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.

A crisis of confidence in ruling class ideas?

Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph columnist, was on Newsnight last night. He's written that:

"I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be right".

The argument runs "What with the the phone-hacking scandal, the eurozone crisis and the US economic woes, the greedy few have left people disillusioned with our debased democracies."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8655106/Im-starting-to-think-that-the-Left-might-actually-be-right.html

Thatcher, he argues, was popular when she cut taxes and attacked the unions. We can challenge this: the cuts were not popular and Thatcher herself, "the Iron Lady", became extremely unpopular in the early years 1980s, her first years in office. What she was good at was in having a clear step-by-step plan to defeat her opponents, the Ridley Plan, sticking to it and understanding that the TUC could be relied on to wobble at the crucial moment. Eventually, people lost hope in an alternative and, helped by the Falklands War, her popularity revived and she won the 1983 election.

The comparison is nevertheless interesting. It reflects a growing crisis of confidence among our rulers. I would argue that this is not because he isn't as powerful a figure as Thatcher. That would be to overvalue her as a historical figure. Rather the circumstances are tougher for Cameron. The system went into crisis in the 1970s. Thatcher was one of the figures that lead the shift to neo-liberal, free market economics, breaking the post war consensus about commitment to full employment.

Coming up to forty years later, despite the continuing economic growth especially in Asia, the system is in much worse shape. Cameron has a tougher task than Thatcher. Nevertheless he can win if he follows Thatcher's example. He needs a plan. He has to stick to it. He has to rely on the TUC to wobble at the crucial moment. So far his plan has been to push ahead much harder and faster than Thatcher did. There have already been a few U-turns. As Moore points out the threat of another recession, the phone hacking scandal and the riots have shaken the confidence of our rulers.

But, if Cameron holds his nerve, he can win unless our side gets its act together. June 30 was a good day but it needs serious follow up. That's the key question for us. The march in Manchester on October 2 is a real opportunity to seize the initiative and put the Tories on the back foot.

Some local resistance, we need more

It’s still true - and has been for quite a long time - that “There is far too little strike action in Britain.” The big question is “When will this change?”

Brendan Barber was right when on ‘Any Questions’ last night he described the situation at the moment as “a phoney war”. The battles are going to come, mainly but not exclusively, after Osborne’s ‘Comprehensive Spending Review’ on 20 October. The problem is that the TUC isn’t getting ready for the battle that Barber is telling us will come. We must give them credit for getting the propaganda out. Today’s Guardian leads with the TUC report that that the proposed Tory cuts will hit the poorest ten times harder than the richest:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/sep/10/coalition-cuts-poor-tuc

But this isn’t enough. There is a danger that the attacks will find many on our side like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights. So there is a need to be there where the action is. This week’s Socialist Worker features two excellent examples, both local, the angry 400 strong lobby against local authority cuts at Bolton Town Hall and the protest in Buile Hill Park, Salford, against the closure of Hope Maternity Unit. We need lots more of these and I’m sure we will get them but I’m not sure they will be organised on the scale and at the speed necessary. We need to get the message across that there is organised resistance so no one feels isolated and abandoned.

This is why the demo outside the Tory party conference is so important. It’s true that some are much easier to organise than others but we have to get it across that our enemies aren’t as confident as they like to portray themselves. Compared to Thatcher, they aren’t starting off against the background of the biggest global economic crisis since the 1930s, they aren’t able to portray the unions as the enemy and people no longer see privatisation as preferable to nationalisation. Rather, as in any battle, the enemy will look for weakness. It’s clear from the battles in the 1970s that those who resisted often succeeded. Those who didn’t went to the wall.

We mustn’t forget how vicious this government is. Lib Dem MP Bob Russell, the MP for Colchester, make the point, if in absurdly polite way when he tells the Today programme: "Yes, let's deal with the welfare cheats. But the notion that they are responsible for all the ills of the nation is in fact a smokescreen and it's not very ethical."

Tomorrow, Sunday’s, lobby of the TUC, calling on it to organise a national demonstration now, focuses on how the TUC is so far failing to give a lead. A brief glance at our history shows how this is no surprise. The nine months notice given by the Conservative government in summer 1925 was used by government and employers to build up coal stocks and a scabbing organisation, the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies. The TUC did precisely nothing. And that was a TUC with much bigger left than today’s TUC. They didn’t invite Stanley Baldwin to address them as the current general council Cameron to address the congress.

The lobby of the Lib Dem conference in Liverpool in a week’s time is a step in the right direction but when union leaderships leave it to branches to organise transport, the limitations of organising from the top down become clear.