Notes on Manchester and Salford after reading ‘Ground Control, Fear and happiness in the twenty-first century’, Anna Minton, Penguin, reissued 2012 with a new section on the Olympics

Who owns and who controls Manchester and Salford?  The August 2011 riots showed that there are plenty who don’t feel these cities belong to them.  Should anyone be surprised as Manchester city centre becomes more and more a ‘mall without walls’, controlled by a private organisation, CityCo, the city centre management company?

The tiny political and business elites that run our cities are driven by the desire to increase the value and value for them is money, the price of property.  To this end, since the 1980s, the council leaderships, first in Manchester and then Salford, have put in public money, hoping to attract private money, what they call ‘leverage’. The two cities certainly looks very different from twenty years ago. Not just new shopping but a giant conference centre, ever more new hotels, new and expanded museums, galleries, concert halls and huge numbers of expensive flats, thousands of them empty, unsold.

Away from the city centre and Salford Quays, the disastrous Pathfinder programme, funded with large amounts of public money while driven by the interests of the private developers has targeted what they call ‘cold spots’ where property values are low, destroying working class communities and often leaving only empty sites with developers sitting on their money waiting for the next (speculative) boom.  Meanwhile, ‘council housing’ is renamed ‘social housing’ which is renamed ‘affordable housing’ and ever more unregulated and uncontrolled private landlords exploit the worsening housing shortage.  Except that, with ever more properties empty, it’s a shortage that is deliberately created by the big property owners.

But can we call this ‘regeneration’ when Manchester now is the most unequal city in Britain, the ASBO capital of Britain, the city with the greatest CCTV coverage, a city where the poor are simply not welcome in the centre because only those with money to spend are welcome and those who are seen as ‘problems’ are deliberately displaced from the city centre? Policing, whether by policed or security  guards exploits the fear of crime (unrelated to actual crime figures which have been falling for many years)  to justify ever more restrictions of those who want to meet friends or skate board, those who want to engage in political activity with leaflets, stalls and street meetings, or just do nothing.

Controlled for many years by sizeable Labour majorities, with Manchester sometimes described as New Labour favourite city, we have seen public space privatised, the historic Free Trade Hall turned into a hotel, the further education city centre campus sold off to the giant Spinningfields development controlled by Allied London.  In such one party states, there is no democracy.  Not that a change of control into the hands of the Tories or Liberal Democrats would make any difference.  There is complete consensus among all these parties that there is no alternative to the market: the only solutions are private solutions.  Nor are spin doctors only to be found in Whitehall.  The local authority press offices present only ‘positive’ images.

But, as Shelley put it in 1819, ‘Ye are many, they are few’. In 2012, ‘We are the 99%’. The efforts by the council to shut down political stalls on Market Street in 2011, failed because the numbers willing to put up stalls and defend them went up and up. Wherever resistance is organised, it gains mass support.  Already we have shown that anti cuts campaigns can succeed.  The November 30 strike gained massive support with over 20,000 marching in the city on that day.  Around 90% of the cuts planned by the coalition are still to be implemented.  They have the money but we have the numbers. This is the fight of our lives.