Tough on rioters, tough on the causes of riots?

‘Merseyside’s economic and social problems are severe. So too are those of other conurbations. The facts are well documented. It is in my judgement our inescapable duty to respond to the problems of the main urban areas with urgency and resource. I opened this report by referring frankly to the inescapable connection between the riots and the visit which I was asked to make. I cannot stress too strongly that my conclusions and proposals are not based on my fear of further riots. They are based on my belief that the conditions and prospects in the cities are not compatible with the traditions of social justice and national evenhandedness on which our party prides itself.’

This is an excerpt from a confidential report to the UK cabinet in the wake of the riots in Toxteth, Liverpool in July 1981. It came from the then environment secretary, Michael (now Lord) Heseltine. ‘It took a riot’ was its title.

This, remember, was a discussion within the government of Margaret Thatcher. That’s right, law-and-order Thatcher. ‘No such thing as society’ Thatcher. But the cabinet deliberations that followed the riots of that year did not lead to simplistic calls to ‘round up the usual suspects’, restrict freedom of expression and impose draconian sentencing in emergency courts. They led instead to policy and investment directed at helping our inner cities and former industrial towns that lasted for 25 years, from the governments of Thatcher through to that of John Major into the Blair years. That is, it led to an approach based on Heseltine’s conclusion that ‘the conditions and prospects in the cities are not compatible with… social justice and national evenhandedness’, and that it is the government’s ‘inescapable duty to respond to the problems of the main urban areas with urgency and resource’.

Nothing remotely like this has been said, let alone done, by Keir Starmer’s government in response to this summer’s riots. All we heard in the aftermath was a pledge to lock up the far-right agitators who apparently make up all those seen on the streets in various UK towns and cities during the unrest. This theme was reiterated by Yvette Cooper at this week’s Labour conference, who spoke only of restoring law and order. That’s it. Nothing else. Not even the balance of Blair when he talked of Labour being ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.

The government’s response was shocking to someone like me, a life-long Labour supporter from one of those struggling post-industrial areas which tended to be at the centre of this summer’s riots. I found it disturbing, too, as a former apparatchik who advised several ministers in the Blair-Brown governments on urban regeneration and the recovery of our towns and cities. That was back when Labour cared a bit more about such communities and tried to do something to regenerate them.

Now, after 14 years of continued decline in such communities, with poverty and social exclusion returning to levels we haven’t seen for decades (the tinder surely for the recent social disorder), a new Labour government has precisely nothing to say about the people at the heart of this crisis. It cannot find in itself either the nobility or the practicality of Heseltine’s plea ‘to respond to the problems of the main urban areas with urgency and resource’.

It’s worth putting Labour’s response to the riots into three related contexts. Firstly, it came against the background of Labour’s abandonment of ‘levelling-up’ not just as a slogan – which is all it was to Boris Johnson’s Tories – but also as an objective. That is, it has given up even on the pretence of raising living standards in the former industrial areas of the UK. Instead of focussing on the economic future of the north, the Midlands, south Wales or the central belt of Scotland, Labour seems obsessed only with building homes in the south-east. What about renewing the economy and the life chances of Britain’s many other communities?

Secondly, Labour’s response was forged amid political defeatism, a sense that nothing can be done to revive the depressed areas and towns of the old Labour heartlands. I felt this pessimism myself among some northern-based MPs when I worked for the Labour government between 2005 and 2010. Parachuted into Labour safe seats, these politicians, with their Oxbridge and London backgrounds, shared the fatalism of Gordon Brown, the then chancellor and, from 2007, prime minister. Brown felt that all that could be done in terms of the economic and social future of Britain was to maximise taxable income from the promiscuous growth in London’s financial services, and use it as welfare payments for those fated to live in areas of inexorable decline.

This brings me to the third context for the Starmer government’s response to the riots. Namely, Labour’s political and moral estrangement from its former working-class bedrock. Labour and the modern left in general now know little about working-class communities. And what they think they know, they don’t like any more. Too many in Labour see the working class as racist, Brexit-loving, carbon-consuming gammons who could do with drinking a bit more Kombucha and eating plant-based foods. Little wonder the Starmer government’s response to the disorder was so lacking.

If this is not the view taken in Westminster and Whitehall then why are we hearing nothing reminiscent of the Heseltine and early Blair agendas? No talk of new investment in and new approaches to the economically troubled towns and cities of the former industrial heartlands. Starmer et al have found billions for big public-sector pay settlements and for international development, but they have nothing except contempt for some of Britain’s poorest towns and cities.

As a former Labour adviser, this is my plea: I urge the new government to evoke the creative responses called for and delivered in response to the riots of the 1980s. We need to see a rebirth of the spirit of urban regeneration and inner-city renewal first witnessed over 40 years ago. The then government knew that anti-social and exploitative political elements were also at play in the riots of the early 1980s. But they also knew that without disadvantage and economic dislocation, there would have been no opportunity for agitators to foment unrest.

Today’s government seems to have little interest in policymaking and investment solutions to the sources of the unrest. Instead, Starmer and Co would rather talk up the miniscule threat posed by ‘fascism’ in the UK, and establish midnight courts in order to process 11-year-old rioters.

Beyond the understandable denunciations of extremism and punishment of criminals, the current Westminster regime needs to offer more. It certainly needs to reflect more deeply on the state of vast swathes of the UK. Given Starmer proudly claims to be the heir to Blair, how about getting ‘tough on rioters, tough on the causes of riots’?

Tim Williams is a former special advisor on urban policy to ministers in the Blair and Brown governments.