily going to reverse decline, but that policy should be directed at trying to ‘ease the pains of change, not attempt to reverse the process’.Footnote 48
The same contradictory and ambiguous outcomes with regard to a supposed neo-liberalism is also to an extent true of the more overtly novel urban policies rolled out during the early Thatcher years. Enterprise zones were attempts to encourage private investment into inner-city areas by offering exemptions on bureaucracy, taxation and planning regulations. The idea was brought to public attention by a 1978 speech at a special Bow Group dinner at the Waterman's Arms in the Isle of Dogs by Geoffrey Howe (although Joseph had posited something similar earlier),Footnote 49 and show some influence of left-field planning ideas of Peter Hall (although Howe himself could not have been clearer that Hall's ‘Freeport’ proposal was far too dramatic and ‘not the one I am putting forward’).Footnote 50 Stephen Brooke sees enterprise zones as having ‘physically [written] neo-liberalism into the language of some British cities’,Footnote 51 whilst Sam Wetherell views them as ‘arguably neo-liberalism's purist policy expression’.Footnote 52
As implemented through legislation passed in 1980, initially in seven inner-city areas,Footnote 53 enterprise zones were rather less radical than Howe's initial proposal, and indeed were criticized by many from the Right, including Anthony Steen, for the way that they were an intervention into the free market in favour of areas where the private sector had manifestly failed. They did include significant tax exemptions, including a holiday on rates for the first 10 years – but, crucially, the local authority was reimbursed for the lost revenue directly from the Treasury.Footnote 54 Proposals to withdraw regional grants and subsidies from businesses located in enterprise zones were dropped after pressure from industry and unions. As businesses in the area continued to receive all the benefits of public services, what tax exemptions that did occur amounted to little more than public subsidy. As it was argued in 1984, enterprise zones ‘became, instead of an experiment in free enterprise and non-intervention, an instrument to encourage the location or relocation of industry in selected areas by means of a spatially-discriminatory fiscal regime and a heavy promotional effort’.Footnote 55 There was some limited planning deregulation, much diluted by the time it came to the legislation, including a streamlined procedure for applying for permits.Footnote 56 This did not, however, amount to anything like the much more far-reaching deregulation of building licences in 1954.Footnote 57 Peter Hall's own view was that enterprise zones were ‘a particularly poignant example of the way that, especially in Britain, radical ideas are taken on board by the establishment, only to be sanitized into something completely harmless’.Footnote 58 The cost, both direct and indirect, to government was substantial.Footnote 59
Urban development corporations (UDCs) are another area where it would be a mistake to overplay either their novelty, or see them as a symbol of a new ideologically neo-liberal approach to cities.Footnote 60 For one thing, the UDCs were openly modelled on the post-war New Town development corporations, which had been set up by Attlee's Labour government in 1946 – hardly a neo-liberal exemplar:
One of the most notable examples of positive planning in Britain during this century has been the New Town Programme … What is now proposed is the use of a management mechanism similar to the one used to create New Towns to redress the problems of inner cities and utilise their existing infrastructure which is at present running at well below its capacity.Footnote 61
The idea of using New Town mechanics to redevelop inner-city areas had been mooted as far back as the 1960s, by groups such as the Society for the Promotion of Urban Renewal.Footnote 62 Godfrey Hodgson had suggested a version of the idea under the moniker of an ‘Old Town Renewal Agency’ in Crossbow as far back as 1962 – an article that influenced Geoffrey Howe.Footnote 63 The concept had certainly been kicking about in central government departments,Footnote 64 and Michael Heseltine was able to dust off the concept from his prior stint as parliamentary undersecretary at the DoE under Peter Walker when he took over at the department in 1979.Footnote 65 The 1977 White Paper had posited them as a possibility, but criticized their ‘lack of accountability to the local electorate’.Footnote 66 As one commentator put it, ‘Urban development corporations are powerful quangos, more symptomatic of Heath-style corporatism than what is usually understood by Thatcherism.’Footnote 67 The Daily Telegraph went even further, complaining in 1987 that they were ‘more of a socialist concept than a child of a Tory administration’.Footnote 68
Of course, the efforts of the UDCs (as with the enterprise zones) were intended to ‘pump prime’ for private development, rather than primarily carrying out development by the state. This was in part inspired by the American example, especially the redevelopment of Baltimore harbour.Footnote 69 Urban development grants, based on the American urban development action grants, designed to attract private investment into inner-city areas by making grants available to support capital investment projects developed jointly by local authorities and the private sector; £60 million was available in 1983–84.Footnote 70
Right to buy has been well served in the historiography, but the way that it was a key facet of the government's approach to the inner-city crisis has not been stressed. Tim Barron, a property developer advising the Conservative party, spoke for many Tories in his zealous belief
that home ownership is not only good for the soul but is an utterly essential ingredient if we are to restore to our inner area populations a sense of pride, a feeling of responsibility to others and a desire to improve and preserve their environment and living standards all of which are needed if they are to become fit places to bring up children and enjoy a healthy family life.Footnote 71
A belief in the active benefits of the gentrification in these inner areas was also at play, whereby ‘attracting back the better off middle classes, who would help give the communities greater stability, who demand better standards of education and other services and, who would help make the inner areas an attractive alternative to suburbia’.Footnote 72 Conservative MP Nirj Deva-Aditya also saw home ownership as an effective palliative for the issues brought about by the 1981 riots, arguing that ‘the most effective way of curbing racial tension is to encourage the formation of a property and capital owning black minority with a vested interest in preserving and improving the urban fabric of our inner cities’.Footnote 73 Projects of improvement were actively aimed at ‘drawing in middle and higher income families too – people who can turn their skills in leading and organising to community benefit. In this way run-down areas have a better chance of stepping off the downward spiral of depopulation, dereliction and dependence and of clambering aboard a virtuous circle of improvement, investment, owner-occupation and repopulation.’Footnote 74 Right to buy, however, would only have limited effect in the inner city. This was in part because flats made up 30 per cent of council dwellings, more in urban areas, but accounted for only 4 per cent of council house sales.Footnote 75 In an area such as Tower Hamlets, local authority accommodation continued to account for more than 80 per cent of housing in 1986.Footnote 76
Housing was the one exception to the general phenomenon that the Thatcher governments failed, as Nicholas Ridley ruefully admitted, in ‘controlling, let alone cutting, expenditure on public services’.Footnote 77 The cuts to local authority housing schemes amounted to a remarkable 75 per cent of the government's total spending reductions between 1980/81 and 1983/84. During the Thatcher decade, the expenditure total for housing fell in real terms from £7.3 billion to £1.9 billion.Footnote 78 Nevertheless, there are reasons to downplay the radicalism of the Thatcher government even in this area. As many have argued, policies such as right to buy had a long ancestry within Conservative thought.Footnote 79 Peter Walker, hardly a neo-liberal, had a more far-reaching conception of the policy than could be countenanced by Thatcher.Footnote 80 Right to buy was extensively countenanced by Wilson and Callaghan's Policy Unit.Footnote 81 More importantly, the approach to council housing also built on the long-term trend away from modernist renewal towards rehabilitation forcefully signalled in the 1977 White Paper.Footnote 82
The estate Cantril Farm, in Knowlsey on the eastern outskirts of Liverpool, was a flagship scheme for the Conservatives. This scheme provided the blueprint for the Conservative-backed attempts at diversifying tenure and privatizing management, which would culminate in the Estate Action initiative from 1985. Cantril Farm was bought from Knowsley council for £7.5 million by a consortium of Barclays Bank, the Abbey National and Barratt's development, and renamed Stockbridge Village. A five-year development programme was underwritten by an investment package of private and public funds. Owner occupation increased from 2 to 15 per cent, and Shelter noted that ‘featureless blocks of low-rise housing have been transformed into a suburban idyll of quiet cul de sacs, complete with planter boxes, coach-lamps and freshly painted Georgian front doors’.Footnote 83
Although neo-liberal ideas were certainly approved of and discussed by many Conservatives, when one turns to actual policy the picture is messier. With the exception of housing, most aspects of Thatcher's urban policy involved an expansion of the state. What all aspects of this urban policy do have in common, though, is the way that they were diminishing the power of local authorities. If one were looking for an overarching theme for what was new about urban policy in the years after 1979, it should not be neo-liberalism, but the viciousness of the attack on local authorities.
Bernard Ingham advised Thatcher to answer the question, ‘Is not your entire inner-city policy designed to marginalise local government?’, with the response:
No. But equally we cannot allow anti-enterprise, spendthrift, irrelevant local government to condemn urban areas to deprivation for which the Government is then blamed. The attachment of some local authorities to high rates, gay rights, Nicaragua and nuclear free zones does not offer much hope to their residents. For too long some local authorities have conducted a guerrilla war against the Government at the expense of their rate-payers. It has got to stop.Footnote 84
Although this was ostensibly a denial that inner-city policy was calculated foremost to subvert local authority power, it nonetheless inadvertently revealed the sheer antipathy towards local authorities. It was perhaps unsurprising then, as New Society argued, cumulatively inner-city policy ‘adds up to something which more closely resembles a war on Labour local authorities than on urban decay’.Footnote 85
Action for cities
Towards the government's third term, there was a recognition that there needed to be a renewed attack on inner cities, with the Conservatives looking to tie together the disparate parts of the approach so far taken. There was recognized to be a ‘lack of coherence’Footnote 86 in inner-city policy, and it was not completely clear what was the answer to the questions: ‘Is our approach bottom up, top down or a mixture? Is it deregulatory or is it interventionist through grants and tax incentives?’Footnote 87 As with much policy formation in the third term, there was also the difficulty of balancing the need to show that the party was not, as Thatcher herself put the problem, ‘stale and running out of ideas’, whilst also protecting themselves ‘against the jibe: if these ideas were so good, why haven't you introduced them before’.Footnote 88 Furthermore, there was a feeling that the government were ‘not receiving sufficient credit for what has been achieved or what is underway’.Footnote 89 The way inner-city policy was interconnected with hostility towards local authorities also became increasingly direct, as the government moved the crosshairs of their focus onto local authorities in their last term: ‘The next major institution to be reformed by the Government – the first two having been the trade unions and the nationalised industries – should be local government.’Footnote 90 This was also the term of the poll tax and Thatcher's downfall.
In the policy discussions that led up to the resulting Action for Cities programme, a fissure is discernible between the political need and desire to be seen to do something, and the free market belief that intervention should not even be countenanced. Norman Blackwell and Hartley Booth were Thatcher's advisors pushing most strongly for a clear ideologically defined position, and they were ‘nervous that the result may simply be a re-hash of the traditional DoE approach’: ‘We are in danger of losing sight of our basic philosophy – that local leadership is the key source of initiative, while Government's role is primarily to create the climate to release enterprise (not to “solve” inner city problems through top down intervention).’Footnote 91 The main reason the focus of inner-city policy was moved to the cabinet office, with Kenneth Clarke appointed minister with special responsibilities for the inner cities, was that Thatcher felt the need to appear ‘a “hands on” Prime Minister so far as inner cities go’.Footnote 92 But it was also because Nicholas Ridley at the DoE, which had tended to lead on inner-city policy in the past, was scornful of the very idea that there should be an inner-city policy as such at all:
His Private Secretary says that Mr. Ridley believes there is no such thing as inner city policy. There is only policy towards housing, transport, social services, blacks and so on … If local firms can win business by being fully competitive so much the better. But if they can't, the Government should not interfere with market forces in order to help them … The same beliefs explain why he is sceptical about any ideas for coordinating inner city policies and presentation.Footnote 93
There was a contradiction at the heart of Action for Cities. The government felt the need to be seen to be proactive in tackling the inner-city problem, so much so that Thatcher made it a centrepiece of her third term, and vested considerable personal capital in the crusade. This was obviously at odds with the belief that there was a limited amount that government could do, and that intervention was often counterproductive. That the results were largely more of the same, albeit repackaged, was freely admitted: as Thatcher put it herself at the press conference launching the initiative: ‘I don't think there is a single new policy here, and there is not a great deal of new money.’Footnote 94 It was in large part promotional, advertising what was being achieved:
Although much has been done by Departments to ensure that Government gets credit for its effort and investment in inner cities, people are still largely unaware of the extent of its contribution. I would like to see our contribution to inner city projects acknowledged by Departments using prominent Action for Cities signboards on all their projects within the £3bn total and for all related Press Notices to be in the standard Action for Cities format.Footnote 95
Rather than a new White Paper, the government published a glossy brochure. As Labour MP Donald Dewer complained, ‘what have we been given, apart from a gathering of bric-a-brac from the past ingeniously packaged to give the impression of generosity?’Footnote 96 Such presentational efforts could be defended as having an important role in challenging stereotypes, and ‘selling a message of motivation and hope’.Footnote 97 Something similar was happening with Lord Young's concurrent massaging of the unemployment figures. A centrepiece of Action for Cities was a series of breakfasts around the country, where businessmen were encouraged to invest in inner-city areas, in a long tradition of civic boosterism, but with local authority figures notably excluded.Footnote 98 It is nevertheless difficult to escape the feeling that all the propulsive talk about inner cities did not amount to much. At its worst, Action for Cities’ concentration on producing results that could be trumpeted involved something worryingly close to the creation of Potemkin Villages for the enterprise culture: ‘In due course we will want to be able to demonstrate that our policies have had a significant impact on specific locations. New initiatives therefore need to be targeted on a relatively small number of areas where we can expect to see improvement.’Footnote 99
Conclusion
Thatcher herself struggled to find the right tone in presenting issues about the inner cities, and she too easily risked ‘sounding patronising and uncaring’, as her advisors warned her.Footnote 100 The years of her premiership nevertheless saw a vast amount of effort expended on the issue. The inner cities were important to her and her administration. It is not so much that inner-city issues superseded other domestic concerns such as the economy, inequality, race relations, social breakdown or the devastation of manufacturing jobs, but rather that the inner city was an important arena in which these issues could be seen to be grappled with. Many of these issues might well have been approached in ways that tackled them without giving any weight whatsoever to where they occurred. A coherently neo-liberal approach would see any policy in favour of one area over another as reinforcing failure. The very concept of a ‘neo-liberal inner-city policy’ is therefore potentially oxymoronic. Fundamentally, the government found it useful to approach domestic issues through the lens of the inner city, because the blame for society's ills could be laid upon long-term processes, and on local government.
The resulting efforts of central government were muddled. Driven by a desire to reduce the state, it arguably ended up being as much an attack on local government as it was on urban deprivation. Split between the contradictory impulses of a free market ideology and the political necessity to be seen to be intervening productively, inner-city policy became increasingly about presentation and spin. What had emerged most clearly in the decade separating the 1977 White Paper on inner cities and 1987s Action for Cities programme is not a clearly defined neo-liberal approach to cities, but the end of the meliorist belief that the inner-city problem might be solved through government intervention. That this loss of belief did not in fact result in less intervention is a paradox.
There was a clearly defined and frequently enunciated neo-liberal philosophy widespread within Conservative circles within central government, stating that the inner-city problem had come about because free market solutions had not been tested. We should, however, be cautious about seeing this period as presenting a new neo-liberal polity. From the perspective of those in government, neo-liberal ideas were very far from being enacted, and the approach to the issue remained much more piecemeal. There is evidence for a number of explanations for this failure of neo-liberal ideas gaining traction, whether it is the continued influence of ‘wets’ as well as ‘drys’ within government, Heseltinism as well as Thatcherism, a civil service committed to old modes of thinking, or the political impossibility of non-intervention, especially following urban riots. Whatever the answer, historians clearly need to be cautious about deploying an ideologically motivated programme as the overarching explanation for urban change in this period.
Inner cities were the places where many of the larger processes negatively affecting British society could be seen most vividly, whether it was unemployment, de-industrialization, social polarization or antagonistic race relations. This article has argued against the primacy of ideology as an explanation for urban change in this period. The still nascent historiography of 1980s urban Britain will need to pay attention to longer-term historical processes, and be cautious of neat periodizations.Footnote 101 This article has focused on the internal urban policy formation of the Thatcher government, but its ultimate conclusion is that we will need to look elsewhere if we are to form a full understanding of urban change in the 1980s.
