Tory report blasts Manchester

Jonathan Schofield considers Iain Duncan Smith’s report singing the blues for the city

Date Published: 08/11/2007

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Hell is a City was released in 1960 starring Stanley Baker. It was the best British film noir of its era and was set in Manchester. According to Iain Duncan Smith’s new report on UK cities, hell is a city called Manchester.

Oh dear, get a load of this lot, and these are just a few of the gruesome stats. We are near the bottom for truancy, fourth worst for school exclusions, worst for lone parent families, we have double the rate of teenage pregnancies, more than double the national rate for men ending up in hospital with booze problems, and of course bad crime figures. In otherwords we have social breakdown like no other place in the nation.

The truth is that much of Manchester is composed of areas which have seen the only reason for their creation, industry, disappear. Manchester, hemmed in by its surrounding towns, has felt this more than most.

Yet as the flaccid former leader of the Tories also notes, Manchester has the fastest growing economy in the UK of any city outside London. And despite the shocking nature of the report's findings there is a lot of work being done. Away from the shiny city centre the city council is very active. There are plenty of initiatives, such as New East Manchester, working hard to build communities as well as houses.

The statistics reflect a demographic problem which is uniquely Manchester's. The report looks at the administrative area of the City of Manchester rather than reflecting the situation of the wider city - most of the time anyway. In a way, it fiddles the figures, providing a statistical measure of a relatively poor administrative area. This is what our article argued last week (click here). Most of Manchester's middle class and rich now lie outside the city boundaries. Using these figures is a distortion of the true city, it's taking a slice through the City of London and then going east for several miles and saying that it represents the whole urban area of London.

The report also puts a distance between say the good burghers of Broadway in Cheadle and those of Moston Lane in Harpurhey. Let's hope that people who dwell technically outside the boundaries but are still part of the city, people from Hale perhaps, or Bramhall, don’t feel smug about the Tories' report - although you can guess some of the dinner party conversations this weekend.

The truth is that much of Manchester, and the North for that matter, is composed of areas which have seen the only reason for their existence, industry, disappear, and only now in the service industry world are finding some sort of relevance. Manchester, hemmed in by its surrounding towns, has felt this more than most. The population of East Manchester after WWII, for instance, fell from over 100,000 to 30,000 (although it’s starting to grow once more). Yet the population of Greater Manchester has remained relatively stable for decades at 2.5m.

Tory rain in Manchester

Still, the report makes for grim reading. Those left behind in this regional diaspora were inevitably the stubborn or the less well-educated and thus less able to realise their aspirations. That’s why the social deprivation stats are so high. It's these people who need to be re-integrated into the future of the city - if they have the desire to be so.

Education and employment are the key of course. Part of the former must include building pride in Manchester, giving kids a sense of identity. How many Manchester schools teach how significant this city has been, how many bring kids into the city centre, teach them pride in the achievement of people who succeeded who were just like them: show that there’s a Manchester of tremendous potential outside the twenty streets within which they move?

Immigration is also a vital component in change. More than any other UK city aside from London, Manchester has always grown through immigration, both internal and international. Immigration might create tensions, especially when closely identified with religion, but it also creates tremendous dynamism. When populations get old, they get whingy, in the UK the rich moaners get second homes in Spain and carp about the UK, the poor stay and do the same. Immigration means people arriving with a desire to succeed. Literally fresh blood. Immigration and Manchester go together hand in hand.

A re-adjustment of the city’s boundaries, encouraging immigration and new educational initiatives, alongside the work already taking place, can all help ensure that a Doomsday of social breakdown doesn't happen. Manchester's problems are no worse than those in other urban areas of the UK, they are merely magnified by the way the city and the region has developed. It's one of the characteristics that makes us stand out alongside a reputation for being bolshy, maverick, radical. It seems our birthright to be the benchmark of one extreme or the other.

As Jim McClellan wrote about Manchester in the late nineties, repackaging sentiments used over the last 200 years: ‘Manchester’s size makes the social processes more visible. You can see how things are developing. Where they might end up is another matter. Perhaps it’ll be the first place to show us if our new cities work.'

One final thought, let’s hope there’re no politics at play in this Conservative report. Manchester has been used as an example by Labour of urban regeneration, they hold their conferences here, they seem to have fallen in love with us. There are no Conservative councillors in the city. To attack Manchester works so well for the Tories in so many ways.

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