One day I walked with one of these middle-class gentlemen into Manchester. I spoke to him about the disgraceful unhealthy slums and drew his attention to the disgusting condition of that part of the town in which the factory workers lived. I declared that I had never seen so badly built a town in my life. He listened patiently and at the corner of the street at which we parted company he remarked: “And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, Sir.”
It's a justifiably famous quote, that tells us as much about Engels who himself was from an affluent background, as it does about the capitalists who were squeezing wealth and life from working people in the city. The tragedy is, as Isaac Rose shows us in his brilliant new book, its a quote that could be attributed to the city today.
Rose tells us the story of Manchester, through its people and their struggles and the lives that they led and continue to lead. He begins with the early history of Manchester, the period when Engels lived there, that saw the city becoming a colossus of capitalist industrial might. The mills and factories went alongside overcrowded, dirty and insanitary slum houses. In the intervening years, struggles over housing and working conditions, and, indeed the very space of Manchester by its working people shaped the city we now know.
In the 20th century, a process of expansion of public housing and slum clearance transformed things for working people. Houses became something that were to be proud of, not profit machines for unscrupulous landlords. For a time in the 1930s and the post-war period, there was an atmosphere of hope. Yet today, living in Manchester is dominated by an enormous housing crisis. Rents are skyrocketing, social housing has all but disappeared and that which remains is decaying and uncared for, and gleaming towers of steel and glass dominate the horizon, but are all but empty of tenants. The impact, Rose points out is worst for the poorest, and its creating a new layer of poor and vulnerable people. As he says, a recent study "has shown that the rent burden is so high in Manchester that it outstrips London for unaffordability, due to the city's lower wages". High rents and lack of social housing mean that "Manchester has the highest number of households assessed as homeless in the country".
How did this come to be? Rose argues it is the consequence of a set of neoliberal politics that are closely associated with Margaret Thatcher's Tory government of 1979 onward. More importantly though, he argues that their impact in Manchester was the result of a series of choices made by the City Council in reponse to Thatcher's assault. In particular, the failure on the part of the Council to be able to fight Tory policies that limited funds. This meant the Council essentially accepting neoliberal ideas, and then becoming the force for driving them forward in the late 1990s and 2000s. Rose says:
Manchester City Council, through the deals struck in the middle years of the last decade, handed over the extraction rights to a broad class of corporate landlords, who extract rent from the tenants and often take this wealth offshore. Manchester has become the pre-eminent example of the real estate state. This is the symbiotic relationship between politicians, the institutions of the local state and the property lobby.
Rose continues:
The local state has gone beyond simply providing the supportive policy context for development or acting as an enabler to being an executor of development.
Drawing on the work of Marx and Engels, as well as contemporary Marxists such as David Harvey, Rose argues that "there is a profound in-built logic to the dynamics of urban development that are now underway in Manchester."
One thing that Rose highlights throughout the book is that there is a strong tradition of ordinary people in Manchester fighting to improve their conditions, and one of the key battlegrounds has been housing. But in fact in the key battles with the Thatcher government, this force was not mobilised. Where it did come on to the scene was in largely passive ways through public meetings and so on. Unlike, say, the Poll Tax revolt, there was not mass participation in tackling the government. The "dented shield" approach of the Labour councils in the 1990s was very much orientated on the idea that the councils were the only force that could fight the government.
Why is this important? Because if we are to move away from the privatised nightmare that is housing provision in Britain, we're going to have to build the type of social movements that can transform British politics. That will require mobilising the mass of working people to use their economic power, and their politic clout to transform national and local politics. Rose's book was, in his words, written with exactly this in mind, as a contribution towards "the crystallisation of a general force that could again wrest our cities back from the hands of the rentier, landlord and speculator".
The Rentier City is a superb book, powerfully written, accessible and readable, and full of the sort of facts and figures that will get repeated and quoted in pubs, cafes and meetings around the city. Everyone who cares about the great city of Manchester should read it.
Related Reviews
Christophers - The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
Robbins - There's No Place: The American Housing Crisis & What it Means for the UK
Hanley - Estates: An Intimate History
Minton - Ground Control
Kynaston - Austerity Britain 1945 - 1951
Jones - Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
Wise - The Blackest Streets, The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum
Hollis - Cities are Good for You
Reader - Cities
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