Monday, September 22, 2008
What's the matter with Sunderland? posted by Richard Seymour

Bear in mind that Gentoo/SHG is a Registered Social Landlord (RSL), exactly the kind of landlord that the government says we have least to fear from. An RSL is answerable to the Housing Corporation, and supposedly behaves better than other private landlords. If the Housing Corporation doesn't hold them accountable, then those co-responsible for sealing the deal should. In fact, the behaviour of Gentoo/SHG had been noted before by local Labour councillors Mike Tansey and Brynley Sidaway, and they did try to alert residents and fellow councillors to the problem. Both Sidaway and Tansey rejected stock transfer because the result, where the government had been able to impose its scheme, was a rise in rents and an increase in homelessness. However, by 2006, they had been driven out of the Labour Party for their pains. They became independents, and on the back of a successful campaign against stock transfer a lively local Respect group was built. What they had to say was important, and their actions benefited the people they represented. By contrast, Labour policy at both a local and national level pitted it against its traditional working class supporters. There is a clue right there: those elected Labour Party members who try to represent their constituents effectively have been punished and expelled.

Another of the government's prominent policy agendas, so dear to its heart that it made this a central plank in the 2001 election despite over 80% public disapporval, is the private finance initiative. I have written enough about its obscene wastefulness here before. Once again, the rationale behind the policy is that it appears to provide something for nothing: money for investment without incurring debts or driving up taxes in the short-run. But the net result is almost invariably a poorer quality of service and a higher cost. For example, in Coventry, two hospitals were replaced by one hospital, with fewer beds and staff overall, and a final cost of £900m, 30 times higher than it would have been to simply renovate the two existing hospitals and keep the beds and staff. In Northumberland, four fire stations were closed and replaced with two under a £10m PFI scheme. One could go on at some length. In Sunderland, as elsewhere, local government functions including in health, education, road-building, street-lighting and waste management have all been outsourced to private companies under expensive PFI and PPP schemes.
Perhaps the most controversial application of the PFI model is in the national health service. Patricia Hewitt announced in 2006 that there would be big cutbacks in public spending on the NHS. She said that the reason was that generous government investment had not been spent on reforms but on salaries for greedy public servants. In fact, as Allyson Pollock pointed out, the government's market-driven reforms had created the crisis. The costs of this marketisation consumed between 6% and 14% of the NHS national budget, on a conservative estimate. As a result, thousands of NHS staff were shed in hospitals up and down the country. The impact has, predictably, been to alienate Labour's usual supporters. One of the main campaigners against the government's NHS cuts in Sunderland has been a well-known local nurse named Kathy Haq, who had been lauded in 1999 for embarking on an unpaid, voluntary mission to improve healthcare in Bangladesh and who had run a support network for victims of a doctor who had raped patients. Haq might have been exactly the sort of person whom New Labour would wish to win over: a devoted public servant and campaigner, who had worked for the NHS for forty years. But she joined Respect when it was launched in the area in 2006, and became the branch secretary. One reason is that City Hospitals Sunderland Foundation Trust ran up debts of over £5m and therefore made plans to shed 10% of its staff, particularly in the Sunderland Royal Hospital. Patients were also angered when local hospitals started to charge for parking, following the lead set by PFI hospitals across the country. Problems within the NHS have been a prominent theme in the local press. In fact, although Bunting refers to the Tory capture for the Ryhope constituency in a bye-election with a low turnout, she does not notice that a surprisingly large component of Labour's vote, perhaps more than a third, appears to have been redistributed over some years to an independent local campaigner and former journalist known as Patrick Lavelle, who made his name by campaigning on the NHS. Another clue, then: investment isn't the same thing as provision, and one cannot disaggregate the money supplied from the way it is spent and the policies underpinning it. If working class voters experience a decline in service, the fact that a large amount of money has been spent on producing the decline makes it even worse. The PFI was originally a Tory policy, but by adopting it, the government has handed the Tories one of their main propaganda planks: higher spending equals more bureaucracy and less efficiency.

Under New Labour, the remaining mining pits in Sunderland were allowed to disappear, with nothing to replace them. Today, the biggest employer in Sunderland is the government, while the services industry is the biggest sector of employment in the city. The council has sought to rejuvenate the economy by gentrifying it, making it into a more tourist-friendly zone, and building up a financial services industry, which is today almost as big as the manufacturing sector. All of these factors make Sunderland particularly susceptible to the toxic situation that we now face: public sector pay cuts, cuts in spending, a crisis in the financial sector, and higher food and energy prices. In addition, while Bunting mentions a disproportionately high rate of single motherhood and incapacity in Sunderland, she does not mention the government's policies of rolling back single mother benefits and incapacity benefits. These, in addition to a vindictive plan to force the long-term unemployed to do 'community service' as if they were criminals, are poison for a local Labour Party seeking to gather votes. Further, in a city with life expectancy well below than the national average, the government's plans to raise the retirement age and privatise the pension system - while demanding that people save money they don't have to invest in a pension scheme that floats on the oh-so-reliable stock market - is asking for trouble. To that should be added a recent rise in pensioner poverty, when a fifth of pensioners already lived on less than £5,000 a year.
Sunderland is supposedly an example of where the government has genuinely tried to help the poor, yet is losing support from voters who fail to recognise New Labour's loyalty to them, while imprudently flirting with the Tories. In truth, while New Labour has delivered some very mild reforms, there could hardly be a more dramatic example of its policies failing the working class on the one hand, and punishing them on the other. The story of Sunderland is typical in this respect. There remains one question: will Sunderland go Tory, and if so, will it be for the reasons Bunting suggests? Sunderland still has a majority Labour council, and will probably return a Labour MP even on a relatively low turnout. The worst wipeouts for the government will be in the south-east, while the polls show the Tories making least headway in core Labour areas. Further, there is nothing to support the claim that once heartland Labour constituencies are won over to right-wing sentiments, and Bunting offers no evidence for this assertion. There is certainly nothing comparable to 1979, when Thatcher won on a platform of aggressively right-wing and anti-union policies. David Cameron is successfully appropriating the centrist language and sentiments of New Labour, even positioning themselves to the 'left' of the government on some questions. In Wales and Scotland, where there are centre-left and sometimes radical left alternatives, the Tories are not reviving at anywhere near the rate that they have been in England. And while the Tories are likely to be the beneficiaries of government unpopularity in England, the process of party identity breaking down is advancing rapidly for both Labour and Conservative parties. What is the matter with Sunderland is what is the matter with the UK as a whole. The system is failing, the neoliberal solution doesn't work, parliament is increasingly impervious to our needs, and we're facing a crisis in which we find elected officials happy to pour money into the City, but extremely reluctant at best to do anything which alters the fundamentally unfair distribution of wealth and power in the society.
Labels: benefits, gordon brown, neoliberalism, new labour, poverty, sunderland, the guardian, welfare