Action and Inaction in the Cities
Susanne MacGregor and Ben Pimlott
The essays in this book do not amount to a programme: but they are intended to provide a springboard for one.
The aim is to analyse a problem which economic growth alone has failed to cure  and to consider possible new forms of public action.
The biggest single difficulty in drawing attention to urban poverty is that it is not new, but simply  in some of its most worrying manifestations  getting worse.
Like the poor themselves, the inner city has long been with us.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution created a mass urban society, the conditions of the poorest city dwellers have given rise to anxiety among the better off.
The inner city has been variously regarded as a cause for moral outrage, a threat to public order, or as a stain on the nation's conscience.
Meanwhile bad housing, bad sanitation, lack of education, and other perennial ills associated with overcrowding and poverty have been routinely denounced by political leaders and social reformers.
A central objective of the post-war welfare state was, indeed, to alleviate the problems of the urban poor, over whom Beveridge's Five Giants (Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness) had for so long held sway.
In the early 1940s and 1950s, the belief was widely held that a combination of government intervention  in the form of town planning, housing and health programmes, and the provision of social security  and permanent male full employment, together with an increase in real wages, would reduce suffering due to poverty to manageable proportions.
The 1964 Labour Government was elected on a tide of impatience at the slackening pace of social reform, but also of optimism that little more than economic growth, fuelled by technological change, was needed to remove the main causes of urban deprivation (MacGregor, 1981).
Disillusion swiftly followed.
The work of Peter Townsend and others showed that, far from presiding over the elimination of poverty, the Wilson Government actually failed to prevent some of its features from worsening (Townsend and Bosanquet, 1972).
Evidence began to mount that much of the social welfare paternalism of the post-war period had created almost as many problems as it solved.
Neither the Butler Education Act of 1944, nor the introduction of comprehensive schools, prevented a high proportion of children from under-achieving.
Post-war reconstruction and housing programmes seemed to do nothing to prevent, and seemed even to encourage, a rise in crime and mental illness.
Meanwhile, in many parts of the country, a problem as old as cities themselves  tension between cultural groups, between earlier immigrants and newer ones, between black, brown, and white, and (increasingly) between large sections of urban youth and the police  came to be identified as the key inner-city issue.
Rising unemployment turned a lingering and growing malaise into a crisis.
As in the United States, so in Britain it was an outbreak of violence that dramatically brought the plight of the inner cities to public notice.
In the early 1980s, at a time when manufacturing industry was collapsing and the outlook for the unskilled looked particularly bleak, frustration boiled over in a series of riots in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, and elsewhere.
All were spontaneous outbursts: none, contrary to some claims, were politically inspired or orchestrated (except in Northern Ireland where urban problems existed on a grander, more devastating scale, and where there was a unique heritage).
Many had an ' ethnic ' dimension, in the sense that many of the rioters were black.
Unlike, however, the 1958 Notting Hill riots, few of those involved were immigrants  the vast majority were British born.
And the disturbances could not strictly be called racial: the most prominent feature was that of violent clashes between young people and the police.
The problems, however, were not confined to violent upheavals of this kind.
Paul Harrison's Inside the Inner City: Life under the Cutting Edge focused on Hackney, a London borough ranked among the worst off on any scale of urban deprivation (Harrison, 1983).
Harrison describes (p. 369) the way in which the inner urban powder-keg leads to a vicious circle, with many victims, but few individual villains:
The police force face the virtually impossible task of keeping the lid on the explosive mixture of ingredients that the dynamics of British society have assembled in the inner city.
This mixture, heated by recession and high unemployment, inevitably generates a high level of crime.
This necessitates, in turn, a far more numerous and ubiquitous police presence than in other kinds of area, far more frequent unpleasant contact with the public as potential suspects, and far greater opportunities for police misjudgment or abuse.
The inevitable sufferers, of course, are the poor, of whom those who actually commit the offences that concern the police are a tiny minority and whom, indeed, it should be the purpose of the police to protect.
Not only are the most disadvantaged on the receiving end of most crime, argues Harrison, they also have to put up with the heaviest police presence.
They are more likely to be stopped and searched, and to be the victim of mistaken arrest or conviction.
At the same time, the residents of the poorest areas have to suffer, in a way that is not true of those who live elsewhere, a growing fear of attack on themselves or their property.
Improved police methods might help, writes Harrison, to contain the problem.
But, without other changes, the result is likely to be a ' society of barricaded self-defence, and a steady erosion of civil liberties'.
And he concludes, ' of all the warnings that the inner city has to offer for the direction British society is taking, this is perhaps the most sinister '.
Harrison's vision of a nightmarish future for inner cities, locked in a cold or hot war between have-nots and the forces of public order, was echoed by Robert Chesshyre (1987, p. 95), who concluded that by the late 1980s:
The basic social contract, whereby citizens enjoy certain rights  including health care, decent education and housing and a job  in return for which they observe the rule of law, was breaking down.
As a consequence an underclass was evolving  football hooligans, muggers, inner city rioters  somewhat more frightening than their Dickensian forebears because they were mobile and all too visible.
Recently, of course, there has been an added dimension  part media-and-politician inflated, part real: drugs.
The spiral in drug abuse and trafficking, with direct consequences for the AIDS epidemic, has created a new kind of alarm.
The early 1980s witnessed a radical change in patterns of heroin taking, alongside the global increase.
Smoking heroin (' chasing the dragon ') was one feature of the upsurge.
Another was the increased availability of, and demand for, cocaine.
Sensational media and police reports in 1989 seemed to suggest an increased use of ' crack ' among young people in parts of south London, Liverpool, and Birmingham  with attendant fears that this particularly dangerous substance might become widespread, as it was reported to be in parts of the United States.
for the moment, however, the pattern of drug abuse in Britain remains as varied as ever  with home-produced drugs such as amphetamines as serious a problem as those that hit the headlines.
It is a symptom of public anxiety about urban squalor  and, less creditably, of class and racial prejudice  that ' drugs' and ' inner cities' are automatically linked in the popular consciousness (MacGregor, 1989a).
Nevertheless, drug-taking and more particularly the disruptive social consequences of addiction, are especially serious in areas of city poverty (Burr, 1989).
In short, if life was always harder in the inner cities than elsewhere, and if conditions may temporarily have been alleviated by the impact of the welfare state and rising incomes, the last decade has been widely represented as a period of deterioration.
Moreover, few would dispute that this apparent decline is a reality: the first words of the Prime Minister herself, after the result of the 1987 election was known, were an acknowledgement of the challenge posed to Government by the ' inner cities'.
What has been lacking however  as well as the political will to do something  has been any shared agreement on the cause.
Can the problems of urban poverty be blamed on individual pathology?
On feckless parents and grandparents?
Or on the social or physical environment  the replacement of companionably unhygienic slums by soulless tower blocks with broken lifts (Coleman et al.,
1985)?
Or would a simple injection of resources transform Kafkaesque honeycombs into happy living-spaces, with a consequent decline in inner-city ills?
' A duke can live comfortably in a castle, after all ', the architect Cedric Price is quoted as saying.
' You and I would die of frostbite.
Same building  just a matter of money and management ' (Parkin, 1989).
The view that only ' outstanding management ' could meet the problem was held by the Audit Commission (1987).
The picture painted by the Commission's report on inner London is as gruesome as any ever presented (and is itself revealing of common prejudices in its choice of indicators of deprivation):
In some London boroughs, unemployment among young men exceeds 45%; in some places, among young blacks, it exceeds 60%.
More than one child in three is born into a single parent family.
Half the school leavers have no O levels or their CSE equivalents.
Homelessness, housing conditions, crime are worsening year by year, as the cycle of urban deprivation becomes more established (p. 1)
Drawing on North American experience, the Commission concluded that ' poor management was an important contributory factor to New York's problems', and sought to apply the same lessons here (p. 2).
The Government's post-1987 initiatives have, to some extent, reflected a diagnosis based on the need for better management  though on the principle that central authorities can provide a firmer grip than local ones  but combined with an anti-collectivist belief in the restorative powers of capitalism.
Leech and Amin (1988, p. 14) summarize this approach, not unfairly, in the following terms:
the encouragement of private investment and the liberation of the market; the containment of the forces of social discontent; the control of the powers of the local authorities; and the encouragement of the movement of the wealthy into the inner city thus creating buffer areas of Tory support, accentuating inequalities and injustice and (hopefully though not necessarily) reducing the potential for conflict among the urban poor.
The main thrust of the Government's policy is contained in the January 1988 White Paper on Regional Policy and the Enterprise Economy, in the new Employment Training programme, and especially in the March 1988 Action for Cities programme  all resting on wider reforms to local government structure and finance, and to education and housing.
The most striking feature of this package, apart from its aim actively to involve employers and entrepreneurs, is a sharp reduction in the role of local government.
Despite the contemporary tone of much of Action for Cities, the programme's heritage can be traced to the early 1960s studies which provided the basis for the 1965 MilnerCHolland Report on housing and the 1967 Plowden Report on education, as a result of which general improvement areas and education priority areas were established.
The 1970s' Urban Programme ' had a social, rather than economic, emphasis and was administered by the Home Office.
It was initiated partly in response to the furore caused by Enoch Powell's 1969 ' rivers of blood ' speech, much as disturbances at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival prompted further steps on the part of the Department of the Environment  ' A riot makes a much bigger impact on government thinking ', as Donnison (1987) has pointed out, ' than any amount of earnest and accurate research '.
The Urban Programme consisted of grants and initiatives under the 1969 Local Government Grants (Social Need) Act, which was intended as a flexible instrument to provide supplementary help to local authorities in the fields of housing, education, and health.
Originally, the Programme supplemented existing central and local government schemes designed to meet special needs in urban areas.
The scope was extended in an ' enhanced ' Urban Programme, which included economic and environmental as well as social projects, and was specifically directed at the inner urban areas where the problems were most severe.
Earlier, the change of emphasis from a ' social ' to an ' economic and environmental ' focus had been reflected in a switch of responsibility for the Programme from the Home Office to the Department of the Environment.
The ' enhanced Programme resulted from the 1978 Inner Urban Areas Act, based on a White Paper, published the previous year, on Policy for the Inner Cities (DoE, 1977), the first comprehensive policy statement on the subject to acknowledge it as a definable and cohesive problem.
The White Paper drew on studies conducted earlier in the decade in Liverpool, Birmingham, and London which pointed to a debilitating flight of capital and skilled labour from the critical areas of deprivation.
A key aspect of the 1977 White Paper was the stress it placed on the wider effects of poverty: that it was not just those with acute needs who suffered.
It argued that in talking about inner cities it was vital to think in terms not just of individuals, but of society; that the multiple deprivations of the worst hit areas affected all the residents; that the consequences included a pervasive sense of neglect and decay, a decline in community spirit, a low standard of neighbourhood facilities, and an increase in crime and vandalism; and that, without government intervention, the future was one of reduced job opportunities, deteriorating housing, and a decline in public services.
The document, and the legislation that derived from it, pointed to a positively discriminatory approach: with both central and local government supplementing existing programmes in such a way as to strengthen local economies, as well as the physical and social environment.
Such measures constituted the present Government's heritage, when it took office in 1979.
None of them, of course, anticipated the scale of the problems which were caused by the slump and collapse of much of what remained of inner urban manufacturing industry in the early 1980s.
Neither, at first, did the incoming administration foresee the impact of rising unemployment, which was to be especially serious among the urban young.
True, the new Secretary of State for the Environment laid stress, from the outset, on the need for economic regeneration, and indicated his sympathy for the voluntary sector in the tackling of urban problems.
The previous Government, however, had already pointed to the need to revitalize urban economies, and at first the shift was more rhetorical than real.
Michael Heseltine (1987, p. 138) has since claimed that ' we set a new objective: to make the inner cities places where people would want to live and work and where the private investor would be willing to put his money '.
Partnership became his slogan  the partnership of public and private brains and money.
A new Urban Development Grant was devised, to pump-prime with public funds schemes which would then attract private investment.
Heseltine's vision was of ' partnerships which recognise that there are some things that only governments can pay for, but also that the ingenuity and flexibility of the private sector is indispensable ' (p. 156).
He claims that serious work on inner-city policy began in 1979: but it was, undoubtedly, the riots of 1981, coinciding with the biggest drop in employment and job vacancies since the war, which gave impetus to the new approach.
Urban Development Corporations were introduced in 1981 in London Docklands and Merseyside, and the Urban Development Grant came in late the following year.
Conservative instincts were, of course, to minimize  within the ' partnership '  state involvement and expenditure, relative to that of private enterprise.
Yet, the irony of the early 1980s  as a deteriorating, but perennial, urban problem rapidly became the most acute aspect of the crisis of mass unemployment  was that a Tory government, willy-nilly, found itself presiding over an increase in state intervention through a variety of agencies.
The increased scale of operations also ushered in another fashion of the 1980s  new management structures.
Thus in 1985 City Action Teams were introduced to each ' Inner City Partnership ' area to co-ordinate the work of the three government departments involved.
Task forces, meanwhile, were directed to tackle youth unemployment.
By 1986/7 the Urban Programme was supporting 1,380 starter units and 400 business starts in enterprise workshops.
It was providing 27,500 training places (often in conjunction with the Manpower Services Commission): some 2,500 buildings were being improved; estate action aimed to tackle run down housing; and a large number of new ' partnerships' (which some might see as subsidies, or discredited regional grants, in a new guise) were in operation, in an effort to bring private investment to run-down urban areas.
By 1988 it was claimed that 200 million of Urban Development Grant and Urban Regeneration Grant had successfully ' levered ' more than 800 million of private investment into the inner cities (although how much of the latter sum might have been invested in any case is difficult to say).
Meanwhile, there were other incentive schemes  Enterprise Zones, for example, and simplified Planning Zones, which aimed to lift tax and planning ' barriers' in order to facilitate investment.
Indeed, while with one hand trying to hold down expenditure by local authorities, the Government found itself by the late 1980s involved with the other hand in massive ear-marked spending on inner urban areas.
The Department of the Environment alone by 1988 was spending half a billion pounds out of an Action for Cities total, involving most Home departments, estimated at 3 billion.
Perhaps a Labour government would have spent even more: it would certainly have spent it in different ways.
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.
One of the most bizarre aspects of government policy has been the effective murder of the voluntary sector, and its appropriation, by subterfuge, into the Tory version of the corporate state.
Conservatives have always lauded the ' voluntarist ' principle in welfare, and encouraged it from platforms.
Faced, however, with the catastrophic increase in unemployment and the need to occupy large numbers of workless people without directly employing them (which would have run counter to the economic doctrine which had led to the redundancy of many of them in the first place), the Government poured money into any ' voluntary ' agency willing to put in a bid for government-funded cheap labour.
One result was the triumphant expansion of some charitable organizations, which rejoiced both at their new-found importance and at the Government's munificence.
Another was the transformation of many such bodies, already heavily subsidized from public funds, into de facto agencies of the state, which financed them and indirectly determined their policy.
Nowhere was the impact of this clumsy sleight of hand more evident than in the inner cities, where voluntary organizations had been most active, and where the Government was most anxious for them to mop up unemployment.
However, the later withdrawal of government support, with the scrapping of the Community Programme as unemployment receded, left many of these voluntary organizations high and dry.
The National Council for Voluntary Organizations (NCVO) has suggested from a recent survey that around 3,000 projects had been affected and had lost 285 million in funding (MacGregor, 1990).
There was, of course, a crucial element in the Government's anxiety: the high concentration of ethnic minorities in the areas of concern.
In 1981 nearly 40 per cent of ethnic minorities in the UK lived in ' partnership ' or ' programme ' areas.
There is a danger in reading back from this figure another stereotype, similar to the Pavlovian ' drug addiction/inner city ' assumed link.
Some urban areas have serious problems without a major ethnic dimension (Newcastle, Teesside); not all members of ethnic minorities are poor or deprived.
Nevertheless, the high proportion of inner urban populations composed of people from ethnic minorities, and the high incidence among these groups of all the indices of poverty and social and environmental hardship  combined with the specific problem of inter-racial rivalry, harassment, and tension  make race and ethnicity an aspect that is central to any analysis of the inner cities and of any ameliorative approach.
It was with the aim of contributing to such an improvement, as the representative body of employers and business investors, that the 1988 Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Task Force on business and urban regeneration came to three conclusions: first (in line with the Government's own beliefs), that business must take the lead in reversing urban decline; second, that charity  governmental or voluntary  can not in itself deal with problems, and any regeneration must spring from private investment, commercially motivated; and third, that the potential exists for such investment, provided that early projects are seen to succeed (CBI, 1988).
Echoing the Government, the CBI stressed the ' partnership ' theme, involving developers and (for the CBI) local authorities.
Leadership in such ventures, however, should come from businessmen, not local government.
The essence of the CBI approach  as it admits, and as the Government approves  is enlightened self-interest: salvation will only come when investors want to invest, not when well-meaning local politicians and bureaucrats decide that they ought to do so.
Notably absent from the CBI's understanding of the problems of inner cities was any notion that they should be met by national economic policy.
The assumption, rather, was one of special, even isolated, blackspots that can be dealt with by localized attention.
As an organization of businessmen, the CBI  naturally perhaps  looked on the inner city primarily as a business opportunity.
Thus a special report of the CBI London Region Urban Regeneration Task Force in October 1988 concluded that there was a need for partnerships in which government, local authorities, teachers, church leaders, and residents would all play a part, but with business taking the lead  helped by government subsidy or pump-priming.
The bottom line to private investment remains, as always, the extent and nature of government funding.
One paradoxical consequence of central government limits to rate support grant was a real-money leap in business rates in some areas, and a sizeable increase in the proportion of local budgets paid through rates by the business community.
This heightened business interest in local spending and revenue raising, and fermented anxiety about the operation of the uniform business rate and the community charge: the CBI, previously concerned about fluctuating rates, is now concerned about the commercial consequences of fluctuating services, as local authorities try to manage their finances.
To the CBI's worries about the future of the inner city is added a very real concern that business services may be placed high on the list for cuts by budget-chopping local authorities.
While echoing the Government's ' partnership ' theme in its rhetoric, and paying dutiful lip service to the principle of laissez-faire, the coded message of the CBI is an urgent demand for more government funding, not less.
So far, the Government has been unreceptive.
In addition to the Audit Commission and the CBI, Business in the Community (BIC) has taken up the theme of ' partnership '.
The problem, however, is turning phrases that are warmly applauded at rotary club or chamber of commerce lunches into serious investment.
Why should genuine money-makers bother?
' We all like to be liked ', as one Northern businessman recently put it.
' But, in reality... what we are doing is serving our own best interests....
The more successful the town and country is the more chance we as individuals have of being successful. '
The trouble is, however, that the linking of individual with group self-interest is not a sufficient incentive for smaller firms struggling to make a profit, nor indeed for large, profitable organizations.
One of the causes of the inner-city crisis has, precisely, been the withering of the ' Victorian value ' of civic philanthropy which once encouraged locally-based businesses to link commercial considerations with the welfare of the wider community.
It is na?ve to imagine that such an ethic can be revived by exhortation alone, or by the use of in uplifting but empty phraseology.
It is possible, indeed, to turn the logic of the opponents of traditional regional policy and incentives, and of the proponents or a ' partnership ' approach, on its head.
' Partnership ' is an acknowledgement that business will not invest without encouragement, combined with a view that long-term investment needs to be self-sustaining.
But if the aim is to encourage serious investment, there is also a need for serious spending on infrastructure and services, is well as for start-up finance or subsidy.
There is a need, above all, for an environment in which a fledgling (or established) business will feel comfortable and wish to remain, because of local amenities and because of the availability of a healthy, happy, well-equipped workforce.
It is certainly arguable (and many progressive employers would agree) that the wisest use of public money from a strictly economic point of view would be on schools, houses, and medical services, together with relevant training and measures to reduce discrimination; in short, that the agencies which most obviously have the capacity to produce strategic planning of a business-friendly kind are precisely those which this pro-business administration wishes to bypass  central government departments, and local government, properly funded.
That, more or less, was the conclusion reached by the 1985 report of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Commission on Urban Priority Areas, Faith in the City (1985), a remarkable document roundly condemned by some Conservatives for its alleged implicit Marxism.
Focusing on economic decline, physical decay, and social disintegration as distinctive features of contemporary urban poverty, the report stressed the Commission's view  quite different from that of the Government, the Audit Commission, or even the CBI  that ' the inner city and the peripheral estates are creatures of the whole society, not simply of their inhabitants' (p. 24).
It dared to question the assumption that the creation of wealth, at whatever social cost, was necessarily the first priority of an economic system.
Contemplating ' the displaced fragments of inner city decline '  peripheral council estates  it suggested that wealth-creation ' must always go hand in hand with just distribution,  offering, thereby, an alternative interpretation of ' partnership ' (p. 53).
It commented, too, on the environmental and ecological consequences.
For the Archbishop's commissioners, partnership needed to mean not just a link-up between business and the public or voluntary sectors, but a conscious attempt to meet the powerlessness felt by the ' people in the street ' (p. 186).
The Archbishop's investigators did not search for, or embrace, a fashionable solution.
On the contrary.
Their main call was for a return to the 1977 White Paper, namely: ' a specific commitment on the part of central and local government to the regeneration of the inner areas... both central and local government will be judged by their willingness to implement new priorities, to make funds available, to change policies and to adapt their organisations, (DoE, 1977, para. 25).
Faith in the City concluded bluntly that the 1977 White Paper's ' policy proposals have not been tried and found wanting.
They have not been tried ' (Archbishop of Canterbury's Commission, 1985, p. 193).
So far from treating the problems of the inner city as local difficulties which a bit of capitalist enterprise could clear up, it regarded them as evidence of systemic failure.
The retreat from the principles of the 1977 White Paper occurred in the context of the economic crisis of the 1970s, which culminated in the 1976 resort to the International Monetary fund.
The scale of expenditure on all aspects of local government, and the greatly increased proportion of total public expenditure which it represented, meant that, when the crisis came, some were led to blame local authorities, and in the cuts that followed inner cities inevitably suffered most acutely.
A serious blow, of course, was also dealt to the reputation of the Labour Party, which controlled many of the councils with the greatest needs and which made the heaviest demands on the public purse, and whose members were least apologetic about doing so.
When Anthony Crosland declared that the ' party is over, he can not have realized that the Government's cuts presaged a long period in which the Labour Party itself would be seriously threatened  partly because of its association with supposedly spendthrift urban policies.
In the early and mid-1980s a handful of ' municipal socialist ' Labour councils (triumphantly declared ' loony ' by Norman Tebbit and the right-wing press) were used as a symbol of the party's alleged financial irresponsibility.
With Labour welfarism out of fashion, and neo-liberalism in vogue, the scene was set, not only for the downgrading of local authority power (including the outright abolition of the Greater London Council and the metropolitan authorities which, though actually limited in their spending power, were nevertheless the coordinators and vocal champions of many inner urban schemes), but also for the injection of national party dogma into the management of local affairs.
' This Government is a radical government with a radical message... ', wrote Secretary of State Nicholas Ridley (1988, p. 32).
' Conservatives have a strong localist tradition, but the danger of too much localism is that the Party's voice and through the Party the political interpretation of the Government's voice is not heard. '
This was one ' problem ', at least, which the present administration has proved highly successful at solving.
So dramatic, indeed, has been the impact of privatization and contracting out of services, and of other local government changes, that a reduction of over a third in the total number of local authority employees over the next five years has been predicted by one senior official (Davies, 1988).
It remains to be seen whether the restructuring will save money, or merely shift essential expenditure between agencies, or simply reduce available services.
What it will not do, of course, is tackle the inner-city problem  nor indeed is it designed to do so.
If there ever was a Thatcherite economic miracle, it has, to an alarmingly divisive degree, passed the urban poor by.
Jobless growth, changes in the composition of the workforce, increased ' flexibility ' of labour's terms and conditions, have all contributed to an economic revival which has had minimal benefits where these are needed most.
' The effect has been to reinforce the concentration of unemployment in traditional inner city areas', the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) reported in Local Work (1988), ' and in the regions which were already suffering the worst unemployment before 1979. '
Yet the critical question for the 1990s and the twenty-first century remains unanswered: is there an approach  through central government intervention, decentralization, the encouragement of participation, or any other method  which avoids the insensitivities of bureaucratic welfarism, and yet produces results?
PROGRAMME FOR THE 1990s
Responding to this question  by asking new questions as much as by offering solutions  is the purpose of this book.
It is, indeed, a great deal easier to point out the irrelevance of much of what is happening at the moment than to have confidence in any particular alternative.
Still, some things may be said with reasonable assurance.
Almost everyone agrees, for instance, that enterprise zones alone are of limited value, that tax incentives are relatively ineffective and deregulation is no solution.
Despite government rhetoric, the impact of such measures on people rather than places  as several authors in this volume show  has been marginal.
Contributors also agree on another point: that public expenditure and public services based on principles of universalism and citizenship for all are central to any real programme.
The chapters in this book deliberately provide a balance between experts with direct political or administrative experience of the areas they describe (such as Nick Raynsford and David Mallen) and academic observers.
Several contributors have both political/ administrative and academic credentials.
The original intention was to provide a critical accompaniment to government promises of action on the inner cities made at the beginning of this Parliament.
Out of them, however, has emerged the kernel of a view of the future.
If there is a consistent bias in favour of public intervention and against inertia, there is also, we hope, little shirking of awkward issues  though the collection does not claim to be comprehensive, and there are aspects of a huge topic that are barely touched.
What the book does attempt to do is to provide a framework of problems and ideas, exploring major themes.
Some chapters look at the manifestations of urban breakdown-John Benyon and John Solomos writing about racial conflict and disorder, for example  others, like Robert Reiner, at the evidence on rising crime rates and the complex ethical dilemmas which are often presented as simple.
Several contributors are concerned with how urban dwellers actually live their lives: Peter Townsend, for example, shows the impact of social polarization upon health and well-being by indicating differential rates of mortality and morbidity, and the widening gap between the experiences of rich and poor.
Others look at local government and central-local relations in practice.
Susanne MacGregor points to the impact of a growing climate of social Conservatism, a climate that is encouraged by aspects of government policy.
John Gibson highlights the regressive aspects of recent local government financial reform, and predicts dire consequences for the urban poor.
The chances of the new system of local government finance surviving for long seem slim.
Particular services are examined by two writers closely involved with implementation: Nick Raynsford looks it recent developments in policies on housing, and David Mallen considers how education might effectively be used as a key instrument of social improvement.
Hilary Land examines women's systematic loss of rights and claims for social protection and its effect on the family and children during the 1980s.
She demonstrates that policies of amelioration will do in more than touch the surface unless fundamental gender inequalities are addressed.
A consistent underlying theme is that a reliance on market forces can not be the answer: in every area, public action is urgently needed.
Alternative approaches are reviewed by Franco Bianchini, who points to the potential role of an adequately funded arts programme in fostering civic pride and countering alienation, and Doreen Massey who emphasized the need for a combination of progressive national and local economic strategies.
She turns the Government's self-help approach around by arguing that urban recovery will only be achieved by empowering the people who live in cities.
Her final essay, indeed, echoes the theme of the whole book: the focus must be on democracy and on a sensitivity to local and individual needs and aspirations.
In the early post-war period, the British welfare state was thought to be the envy of much of the industrialized world.
Today, it is a cause for embarrassment, especially in the context of moves towards European integration.
One reason is relative economic decline.
Another is the failure of vision of successive governments, Labour and Conservative, since 1951.
A third, since 1979, has been a conscious (and accelerating) ambition to limit public provision.
To a large extent, however, fashionable doctrine has been the excuse for actual incompetence and neglect.
There has been a consistent failure to direct the fruits of growth to the areas, industries, and groups that need it most.
Outside London and the South-East, mass unemployment persists even among ' prime-age males', and much of the increase in employment has taken the form of low-paid, so-called ' part-time ' work usually undertaken by women in addition to their child-rearing and ' community care ' activities.
Contempt for the public sector has led to a deterioration of the infrastructure, and a visible collapse of key public services.
Meanwhile, as Layard and Nickell (1989) have shown, Britain's recent record on education and training has been notably inadequate.
The pragmatic short-term remedies suggested by W. J. Wilson (1987) in his study of inner cities and public policy in the United States could serve as one starting-point for discussion of policy in Britain.
Wilson warns of the long-term effects of discriminatory policies.
' Long periods of racial oppression ', he writes, ' can result in a system of inequality that may persist for indefinite periods of time even after racial barriers are removed ' (p. 146).
Bad policies in the past may continue to cause problems, long after they have been replaced by good ones.
Similar problems follow from centuries of unequal treatment of men and women.
Conversely, positive policies should not be abandoned because they do not show immediate miraculous results.
What the Right regards as wasteful  ' throwing money at the problem '  in terms of, for example, income support to the unwaged, non-means-tested family and child benefits, may actually be a prudent investment in the future, with social and economic dividends.
Wilson's conclusion  in favour of universal programmes  is one that needs to be reasserted for many areas of policy in Britain.
Here, too, Richard Titmuss's exposure of the inadequacies of the ' residual ' model of the welfare state bears re-examination: so does his healthy disrespect for econometric models as a foundation for social policy.
It is not just that a ' market ' approach to the administration of services dehumanizes people and makes doubtful assumptions about the way organizations actually work.
It also ignores the complexity and variability of social relations and human needs, ' chopping people up ' into consumers of this, clients of that, institutionalized service.
Thus, Titmuss ridiculed the contortions of some economists in trying to base models on unreal statistical categories, such as that of the ubiquitous' average family ' (Abel-Smith and Titmuss, 1987, p. 9).
In spite of their claims, ' targeted ' programmes frequently miss some of their most needy would-be clients, and stigmatize those they do succeed in reaching: selectivist policies deepen social divisions rather than heal them.
Such programmes treat people as consumers in a supermarket, an approach which is the hallmark of Thatcherite social policy best epitomized in their poll tax legislation.
Another, more fundamental lack is the absence of a view of the recipients of services as social participants.
An obsession with cutting costs and with theories of self-help has downgraded public services and re-evoked images of the poor law.
There is no simple way to turn local administration  which increasingly means delegated central administration  into what John Stewart and Gerry Stoker (1988) call ' community government '.
Participation is an easier word to use than to implement, as was discovered by the would-be implementers of the 1969 Skeffington Report, and by many idealistic councillors in the 1980s.
But to say that it is hard does not make it less desirable, neither does it mean that governments should abandon the attempt.
What is clear is that civic or community pride  essential if urban decline is not to turn into urban collapse  and the view of local government as an honourable profession, can not survive unless the public service which local authorities provide rests on principles of local democracy.
Simply handing over powers to local government (or stopping the removal of them) is not enough.
But it is the sine qua non of progress towards a more sensitive management of urban affairs.
Decentralization and local democracy should be the slogans of all who are concerned about the inner city.
CONCLUSION
The essays in this book do not present a monolithic view, and they reflect widely differing perspectives.
However, they share common perceptions, as we have already indicated.
Though they are neither statist nor paternalist, the authors see a larger role for democratic central and local government in the reduction of urban poverty.
They do not  as this administration, despite its early assurances, appears to do  regard urban life as marginal to the issue of economic progress.
On the contrary, they place the crisis in the inner cities at the centre of any national programme  of critical importance to this country's future social, economic, and constitutional well-being.
They see urban decay not as a peripheral manifestation nor as a growing pain, but as a chronic condition of social polarization that is becoming firmly entrenched in British society.
The authors are unconvinced that a reliance on business, left to its own devices or even pump-primed, is sufficient, without full-scale and direct attention to the needs of all residents, those in both the paid and the unpaid workforce, and their dependants.
In the ancient world, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, even in the twentieth century, the word ' city ' was frequently associated with wealth, success, culture, and opportunity.
The word ' civilization ' itself  and the word ' citizen '  derives from it.
It is a bitter indictment of our own time that the phrase ' inner city ' should today universally conjure up images of disorder, poverty, fear, vandalism, and alienation.
If capitalism can be credited with historic levels of prosperity for many, the inner city is the cockroach at its heart.
Homelessness, drug addiction, beggars in the streets give the lie to the assumption that the standardized values and comforts of the suburbs are universally available.
This book does not pretend to offer an answer.
Its authors seek, rather, by challenging old approaches and re-analysing the problem, both to assert its importance and to suggest new ways of tackling it. '
Race, Injustice, and Disorder
John Benyon and John Solomos
INTRODUCTION
Civil disorder and unrest were recurring phenomena in many British inner-city areas during the 1980s.
In 1980, 1981, and 1985 major riots in Bristol, London, Liverpool, and Birmingham commanded the headlines and became a key theme in policy debates about the future of the inner cities.
It is worth stressing that in each year since 1980 there have been examples of serious street disorder (Benyon, 1984; Benyon and Solomos, 1987).
These outbreaks of disorder have presented a major challenge to the Thatcher Government's image as the guardian of public order.
More importantly, however, they have given added urgency to the long-running debate about the future of Britain's inner cities.
The sight of violent confrontations on the streets of major cities helped to stimulate yet further the acrimonious political debate about how to regenerate depressed inner-city localities (Robson, 1988).
This chapter explores the political and policy debates surrounding the major outbreaks of urban unrest during 1980C1 and 1985, and the ever-present threat of more violent disorder.
After providing a brief overview of the chronology of urban unrest during the 1980s, the chapter concentrates on two main themes.
First, the political debates about the origins and causes of the unrest are assessed, and second, the impact of the unrest on the policy agenda is examined.
This entails a review of the impact of the Scarman Report, and other important policy documents, on the agenda of both the Government and other political institutions.
Finally, the chapter concludes by providing some reflections about the prospects during the decade ahead.
THE CONTEXT OF URBAN UNREST: 1981 AND 1985
The first notable instance of urban unrest during the 1980s took place in the St Paul's district of Bristol on 2 April 1980.
The immediate reaction to this event was one of shock and surprise, with public and media attention focusing particularly on the interplay between racial and social deprivation in the St Paul's area (Joshua and Wallace, 1983).
A year later further serious violence occurred during the weekend of 10C12 April 1981 in the Brixton area of south London; this resulted in many injuries and widespread damage, and it attracted enormous media attention.
Further disturbances took place in many parts of the country in July 1981.
On Friday, 3 July a pitched battle occurred in Southall between hundreds of skinheads and local Asian people, and the police quickly became embroiled.
On the same night in the Liverpool 8 district of Merseyside, an apparently minor incident sparked off rioting which lasted until Monday, 6 July.
The disorder in Liverpool 8 was particularly violent.
For the first time ever in Britain, CS gas was fired at rioters by the police.
Looting and arson were widespread, and the damage was estimated at some 10 million.
On the night of 7C8 July 1981, disorder occurred in Moss Side, Manchester.
During the following week disturbances were reported in places such as Handsworth in Birmingham, Sheffield, Nottingham, Hull, Slough, Leeds, Bradford, Leicester, Derby, High Wycombe, and Cirencester.
Disorder again erupted in Brixton on 15 July 1981.
At 2.00 a.m. eleven houses in Railton Road were raided by 176 police-officers, with a further 391 held in reserve.
The police had warrants to look for evidence of unlawful drinking and to search five houses for petrol bombs, although no evidence of either was found.
During the operation the houses sustained very considerable damage  windows, sinks, toilets, floorboards, furniture, televisions, and personal possessions were smashed.
The resultant outcry led to an internal inquiry which exonerated those involved and stated that the police officers had been issued with sledgehammers and crowbars' to effect speedy entry '.
Compensation of 8,500 for structural damage, and further sums for damage to personal property, were paid by the Metropolitan Police.
This raid, and the resultant violence on the streets of Brixton, convinced many people that the way policing is carried out is a vital factor in the context of urban unrest.
An inquiry into the Railton Road raid by the Police Complaints Board discovered ' serious lapses from professional standards' and an ' institutional disregard for the niceties of the law ' (Benyon and Solomos, 1987).
Disorder was again evident in 1982 and in subsequent years, although on a reduced scale (Benyon and Solomos, 1987).
The attention of the news media was firmly focused on the Falklands, and so few accounts of disturbances in British cities were reported.
It is clear, though, that urban unrest continued to occur in parts of London and Liverpool, and similar disorder seems to have taken place in 1983.
The following year, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner reported that during 1984 there were many mini-riots which had the potential to escalate to Brixton 1981 proportions, and he added: ' London is nowadays a very volatile city. '
A MORI opinion poll in February 1985 reported that 64 per cent of those surveyed expected further riots to occur in British cities, and seven months later their fears were justified.
In September and October 1985 serious urban unrest again became the focus of popular attention.
The first major eruption occurred on Monday, 9 September 1985 in the Lozells Road area of Handsworth, Birmingham.
The riot resulted in the deaths of two Asian men, Kassamali and Amirali Moledina, who suffered asphyxiation in their burning post office.
Another 122 people, mainly police, were reported injured and the value of damaged property was put at 7.5 million.
Further rioting occurred the next day when Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, visited the area.
Other disturbances, widely regarded as' copycat ', were reported elsewhere in the West Midlands, for example in Moseley, Wolverhampton, and Coventry, and in the St Paul's district of Bristol.
The Handsworth/Soho/Lozells area, with a population of 56,300, is regarded by Birmingham City Council as the most deprived district in the city.
Unemployment is a major affliction, and at the time of the riots 36 per cent of the workforce in Handsworth was out of work, while the figure for people under 24 years was 50 per cent.
It is an area in which it was claimed that reasonably good relations existed between young blacks and the police, as a result of the practice of community policing introduced in the late 1970s.
However, at the end of 1981 a new superintendent instituted changes which included moving a number of the area's community police-officers to other duties and clamping down on the activities by local youths which had previously been tolerated.
These changes resulted in an increase in tension between youths and the police.
In July 1985 two serious disturbances occurred in Handsworth, but both were played down and went unreported in the media.
The context within which the eruption on 9 September occurred was thus one of deteriorating relations between young people, especially blacks, and the police, as well as one of widespread unemployment and social disadvantage.
The tinder merely required a spark, which was provided when a black youth became involved in an altercation with an officer over a parking ticket.
It was alleged that during the incident, at which more police arrived, a black woman was assaulted.
Three hours later some forty-five buildings in Lozells Road were ablaze.
Brixton was the scene of the next outbreak of violent disorder, during the weekend 28C9 September 1985. 724 major crimes were reported, 43 members of the public and 10 police-officers were injured, and 230 arrests were made.
As in Handsworth, the event which led to the rioting involved police-officers and a black person.
At 7.00 a.m. on 28 September armed police entered Mrs Cherry Groce's house in Normandy Road, Brixton, looking for her son.
Two shots were fired by an officer, and a bullet damaged Mrs Groce's spine causing permanent paralysis.
At 6.00 p.m. the local police station was attacked with petrol bombs, and during the next eight hours large numbers of people, both black and white, took part in burning and looting which caused damage estimated at 3 million.
During the riot a freelance photographer sustained injuries from which he died three weeks later.
Two days after Mrs Groce was shot, rioting occurred in Toxteth (Liverpool 8).
In this instance, the disturbances were precipitated when four black men were refused bail at Liverpool Magistrates' Court.
During the summer there had been reports of rising tension in the area, and on 30 August a crowd demonstrated outside Toxteth Police Station and then attacked police cars and the station itself.
A number of assaults on police-officers were also reported.
As in Brixton and Handsworth, police relations with youths, and especially with young black people, were a significant factor in the explosive mixture, and in Toxteth, too, the disorder was precipitated by an incident involving police officers and black people.
The most serious of the disorders occurred at the Broadwater Farm Estate, in Tottenham, London.
The rioting began about 7.00 p. m. on Sunday, 6 October 1985, and during a night of extraordinary violence Police Constable Keith Blakelock was stabbed to death, 20 members of the public and 223 police-officers were injured, and 47 cars and some buildings were burned.
Guns were fired at the police, causing injuries to several officers and reporters, and the forces were issued with CS gas and plastic bullets, although these were not used.
As in Handsworth, Brixton, and Toxteth, the context within which the disturbances occurred in Tottenham was one of deteriorating relations between the police and young people, especially blacks, and the trigger event involved police-officers and black people (Gifford, 1986).
The chief superintendent for the area was a firm believer in community policing, and he put as his first priority the prevention of public disorder.
However, it is clear that many of his police constables and sergeants did not agree with this approach.
During the summer of 1985 there was evidence of increasing tension, and a prominent member of the Hornsey Police Federation was quoted as saying that rank and file officers' desperately wanted to go in hard and sort out the criminals'.
Some serious incidents occurred during this period on the Broadwater Farm Estate, such as an attack on police by youths which resulted in one officer sustaining a bad head wound, and there was also a series of attacks on an Asian-owned supermarket.
Senior police-officers appeared to play these incidents down, but black youths complained that on the estate they were increasingly harassed by the police.
The incident which precipitated the riot began when police-officers stopped a car driven by Floyd Jarrett, a 23-year-old black man well known in the area.
One of the officers decided to arrest Jarrett for suspected theft of the car, but after an altercation Jarrett was in fact charged with assaulting a police-officer.
On 13 December 1985 Jarrett was acquitted of this charge, and was awarded 350 costs against the police.
While he was detained at the police station a number of police-officers used a key taken from the arrested man to enter his mother's home.
During the police search of the house Mrs Cynthia Jarrett collapsed.
The family alleged that her death was caused by a police-officer who pushed her over; the police denied that this had occurred.
On 4 December 1985 the inquest returned a verdict of accidental death.
Mrs Jarrett was certified dead at 6.35 p.m. on Saturday, 5 October, and news of the tragedy spread quickly around the estate during the evening.
The next day, after sporadic incidents, violent disorder erupted at about 7.00 p. m.
Disorder occurred again in 1986.
During the spring there were renewed reports of increasing tension in some areas.
In Notting Hill, for example, there were allegations of assaults by the police, and the planting of drugs, while in Nottingham a number of forced entries into black people's homes and a series of street searches caused widespread anger.
On the Broadwater Farm Estate virtually every black male under 30 was interrogated  over 350 people were arrested although most were released without charge.
In July 1986 the Metropolitan Police mounted a huge raid in Brixton, involving nearly 2,000 officers, aimed at selected premises in which cannabis offences were allegedly being committed.
In early September 1986 serious disorder occurred on the streets of the North Prospect Estate in the Devonport constituency of Plymouth.
A large crowd of white youths set up burning barricades and smashed windows, doors, and fences on the estate.
A few days later the Avon and Somerset Police organized a large raid in the St Paul's district of Bristol.
Almost exactly one year after the Handsworth riots, 600 police moved into the area to search several premises in connection with drugs and drinking offences.
The reaction was serious rioting and attacks on the police involving petrol bombs, bricks, and stones.
In 1987 disorder occurred in Wolverhampton after a black youth died of asphyxiation while being arrested on 20 February.
Later in the year, violent clashes occurred on the streets of
MAKING SENSE OF THE 1981 RIOTS
Reactions to the riots have concentrated on a number of key variables that are said to characterize the localities in which the riots have occurred.
Lord Scarman's report on the 1981 disorders highlighted the importance of unemployment, urban deprivation, racial disadvantage, relations between young blacks and the police, the decline of civic consent, and political exclusion as the key issues.
Other reactions have concentrated on the issue of the interplay between inner-city decay and racial disadvantage in contemporary Britain.
Yet others have argued that the unrest can be seen as a symptom of the breakdown of law and order in British society (Gaffney, 1987; Hall, 1987; Keith, 1987).
The main issues that were prominent in debates during 1980C1 were ' race ' and ' law and order '.
This was by no means an accident, since throughout the 1970s a powerful body of media, political, and academic opinion had been constructed around the theme of how Britain was drifting into a ' violent society ', and how the basis of consent was being shifted by the pressures of immigration and the growth of multi-racial inner city areas.
A glimpse of the impact of the 1980C1 riots at this level can be achieved through two important debates in Parliament.
The first took place in the midst of the July 1981 riots, and had as its theme: ' Civil Disturbances'.
The tone of the debate was set by Home Secretary William Whitelaw's introductory statement in which he spoke of (a) the need to ' remove the scourge of criminal violence from our streets', and (b) the urgency of developing ' policies designed to promote the mutual tolerance and understanding upon which the whole future of a free democratic society depends' (Hansard, vol. 8, 16 July 1981: col. 1405).
The ' scourge of criminal violence ' was, Whitelaw argued, a danger to the whole framework of consent and legality on which the political institutions of British society were based.
In reply Roy Hattersley supported the call for the immediate suppression of street violence, but warned that the roots of such riots could not be dealt with until all people felt they had a stake in British society (ibid.: cols. 1407C9)
The second debate took place on 26 November 1981, on the publication of the Scarman Report, and had as its theme: ' Law and Order '.
The importance of the riots in pushing the law and order issue, and specifically policing, on to the main political agenda was emphasized by the Liberal leader, David Steel, who argued that ' urgent action ' to prevent a drift into lawlessness was necessary from both a moral and a political perspective (Hansard, vol. 13, 26 November 1981: cols. 1009C11).
A subsequent debate on the same issue in March 1982 was also full of references to the experience of 1981, the impact of street violence, crime, decaying urban conditions, the breakdown of consent between the police and many local communities, and the spectre of ' more violence to come ' if changes in both policing tactics and social policy were not swiftly introduced (Hansard, vol. 20, 25 March 1982: cols. 1107C81).
The need to support the police was accepted by both the Labour and the Conservative speakers in the parliamentary debate on the riots, and was established as a benchmark for the official response to the riots long before the Scarman Report was published in November 1981.
Any substantive disagreement centred around the issue of what role social deprivation and unemployment had in bringing young people to protest violently on the streets.
Intermingled with the discourses about race and law and order were constant references to unemployment, particularly among the young, and various forms of social disadvantage and poverty (Solomos, 1988, pp. 186C911).
Throughout 1980 and 1981 debates about the riots in the media, in Parliament, and in various official reports hinged around the interrelationship between racial, law-and-order, and social factors.
The importance of this debate can be explained, partly, by the political capital which the Opposition could make from linking the social and economic malaise of the country at large with violent street disturbances.
Conversely, throughout this period Government Ministers strenuously denied that unemployment and social deprivation were significant causes of urban unrest.
Although the Scarman Report is often taken to be the central text which argues for a link between ' social conditions' and ' disorder ', the terms of the debate were by no means set by Scarman.
During both April and July 1981 vigorous exchanges took place in the press and in Parliament about the role that deteriorating social conditions and unemployment may have played in bringing about the riots.
During the 16 July parliamentary debate on ' Civil Disturbances', Roy Hattersley's formulation of this linkage provided a useful summary of the ' social conditions' argument.
After some preliminary remarks about the Labour party's support for the police, he went on to outline his opposition to the view of the riots as essentially anti-police outbursts:
I repeat that l do not believe that the principal cause of last week's riots was the conduct of the police.
It was the conditions of deprivation and despair in the decaying areas of our old cities  areas in which the Brixton and Toxteth riots took place, and areas from which the skinhead invaders of Southall come.
(Hansard, vol. 8, 16 July 1981: col. 1408)
Much of the subsequent controversy about this analysis centred on the question of youth unemployment.
Hattersley had suggested that the riots were a ' direct product ' of high levels of youth unemployment, and a furious debate ensued in both Parliament and the media about this assertion.
The final symbolic cue used to make sense of the 1980C1 protests is more difficult to categorize, but its basic meaning can be captured by the term ' political marginality '.
While a number of discussions of the roots of urban unrest in the United States have noted the salience of political marginality in determining participation in violent protests (Skolnick, 1969; Fogelson, 1971; Edelman, 1971; Knopf, 1975), this issue has received relatively little attention in Britain.
Nevertheless, during the 1980C1 events and their aftermath the political context was discussed from a number of perspectives.
The Scarman Report, for example, located part of the explanation for the riots in the feelings of alienation and powerlessness which were experienced by young blacks living in depressed inner-city areas.
A successful policy for tackling the roots of urban disorder was seen as one which sought to involve all the community in dealing with the problems of each area so that they could come to feel that they have a stake in its future (Scarman, 1981, para. 6.42).
Where such arguments did not fit in with the overarching themes of race, violence and disorder, and social deprivation they were either sidelined or pushed into the sub-clauses of official reports.
The Scarman Report, for example, contained the following policy proposal: ' I recommend that local communities must be fully and effectively involved in planning, in the provision of local services, and in the management and financing of specific projects, (Scarman, 1981, para. 8.44).
Such a move towards greater political integration was seen by Lord Scarman as essential if the gap between inner-city residents and the forces of law and order was to be bridged.
But the concern with overcoming political marginality remained on the sidelines of the main public debate because it questioned the perception of the rioters as driven by irrational, uncivilized, and criminal instincts.
This did not, however, stop the question of political marginality and the need to reform existing policies from being raised at all, as can be seen subsequently by the attempts after 1981 to introduce both locally and nationally measures which were meant to address some of the grievances of the rioters and to ensure that further disturbances did not occur.
Aspects of these measures are considered further on in the chapter.
PERSPECTIVES ON THE 1985 RIOTS
Despite widespread predictions of further unrest in the aftermath of 1981, the scale and the location of the 1985 riots seem to have surprised even some of the most astute commentators.
Handsworth, for example, was presented even shortly before September 1985 as a ' success story ' in terms of police  community relations.
The outbreak of violence in this area was therefore widely presented as an aberration.
Similarly the spread of violence in London to areas such as the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham was seen as a break from previous experience, which had centred on areas such as Brixton.
There are many continuities between 1980C1 and 1985 in relation to the common-sense images used in the press and television to cover the events.
But responses in 1985 were different, at least in terms of degree, and probably in relation to the extent to which the riots were seen as a ' race ' phenomenon by a wider body of opinion.
The ambiguities and sub-clauses to be found in much of the press coverage during 1980C1 had at least acted as a countervailing tendency against the more extreme forms of discourse which blamed the riots completely on black people.
During the 1985 riots and their immediate aftermath, the imagery of ' race ' was used by sections of the press without the sense of ambiguity which could still be found in 1980C1.
The ' silence over race ' was breached in 1980C1, but in 1985 debate about racial issues was taken a step further.
Peregrine Worsthorne, for example, used the ferocity of the confrontations in Handsworth, Brixton, and Tottenham to argue that there was a major question mark over the possibility of assimilating the ' coloured population ' into mainstream ' British values' (Sunday Telegraph, 29 September 1985).
To be sure there was still a strong response opposing Enoch Powell's call for repatriation, from all shades of political opinion, but the racialization of public debate about the 1985 riots went much further than 1980C1.
In this context it was the externality of British Afro-Caribbeans and Asians which was highlighted rather the racist institutions and processes which worked against blacks at all levels of society.
The usage of ' race ' during the September-October 1985 period took on new meanings, which had little if anything to do with the impact of racism as such, since the emphasis was on the cultural characteristics of the minority communities themselves.
After Handsworth part of the press response was to blame the riot on rivalry between West Indians and Asians, and even after the arguments were criticized by local residents; and community leaders, they were used to ' explain ' ' what happened.
In addition, the question whether the cultures and values of the black communities, their family structures, and their political attitudes' bred violence ' was constantly raised (van Dijk, 1988).
The actual facts' of who was arrested during the riots, whether black or white, were hardly debated since it was assumed that they were mostly black and mostly unemployed and involved with crime (Keith, 1987).
The imagery of the ' black bomber, used in Handsworth was extended to the notion that there were groups of alienated and criminalized young blacks who saw the riots as a chance to engage in an ' orgy of looting '.
The Dear Report on Handsworth captures this image and links it to the social condition of young blacks:
The majority of rioters who took part in these unhappy events were young, black and Afro-Caribbean origin.
Let there be no doubt, these young criminals are not in any way representative of the vast majority of the Afro-Caribbean community whose life has contributed to the life and culture of the West Midlands over many years and whose hopes and aspirations are at one with those of every other law-abiding citizen.
We share a common sorrow.
It is the duty of us all to ensure that an entire cultural group is not tainted by the actions of a criminal minority.
(Dear, 1985, p. 69)
This' black ' criminal minority was constructed not only into the leading force behind the riots, but sometimes as the only force.
Indeed, throughout September and October 1985, and during the following months, the imagery of race continued to dominate debate about both the causes and the policy outcomes of the riots.
As pointed out earlier, the ' social causes' argument was another major plank of public debate about the 1980C1 riots, particularly in relation to the highly politicized issue of unemployment.
During 1985 this issue was raised once again, though by then the extent of mass unemployment and urban de-industrialization and decay was more stark than it had been in 198l.
Images of ' urban decay ', ' tinderbox cities', and ' ghetto streets' linked up with the images of ' race inequality ' and ' black ghettos' to produce an analysis more complex but also more contradictory.
An interesting mixture of the various images was provided by a story in the Daily Telegraph under the headline: ' Broadwater Farm: Like the Divis Flats with Reggae ' (8 October 1985).
The Mirror described the estate as' Living Hell ', and quoted one resident as saying that ' You've no idea how awful daily life is' (8 October 1985).
Such images were reworkings of arguments already used about Toxteth in 1981 and Brixton in 1981, but they were used more widely than in 1980C1.
Even the Daily Mail, which deployed the clearest use of ' race ' and ' outside agitator ' arguments, ran a major story on Broadwater Farm under the headline: ' Burnt-out hulks litter this concrete jungle... despair hangs heavy ' (8 October 1985).
A number of stories using such imagery were run by both the quality and the popular press during this period, but similar arguments are to be found in parliamentary debates (Hansard, vol. 84, 21 October 1985, cols. 30-.46, 388), and even in official reports produced by the police on the riots in Birmingham and London.
The ' cities of inner despair ' were conceived as the breeding ground for disorderly protest, and however hard the Government tried to break the causal link between the two, it was forced to take on board the need to restore order not only through the police but through promises of help for the inner cities.
Much as in 1980C1, the ' social causes' argument can not be seen separately from the broader debate about the future of the British economy and society.
The Government's record on unemployment was a heavily politicized issue, and just as in 1981 it vehemently denied any responsibility for the riots through its pursuit of free-market policies.
But the Government did find a way of accepting a link between the riots and social problems without bringing its main policies into the debate: namely by linking the growth of violent disorder to crime and drugs.
The emphasis on ' crime ' and the ' criminal acts' of the rioters in the official responses to the 1985 riots took a general and a specific form.
The general form relied on the argument that the riots were not a form of protest against the insufferable social conditions of inner-city areas or the actions of the police, but a ' criminal act ' or a ' cry for loot '.
This was an argument put most succinctly by Geoffrey Dear, Chief Constable of the West Midlands (Dear, 1985) and by Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, in relation to Handsworth.
But it recurred as a theme in official and press responses to the other riots.
The specific form was built upon the notion that the outbreak of violence in Handsworth and Brixton, in particular, was brought about by ' drug barons' who saw the police attempting to curb their activities and control ' their territory '.
Numerous examples of this line of argument can be found in Dear's report on Handsworth, and in press coverage during the riots.
Taking the specific argument about the role of drugs and ' drug barons' in stimulating the riots, this seems to have served two purposes.
First, it distanced the riots from the social, economic, political, and other grievances which had been linked to them by locating the cause outside the ' social problems' of inner-city dwellers and in the ' simple greed ' of the drug barons to accumulate ' loot '.
Second, just as Dear's image of a few hundred ' young black criminals' was used to explain what happened in Handsworth, the problem of drugs was used to explain what happened at a national level.
The issue of drugs provided an everyday image, already a national issue through saturation media coverage and public debate, around which the police, the Home Office, and other institutions could depoliticize the riots.
Responding to the Handsworth events Douglas Hurd was moved to argue forcibly that such events were senseless and reflected more on those who participated in them than on the society in which they took place: ' The sound which law abiding people in Handsworth heard on Monday night, the echoes of which I picked up on Tuesday, was not a cry for help but a cry for loot ' (Financial Times, 13 September 1985).
The Chief Constable for the West Midlands, Geoffrey Dear, took this argument further by pointing out that the day before the riots a successful carnival had taken place, with the support of local community leaders.
He drew the conclusion from this that the riot ' came like a bolt out of the blue ' (Guardian, 21 November 1985).
Such language focused attention on the individuals or groups who were ' breaking the law ', ' committing criminal acts', and threatening the interests of the law-abiding ' majority '.
SYMBOLIC POLITICS AND POLICY INITIATIVES
The 1980C1 and 1985 riots resulted in a wide variety of responsive measures, emanating from both central and local government, as well as other agencies.
The very multiplicity of ideological constructions of the riots is an indication of the complexity of the responses which resulted in policies and programmes of action.
There are, however, three analytically distinct and important political and policy responses which need to be examined: (a) the Scarman Report; (b) policing and law and order (c) economic and social policies.
The Scarman Report
In the aftermath of the April 1981 riots in Brixton the Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, used his powers under the 1964 Police Act to appoint Lord Scarman to inquire into the events, produce a report, and make recommendations.
This brief was subsequently widened to cover the occurrence of other disturbances during July 1981.
Lord Scarman's inquiry was not on the same scale as the famous Kerner Report in 1968 on the US riots, but since the publication of his Report in November 1981 his views and prescriptions have played an important role in fashioning political debate about the riots.
It is therefore important to look into the basic analysis which the Scarman Report puts forward in order to understand how the political agenda has developed, in response to the riots, since 1980.
The starting-point of Lord Scarman's explanation of the riots is important.
His analysis began by distinguishing between the background factors which had created the potential for urban disorder in areas such as Brixton and the precipitating action or event which sparked off the riots.
Scarman identified two views that were commonly held as to the causation of the disorders.
The first explained them in terms of oppressive policing, and in particular the harassment of young blacks.
The second explained them as a protest against society by deprived people who saw violent attacks upon the forces of law and order as a way of calling attention to their grievances.
For Scarman both views were a simplification of a complex reality, or at least ' not the whole truth '.
He linked the ' social ' and ' policing ' aspects of the complex reality of areas like Brixton in an analytic model which emphasized the following issues:
1.
the problems which are faced in policing and maintaining order in deprived, inner-city, multi-racial localities;
2.
the social, economic, and related problems which are faced by all residents of such areas;
3.
the social and economic disadvantages which are suffered particularly by black residents, especially young blacks.
(Scarman, 1981, paras.
2. 1C2.38)
He saw the existence of all these features in certain deprived areas as' creating a predisposition towards violent protest ', which could be sparked off by incidents such as confrontations between local residents and the police or by rumours about the actions of the police or other authority figures.
From this account Lord Scarman drew the conclusion that once the ' predisposition towards violent protest ' had taken hold it was difficult to reverse.
Talking about the position of young blacks, he noted that because they felt neither ' socially nor economically secure ' many of them had drifted into situations where more or less regular confrontations with the police were the norm of their daily experience.
Noting that despite the evidence of academic and government reports, which had pointed to widespread discrimination against young blacks, very little had been done to remedy the position, Scarman concluded that: (a) many young blacks believed that violence was an effective means of protest against their conditions; and (b) far from the riots being a meaningless event, they were ' essentially an outburst of anger and resentment by young black people against the police ' (Scarman, 1981, paras.
3. 110 and 2.38).
What is important to note here is that aside from Lord Scarman's condemnation of the ' criminal acts' committed during the riots, the Report was a strong argument in favour of a historical and social explanation of the riots.
Given the close link which the Scarman Report established between questions of policing and the ' wider social context ', the programme of action which it outlined contained proposals not only about the reform of the police and the introduction of new methods of policing and riot control, but about employment policy, social policy, and policies on racial discrimination.
In a telling phrase Lord Scarman argued: ' The social conditions in Brixton do not provide an excuse for disorder.
But the disorders can not be fully understood unless they are seen in the context of complex political, social and economic factors which together create a predisposition towards violent protest ' (para. 8.7).
Although some of these issues went beyond the main remit of his Inquiry, he drew the conclusion from this basic finding that only a national government-led initiative to deal with problems of policing, unemployment, poor housing, and racial disadvantage could get to the roots of the unrest.
Parliamentary and media responses to the Report varied greatly, although it was widely seen as making an important contribution to the debate about how to respond to the riots and prevent the outbreak of violence in the future.
But what became clear after the immediate debate on the Report in late 1981 and early 1982, was that the Government was not going to implement all the recommendations.
Some aspects of its proposals for reforming the police and rethinking police tactics were implemented during 1982 and 1983, but evidence of the ' urgent action ' which it called for in other areas remained difficult to find.
This returns us to the earlier point about the other major forces which contributed to the development of political responses to the riots: namely the media, Parliament, the political parties, and popular ' common-sense ' debate.
The Scarman Report formed a part  and a vital one  of this process of political debate, but its role can not be understood in isolation.
This can be seen if we look more closely at the issues of policing and economic and social problems.
Policing and law and order
Indeed, in the aftermath of the Scarman Report's publication, police opinion was divided on the question of whether its proposals for reforming the police and the adoption of new methods of policing could be implemented, or whether such changes could insure against further violence and unrest.
The policy responses after the 1985 riots show some of the same characteristics as those during 1980C1, but as argued earlier, the emphasis on the ' criminality ' of the riot participants favoured explanations that linked disorder to the pathological characteristics of inner-city residents which pushed them towards lawlessness and crime.
This in turn produced a sharper contrast than in 1980C1 between (a) responses which emphasized the need to strengthen and buttress the role of the police, and (b) responses which called for greater emphasis on the rejuvenation of the social and economic fabric of the inner cities.
Economic and social policies
In terms of economic and social policies the impact of the 1980C1 riots was equally ambiguous and contradictory.
Part of this ambiguity, as outlined above, resulted from the Government's strenuous efforts to deny any link between its policies and the outbreak of violence and disorder.
This denial was particularly important, since at the time the Thatcher administration was going through a bad period in terms of popular opinion on issues such as unemployment, social services, and housing.
While Lord Scarman was careful not to enter the political dispute between the Government and the Labour party on issues such as unemployment and housing, his call for more direct action to deal with these problems, along with racial disadvantage, posed a challenge to the political legitimacy of the policies which the Government had followed from 1979 onwards.
It also posed a delicate problem for the Home Secretary himself, since Lord Scarman had been appointed by him to carry out his Inquiry.
Having spent the whole summer denying any link between its policies and the riots, the Government had to tread warily in responding to the economic and social policy proposals of the Scarman Report when it was published in November 1981.
The parliamentary debate on the Report showed the Home Secretary adopting a two-pronged strategy in his response.
First, he accepted many of the recommendations of the Report, particularly in relation to the role of the police.
Additionally, he accepted the need to tackle racial disadvantage and other social issues.
Second, he emphasized the Government's view that, whatever broader measures were taken to deal with racial and social inequalities, the immediate priority was to restore and maintain order on the streets.
When the Home Secretary talked of the need for the Government to give a lead in tackling racial disadvantage he therefore saw this as in issue for the longer term.
On the other hand, he was much more specific about the reform of the police and the development of new tactics and equipment for the management of urban disorder (Hansard, vol. 14, 10 December 1981: cols. 1001C8).
In 1985, however, the Government specifically rejected calls for another inquiry like Lord Scarman 's, arguing that since the riots were a ' criminal enterprise ' it was useless to search for social explanations or to have yet another report advising it about what to do.
Implicitly, the Government was saying that it knew what the problems were, and how they could be tackled.
While some senior policemen, like Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Kenneth Newman, wanted to stress the link between the police and other areas of ' social policy ' (Metropolitan Police, 1986), the official government response attempted to decontextualize the riots and see them as the actions of a small minority who were either criminalized or influenced by extreme political ideas.
The dominant approach of the Government attempted to emphasize two main arguments.
1.
that the riots were ' a lust for blood ', an ' orgy of thieving ', ' a cry for loot and not a cry for help ';
2.
that the riots did not reflect a failure to carry out the ' urgent programme of action ' recommended by Lord Scarman in 1981, but were the outcome of a spiralling wave of crime and disorder in inner-city areas.
The logic of this approach, articulated by Home Secretary Douglas Hurd most clearly, was that the riots were both ' unjustifiable ' and a ' criminal activity '.
In a widely reported speech to police chiefs at the time of the disorders Hurd made this point clear:
Handsworth needs more jobs and better housing.
But riots only destroy.
They create nothing except a climate in which necessary development is even more difficult.
Poor housing and other social ills provide no kind of reason for riot, arson and killing.
One interviewer asked me whether the riot was not a cry for help by the rioters.
The sound which law-abiding people heard at Handsworth was not a cry for help but a cry for loot.
That is why the first priority, once public order is secure, must be a thorough and relentless investigation into the crimes which were committed.
(Daily Telegraph, 14 September 1985)
Such arguments resonated through the media and in the various parliamentary debates during September and October 1985.
They became part of the symbolic political language through which the riots were understood by policy makers and by popular opinion.
Since the 1985 unrest, and particularly after the 1987 General Election, the Government has announced a number of initiatives on the inner city, and it has presented these as part of an effort to rejuvenate depressed areas on a sound basis.
The evidence that has emerged since then, however, points to a major discrepancy between the Government's promises of action and the allocation of resources to implement them (Robson, 1988).
It is perhaps too early to reach a conclusion on this point, but a repeat of the period of inaction between 1982 and 1985 seems to be evident, within the current political context.
A number of local authorities have attempted to take more positive action to deal with the issues raised by the 1985 riots, but their experience has shown that such local initiatives are often severely limited by the actions of national government, the police, and broader economic and political pressures.
In the years since 1981 the one consistent response to urban unrest has been the provision of more resources, more training, and more equipment to the police.
Instead of tackling the causes of urban unrest, the Government has built up force to deal with the manifestation of those root conditions.
Increasingly the most strident political voices are raised in the name of free enterprise and law and order, not for equity and social justice.
For the New Right and other influential sectors of political opinion the attempt to achieve racial equality through legal and political means is at best na?ve political folly, and at worst a restriction on the workings of the market.
The present political climate gives little cause for optimism that a radical change in governmental priorities in this field is likely (Solomos, 1989).
The Government's plan of Action for Cities (DoE, 1987), issued after Mrs Thatcher's post-election promise, says very little directly about racial inequality.
It remains to be seen whether it will suffer the fate of numerous other initiatives on the inner cities and fade into obscurity.
But one thing seems clear: during the past decade the Government has been more intent on reducing the powers of local authorities than on providing for fundamental changes in the social conditions of the inner cities.
CONCLUSION: LITTLE ROOM FOR OPTIMISM
Despite the Government's recently proclaimed intention of regenerating the inner cities, there is little room for optimism.
Unless radical action is taken, British cities seem poised to become yet more turbulent, brutalized, and trouble-torn.
The excluded black and white citizens in the urban areas seem set to continue to suffer deprivation and disadvantage.
The remedy of using tough policing is merely tackling the symptoms of the disorder, and is liable to exacerbate the underlying malaise.
This approach should come as no surprise, however.
History shows that the usual response to violent protest and riots was repression.
History also shows that this course was normally ineffective and that disorder only diminished when movement was made in the direction of the reforms which were demanded.
The auguries for such reforms are not good, and further urban unrest remains in prospect. '
Crime and Policing
ROBERT REINER
FULL CIRCLE?
On 13 May 1833 the National Political Union, a body organized to seek the extension of the franchise to the working class, held a meeting in Coldbath Fields, in Clerkenwell, London.
This was to become a celebrated and controversial rite of passage for the new Metropolitan Police, then not quite four years old.
Fighting broke out between participants and the police, during which a constable, PC Culley, was fatally stabbed.
An inquest jury, rapidly assemble in a nearby inn, returned a verdict of ' justifiable homicide '.
This was quashed on appeal to the Court of King's Bench, but it symbolized the deep and widespread popular suspicion which attended the birth of Peel's ' New Police '.
For the conventional ' cop-sided ' histories of British police development, Coldbath Fields marks the crucial turning-point in their battle to win consent for their very existence.
From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards a growing chorus of voices had championed the creation of a professional police.
But they were successfully resisted by a rejectionist front which encompassed a variety of social interests and philosophies, ranging from rural Tory gentry to urban working-class radicals.
Upper-class objectors worried about traditional civil liberties, central government encroachment on the delicate network of power relations in local parishes, and the expense of a public police.
Working-class hostility was roused by the fear of the police being used to control industrial and political organization, and to curb their recreational activities under the guise of maintaining public order in the streets.
This alliance of opposition frustrated all attempts to establish a professional police until Peel's 1829 Metropolitan Police Act.
In the conventional view Coldbath Fields was a shock to respectable consciences, and rallied the support of all but the dangerous classes to the Peelers.
In fact, however, resistance to the new police continued to be expressed in the street violence and riots as' the plague of blue locusts' spread throughout the country between 1829 and 1856, and in particular as it came to the working class communities of the North (Storch, 1975, p. 94).
Indeed, working-class assent to policing has arguably always been hesitant and brittle (Cohen, 1979; Brogden, 1982).
When PC Keith Blakelock was stabbed to death on 6 October 1985 during the rioting in the Broadwater Farm Estate he was the first Metropolitan policeman to be killed in a riot since PC Culley in 1833.
The parallel with Coldbath Fields dramatically symbolizes the way that policing, crime, and public order have turned full circle back to echo early Victorian conditions.
The urban disorders of the 1980s are the most explicit index of the deep hostility now felt by many inner-city residents towards the police, and of the problems of policing the inner city.
Nor are the parallels confined to the inner city.
Another dramatic instance of historical dj vu came during the miners' strike, when it was reported that an attack had been made on the police station in Malby, South Yorkshire, scene of an anti-police riot a century earlier when the ' new police ' first arrived there.
More recently a moral panic about ' lager louts' despoiling rural Arcadias has emerged.
What has been rudely shattered is the cosy depiction of British history as the progressive ' conquest of violence ' (Critchley, 1970) which is celebrated in the conventional accounts of the British police (Reith, 1938, 1943, 1956; Critchley, 1967; Ascoli, 1979; Stead, 1985).
But if the long-term trajectory of ' law and order ' in Britain is not the unilinear march of civility which may once have seemed plausible, what is it?
And how are we to understand and deal with the contemporary return of the repressed, in terms of spiralling levels of recorded crime and riotous disorder?
In this chapter I shall try to locate our present concerns in a pattern of historical development, and seek to excavate from this a prognosis for the viability of current strategies and initiatives.
A CRISIS OF ' LAW AND ORDER ': MORAL PANIC OR REASONABLE CONCERN?
In the conventional view, Britain, once a legend throughout the world for its stolid, peaceable, and harmonious character, has experienced in the last decade and a half an alien and shocking advent of unprecedented incivility and disorder.
At the visible apex of this trend come the urban disorders of Brixton and Bristol, Toxteth and Tottenham.
Underneath lies the more regular procession of smaller-scale crowd disturbances, political, industrial, and recreational.
Even less visible except to immediate participants and police is the routine ' slow rioting ' of Saturday night street brawling, which (according to the perceptions of all the chiefs constables I have interviewed in a research project over the last year) is assuming more menacing and violent proportions throughout the country.
Beneath it all is a growing wave of individual crimes, adding up to a crisis of law and order.
This conventional view is summed up by the dominant reactions to the 1981 Brixton disorders.
Lord Scarman referred to violence and disorder ' the like of which had not previously been seen in this century in Britain ', while one Conservative MP summed up this orthodox reaction in a parliamentary debate (on 13 April 1981) when he spoke of the riots as' something new and sinister in our long national history '.
The initial response of the Left and liberals to this reaction was to dub the conventional wisdom ' moral panic '.
What was new was the growth of a strong state control apparatus, legitimated by the fears generated by manipulation of public anxiety.
It was pointed out that contrary to the rose-tinted spectacles view, Britain has a long history of riot and disorder.
The conventional perspective is guilty of ' historical amnesia ', which has forgotten the turbulent and bloody conflicts of the past (see, for example, Benyon, 1985).
The most thorough-going and influential example of this genre of debunking moral panic is Hooligan by Geoff Pearson (1983).
This is a deservedly much-admired, fascinating, and lovingly collected parade of paranoia through the ages.
Moving backwards, through four centuries of history, Pearson shows a perennial refrain lamenting a supposedly shocking increase in crime, violence, and public disorder.
Each period seems to construct its own mythical golden age ' twenty years ago '.
But Pearson assiduously shows how the grandads of that supposed era of tranquillity were themselves bemoaning the sad decline of standards of virtue and discipline since their youth.
And so on, in a potentially infinite regress of grandadology, wailing and gnashing teeth at the decline of family life, parental irresponsibility, declining national character, and the need for a firm reassertion of authority.
' Street violence and disorder are solidly entrenched features of the social landscape ', argues Pearson, at any rate in capitalist societies which necessarily generate a ' residuum ', an under-class of the underprivileged and unemployed, unintegrated and potentially threatening to the established and respectable.
If this reserve army is always with us, so is social reaction to it: an ' immovable preoccupation ' with ' the awesome spectre of crime and violence perpetually spiralling upwards'.
This perspective offers a useful corrective to the historical perception of recent levels of crime and disorder as utterly foreign and novel in British experience.
But the critique runs the danger of becoming a facile agnosticism about patterns or trends in crime and disorder.
Piecing together a catalogue of recurring laments neither answers nor dismisses the still pertinent question: are things really getting worse, getting better, or remaining the same?
It is as if an economic historian, collating woeful Financial Times editorials every few years, were to conclude that there really were no business-cycles, let alone longer-term Kondratieff waves of growth and decline.
Furthermore, the litanies of ' respectable fears' and ' moral panics' are only one of the discourses about ' law and order ' found in popular, political, or academic discussion over the last century.
At the turn of the century, the very time when Pearson documents the coinage of the term ' hooligan ' to portray a supposedly new breed of youthful folk-devil, there is found in other sources a mood of contemporary congratulation about the long-term conquest of the problem of order.
The Criminal Registrar's Report for 1901 documents a trend for declining levels of crime and violence over more than two decades.
The introduction comments: ' We have witnessed a great change in manners: the substitution of words without blows for blows with or without words; an approximation in the manners of different classes; a decline in the spirit of lawlessness. '
Nor was this position unique.
The latest volume of the magisterial History of English Criminal Law (Radzinowicz and Hood, 1986, vol. 5) shows that criminologists at the turn of the century were vexed with explaining the puzzling phenomenon of English success in conquering routine crime and violence.
Not that all was well in the sphere of order and crime.
On the one hand, there was a variety of political and industrial threats to the order of the established classes.
The Fenian menace legitimated the establishment of a specifically political police, which would have been utterly unacceptable in the climate of early nineteenth-century Britain (Porter, 1987).
The industrial conflicts of the first quarter of this century stimulated a new level of centralization and sophistication in the state's coercive response to the labour movement (Morgan, 1987).
But what differentiates the earlier part of this century from either the present or the early nineteenth century is that these problems did not all coalesce into one disturbing image of a threatening, dangerous, and disorderly criminal class.
Various types of criminal  the political, the habitual and the recidivist, the feeble-minded, the inebriate, the juvenile  were all differentiated as separate specimens in the taxonomies of the new science of criminology (Garland, 1985).
And with the cognitive optimism of criminology was combined a penological optimism, that the new forms of scientifically grounded interventions would provide a solution to the problems of crime.
This penal optimism reigned throughout the first half of this century (Bailey, 1987).
Right down from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the 1960s one can indeed construct a counter-grandadology to Pearson's ' history of respectable fears'.
It is possible to catalogue a chorus of social self-congratulation, as respectable commentators recount the positive achievement of tranquillity since the days of their youth, as the very epitome of social progress.
This mood is captured, for example, in Leonard Woolf's autobiography Sowing (1960):
I am struck by the immense change from social barbarism to social civilisation which has taken place in London (indeed in Great Britain) during my lifetime.
No one but an old Londoner who has been born and bred and has lived for 50 to 60 years in London can have any idea of the extent of the change.
It is amazing to walk down Drury Lane or the small streets about 7 Dials today and recall their condition only 50 years ago.
Even as late as 1900 it would not have been safe to walk in any of these streets after dark.
This is not intended to supplant Pearson's perennial panic view with a resuscitated Whig theory of progress.
The point is only that there are long-term trends and patterns in crime, violence, and disorder.
There may be a perennial fascination with the crimes which do exist, but more sober analytic or reflective assessments have not always been pessimistic or anguished.
It may evoke nostalgia now, or appear quaintly na?ve, but there have been periods when crime and disorder seemed soluble, if not yet totally vanished, problems.
IS CRIME INCREASING?
The statistics on crime, for all the familiar pitfalls in their interpretation, should not be dismissed.
They can be judiciously appraised, with an open eye for trends which may affect the relation between recorded and unrecorded crime, in combination with broader consideration of historical and theoretical issues which may affect their validity.
The major studies of the long-term trends in crime statistics (Gurr, 1976, 1981; Gatrell and Hadden, 1972; Gatrell, 1980) concur in depicting a secular decline in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
This coincided, however, with an increasing prevalence of the conditions and institutions which should lead us to expect the reporting and recording of offences to grow in proportion to the actual occurrence of victimization.
As a noted historian of crime recently argued, the decrease in levels of recorded crime ' coincides with increased court activity, with the spread and professionalisation of the new police, and with an apparent increase in public cooperation with both courts and the police.
If the radical criminologists' assumptions are correct, then the figures for the second half of the 19th century might probably show the opposite from that which they do ' (Emsley, 1988, p. 42).
The secular trend towards declining levels of crime levelled off in the first decade of this century.
The recorded rate of crime then remains on a rough plateau until the end of the 1930s.
During the late 1930s and early 1940s there is a fairly sharp rise, but then again a rough plateau (albeit with sharp year-by-year fluctuations) in the late 1940s until the mid-1950s, when there begins a sustained and sharp increase, getting ever steeper in the late 1970s and 1980s.
From 1975 onwards the rising crime-rate is justifiably referred to as in a stage of ' hyper-crisis' (Kinsey et al.,
1986 p. 12).
While in the quarter-century from 1950 to 1975 recorded notifiable offences per 100,000 population increased by just over 3,000, from 1,094 to 4,283, it took just the decade from 1976 to 1986 for crimes per 100,000 population to increase another 3,000, from 4,346 to 7,331 (Criminal Statistics, 1986, Table 2.2).
In the late nineteenth century the trend to lower levels of recorded crime coincided with developments which, other things being equal, would lead us to expect rising levels of recording.
This buttresses confidence that the recorded trend is in the correct direction.
But can we be sure that the last three decades of sustained growth in crime are not a recording phenomenon (Bottomley and Pease, 1986)?
The plain answer is that we can not be certain about it.
At the same time as recorded levels of crime have increased, so have many other factors which might increase the propensity of the public to report, and the police to record, offences.
Police numbers and resources, for example, have increased considerably.
The number of police-officers in England and Wales grew from nearly 76,000 in 1961 to nearly 110,00 in 1976, and nearly 122,000 in 1986. police strength his not, however, kept pace with the increase in recorded crime.
In 1961 there were 11 crimes recorded per police-officer, but by 1986 this had grown to 32.
Even taking account of the increase in other resources available to augment police-officers, from civilian support staff to more sophisticated technology of all kinds, there is clearly a much greater recorded crime work-load per police-officer.
The only way that we could definitely ascertain the extent of the increase in recorded crime which is due to changes in reporting and/or recording practices would be if there were available victimization data over a long period.
Such data is available for the United States since 1973, when the Federal Government initiated an annual series of National Crime Surveys.
Overall these indicate that while the rate of victimization recorded in the annual surveys did increase in the 1970s and 1980s, this was at a substantially lower rate (1 per cent on average) than the officially recorded crime-rate (3.5C5 per cent average annual increase; cf.
Box, 1987, pp. 18C20).
Moreover, the global index of either victimization or recorded offences can be misleading, in that it conceals quite large variations in the trends for specific offences.
None the less, what the United States data imply is that the upward trend in recorded crime is in the same direction as actual victimization, although at a slower rate.
The recorded figures exaggerate the increase in victimization which is occurring, mainly because of a greater public propensity to report certain crimes.
The experience in the United States can not necessarily be extrapolated to the United Kingdom.
In Britain there have been three national crime surveys, in 1982, 1984, and 1988.
Overall.
between these years, the increase in victimization measured by the survey (30 per cent) roughly matches the increase of police recorded offences (41 per cent).
But this can not be taken as carte blanche for assuming that long-term recorded crime trends correspond to victimization.
Not only is a comparison between only three years potentially misleading; there are very considerable divergences between trends in victimization and recorded crime for specific offences, which are concealed by the coincidence in the overall direction (Hough and Mayhew, 1985, Dowds et al.,
1989).
It is often pointed out that the long-running set of victimization data in Britain, the General Household Survey's regular measurement of the extent of burglary victimization since 1972, indicates that most of the increase in recorded burglary is a reporting phenomenon.
Combining the General Household Survey (GHS) and the British Crime Survey (BCS) victimization data reveals that while police-recorded burglaries doubled between 1972 and 1983, the level of victimization went up only by 20 per cent (Hough and Mayhew, 1985, pp. 16C17).
Thus the considerable increase in recorded burglary during the 1970s was largely a recording phenomenon.
But this may not apply to other offences.
Furthermore, the BCS points out (ibid.) that the gap between the trend in recorded burglaries and victimization is much lower in recent years: there has been an appreciable increase in burglary victimization between 1981 and 1983 of 9 per cent, while recorded burglaries increased by 24 per cent.
If this gap continues to narrow then the recorded trend of burglaries may be more confidently interpreted as showing the direction of crime.
In conclusion, it seems that we can not accept without question the dramatic increase in recorded crime as corresponding to a real increase in victimization of the same proportions.
But it would be wishful thinking to explain away all, or even most, of the increase as an artefact of recording changes.
We can plausibly infer that crime has been increasing in the last two to three decades, presenting a problem for explanation and policy.
CRIME AND INNER CITIES
While crime overall has been increasing, it must be emphasized that both the reality and the fear of victimization are considerably greater in some areas than others.
The British Crime Survey found, for example, that (as classified by the ACORN ' Classification of Residential Neighbourhoods' system) there were three types of area which were especially prone to both crime and fear of crime: ' High-status non-family areas' (I), ' Multi-racial areas' (H), and ' Poorest council estates' (G).
Whereas the national average frequency of being a ' mugging ' victim (robbery/theft from the person) was 1.4 per cent, in these areas it was: I: 3.9 per cent; H: 4.3 per cent; G: 3.3 per cent.
In the last two areas, the proportions of people who were ' very worried about mugging ' were 32 per cent and 36 per cent, compared to an average of 20 per cent, and (11 per cent in rural areas  these data evidently precede the advent of lager loutishness!).
Whereas on average 2.4 per cent of households were victimized by burglary, in the high-risk areas it was 6.3 per cent (Hough and Mayhew, 1985, Table M).
These findings are replicated by the recent local crime surveys, notably those in Merseyside and Islington, which have constituted the empirical core of the ' New Left realism ' in criminology (Kinsey, 1985; Jones et al.,
1986).
The Merseyside Crime Survey found, for example, that 44 per cent of interviewees had been victims of crime in the last twelve months, and a quarter had been victimized twice or more.
Multiple victimization (two or more experiences) was twice as high in inner-city areas as in affluent suburbs.
Fear of crime varied accordingly.
Crime was seen as a big problem by 66 per cent in inner-city Liverpool, compared with 13 per cent in wealthier suburbs (Kinsey et al.,
1986, p. 4).
David Downes (1983) aptly summed up the irony of ' law and order ' being seen as a Conservative concern, when he called it ' theft of an issue '.
POLICING, ORDER AND LEGITIMACY
Rising crime is not an inevitable nor universal problem.
It was noted above that for an extended period of our history crime was actually falling.
The overall trajectory since the early nineteenth century seems to be a rough U-shape: falling down to the early 1900s, a plateau until the mid-1950s, and a steepening rise since then.
It is plausible that disorder follows a similar pattern.
It has been shown, for example, that levels of violence during industrial disputes fell in the first three-quarters of this century, but that this trend has been reversed more recently (Geary, 1985).
If crime and disorder follow a U-shape pattern of long-term change, the legitimacy of the police  the extent to which they are broadly accepted as valid in mission and methods  has followed an inverse path: an upside-down U. Starting from the widespread opposition encountered at the birth of the new police, opposition gradually came to be located primarily within the less' respectable ' sections of the working class, as well as in the wider working class during periods of labour conflict.
Even here, as the fact of policing came to be established, opposition was not to the police per se, but to specific operations or tactics.
By the late 1940s and 1950s, the advent of post-war political consensus and social integration was the precondition for the police achieving a pinnacle of widespread popular acceptance.
This was symbolized in the Dixon of Dock Green phenomenon: the only time that a cosy, non-action-man, ordinary uniform bobby has attained heroic stature in a country's folk-lore.
But it was confirmed by harder evidence, above all by the national survey conducted for the 1960 Royal Commission on the Police.
This found not only a generally high level of support for the police, but that this spread throughout the class structure (indeed was marginally higher in the working class).
The very fact that a series of comparatively minor incidents had triggered the establishment of the Royal Commission as the only comprehensive review of the organization of policing in a century, is testimony to the widespread consensus about policing.
Since the 1950s policing has become a highly controversial, politicized issue.
More recent poll evidence (e.g. for the British Crime Survey, or the British Social Attitudes Survey by Jowell et al.,
1988) continues to show high overall acceptance of the police.
But this must be qualified in two crucial ways.
First, there is a widespread perception recorded in the surveys of specific types of police malpractice coming to be perceived as problematic, e.g. corruption and racial discrimination.
Second, there is a considerable and growing rejection of the overall legitimacy of the police among some sections of the population: youth, the economically marginal, and ethnic minorities especially Afro-Caribbeans.
For example, the Policy Studies Institute found that while 29 per cent of Londoners overall thought the police treat particular groups unfairly, this rose to 68 per cent amongst young West Indians (Smith, 1983, pp. 243C6).
How can these recent trends (rising crime and disorder, and falling police legitimacy) be explained?
CRIME, DEPRIVATION, AND MORALITY
Criminologists have scarcely addressed, let alone answered, the broad questions of explaining overall trends in crime.
Positivist research has generated much data about specific relationships between individual or social characteristics and the likelihood of conviction.
Radical approaches have been characterized more by theoretical or programmatic work than by grounded accounts or changing crime patterns.
Even the recent ' New Left realism ' does not address the broader questions of causation, though its leading exponent Jock Young (1986) has rightly emphasized the need to return aetiological questions to the foreground.
But so far their explanation of rising crime has largely focused on alleged deficiencies in police strategy, in particular on counter-productive militaristic tactics which exacerbate ' public alienation ' and therefore impede successful crime control (Kinsey et al.,
1986, pp. 40C2).
Admittedly the vicious cycle of police militarization and public alienation is seen to be kicked into play by the economic crumbling of the inner city, but thereafter the weight of the explanation is placed on inadequate (or over-heavy) policing.
As will be indicated below, I do not feel that much (if any) of the explanation can lie at the door of the police station.
More plausible is the analysis developed in Dahrendorf's Hamlyn Lectures on ' law and order ' (Dahrendorf, 1985, 1987).
In this the main structural precondition of growing crime is seen as the growth of an underclass.
The social prerequisite of the long trend in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries towards lower crime and disorder, and greater police acceptance, was the historical process of working-class incorporation.
Uneven and limited though this might have been, the gulf between Disraeli's two nations in the early and mid-nineteenth century became blurred and attenuated by the twentieth.
The sharp end of routine policing always falls on the economically marginal, those who live out their lives in public places which routine police patrols regulate, and those who are not integrated into the mainstream institutions of economic and political life.
Incorporation of the working class reduced the adult part of this residuum to a politically insignificant, atomistic, albeit cyclically fluctuating stratum.
The main grist to the mill of policing was working-class youth, but the perennial conflict between youth and the police is one with ever-changing persona and is not the basis of political conflict.
This changed with the re-emergence of long-term structural unemployment, leading to the de-incorporation of increasing sections of the working class, ' who are being defined out of the edifice of citizenship ' (Dahrendorf, 1985, p. 98).
The underclass in Dahrendorf's account is not simply the product of unemployment.
It is the consequence of the apparent structural inevitability of its position: ' The majority class does not need the unemployed to maintain and even increase its standard of living...
The main point about this category  for lack of a better word we shall call it ' under class' '  is that its destiny is perceived as hopeless' (Dahrendorf, 1985, pp. 101C7).
Now there are problems with the simple postulation of a link between unemployment, crime, and disorder, as Mrs Thatcher is only too ready to point out.
There is an enormous literature of research on the relationship, which the late Steven Box (1987) has usefully summarized and reviewed in his very important last book, Recession, Crime and Punishment.
Box summarizes some fifty research projects on the relationship between unemployment and crime.
Most are aggregate studies, looking at the correlation over time or across space between levels of crime and unemployment.
He sums it up:
The relationship between overall unemployment and crime is inconsistent... on balance the weight of existing research supports there being a weak but none the less significant causal relationship.
However, properly targeted research on young males, particularly those from disadvantaged ethnic groups, which considers both the meaning and duration of unemployment... has yet to be done '.
(pp. 96C7)
Much of this debate has been vitiated by the assumption that if unemployment is causally related to crime, this must be an invariable law: true at all times and places.
But it is more plausible to suppose that the meaning of unemployment will vary according to a number of factors, e.g. its duration, social assessments of blame, previous experience of steady employment, perception of future prospects, comparison with other groups, etc.
It would be too much, therefore, to expect that there would be a universal and invariant relation.
Some support for the link between offending and perceptions of the justice of unemployment is suggested by the research evidence on the connections of income inequality and crime.
All the fifteen studies of this reviewed by Box suggest a strong association (over time or cross-sectionally) between economic inequality and crime in general (though this is not true of five studies on homicide specifically) (Box, 1987, pp. 86C98).
This plausibly supports the view that it is relative deprivation which is causally related to crime, and that in conditions where unemployment is perceived as unjust and hopeless by comparison with the lot of other groups, this will act as a precipitant of crime.
Two recent studies, one American (Thornberry and Christenson, 1984) and one British (Farrington et al.,
1986), have both used a novel methodology to establish that at least in the present climate unemployment is linked to crime.
They have looked at the commission of offences reported over time by a sample of youths in longitudinal surveys.
What is shown is that crime-rates (especially for property offences) were higher during periods of unemployment than of employment.
This suggests that holding constant other variables, the same youths commit more crimes while unemployed.
That there should be a link between (a) unemployment and (b) relative poverty, and crime is hardly surprising.
Both exacerbate the incentives to commit offences and erode the social controls which would otherwise encourage conformity (relative fearfulness of sanctions, perception of the justice of the system, involvement in conventional activities and relationships, etc.).
So it is clearly right to argue as Dahrendorf does that the emergence of an underclass excluded apparently permanently from dominant economic life is a potent condition of rising crime.
This is all grist to the mill of orthodox social democratic analyses of crime.
But it can not be the whole story.
First, there is the problem of rising crime during the so-called period of affluence.
It is this indeed which prompted the first ' new realisms' in criminology.: the right-wing realism of James Q. Wilson and his associates in the United States (Wilson, 1975); and the ' administrative realism ' attributed by Jock Young to our own Home Office Research Unit (Young, 1986).
If the rate of crime increases when the adverse social conditions which have been linked to it are becoming ameliorated, the answer must lie elsewhere: either in the failure of the criminal justice system to deliver sanctions with sufficient certainty or positiveness (the ' New Right ' analysis), or in changes in the availability of criminal opportunities in the environment (administrative criminology).
Dahrendorf accepts both these as possible contributions, but encompasses them within a much broader idea: the growth of anomia, the failure of a social structure to instil adequate commitment to its conventional moral codes, as crystallized into the criminal law.
This is more profoundly a matter of the deeper cultural instilling of conformist values than of the effective threat of post hoc sanctions by the criminal justice system.
The idea of the failure of the agencies of socialization to instil discipline and moral values because of the effects of post-war ' funk ' and permissiveness is a favourite stalking-horse of the right-wing populist criminology championed by Norman Tebbit and others (and in a more sophisticated version in Douglas Hurd's Tamworth and other speeches).
The Government has eagerly seized on the ' evidence ' provided by the new affluent and rural as well as urban ' lager lout ' folk-devils to deny any link between inner-city deprivation and crime.
Instead, the finger is pointed at a common moral malaise due to over-liberalization and erosion of discipline (Patten, 1988).
Because of this pedigree, the opinions of the Left and of liberals have shied away from examination of the issue of morality in relation to crime.
This is a great loss, because at root there is an integral relation between the ideas of crime and morality.
Older Marxist criminologies (notably Bonger's) saw the link between economic conditions and crime precisely as lying in the culture of egoism which was stimulated by economic advance under capitalism (Bonger, 1916).
This is more evident than ever in recent years with the amorally materialistic culture which has been encouraged by the present Government's economic and social policies.
(Labour is beginning to pick up this theme: Guardian, 2 January 1989, p. 3.)
But uncomfortable questions must also be raised about the less traditional and disciplinarian approaches to education, to family, and to other social institutions which Left and liberal opinion have championed.
What values do we want to underpin social relations and criminal law?
How can these be instilled?
These problems are ones well recognized and analysed, though not answered, by, for example, Durkheim's discussion of anomie (Fenton et al.,
1983) and Dahrendorf's of anomia.
As both emphasize, moral education can not proceed effectively in an economically unjust society.
This much is social democratic orthodoxy.
But can less authoritarian forms of moral discipline be effective and if so, how are they to be achieved?
POLICING
Traditional Left analyses have a uniformly negative image of the police as a repressive apparatus of the state.
' New Left realism ' specifically challenges this.
The nub of its argument is that policing is a necessary function which ideally should control the criminal victimization disproportionately afflicting the most vulnerable members of our society.
But it can only be performed well if there is a profound democratization of the structure of accountability.
At present the police do not perform their task satisfactorily.
Their initial response to the growth of crime, which stemmed from rising unemployment and inequality, was heavy-handed and militaristic.
This was counter-productive in alienating those sectors of the community whose co-operation was essential to criminal investigation.
Only by restoring the confidence of these sectors can crime control by the police be successful, and the prerequisite of this is democratic accountability to local communities.
There is an unquestioned presumption here, which pervades current thinking about the police from all perspectives: that the effectiveness and quality of policing have declined.
The evidence presented for this by the ' New Realists' and others is the seemingly inexorable rise of crime and the decline of ' clear-up ' rates (Lea et al.,
1987).
Between 1979 and 1986 the clear-up rate fell from 41 per cent to 32 per cent.
But the clear-up rate is a notoriously inadequate measure of police effectiveness, open to manipulation by many factors other than policing skills (Reiner, 1988a).
To take the most obvious arithmetical point, if the number of crimes per police officer increases, then, other things being equal, the detection rate must fall, even if efficiency remains constant.
In a recent study Lea and Young recognize this point, and say that the best indicator of police performance in crime investigation is the number of crimes cleared per officer (Lea et al.,
1987).
What they do not say is that on this' best ' measure, police performance has in fact improved marginally, not declined (from 7.9 in 1972 to 9.6 in 1986.)
Clearly in the last twenty years there has been growing controversy about fundamental aspects of policing, unprecedented in this century.
(Reiner, 1985, charts and tries to explain this.)
But, to put it provocatively, the growth of conflict over policing, and evidence of increasing public hostility and questioning, does not itself establish that standards of policing have declined.
(When looking at crime trends criminologists are usually hesitant about inferring objective worsening of problems on the basis of moral panics.)
There are many reasons to expect a priori that standards of policing should have improved.
There has, for example, been a progressive improvement in the educational standards of recruits, and in the quantity and quality of police training.
Perhaps it is not so much that police behaviour has deteriorated as that public expectations have risen.
What, it will be said, about the ' obvious' evidence of brutality and corruption?
While there are, of course, many recent causes clbres of police abuse (Reiner, 1985, ch. 2. 2), memoirs of earlier times (e.g. Mark, 1978; Daley, 1986) suggest that there was an enormous extent of subterranean wrong-doing in the cosy days of the traditional bobby on the beat.
For obvious reasons the dangers of such malpractice are endemic in policing, and it may be ' respectable fears' about it which fluctuate more than the extent of abuse.
In so far as tactics have evidently changed (for instance in public order policing: McCabe et al.,
1988; Northam, 1988), it is at least as plausible to see these as a reactive response to rising crime and disorder, as the spontaneous cause of them.
The ' New Realists' see policing as the key to crime control, and accountability as the key to good policing.
Paradoxically, this comes at a time when both the Conservative Government and the police themselves are much more cautious about the potential contribution of policing.
Police numbers and resources are no longer seen as a vade-mecum by the police or the Government (as Hurd, for example, made clear in his speech to the Police Foundation Conference in Oxford on 11 April 1988)  hardly surprising after nine ' wasted ' years.
There is in fact a remarkable cross-party congruence on the idea that the effectiveness of criminal justice and policing depends on the ' involvement of the community ', though the Government denies that this requires full local democratic control, as opposed to consultation.
I am myself sceptical about whether the local democratic control espoused by the ' New Realists' would have the dramatic confidence-building effect claimed.
In any case, the extent of central influence over policing has grown remorselessly and may not be reversible (Reiner, 1988b, 1989).
This implies that the accountability of central government in relation to policing is the more important problem to address.
CONCLUSION
' New realism ', like the old ' law and order ' Conservatism, rejects the traditional social democratic analysis that there is no panacea for crime through criminal justice policy, whether of the Left or the Right.
But the essential precondition for order is economic justice and welfare, without which moral socialization can not take root as other than fragile coercion.
None the less, in a just and thriving economy, an effective criminal justice system has important functions to perform.
It must show that serious offences against the criminal law will be effectively dealt with.
But it is not clear that the declining overall effectiveness of the police and of criminal justice is because of internal failings so much as because of the overwhelming growth of work-load due to growing social and economic inequality coupled with moral deregulation. '
The Inner-City Battlefield: Politics, Ideology, and Social Relations
Susanne MacGregor
INTRODUCTION
From the moment in 1979 when Mrs Thatcher swept to power on a wave of uncollected garbage following the ' winter of discontent ', her radical assault on social democracy and the welfare state was to be a continuing theme of the politics of the 1980s.
In her famed speech on election night 1987, as she rallied her party troops on the steps of Party Headquarters not to rest on their laurels but to continue the fight (they were to be allowed one night of ' marvellous partying ' but must start back the next day with renewed vigour), she announced that ' we've got a big job to do in some of those inner cities... and politically, we've got to get back in there  we want to win those too '.
The connection between her public policies and the political arithmetic was precise and clear.
In this chapter, I shall argue that the concept ' inner city ' is a fundamentally ideological category.
Although it is often presented as a scientific term, relating to features of urban development, its use is better understood as part of an ideological set which has been borrowed from the United States.
The use of the very term is therefore questionable.
As used in politics and social policy in contemporary Britain, the concept ' inner city ' is part of a move to a more conservative and punitive set of social practices and attitudes.
THE ' INNER CITY '
The ' inner city ' is a representation which serves as a focus for politics and policy.
It is a public issue which represents a constellation of social worries, to do with urban poverty, squalor, ill-health, deprivation, decay, crime, social disintegration, and social polarization.
The core issue is that of urban poverty.
Poverty has been a continuing problem in post-war Britain.
Its size and shape have varied and the names used to describe it have varied.
What we have seen in the 1980s is a process by which poverty has been redefined as to do with the ' inner city '.
This involves an association of poverty with crime and violence, and with decay and backwardness.
The redefinition of poverty as urban poverty and as a problem of the inner city reflects also a change in perceptions of appropriate policy responses.
Specifically, the concentration on the spatial dimension, the grounded location of poverty in certain areas, arose when attempts were being made to restrict the scope of public policy and the extent of public expenditure, to limit its focus to targeted areas.
However, reality intrudes on such constructions, as indicated by the gradual widening of the category ' inner city ' to refer also to ' outer estates' and then to whole cities, like Bradford; in some cases it is even used as a code for whole regions of deprivation in conjunction with that other metaphor, the North-South divide.
The battle of ideas is about the very categories to be used in policy debate.
Those who prefer limited, selective superficial policies exert pressure to restrict the scope of the categories.
Those arguing for more fundamental change, tackling the causes rather than merely the symptoms of social distress, utilize categories embracing wider sections of society, extending from the still limited concept of the ' bottom third ' to wider notions of the ' public ' and ' citizens'.
This chapter has a double focus.
It aims to show that closely related to the objective of resurrecting conservative social policies is a political method which involves an attempt to change Britain's political landscape.
Mrs Thatcher's expressed aim was to rid the country of socialism forever, and part of this involved destroying the Labour party's local government base.
In the 1980s, Labour local authorities had emerged as defenders of the poor and of public services.
The third term reforms to local government, the ' inner-city ' policies, were much less about doing good for the poor and arresting decline and decay than about undermining Labour's power bases.
The flagship reform, the poll tax, and the related flotilla of changes affecting privatization and contracting-out, education, housing and social services, as well as specific ' inner-city initiatives', were designed to change the political structure and quite precisely to replace local democracy by the ' market '.
The explicitly anti-democratic nature of the radical Right project was put succinctly in an Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlet:
it is clear that the machinery of representative parliamentary democracy has so far proved unsuitable as the mechanism for translating personal preferences into day-to-day practice.
Profoundly disturbing questions must be raised about the imperfections or obstacles in the representative political process that frustrate the wishes of the sovereign populace it is ostensibly designed to represent.
(Harris and Seldon, 1987, p. 64)
Rather than propose ways in which representative democracy could be strengthened and improved, these authors concluded: ' the weight of the evidence is that a vote is much less effective than purchasing power... the market is potentially more democratic than the state ' (p. 65).
DIVIDED BRITAIN: THE ASSAULT ON THE WELFARE STATE
Britain has become an increasingly divided kingdom under Mrs Thatcher: the years 1979C87 witnessed major changes in Britain's electoral geography, reflecting growing socio-economic polarization  the divide between the relatively prosperous and the relatively deprived areas widened (Walker and Walker, 1987).
Johnston and his colleagues (1988, pp. 325C7) have argued that
this polarisation of the country and its potential political consequences was recognised by the Conservative Government almost certainly well before the results of the 1987 general election were known... the development of policies to tackle the economic run-down and social deprivation of inner city areas was identified as a major thrust for the new government and many new initiatives were conceived in the first weeks of the new Parliament.
To a large extent, these continued and crystallised earlier attempts to tackle similar problems...
The nature of those policies with their emphases on private sector developments, home ownership and small businesses, suggests that in part at least the Government is seeking to produce electoral change by introducing traditional Conservative supporters to areas where the party has been very weak  as, for example, in many of the residential developments in London's Docklands.
Mrs Thatcher's identification of the ' inner cities' as the focus of her third term's agenda was not therefore a new conversion to the need to do something about urban poverty, squalor, and alienation.
Rather it was one more step in the step by step approach to the reform of both local government and the politics and values of British society, which has been followed through consistently and vigorously throughout the 1980s.
For the third term, the key policy areas, which would tackle the ' really big job ' of the ' inner cities', were named as the policies for local government, education, and housing.
Much of the right-wing discussion of policies for inner cities has been framed as though the attack was solely on two forms of ' extremists': one, the ' Loony Left ' and the other, disorderly, criminal elements fomenting riots and social disorder.
But the Thatcherite counter-revolution is much more all-encompassing: it is an assault on social democracy and all that that term entails, just as much if not more so than on simply ' taking out ' pockets of resistance in specific local areas.
Key state agencies in the social democratic arrangements identified for attack were local authorities.
TACKLING THE TOWN HALLS
The programme of reforms to local government, to reduce the power and status of local authorities, is part of a planned programme which, it is intended, will stretch into the 1990s.
Because some reforms are hidden from public view over the horizon does not mean that they have not been thought out and designed.
As we move along the road, they will come into sight.
Mrs Thatcher herself supported this reading: ' I 'm here because I believe in things  because I 'm always thinking forward ' (speaking on Panorama, 25 January 1988).
The Bradford model represents Thatcherism in action in the ' inner city '.
(Bradford as a whole was frequently described as an ' inner city ' in news broadcasts in 1988, demonstrating clearly that the term signified ' poverty and decline ' rather than a specific area in a city.)
Shortly after the Tories won control of the council in September 1988, almost 6 million of cuts in local authority expenditure were announced.
The Leader of the Council, Eric Pickles, speaking at the Tory Conference in 1988, had promised that these reforms would place the customer first and that Labour would be swept from control of the cities and Town Halls.
In this constellation, the Right identifies housing as of particular significance.
The long period of domination by municipal socialism is said to have produced a dependence on the local authority, especially through provision of council housing.
Low rents are seen as a form of bribery of the electorate.
And this special culture is thought to be found in a particularly acute and virulent form in Scotland and in some parts of the North of England.
Michael Heseltine was the main spokesman of the Conservative approach to the inner cities until his ministerial career was abruptly interrupted by the Westland affair in 1986.
He has remarked on the apparent fact that the ' Loony Left ' were ' increasingly to be found in the more deprived and distressed parts of our country ' (Heseltine, 1987, p. 131).
The Government had, he said, four choices.
They could let conditions worsen; or they could move power back to national government; or they could re-organise the electoral boundaries so that the irresponsible Left loses its tight inner urban constituencies; or they could push power out beyond local government and into the hands of the people whom it is elected to serve.
(p. 132).
In practice, all four of these options have been pursued by the Thatcher administrations.
But it was the fourth option which the Tories emphasized in their rhetoric.
Local authorities would be encouraged to see themselves primarily as' service-providers'.
Once this was conceded, the next step would be to move to their becoming semi-independent public bodies (much the same might happen to hospitals and other public services), with the ' freedom to manage ' without regard to political pressure from local electors or ' vested interests' (trade unions and professionals) and the freedom to cut labour costs (the main item in service budgets) by paying people only what it was necessary to pay them in that local market.
National pay settlements and negotiating arrangements hinder that process which would be improved, they argue, by ' flexibility ' in wage-rates and local pay bargaining.
The economics of the enterprise culture and the shape of service provision are thus integrally related, two sides of the same coin.
And such changes mark a decisive shift away from local democracy.
INSTITUTIONAL REFORM AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING
Two developments  opposition to central government policies by Labour local councils, and urban riots  forced the Government to develop policies for the ' inner cities' (Heseltine, 1987).
That riots and local socialism were both found in the most acutely stressed parts of the country is no accident.
Each was a form of opposition to the direction and effects of government policy and protest at economic changes.
Hence the Tory Government's need to try to destroy such opposition.
This could be done by beating down, as in the assertion of dominance over local authorities.
Or it could be done through fragmentation.
Fragmentation takes place where blocks of low-income poor housing and their associated populations are broken up and dispersed, either through deliberate slum clearance and dispersal of population, as in the late nineteenth century (Stedman Jones, 1971); or by the decentralizing effects of the policies of earlier post-war years, overspill outer estates and new towns; or through the later processes of ' gentrification ' (Glass, 1964)  a term first used by Ruth Glass but popularized in the late 1970s  i.e. the emergence of new wealthy areas as in Islington or Docklands and the displacement of the poorer local population, likely to be further encouraged by the impact of the poll tax.
Both the assertion of central authority and the fragmentation of local social structures and economics are integral to the overall desire to use power to restructure social arrangements in such a way that certain interests are favoured over others, to reward supporters, and to maintain these arrangements by using social institutions to entrench an alternative set of ideas, those of the ' enterprise culture '.
The Thatcherite counter-revolution should be seen, then, as consisting of a number of interrelated policies designed to restructure taxation, restructure public expenditure, reshape the welfare services, and curb the power of professionals, trade unions, and local authorities.
These are closely interrelated and the Government's plans for the ' inner cities' can not be understood unless seen as part of this overall enterprise.
Thatcherism's social engineering  just as much social engineering as that of the Fabians or the very different local socialists they oppose  aims to ' temper expectations'.
The post-war boom's revolution of rising expectations is said to have fostered an insatiable appetite for more, without concern for the question of ' who pays? '
Thatcherism is the revolt of the haves against the demands of the have nots.
Mrs Thatcher, speaking on Panorama (25 January 1988), said that her constituency is that of those who are working ' for an increased standard of living for their own families' (not, we should note, for others).
She receives more complaints, she said, from those who are in work but feel they would be as well off on supplementary benefit; her aim is to increase the gap between those who are working and the non-working.
An interesting aspect of any ' counter-revolution ' is that it takes the terms of the ' revolution ' and turns them to its own purposes.
As Arno Mayer (1971, p. 45) commented, ' As if by reflex, the counter-revolution borrows its central ideas, objectives, styles and methods from the revolution '.
Thus ideas and principles are taken over, redefined, and reapplied in order to structure and manage discontent and political rebellion.
Key words such as self-help, accountability, responsibility, hard work, thrift  many central to the tradition of the English working classes and trade unions  have been appropriated and presented as specifically Conservative and in some way under threat from socialism and collective action.
So the Thatcherite counter-revolution has redefined the idea of justice.
John Redwood, Head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit in 1983C5, now a Conservative MP, sees two different kinds of justice: protection for the poor; and that all who enjoy services should pay (speaking on Weekend World, 11 October 1987).
The poll tax, he said, is central to change and to improving the inner cities.
Enterprise has been driven away by high business rates and high domestic rates.
Enterprising people, in Thatcherism's view, are those who create new jobs.
These are the highly successful, who must be encouraged to stay and to do well for they are the motor that pulls the rest up; they create prosperity and employ other people.
Part of the drive to improve inner cities is deliberately to reward success, increase the gap between the working and the non-working, retain business and talented and successful people in these areas, and charge those who use services the economic cost of these services, so that if they don't like the price they will be encouraged to move out to areas where ' the price is right '.
This is called ' consumer choice ' and it also opens up the possibility of charging for more services.
The effect on the demography of the inner cities could be dramatic, as migration into and out of inner cities is in any case already high.
Since housing is also crucial to mobility, the break-up of local authority control of low-income estates is also part of the package of reforms.
Reports that the numbers registering on the electoral rolls are falling (Weekend World, 11 October 1987; the Independent, 23 February 1988, p. 6) indicate that the political arithmetic will also play its part.
If some of those who resist and resent the imposition, opt out of the electoral system (and the calculation is that these will be those who are thought, either now or in the future, likely to benefit from the present array of public services), while others are more inclined to vote at local elections for a party which offers to cut and reorganize services, the electoral outcome would be dramatic.
Michael Howard, then a Minister at the Department of the Environment, reported an opinion poll as having found that one-quarter of people who had not previously voted in local elections intended to vote in future as a result of the community charge (interview on This Week, Next Week, 21 February 1988).
Quite how they will choose to vote is less certain, however, as the poll tax becomes labelled ' a Tory tax ' and as environmental issues and collapsing public services assume a higher priority.
Another concept which has been taken over and reinterpreted is that of ' decentralization '.
One argument against the Government's third term agenda for local government and the public services has been that, by undermining local authorities, they are increasingly centralizing decision-taking.
On the contrary, argue the Thatcherites, we are ' putting power further away ', for example to parents through the education reforms.
With the opting-out opportunity, schools will have greater responsibility and liberty than under local authorities.
In addition, capital is said to have been spread among the people.
FROM ENTITLEMENT TO OBLIGATION
The new enlightenment's assault on social democracy has focused particularly on the concept of ' dependency '.
Dependence on bureaucracies (local authorities, the NHS, the social security system) is said to present people with a lack of control over their own lives, to damage the spirit of independence.
The sole supporters or the ' social democratic ' welfare state are, so the argument goes, the publicly employed educated classes, whose careers are linked to the state.
Removing the supports of these state agencies  the welfare net, subsidized public services  would face people with a ' reality test ': that if you don't sweep floors eight hours a day, you won't have any money to live on.
Young people are thought to have imbibed this dependency culture to an extent not found in their parents and grandparents  a product of the high rates of social expenditure of the 1960s and 70s.
To effect a new social discipline, a new relationship is being established between the state and its subjects: society, that is the government, plays the role of the strict disciplinarian father; the people ate their children who have to be taught to mend their ways.
John Moore, then Social Services Secretary, set this out explicitly in a key speech in autumn 1987, when he argued the need to move from social protection towards attacking dependency.
In doing this, he said, ' we are following the oldest pattern of behaviour known to man: the way parents raise their children.
The aim of all parents is to teach their child to become an independent, self-reliant adult, able to participate in life and gain satisfaction.
This should be society's aim for all its citizens too. '
A clearer statement of the top-down direction of the people by government would be hard to find.
It demonstrates the emphasis on moral regulation and discipline which distinguishes the conservative from the liberal phases of Thatcherism.
The American writer Charles Murray, one of Mr Moore's mentors, has justified moves away from the language of entitlement to the language of obligation by reference to something he calls' popular wisdom '.
This he defines as characterized by ' hostility towards welfare (it makes people lazy), toward lenient judges (they encourage crime), and toward socially conscious schools...
The popular wisdom disapproves of favoritism for blacks and of too many written-in rights for minorities of all sorts' (Murray, 1984, p. 146).
John Moore continued his' assault on dependency ' in 1989 by arguing that real poverty has already been abolished in modern Britain.
Very few are really poor any more.
To make this case, he defined poverty in ' the old absolute sense of hunger and want ' or as' starving children and squalid slums'.
By defining poverty as starvation and destitution, he was able to claim that not many people in Britain are poor and that those who argue the case for improvements to welfare provision, ' the poverty lobby and the media ', are really intent on furthering their socialist aims through calling Western material capitalism a failure.
Where others might see a more complex situation with a conceptual continuum between starvation, hunger, destitution, poverty (want), and inequality, Moore abolishes poverty by dividing it up between the two extremes of the continuum, also at the same time neatly side-stepping discussion of the visible increase in begging, destitution, and homelessness in major British cities.
The sub-text, or hidden message, of Moore's attack on the poverty lobby is an attack on the poor themselves, part of the move to a harsher, conservative approach to social policy.
The poor are in reality simply experiencing the effects of inequality and can indeed be blamed for their condition.
' It is hard to believe that poverty stalks the land when even the poorest fifth of families with children spend nearly a tenth of their income on alcohol and tobacco ', was Mr Moore's dismissive conclusion.
Such new social engineering is based on a specific form of behaviourist psychology  rewards and punishments directed at individuals teach them that actions have consequences, that failures or mistakes are punished and not rewarded, so that behaviour changes.
This stress on merely individual responsibility ignores the reality of the interrelatedness of human life.
No consideration is given to the fact that actually society is everything  that one person's effort may bring reward to someone else; that one person's mistake can bring disaster to another.
The aim of the Thatcherite reforms to the public services is said to be to give consumers the power to go elsewhere if they are not satisfied.
This policy is limited, however, in two crucial ways: first, that such ' choice ' in effect reduces to the ability to pay, and ability to pay has been profoundly affected by other policies which have increased the differences among groups with regard to income and wealth; and secondly, that many public services must be provided in the local area if they are to be of real value and if other costs, not only financial, are not to be incurred, for instance, in travelling or moving residence in order to receive them.
For example, proposals such as those to base service provision on charges or vouchers are impractical and tend only to increase the differences between the services available in different areas and to shift the costs from the more visible budgets of the services to the less visible ones of the individual, relatively powerless consumer: either their pockets or their time and energy will be hit.
As we have seen, the language of this welfare revolution is American, much of it popularized by writers like Charles Murray (1984).
The aim to move away from the language of entitlement to the language of obligation is very different from the language of freedom and liberty which dominated the earlier phases of Thatcherism.
As the terms accountability and democracy were redefined in the poll tax debates, so the concepts of ' justice ' and ' active citizenship ' have been redefined in the debates about public services.
The Thatcherite assault on the welfare state involves two key aspects: lowering expectations and imposing work discipline.
The object of the ' training schemes' being promoted as part of the inner-city package is to drive down wages, for without reducing wages there will be in job creation.
The creation of the enterprise culture in deprived areas of the North and the ' inner cities' is fundamentally about the creation of jobs at lower wages than were previously viewed as acceptable and reducing entitlement to benefit and levels of benefit in order to increase the incentive to take on these jobs.
The end of entitlement is perhaps best demonstrated by the introduction of the Social Fund in the social security reforms of 1988.
The Social Fund replaced the previous system of additional and urgent needs allowances and grants, which had been an area of supplementary benefit responsive to demand and welfare rights pressure.
The solution to the complexities of the system and the growing complexity of case law adjudication was to abolish the notion of additional allowances completely, replacing them with loans from a limited budget and no right to independent appeal.
This signified a ' campaign against the benefit culture '.
Benefits would go only to those in ' genuine need ' so as not to ' featherbed ' the rest.
A distinction would be made between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
The main aim of these reforms was not to meet need precisely and in a neat, targeted form.
Rather it was precisely to change attitudes, to stress individual responsibility  you're on your own, don't expect any help from us  and to reduce the state's obligations.
THE BATTLE OF IDEAS
' The welfare state is at once Britain's proudest achievement and the biggest man-made disaster ', Sir John Hoskyns has written.
(He is another former Head of the Prime Minister's policy Unit and a key figure in the Institute of Directors.)
In a series of articles in The Times to celebrate Mrs Thatcher's ten years as leader (11, 12, and 13 February 1985) he wrote that she had inherited ' forty years of muddled policy '.
The first stage of the attack on the ' muddled policy ' involved reducing the power of the trade unions, especially the public sector unions, who were thought to dominate the welfare state itself.
Having cowed the trade unions, we can see that the next step was to take on the local authorities and the poor.
Next in line for the 1990s are child benefit, pensions, and the NHS.
By the year 2000, little will remain of the 1940s social legislation, assumed by Beveridge.
Beveridge's Report was based on three guiding principles: the second of these was that:
the organization of social insurance should be treated as one part of a comprehensive policy of social progress.
Social insurance fully developed may provide income security: it is an attack upon Want.
But Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack.
The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness'.
(Beveridge, 1942, para. 8, my emphasis)
Thus Beveridge had assumed that the elimination of poverty was integrally linked to policies for health, education, housing and town planning, and full employment.
Under Thatcherism, full employment commitments, family allowances, the NHS, town planning, council housing, education, social security, all will have been radically reformed.
The battle of politics and ideas which focuses on the inner city represents a conflict between sets of interests and values which have a long history, dating at least from the 1830s and the New Poor Law of 1834.
These are conflicts between democratic and anti-democratic, socialist and anti-socialist, egalitarian and anti-egalitarian ideas.
The ideas of the radical Right are not new.
They go back a long way.
They are old ideas stated in new form, in new language.
In all the post-war years, both currents have been present.
What changed was the party political situation: the seizure of power by the radical Right in the Conservative party and thence in government.
For example, Ian Macleod and Enoch Powell (1952) had argued:
Given that redistribution is a characteristic of the social services, the general presumption must be that they will be rendered only on evidence of need, i.e. of financial inability to provide each particular service out of one's own or one's family's resources.
Otherwise the process is a wasteful and purposeless collection and issue of resources, which leaves people in the enjoyment of the same facilities as before.
And Geoffrey Howe (1961) argued that ' over the whole field of social policy, the firm aim should be a reduction in the role of the state '.
These ideas were given a great push forward by the increasing impact of American thinking on British social policy from the late 1960s onward.
The collapse of thinking about social policy in Britain, a result largely of the failure of the Labour party to develop new policies and not to defend adequately basic principles and institutions, created a vacuum into which right-wing ideas flooded.
It was easier for the Thatcherites to attack the welfare state successfully because its principles and institutions had not been adequately defended, as Dorothy Wedderburn and others were warning as early as 1964 (Wedderburn, 1965).
The slippage of support for universalism, equality, and public services was illustrated in comments made by Roy Jenkins.
Writing in 1959 and with reference to Peter Townsend's calculation that a fifth of the population had not shared in the general improvement in living standards since the war, Roy Jenkins argued:
Any believer in social justice, or indeed any believer in a civilised society, must surely give a high priority to providing such an improvement.
Some, including Mr Townsend himself, would give it an absolute priority.
They would deny the right of those whose standard of living is already at or above the average to any further improvement until the submerged fifth had been given more or less equivalent benefits.
I would not accept this extreme position.
Neither the economic policy of a nation nor the political programme of a party is likely to achieve a successful dynamism if it is based solely upon the assistance of lame ducks.
(Jenkins, 1959, pp. 56C7, my emphasis)
Thus even in 1959 advocacy of equality was cast as extremism.
the need for incentives was accepted if economic growth was to be attained.
And any chance of winning an election on proposals for social justice was' realistically ' denied.
It is important to stress that while there is within right-wing attacks on the welfare state a concentration on shifting culture and attitudes, with the increasing emphasis on ' business' and ' enterprise ', on managing tight budgets and devolving responsibility for effecting cuts to lower levels, the intentions are determinedly economic.
Ideology provides the justification and politics the means for shifts in economic outcomes  redistribution of income and wealth away from some sectors and groups towards others.
This shift requires crucially a lowering of labour-costs and restructuring of the labour market.
Social discipline is wanted not just for itself but for these ends.
Much of what happened with the ascendency of the radical Right in British politics was predicted in at least one prescient article (Leonard, 1979).
What is interesting, however, is that it has taken over ten years to bring about the changes Leonard anticipated.
This is important and tells us two things.
First, that the radical Right's assault has been carefully managed; the step by step approach was brilliantly conceived and managed by diligent and unerring control from the centre; secondly, that the speed of its success has varied in different areas of public provision, which tells us much about the role of resistances, resistances built on organized opposition within the public services.
In the areas most closely concerned with the inner city, opposition from local authorities has been crucial.
RECENT POLICIES ON THE INNER CITIES
Conservative policy on the inner cities has diverged in some ways from the earlier policies of the 1970s, especially in shifting away from social and environmental programmes towards an emphasis on economic and enterprise-generating ones.
In other ways, however, there is a continuity in these policies, especially in so far as inner-city and urban initiatives specifically target defined spatial areas and direct resources deliberately towards them through special schemes.
The assumptions lying behind such targeted programmes are that the ' problem ' is a bounded one, concerned with ' pockets of poverty or deprivation ', restricted areas of decay, which can be remedied through relatively limited expenditure and precise targeting of funds and activities to ' special ', different, difficult problems, limited problems which remain to be rooted out, while the rest of the system is assumed to be functioning well and on course for prosperity and harmony.
That is, inner cities are perceived as' deviant communities', areas which need to be turned around and brought back into the mainstream, a mainstream that requires little or no restructuring or reform.
This shift in policy from universalism towards selectivism and area targeting was criticized as early is 1976 by Peter Townsend, who was quick to note its implications:
The perception that the ills of society are relatively more prevalent in some areas than others has innocent and fairly obvious origins...
But then material and environmental deficiencies become heavily associated in the public mind with other socially perceived problems.
For social reasons, both the degree of concentration of certain acknowledged problems and the extent to which they can be explained by internal processes of self-generation rather externally imposed processes may be grossly exaggerated.
(Townsend, 1976, p. 168)
He foresaw the dangerous drift in urban policy, which began under a Labour government, towards beliefs in contamination, self-generation of problems, individualistic explanations for poverty, pathologizing of areas and their populations.
These perceptions were encouraged by policies which assumed that problems of urban deprivation had their origins in the characteristics of local populations and that these could be resolved simply by better co-ordination of the social services and encouragement of citizen involvement and community self-help.
THE ' URBAN UNDERCLASS'
A key feature of this situation is the extent to which public policy itself acts to create an ' underclass' of excluded poor, who are compressed into densely populated, poorly served physical spaces, crowded estates, and ' inner cities'.
This also implies, as recognized by the community development activists of the 1970s and their inheritors the ' local socialists', that poverty is a political condition as much if not more than a social or economic one.
The powerlessness of the poor, their inability to influence the distribution of life-chances and rewards, helps to explain their poverty (Miliband, 1974; MacGregor, 1981).
Some political activists concluded from this that what was needed was to ' empower the poor ', encourage their civic and political participation as a way to redress the balance, give them the strength to organize in such a way as to make effective claims on society, to receive those citizen's rights to which they were said to be entitled.
Much welfare rights activity and anti-poverty campaigns of local authorities, as well as anti-racist, anti-sexist equal opportunities policies, were based on this analysis.
Once again, the counter-revolution has taken over the key concepts of this approach and turned them on their head.
The ' enabling state ' and the concept of empowering people have been interpreted as encouraging more individual consumer choice and limited, voluntary self-help welfare activity and ' community care ' (Thatcher, 1985; Ridley, 1988).
The perceptions of the ' inner city ' and of the ' underclass' which inform government circles today are drawn from the United States, whose cities offer a terrifying picture of our future if we continue to move down the road to a residual, extremely selectivist welfare system.
These perceptions emphasize the pathology of the victims themselves and the pathological influences found in certain areas.
Fear about a drugs epidemic fuelled this alarm (MacGregor, 1989).
' We have seen the future and it is frightening ', said Robin Corbett MP returning from a visit to New York's Lower East Side with the Home Affairs Select Committee in 1985.
The picture was sketched by John Banham (1988, p. 23), Director-General of the CBI, describing Lawndale on the south side of Chicago.
This, he said,
represents a future to be avoided at almost any cost.
There, a combination of poor housing and education, high crime rates, much of it drug-related, large-scale immigration and associated racial tensions, an exodus of jobs and the more well-off to the suburbs, high youth unemployment and welfare dependency and the break-up of traditional family structures have served to create what some commentators in the United States have described as an ' urban underclass'.
John Banham's understanding of the term ' underclass' derives from his days as a Director-General at the Audit Commission.
It reiterates an orthodoxy whose source can be traced to one specific article (Lemann, 1986).
This perception found expression also in an important Audit Commission Occasional Paper (Audit Commission, 1987) from which Banham's statement quotes and which is itself a direct repetition of Lemann's views.
The paper set out in diagrammatic form a view of the factors causing an urban underclass (see Figure 4. 1).
At the centre of the conception is high youth unemployment which, it is assumed, in the case of males leads to crime and trouble with the police; in the case of females it leads to single-parent families.
Single-parent families, that is mothers, are blamed for continuing this process, producing a culture of dependency and poverty in that their children are said to grow up with poor interpersonal skills, low educational achievement, and lack of marketable skills.
Recent US research and policy have focused on ' dependent mothers'.
Welfare is seen as a drug of addiction but studies of long-term welfare recipients have found that only one in five daughters of dependent mothers themselves become dependent.
Furthermore, half of all mothers on welfare come off it within two years (Daly, 1989).
However, superficial reading of research findings, combined with prejudice, has led to a growing stress on workfare in the United States where mothers, whose children may be as young as six months in some States, could be forced to accept training or low-paid work even where the child care support services are inadequate.
The harshly punitive impact of the new social conservatism on these women and their children contrasts with right-wing rhetoric expressing concern for the family.
These views are being borrowed by right-wingers in Britain (Redwood, 1989).
The social historian John Macnicol (1988) has criticized the ' pursuit of the underclass' which characterized the 1970s and 1980s.
He pinpoints the beginnings of the contemporary resurgence of this theme as Sir Keith Joseph's speech to the pre-School Playgroups Association on 29 June 1972, when he was Secretary of State for Social Services.
Macnicol shows that the roots of these views lie deeper and can be found in the social debates of the past one hundred years.
Investigations of a hereditary or hard-core social problem group have always been crucial in conservative social reformist strategies.
Joseph had mused: ' perhaps there is at work here a process, apparent in many situations but imperfectly understood, by which problems reproduced themselves from generation to generation ' (Joseph, 1972).
The focus on the pattern of births among the very poor, a feature of the American concept of the underclass, one which prioritizes' single-parent female headed households' as major issues (blaming the mothers), appeared explicitly in Joseph's 1974 Birmingham speech when he maintained that, because an excess of births was apparently occurring in mothers of social class V, ' the balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened '.
Birth control might help to prevent the excess production of ' problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our Borstals, subnormal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters'.
Extensive research failed to support the cycle of deprivation thesis but the stereotype lived on, and grew to more prominence with the dominance of the right wing in the Conservative party and thence in British society and politics: Keith Joseph was of course an early leading figure in this faction within the party.
The apparent existence of an economically unproductive residuum of social outcasts has been traced as a feature of social investigation and social policy by, among others, Stedman Jones (1971) and John Macnicol (1988).
The words used  the labels  have varied over time: residuum; social problem group; hard-core; problem families; the culture of poverty; alienation; hereditary poverty; the inadequate poor; the urban underclass.
The search for personal inadequacy and behavioural defects has been the key focus of such research and policy.
Macnicol argues that ' in its periodic reconstruction, the underclass concept has tended to consist of five elements':
1.
an artificial ' administrative definition relating to contacts with particular institutions of the state and welfare agencies, social workers, the police etc. ';
2.
the separate question of inter-generational transmission, through either heredity or socialization;
3.
identification of particular behavioural traits as antisocial, ignoring others;
4.
stress on resource allocation issues, emphasizing high demand for services by defined categories of users; and
5.
' it tends to be supported by those who wish to constrain the redistributive potential of state welfare and thus it has always been part of a broader conservative view of the aetiology of social problems and their correct solutions' (Macnicol, 1988, p. 316).
The centrality of the ' family ' in these conservative perceptions, and the double-edged nature of the disciplines advocated to deal with the problem, were illustrated in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal (Europe) of 17 January 1989.
Entitled Today's America, this explained the split between the successful, socially mobile blacks and the rest thus:
the key to the difference... lies in the family  a truth Daniel Patrick Moynihan was pilloried for stating a few years before Martin Luther King's assassination.
In the past week, it happens, we have heard intelligent and well-meaning whites talking in apocalyptic terms about the problem of the black underclass  that it can only be solved by draconian measures of enshrining abortion or taking children away from mothers.
Rather than this, argued the Wall Street Journal:
the solution to the underclass lies in stricter enforcement of the criminal laws, in giving tenants a stake and a say in public housing, in educational innovation opposed by teachers' unions, in changing welfare laws so that a baby is not a ticket for an apartment separate from mom 's.
Much of the problem of the underclass, we continue to believe, arises from perverse incentives rooted in misguided paternalism.
This explanation of urban poverty in terms of ' perverse incentives' is being picked up by the right wing in Britain and used as the basis for proposals for new policies and regulations regarding unemployment benefit, income support, and housing entitlement as they apply to lone mothers.
In the same week in which the Wall Street Journal editorial appeared, it was announced in Britain that an extensive study of lone parents' reliance on social security would be carried out after comments from Ministers that the state is having to foot the bill for the so-called dependency culture (Guardian, 18 January 1989, p. 3).
Mr John Moore, then Social Security Secretary, had spoken of a young woman in his constituency who obtained special benefit and a council flat by becoming pregnant.
He had said that the Government needed to be ' wary of providing incentives to obtain a particular benefit which can erode a sense of personal responsibility and adversely affect behaviour '.
Similarly, discussions are developing on how to limit the housing provided for single mothers and their children to very low standard institutional care, ' to discourage the others,.
BLAMING AND EXPELLING THE VICTIM
While disputing the definition of an underclass composed of recalcitrant or wayward pathological individuals, it should be noted that current developments in public policy, especially the poll tax registration and payment procedures, are encouraging the formation of an ' underclass' in the sense of a section of society which does not participate even formally in society, let alone participate fully as citizens.
Townsend's most important definition of poverty which emphasizes that lack of money leads to in inability to join in fully in social life, producing in exclusion of individuals and social groups from ordinary life, focuses crucially on the role of lack of participation and powerlessness in the social construction of the ' poor '.
Some features of public policy may add to this informal exclusion and outcast status by encouraging people to opt out completely even from formal status as a citizen, thus losing all civic rights.
The poll tax is crucial here (MacGregor, 1988).
The pressures to evade the tax  a new imposition bearing particularly hard on poor people in deprived, high spending areas  will encourage some people to disappear from all public record and perhaps to keep on the move to avoid detection.
Recent changes in social security regulations add to this.
Shelter estimated that 25,000 to 40,000 young people slept out in the open in Central London in 1987.
Others say the numbers increased in 1988.
The census of 1991 may be affected by these processes and since the census returns will form the basis of some resource-allocation calculations, severe underestimation of the needs of some areas may be the result.
In the United States cities already have to argue for a notional amount to compensate for such under-recording: the same will probably have to happen in Britain.
THE DEBATE IN THE UNITED STATES: SOCIAL DEMOCRACY'S ALTERNATIVE
In his book The Truly Disadvantaged, William Julius Wilson avoided the simplistic banalities of writers like Murray and Lemann (Wilson, 1987).
He confronted the evidence on inner cities and, being a black social democratic scholar, dared to observe the clustering in ' ghetto ' neighbourhoods of ' socially isolated ' blacks and Hispanics.
This is due, he argued, to decreasing employment opportunities with the shift from goods-producing to service-producing activities and the loss of 7 million unskilled jobs, and the undesirable concentration effects of this.
But this situation was not, he claimed, the result of personal inadequacy; it resulted from wider impersonal economic and demographic forces.
The loss of employment opportunities led to a loss of ' marriageable men ' in inner-city areas.
A key factor in the process, Wilson argued, was the collapse of institutions in these neighbourhoods, a direct result of poverty and social isolation, which produces a continuing social disorganization.
Wilson's work has been lauded by the centre-left in the United States and is an important reminder that not all Americans are Reaganites.
But this brave attempt to ' face facts' contains problems.
The concept of social disorganization, for example, which has a long history in sociology, assumes its contrast to be with a ' community ', a harmoniously well-organized and integrated society.
What we see, however, are different forms of organization, alternative institutional arrangements.
We may prefer arrangements based on institutions like the church and the shop but gangs and parties are also forms of social institution, not perhaps quite so easy to break down and displace as' disorganization, would imply.
We may agree with much of Wilson's emphasis on the need for public policy that promotes universal programmes and increases employment and training opportunities open on the same basis to all people.
However, his analysis has been criticized as' abominably sexist not to mention atavistic ' (Reed, 1988).
The tangle of behaviours Wilson discusses consists of crime rates, teenage pregnancy, female heads of families, welfare dependency, and out of wedlock births.
Clearly four of these are overlapping categories and focus on women specifically.
To condemn this analysis as sexist is not however exact.
Young men and underclass men in general are also portrayed in disparaging terms in the book, even though the explanation for their behaviour (criminality, violence, drugs, hanging round pool halls, lick of responsibility for offspring) is placed at the door of external forces.
Rather, the analysis is pro-nuclear family and implicitly pro-patriarchy and favours a clear set of moral rules and values, which perhaps are ones of which many respectable working-class people, both black and white, Afro-American, European-American, and others, might approve.
But by focusing on a particular selection of empirical evidence, the book seems to shift the blame from the poor and the underclass to women and to their lack of available, acceptable marriage partners.
The implicit solution is a resurgence of the ' normal ' nuclear family.
Whatever the support or not for these values, the book fails to recognize the wider changes that have gone on in the family and in gender relations, changes which may be quite separate in origin from the question of poverty, although they add to the poverty of women and children.
Remedies for the poverty of single mothers and their families in an economy where the two-income family sets the norm in both the production and consumption systems would need to be more far reaching than those proposed by Wilson.
It is quite clear that the lone parent is greatly disadvantaged in terms of available resources, money especially, but also time and energy, compared to the two-parent or three-generation family, and she and her children suffer because of this.
But other factors cross-cut and a given lone-parent family may still be better off than if they were in a two-parent household characterized by vindictiveness, meanness, or violence (Pahl, 1985).
Importantly, the politics behind the ' impersonal, economic and demographic forces at work in British and American cities need to be brought out.
The transformation of postwar industrial cities was driven not by some abstract historical force but by a combination of private investment decision and state action.
This impetus was centred around an urban renewal policy that  along with explicitly segregationist policies in federal public housing  cut off minority communities, displaced large sections of these communities and concentrated them between expressways, office complexes, stadiums and civic centers.
There lies the source of Wilson's ' social isolation '.
(Reed, 1988, p. 169)
Wilson in the end fails to escape from ' the nexus of moralistic ideology and patriarchal vision dressed up as social science, (ibid.), much as the writers reviewed by Macnicol failed to do.
However, his conception of the ' underclass', its causation and policy remedies, differs markedly from those of the far Right whose views have been so easily absorbed into British government and establishment thinking.
CONCLUSION
the single point that emerges from a close reading of the literature on the underclass and the inner city is that there is no valid need to identify the poor by their putative behaviour at all.
Many of the indicators chosen are suspect, as Macnicol has shown for earlier periods, in that they simply count contact with state agencies, and it is a commonplace observation that the poor are more likely to be in contact with social workers because they are poor (Becker, 1988); young drug-takers in inner cities are more visible than wealthy socialites but drug-taking and drinking stretch across social groups (O'Bryan, 1989; Plant, 1989); desertion of women by husbands and the choice to remain unmarried are not restricted to the poor; and so on and so on.
All these ' signs' of ' inadequacy ' are nothing of the kind but are indicators of poverty and powerlessness.
Only measures of material social conditions, unemployment, income, housing conditions, density of population, can usefully serve to characterize the deprivation encountered by those forced to live in these circumstances.
The ' underclass' is what the working poor become when they are not employed.
Once jobs arise and if they are paid for their labour, they become the workers again; sometimes they are just as poor but their class position has changed.
However, long-term unemployment and disconnection from the social relations of work and employment are bound to produce different patterns of social life, norms, and values and possibly despair and hopelessness.
It may lead to a gap between the values of those most closely tied to the institutions of the labour movement and the unwaged.
But this problem too is not confined to the gap between the ' workers' and the unemployed.
It affects the gap between unionized and non-unionized sectors, between men-dominated and women-dominated work-situations and areas of social life.
These varieties are complex and changeable: at times of rapid social restructuring such changes are also more rapid.
What is clear is that public policies that come from outside and are imposed on inner-city populations are often based on prejudice and ignorance.
What is needed is a change in the processes of decision-making so that policies are informed from below by the people involved, who are the only ones who really know what life there is like and what people really want and are able to do.
In the dominant conceptions of inner-city public policy, breaking the cycle focuses on the issues of ' welfare dependency ' and ' youth unemployment ': it does not include far-reaching and fundamental reorganization of social and economic life and the redistribution of income, wealth, and life-chances.
Hugh Stretton (1978) has provided four metaphors to characterize the city: the city as machine; as community; as a market place; and as a battle-ground.
In this chapter I have concentrated on the image of the inner city as a battle-ground  a battleground on which opposing forces, ideas, and values can be identified.
The argument has been that the geography of poverty and the geography of voting are interconnected and thus party politics and public policies are interconnected too.
Attitudes to social problems and public policy and electoral strategies are closely intertwined, most effectively by the Thatcherites in their overall strategy of social engineering.
Their opponents have not been able to make the connections as effectively, either through working out a coherent ideology or through practice and organization.
Only municipal socialism offered any coherent alternative, but this was limited by its restriction to the local level; the balance of power went against it and it has now been thrown back.
Dominant perceptions of poverty in divided Britain as characterized by urban poverty, decay, and concentration in areas defined as' inner cities' and inhabited by an ' underclass' call forth increasingly punitive and extremely tight-fisted selectivist policy responses.
An alternative view sees the shape of poverty as reflecting the shape and condition of the wider society and requires more wide-ranging policy responses, especially those founded on universalist principles.
In a critical article written several years ago, Townsend concluded by reminding his readers what Tawney had written in 1913.
Plus ?a change: in the 1990s these words (apart from their dated gender references) remain as relevant and as enlightening as in the 1970s and at the beginning of the century: the problem of poverty is the condition of the normal man [ and woman ] in normal circumstances, neither better nor worse off than his [ or her ] neighbours, not of those whose failings qualify them to be the text for the moralist, and who are no more common in the manual working-classes than in other sections of the society.
It is in short the question of the economic status and opportunities of those who make up seven-eighths of the community, not of any submerged residuum...
The problem of poverty with which the student is concerned is primarily an industrial one,  and only secondly in its manifestations,  [ found ] in the mill, in the mine or at the docks,  not in casual wards or on the embankment.
(Townsend, 1976, p. 171) '
