This article was originally published at Our Kingdom

Child B is apprehended after landing in Dover. He is subjected to something called a “welfare interview” and asked “Are you in any pain?” Yes, he says. The little finger on his left hand is in a splint. He is bleeding from his anus. His interrogator writes that Child B has been prescribed “Petadine” by doctors in Belgium. The boy is asked if he wants to see a doctor now in Dover. Yes, he says. But he doesn’t see a doctor. That was just a question on the form.

Despite the pain, the bleeding, the request for medical help (denied), the lack of sleep (he has not slept for more than 24 hours), and the fact that Child B has been prescribed Pethidine (that’s what it is), a drug known to be associated with “euphoria, difficulty concentrating, confusion and impaired psychomotor and cognitive performance”, Child B is subjected to a further interview and then a “Full Screening Interview” upon which the authorities may rely when deciding whether or not to grant him asylum. The interview is conducted through an interpreter by telephone. No legal representative is present.

Child B is asked dozens of questions about how he came to this country, about his biodata and his documents, then a mandatory declaration is read out to him: “I am aware that it is a criminal offence to fail to provide a document establishing my identity and nationality at a leave or asylum interview and/or seek to obtain leave to remain in the United Kingdom by deception. I understand that my fingerprints will now be taken and examined against existing immigration and police databases. I declare that the information that I have given is correct and complete.”

He must sign. When all this concluded, Child B is sent for medical attention to the accident and emergency department of a local hospital.

Let’s stop here. This is not fiction, but real life — as designed by the UK Border Agency — for vulnerable children who may have fled war zones or been trafficked for sexual exploitation. All the quotes are from a new report by Adrian Matthews, Policy Adviser at the Office of Children’s Commissioner for England, published this morning: Landing in Dover, The immigration process undergone by unaccompanied children arriving in Kent.

Why the rush to interview?

Why not wait until an interpreter can be present?

Why doesn’t the child have any legal representative given the fate that might await him if he is sent away?

Here is one reason: if children are interviewed immediately on the day of arrival, those who fail to register a claim for asylum straight away can be sent to France under something called the “Gentleman’s Agreement” that was signed by France and the UK and is dated April 1995.

Gentlemen indeed.

The Gentleman’s Agreement has only now, after 15 years, been exposed by Adrian Matthews.

The Children’s Commissioner, Maggie Atkinson, congratulated the Border Agency’s new chief executive Rob Whiteman on agreeing to stop applying the “Gentleman’s Agreement” to children once it had been “brought to his attention”. But the agreement — which has no legal basis — has been in full view of Border Agency executives for years and still applies to adults and to children deemed by officials to be adults.

Article 3(1) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states: “in all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration”.

Landing in Dover makes one key recommendation: “Interviewing, beyond the gathering of basic identity data, should be postponed until after a child has had a period of some days (or longer if deemed necessary by a childcare professional) to recover from their journey and the opportunity to instruct a legal representative.”

In 2010 (the last full year where data is available) across the whole of the UK there were 1,717 applications for asylum from unaccompanied children. Nobody knows how many children have been returned under the Gentleman’s Agreement nor what became of them.

Based around a survey of just under 200 managers in four different sectors which represent the region’s major employers – aerospace manufacturing, software, call centres, local authorities and, er, job centres – the research outlines the widespread adverse effects of the recession on the North West’s economy between 2007 and 2010.

Nearly two thirds of the businesses surveyed claimed to have been impacted by the recession, with more than one third saying they have still not recovered from the impact of the slump that officially began in 2009. Surprisingly, the experience was found to be quite consistent across very different sectors of the economy.

The outcome for workers in the region has been unemployment, lower pay and worsening conditions. The most common response to the recession, used by 42 per cent of employers, was downsizing: the use of voluntary and compulsory redundancies, or reductions in wages and working hours. Of those surveyed, 40 per cent of employers used a ‘flexibility response’ – predominantly the increased use of temps, outsourcing, job mergers and changes to working hours. A third category created by the research team, ‘downsizing plus’, refers to employers using a combination of downsizing and other strategies and was implemented by the remaining 18 per cent of the businesses surveyed.

Negative impacts

Costs including the loss of skills and experienced staff and the inability to deliver quality products and services were reported to varying degrees by organisations using all of these strategies, but were most severe amongst business using the ‘downsizing plus’ approach. Here, 45 per cent of organisations reported losing skills and knowledge, compared to only 9 per cent of downsizing organisations. 60 per cent reported a loss of experienced staff.

The new working regime adopted by employers may have wider negative impacts beyond the economic sphere, the study notes, with significant numbers of employers reporting increases in stress among their employees and work related illness. Over a quarter of ‘downsizing plus’ organisations reported increases in health related absences.

One of the most surprising findings of the report concerns the manner in which employers have consulted with staff over their measures taken in response to the recession. Just over 10 per cent of employers engaged in consultations or negotiations with trade unions. In contrast, 40 per cent of employers used ‘informal discussions with individuals’ as a means of breaking the bad news, while nearly 30 per cent chose to brief employees after the changes had been implemented.

Few workers’ rights

With trade unions providing the most basic means of protecting workers rights, their presence in the coming years will be crucial as business seek to cut their costs more aggressively than normal. Even with the weak presence of unions in modern workplaces just over half of employees in the North West work for an organisation where a union is present. Nine out of every ten employers planning redundancy, lower wages or worse working conditions without a trade union either present in their workforce or being consulted is a worrying statistic in this respect.

Times for working people in the North West could be about to get much worse though. As the report notes, unemployment in the North West rose slower than the national average in 2009 after the official onset of recession. The cause, you would expect, is the increased reliance of the North West on public sector employment as opposed to areas such as London, where the boom in financial services prior to 2007 was matched by a sharp contraction when the bust arrived.

Now however, the cost of bailouts and recession have been moved from the banks onto the public sector. The report covers the period up until the final quarter of 2010 but major public sector cuts did not begin to be implemented until mid 2011. The knock-on ‘multiplier’ effect of public sector employment means that the impact of the cuts will spread further afield – indeed, the report notes that managers in call centres reported an adverse impact from the closing of public sector contracts. A similar report to this in a year’s time will, unfortunately, likely make for even grimmer reading.

Andrew Bowman

Photograph: Phil Simpson

Activity in the construction industry is often seen as a barometer of economic health and figures have been particularly bad for the government of late. While the UK economy continues to stutter the construction industry has been contracting and shedding jobs due to the virtual freeze on school and hospital building, a collapse in demand from the retail sector and a stagnant housing market. The future looks bleak, with the Construction Products Association’s latest forecast estimating the sector’s output will fall by 1.1 per cent in 2011 and 3.6 per cent next year, with no growth expected until 2014.

The coalition appears to want to buck that trend with some significant stimulus. The Growing Places Fund, according to Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, is a “flexible fix-it fund” that could be used for schemes such as new roads and flood defences to open up land for development.

“We’re making available half a billion pounds of public money to pay for that up front, so the developer can get on and invest billions of pounds more in building houses and employing people – in getting Britain building again,” he told The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday.

In a press release from CLG, Pickles said: “It will be local enterprise partnerships, made up of the people and businesses who know their local areas best, who will decide where this cash boost will be spent.”

Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) across the North West will share over £60m of the £500m pot, with GMLEP potentially receiving £24.7m. LEPs must now submit proposals to CLG by 20 December on how they would spend the money and where they think local development priorities lie. The cash will all be distributed by the end of January 2012.

A role – or some money at least – for the LEP

The news has been warmly received by GMLEP, especially having come in for recent criticism along with other LEPs from the think tank Centre for Cities. Though it essentially replaced the Northwest Regional Development Agency and formalised the increasingly powerful role of the private sector in sub-regional governance, GMLEP has remained remarkably low-key in its first year. While quietly supporting schemes such as Manchester Airport City, it has suffered from lack of funds – as the former deputy chief executive of Manchester City Council said back in January, there was “no new money” for the LEP.

Last week however saw allocation of funds from the second round of the Regional Growth Fund. GMLEP was apportioned £30m to support schemes of its own choosing, coming out of almost £60m won by projects in Greater Manchester – with Airport City being the most high-profile loser having failed in its £10m bid. The fund has however been a source of considerable controversy, not least due to the lack of progress in the actual distribution of money but also because of the opaque nature both of its process and the job creation claims made. Conservative party pundit Tim Montgomerie tweeted how the “Regional Growth Fund looks a lot like tax-funded goodies for politically connected big business”, while others went as far as to claim the firms have effectively been blackmailing the government for money from the fund through thinly-veiled threats that they will relocate overseas.

Whatever has been going on behind closed doors, the Growing Places Fund has led Labour politicians to goad the coalition for what Shadow Secretary of State for CLG Hilary Benn has called “a huge admission…that abolishing the RDAs and the £1.4bn of funding they received each year was a mistake”.

Kickstarting more wealth transfer

Despite the smug statements now emanating from the opposition, the Growing Places Fund actually seems more reminiscent of the Kickstart programme initiated in Labour’s final term – a last desperate attempt to keep the propertied wheels of the economy turning. In 2009 the Brown government embarked on a largely unreported and under-scrutinised bail-out of property developers through the newly created Homes and Communities Agency (HCA). The HCA spent £2.8bn in just four months in 2009 to support the continued the building of ‘affordable homes’, but about half the money ended up basically re-capitalising private developers.

The Kickstart scheme followed, which bailed out stalled regeneration projects around the country. This time the vague ‘affordable housing’ proviso was dropped as approximately £1bn was pumped into the accounts of private developers to restart schemes which had run into trouble. Many were “very high risk” – meaning substandard – according to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. Brown’s property bail-out not only involved transferring vast amounts of public money into private hands for poor quality housing though. It was quite literally throwing money away, misjudging just how broken the regeneration model and Britain’s property-fuelled urban economies were.

Lowry Homes advertisement in Moss Side just months before the developer folded

In Manchester for instance, the long-running redevelopment of the former site of the Maine Road stadium in Moss Side received £9.4m in late 2009 – the largest injection of cash in the North West under Kickstart – from the HCA, only for the developer Lowry Homes to go bust a year later. Earlier this year Town Hall insiders told MULE that significant amounts of public money had disappeared into a black hole and remained unaccounted for since the collapse of the council’s flagship regeneration scheme. Freedom of Information requests regarding the debacle have been roundly rejected by Manchester City Council on grounds of “commercial sensitivity” since the Maine Place was handed over to social housing giant Prospect, with appeals being ignored.

Different this time?

Alexander says the government expects the money back once developments are complete and are sold off. However, when – or if – that will be remains at the very best unpredictable. LEPs only have until the end of January to prove how expensive and previously ‘unaffordable’ projects will suddenly become viable with some up-front cash. CLG meanwhile will have just over one month as assess proposals and transfer the funds. Quality control is unlikely to be anything more than rudimentary, especially in what is an extremely depleted government department.

It’s unclear what kind of projects the GMLEP will put forward under the broad criteria of “infrastructure and development”. The housing market remains stagnant across Greater Manchester with the average price just over £105,000, down from the high-point of around £130,000 – still unaffordable, but not expensive enough to tempt developers to restart work, regardless of record-high rents. The summer saw an investment binge in the centre of Manchester, but this now looks more like an aberration with even the commercial property market going quiet – although some of those super-rich multinationals will no doubt be interested in this pot in the near future, as will MAG Developments in hope of some kickstart for Airport City.

The government just wants some building sites to make the cities and the economy look healthy again, but throwing money at developers didn’t do the trick last time. It isn’t going to work this time either.

Andy Lockhart

Sparks protestors at Blackfriars in London

The protests began following the announcement in May by Balfour Beatty and another seven of the UK’s 14 major electrical contractors (Crown House, NG Baileys, T. Clarkes, MJN Colston, Gratte Brothers, Shepherds Engineering, Matthew Hall) that they would impose new contracts upon their electricians, and in doing so scrapping the Joint Industry Board (JIB) agreement which has for the past 40 years been the basis for setting pay and working conditions. The firms have drawn up a replacement, the Building and Engineering Services National Agreement (BESNA), and issued notice to employees in August that their current contracts will be terminated on December 7, leaving them with the option of taking up the new contracts or accepting unemployment.

According to Unite, which represents UK electricians, BESNA will have a number of negative effects on the trade. Contractors will be able to continually raise and lower hourly pay according to specific tasks workers undertake at any point in time, rather than maintaining a standard wage for skilled work. For some electricians this will entail a lowering of the hourly rate from £16.25 to £10 – a 35 per cent pay cut.

Unite say that both travel and overtime pay will be cut and made payable only at the employer’s discretion, the ability to claim for unfair dismissal will be reduced, while employers will simultaneously be enabled to make redundancies while agency temp workers are still engaged on projects. As one electrician analysing the agreement put it: “People are going to be losing a lot. Every single term in BESNA gives all the power to the employer. They get final say on everything.”

The JIB agreement has been in place for over 40 years, and part of the reason for its creation was the avoidance of labour unrest. The prospect of its removal is now fuelling some of the most potent labour militancy of recent years.

Protests by rank and file union members have shut down building sites across the country. In September a group of around 1,500 electricians workers at the Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire walked out to join demonstrating electricians and Unite officials, while sites in London have been blockaded and occupied by workers several times in recent weeks.

“We’ve got to have mass walkouts, whether it’s official or not, it’s our very futures at stake,” explained Steve Acheson, Branch secretary for Unite from Manchester.

He said in view of the fast-approaching December deadline, electricians “aren’t prepared to wait for the union to decide what they’re going to do. Time is not permitting. The rank and file are saying we haven’t got enough time and they’re taking action.”

Acheson, himself a victim of Balfour Beatty’s past union blacklisting activity, accused building firms of lacking commitment to negotiations with their workforces.

“They’re just moving the goalposts so they can get the rate down by £3. This is a 43 year agreement they’re walking away from. The root cause of everything is insatiable greed for greater profit.

“The only language these companies seem to understand is industrial action. There’s no dialogue, they don’t want dialogue.”

One of the original eight companies proposing to scrap the JIB, MJN Colston, has already backed down in response to the protests, and the workers are confident that others can be forced into the same decision.

Balfour Beatty, a firm with a recent history of illegal union blacklisting, is viewed as the driving force behind BESNA and as such is being targeted by Unite for the first wave of official strike action. The decision to ballot the 1,000 Unite members employed by Balfour Beatty was announced on October 18. While Balfour Beatty have claimed that the scrapping of the JIB is a response to competitive pressures, Unite point out that the companies orders have risen 6 per cent this year, with £15.5bn worth of projects underway since last year, yielding pre-tax profits of £50.5m. Ian Tyler, the company’s chief executive, received a total pay package of £979,994.

Unite national officer, Bernard McAulay said: “We believe Balfour Beatty is the main aggressor among a group of companies trying to bully their workers into signing away their livelihoods so Unite is balloting them first. We have warned them repeatedly that their greed will bring mayhem to an industry desperately trying to steer a path through the recession, but they refuse to listen.

“The failure of the senior management at Balfour Beatty to withdraw the threats of dismissal has left Unite with no choice than to prepare for an industrial action ballot with Balfour Beatty, the ring-leader of these break-away firms.

“This is a vastly profitable company. It has no need whatsoever to rob its employees in order to satisfy its shareholders. Perhaps the threat of strike action will bring Balfour Beatty to its senses and back to the negotiating table.”

Manchester Town Hall

In Manchester, as well as the Carrington Paper Mill construction site run by Balfour Beatty, the other major target of protest has been the Town Hall refurbishment project. The contractor chosen for the project, NG Bailey, is one of the seven firms still seeking to implement BESNA. July’s Manchester People, the council’s news publication, quoted deputy leader Sue Murphy praising the project for its role in creating jobs and apprenticeships for local youngsters, saying as well as “preserving these heritage buildings for the future and ensuring they can deliver improved services in the years ahead, we are also helping give these people a promising future”.

This future now looks decidedly less promising for those hired by NG Bailey, which will, under the terms of BESNA, also no longer be offering specialist electricians’ apprenticeships.

Balfour Beatty were contacted for comment and supplied the following statement:

“Balfour Beatty Engineering Services (BBES) remain committed to the HVCA and the introduction of the Building Engineering Services National Agreement (BESNA) which will introduce one consistent set of terms and conditions for electrical, mechanical and plumbing operatives who are currently employed under a number of existing industry agreements.

“The UK construction industry is under pressure to increase efficiency, to improve productivity and to minimise costs. We are in the process of consulting with our workforce on the proposed introduction of the BESNA, this process includes providing the opportunity for our employees to ask questions to fully understand the detail and benefits of a single agreement for BBES and the industry as a whole.

“We believe that by implementing the new agreement we will create a more modern structure, better able to respond to the market place and to safeguard employment, without eroding the terms and conditions of our employees. No employee will have their wages cut, electricians will earn the same rate under the BESNA and mechanical and plumbing operatives will see an increase in their hourly rate to create a level playing field.”

A report on Manchester City Council’s reaction to the protests against NG Bailey will follow in the coming weeks.

Andrew Bowman

Cuadrilla's exploratory gas rig

Walking through the village of Hesketh Bank in West Lancashire, you can see why the residents are so proud of this green belt area. At the village’s busy agricultural show people repeatedly emphasised how when you buy British produce from Tesco or Marks and Spencer, it was probably grown here.

Modern agriculture thrives in this area, and local politicians such as Conservative councillor Malcolm Barron boast that just two of the many local growers export roughly £90 million in fruit and vegetables each year. Planning regulations in the green belt are strict. Unsurprisingly, the appearance of a gas rig in the middle of a field of cabbages caused some upset.

The rig was the property of Cuadrilla Resources, an energy company financed by Australian engineering corporation A. J. Lucas and a joint private equity venture between the well-connected Carlyle Group and Riverstone Holdings. Cuadrilla Resources are there to explore the area’s potential for a technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’. A process that releases gas held in shale deposits deep underground by fracturing the rocks with large injections of water, sand and a chemical mix.

What the frack?

Camp frack

Residents joked that the brightly lit rig arrived in the area like “aliens landing”, and have formed the campaign group Ribble Estuary Against Fracking in response to what they felt were consistently frustrated attempts to raise concerns about the site. At a farm one mile down the road from Hesketh’s agricultural fair they were joined by activists and organisations from across the country at “Camp Frack”, a gathering where residents and others such as Campaign Against Climate Change, the Green Party and the Co-operative Group could learn from one another and link into wider campaigns.

At the camp Doreen Stopforth, who lives across from the rig, explained how the only effort at consultation on granting Cuadrilla permission for exploratory fracking she had seen was an A4 piece of paper pinned to a lamppost found while walking her dog down a remote dirt track. For their own part, a Cuadrilla spokesperson was careful to specify to Manchester Mule that the company is only required to “engage” with residents, not consult them. The presence of four uniformed police officers and a not very discreet riot van at the agricultural show in case of “trouble” from the “protest camp” raised chuckles and eyebrows across the village.

Banned in France, Switzerland and several US states, fracking has proved controversial wherever it has been tried. Although the precise batch of chemicals used in injections is a trade secret, EU researchers have identified substances such as neurotoxins and the carcinogen benzine as part of the mix. Scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research found the process to “pose significant potential risks to human health and the environment”, and called for thorough research into “the potential for hazardous chemicals to enter groundwater via the extraction process”.

Competent authorities?

Cuadrilla downplayed these risks in their memorandum to the Commons Select Committee for Energy and Climate Change, arguing that “as of 2009…US regulators have confirmed no cases of hydrocarbons or frac[k]ing fluid leaking into shallow water aquifers”. The company said they had complied with “all necessary planning, environmental and health and safety permits from the competent local and national authorities”, echoing claims made in the Guardian by Energy Minister Charles Hendry that UK shale gas exploration “is governed by one of the most robust and stringent regulatory frameworks in the world.”

That has not been the experience of residents of Hesketh Bank and nearby Tarleton. Cuadrilla’s application for temporary exploratory bore holes, the earliest of which date back to 2009, triggered neither an environmental impact assessment nor consultation with residents. Letters between the company and government officials seen by the Guardian revealed a largely self-regulated industry, with no specific rules governing either “unconventional” gas extraction or the disposal of waste water. The documents in the planning application for the rig at Hesketh Bank contain little more than an assessment of the rig itself, and the possible impact on birds and traffic.

Permission was given to go ahead with the site even after two earth tremors which coincided with initial explorations prompted a temporary moratorium. Despite past associations between earthquakes and hydraulic fracturing in the USA an ongoing report into the causes of the tremors has not yet been released, and the Department for Energy and Climate Change disclosed to Mule that the consultants carrying out the investigation have themselves been appointed by Cuadrilla.

Dampened expectations

Malcolm Barron, one of the councillors whose name appeared on the site’s planning application, spoke of his desire to see new industries which would keep young people in the area, many of whom are pushed out by property prices. “They have good jobs in London, we need jobs here,” he said, adding his belief that “genuine talent [is] going south.”A genuine concern but one easy to exploit, and the jobs figures anticipated by Cuadrilla’s economic outlook report should be approached with caution.

Key to the company’s formidable publicity campaign aimed at local decision makers is the promise of creating 5,600 jobs with an average wage of £25 per hour, 1,700 of which will be based in Lancashire. The projected pay of £25 an hour, roughly £55,000 per year, was derived by the company by taking the Office of National Statistics (ONS) 2009 figure of an £89,800 average full time salary for male workers in the petroleum and natural gas extraction industries and dampening it down “to account for the fact that some employment will be in less well paid sectors/occupations.”

Selecting the average male full time income ignores both female and part-time employees who typically earn less – the actual average wage for all individuals employed in the industry is £80,000, which is itself skewed upwards by high executive pay at the top of the corporate ladder. A breakdown of the jobs which current Lancashire residents can expect to receive is not given and Cuadrilla expects “the attraction of specialist suppliers” from other areas of the UK and overseas, who are likely to take up most of the highest-earning positions.

“Pie in the sky”

Ribble Estuary Against Fracking (REAF)

As to the estimated 1,700 jobs that Lancashire will gain, the model used to predict the increase does not distinguish between those directly employed by Cuadrilla or indirectly employed by the firm’s suppliers and indeed, the companies which supply Cuadrilla’s suppliers. Such a technique risks the double-counting of jobs across different sectors and its use elsewhere has been criticised as being based on “dubious statistical concepts” by the former advisor to the Treasury and the British Bankers Association Brendon Sewill, who noted how if every sector “used the same technique the number of people employed in British industry would far exceed the total population”.

Cuadrilla’s claim to have identified 200 trillion cubic feet of shale gas in Lancashire’s Bowland basin was excitedly reported as creating a potential “Aberdeen effect” comparable to North Sea oil. This excitement quickly dissipated as Cuadrilla’s publicity claims crumbled under scrutiny. When contacted, the firm clarified that only between 10 and 30 per cent of the “discovered” resources would be recoverable, and the find would only apply if they drilled enough wells to cover the entire gas basin.

Steve Holditch, a geologist from Texas A&M University, described the claim to Reuters two days later as “pie in the sky” and questioned Cuadrilla’s ability to make such an assessment given so little data. Many of the figures extrapolated from old explorations and the fortuitous “find” was announced one week after it was reported that a refinancing deal had to be agreed with the Chinese state-owned oil group CNOCC after Cuadrilla’s backers A. J. Lucas, who own 41 per cent of Cuadrilla, struggled to cover their debts.

Nonetheless Cuadrilla’s executives argue that “unconventional gas drilling” can provide a “triple win” for governments in the face of climate change and dwindling energy supplies, with European gas production expected to decline 30 per cent by 2035. Fracking, the company says, can contribute to key objectives such as “enhancing energy security…lowering the cost and price of energy” to consumers and “reducing greenhouse gas omissions”. Others dispute this, with the report to the EU pointing out that “greenhouse gas emissions from unconventional gas supply are significantly higher than from conventional gas supply”. The study added that “resources for unconventional gas in Europe are too small to have any substantial influence on these trends”, and could even be “counterproductive” by providing the misleading impression of an “ensured gas supply”.

Little substance

A field of cabbages: arable farming is important in the area

In addition, the economic outlook report confirmed that Cuadrilla would only be drilling until 2021, contradicting earlier suggestions recalled by residents of a likely 30 year lifespan of fracking in the area. Such little substance in a report presumably intended to reassure politicians and investors raised worries, and some scepticism, given the financial issues experienced by A. J. Lucas.

The press conference announcing the shale gas discovery was described by Doug Parr of Greenpeace as a “pitch” to Lancashire County Council, while local Labour councillor Jon Hodson spoke to Mule of a tightly managed affair overseen by numerous public relations people. Liberal Democrat councillor Sue McGuire described the picture the company painted as “Disneyland”.

Water supplies are especially important for agricultural areas such as Hesketh, and the Commons Energy Select Committee when giving the green light to fracking were careful to note that the volumes of water required could challenge resources “at times of drought in low rainfall areas”. While West Lancashire is not precisely a low rainfall area, the Tyndall Centre noted that the Environment Agency has classified the river catchment zones where fracking is likely to take place as “either ‘over licensed’, ‘over abstracted’ or ‘no water available’” according to its Catchment Abstraction Management Strategy.

Vital concerns

Cuadrilla has not yet made an application to purchase the water required for commercial extraction but the volumes required means it cannot automatically assume that the regional supplier, United Utilities, will be able to meet the demand. Speaking to Mule, United Utilities explained that any application would trigger an environmental impact assessment – one likely to be more stringent than any triggered by the planning applications they have made.

Such concerns are vital for the area, but correspondence seen by Mule between local Labour councillor Jon Hodson and the clerk of his parish council indicates the difficulty for local democracy in bringing Cuadrilla’s operations out into the open for proper discussion. Despite agreement at the council that the company should be an item for discussion the clerk removed it from the agenda, asserting that because Cuadrilla as yet has “no intention of placing a permanent application” in the area there was nothing to discuss.

In the exchange that followed the clerk did not understand why local residents would not want to simply rely on “informed comment and observation” from Cuadrilla, dismissing objections as to their reliability. When Cuadrilla’s status as an objective source of information was questioned, the clerk accused Hodson of a mere “pre-disposition to oppose this development”,  and urged him to “do everything in your power to present a fair and balanced view to residents on the subject and support our proposals”.

The episode has left many residents questioning the ability of local democracy to deal with decisions when faced with the weight of powerful interests. The thrall of Cuadrilla’s PR campaign over their representatives and media left them with few avenues to pursue, but with the wheels falling off the company’s PR machine people who never anticipated learning protest methods and the intricacies of labyrintine planning bureaucracy are now working with national and international campaigns against fracking. Little more than a week after the good natured protest at the end of Camp Frack, this fight looks winnable.

There was an odd atmosphere the morning after the riots. Hundreds gathered in Piccadilly Gardens to assist the cleanup, and although their efforts were largely symbolic thanks to the hard effort of council cleaners who had worked through the night there was a genuine desire to get the city “back to how it was”. Some remembered past troubles; the IRA bomb, the EDL demo, drunken Rangers fans wrecking havoc in the main squares, and were confident the city would bounce back.

Council leader Sir Richard Leese hailed the response as “a real demonstration of Manchester pride”, one which sent “a powerful message to the thugs that have trashed our city”. Yet tensions lurked underneath the “I Love MCR” face paint and strained cheer. At one point a man began to harangue the crowd, accusing those present of “taking people’s jobs and giving them to students”. To jeers, he was led away by police.

With admirable efficiency Marketing Manchester, the public relations agency subsidised over £1 million each year by Manchester City Council to attract tourists and big businesses to the city region, quickly capitalised on this civic sentiment. A major advertising campaign was launched to lure back shoppers to the city centre, the centrepiece of which is the “I Love MCR” day timed to coincide with Manchester Pride and the August bank holiday weekend.

Rebranding a riot

Photograph: Phil Simpson

Few Mancunians will be unaware by now of the social media-savvy campaign. Celebrities such as Formula One racer Jenson Button have been drafted in, contentious plans to hike parking charges in the city centre are on hold and a raft of events, vouchers and discounts are planned to lure back nervy shoppers. Council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein has asked companies to give their staff an hour off work and Vaughan Allen, boss of the city centre management quango Cityco, is urging local businesses to support “the drive to get people back into the shops, bars and restaurants”.

Rescuing the ‘Manchester brand’ of the city centre as an enticing location to shop, relax and invest in is the driving force of the campaign, with Marketing Manchester’s director of strategic marketing Rachel Combie explaining to the business newspaper Insider how “the trouble isn’t what this city is about and isn’t what we want to be known for”. Recognising the potential damage off-message youths rioting in the streets may do to the brand, with an initial 20 per cent drop in visitors to the centre the Saturday after the disturbances, Leese told businesses he needed their help in “getting the message out that Manchester is open for business as usual”.

Unemployment in the North West rose 13 per cent in the last three months, and Leese defends the business-focused recovery on the grounds that “the coming weeks will be a difficult time for city centre business – a major source of employment for Manchester people”. However, any hopes Manchester’s leaders may have in healing the city by feeding the commercial interests of its centre are misplaced. For the success of Manchester’s brand in attracting private investors and wealthy consumers rests on the stagnant wages and widespread unemployment necessary for its cheap service economy.

Cheap labour

Photograph: Phil Simpson

On the face of it the city’s leadership would appear to have had some success in managing the local impacts of the transition from mass industry to a retail and ‘knowledge’ economy based on workers in high tech industry, business services, media and IT, plus the shop workers, call centre workers, cleaners and security guards who serve them. While 221,000 manufacturing positions were destroyed between 1981 and 2006, as technological advances enabled industrial companies to dispense with the need for a mass workforce and relocate their remaining shop floors to countries with more easily exploitable staff, the number of jobs in the city region overall rose by 11.3 per cent, of which  the majority were in the rising service sectors according to the Manchester Independent Economic Review (MIER).

Closer inspection of the changing nature of both the workforce and work reveals deep and growing inequalities. Segregation between the relatively wealthy areas south of the city centre, with its universities, airport and the regional industrial hub of Trafford Park, and the manufacturing-dependent inner cities and former mill towns to the north grew enormously. Between 2003 and 2008, before the recession, the south gained 24,600 private sector jobs. The north lost 2,700. The decline was only partly masked by Labour’s expansion of the public sector workforce, itself set to be dismantled under the Coalition’s austerity measures.

The private workforce that has developed is on the whole characterised by a polarisation between relatively secure and high paying jobs and a bulk of insecure, de-unionised, low paid work. Many of the fastest rising employment sectors were in the celebrated knowledge economy, with financial and business service occupations rising by 120 per cent in 25 years. This rise rests on what the Commission for the New Economy calls a “low skilled equilibrium where businesses can compete successfully on low cost, low skill business models”. In other words, cheap and disposable labour. Such jobs have high turnover, with the Manchester Monitor noting a replacement rate of around 14.2 per cent each year.

The reality behind the brand

Photograph: Phil Simpson

Manchester’s increasingly centralised political and business elites have played their role in this by joining hands in a drive to attract private investment and rejuvenate the city’s real estate core. Marketing Manchester is but one of a ‘Manchester family’ of various advertising, consultancy and lobbying agencies designed to promote the city’s brand to the highest bidder. Vast regeneration schemes have been put into action over the last decade with the stated intention of improving the social housing and living standards of the city’s working class.

According to MIER the actual impact of the projects was to clear the way for a vibrant ‘city living’ housing market, finding that the impact on inner-city Hulme’s £400 million regeneration was to create “a growing trend for local families to be priced out of the owner occupation market by higher earning professionals and childless households, displacing families to more affordable areas”. The much-vaunted redevelopment of East Manchester created just 3,000 jobs in 10 years – woefully undershooting its target of 10,000.

This style of ‘regeneration’ and the reliance of Manchester’s moderately successful knowledge economy on cheap labour makes it no accident that the glitz and prosperity of the city centre is nestled among inner city estates with the highest rate of severe child poverty in Britain, the lowest life expectancy in England and a youth unemployment rate that has consistently languished at 30 per cent for the last 20 years. Manchester is the most unequal city in the UK, according to the Centre for Cities. This is not despite the social engineering and reforms of past decades, but because of it. This is the reality of the Manchester brand.

There are alternatives

Photograph: Phil Simpson

Last April mothers campaigning to save their Sure Start centres questioned Richard Leese on why his city was spending money on subsidising leisure and tourist interests when their own public services were being cut and outsourced. His answer was that the era of globalisation makes it a necessity for Manchester to attract business growth if it is to provide jobs, both through providing good “quality of life” for the employees of incoming businesses such as the Bank of New York Mellon and for facilitating the city’s burgeoning tourist and conference industry, worth £2.7 billion to Manchester alone in 2009.

In so far as globalisation is a force necessitating the staggering inequalities of both Manchester and Britain however, with the free movement of capital that supposedly enables it to up sticks and leave if politicians do not cater to its interests, he is wrong. For all their issues, the relative egalitarianism of the social democratic welfare states of Scandinavia has not been gravely undermined despite their own service economies being even more open to trade than the UK’s. A ‘knowledge economy’ does not have to be inequitable.

In reality, the roots of our social tensions are as much political as they are economic. The dirty secret of the free market is that the knowledge economy is not particularly profitable for private enterprise, as it requires long term and risky investment in research and development that can be easily stolen by rivals. Service workplaces such as call centres are notoriously difficult to unionise, but since the 1980′s businesses in the UK have also relied on the nanny state to impose draconian anti-union legislation to lower their labour costs.

Land and property

Photograph: Phil Simpson

The state has also frequently stepped in to socialise the risk of costly investment while allowing profits to be kept in private hands, be it through the government subsidising high speed rail, advanced technology research in the arms industry, or a local authority signing off a PFI contract.  In 2005 every pound in private venture capital start-up finance in the North West was matched by eight pounds from public bodies such as the North West Development Agency. Even then, British companies are still sitting on £600 billion in reserves – roughly a quarter of GDP – for want of lucrative investment opportunities with which to plough their cash back into the economy.

In the UK, the solution to this problem was the encouragement of a long credit boom between 1992 and 2007, whereby the consumption businesses rely on for their sales was sustained through the ability of households to refinance their mortgages in a buoyant housing market. Manchester’s own political and business class surfed this wave, focusing their efforts on building an attractive brand and revitalising the city’s assets for the service economy and its attendant new middle class.

Careless amounts of taxpayers’ money have been flung at this, with the council overpaying Marketing Manchester £421,000 last year and not bothering to claim it back. The justification is that the city sees “a return on investment of £32.10 per £1 of subvention provided”, but this investment does not appear to have been returned to the city’s strained public services. In the campaign to rebrand the riots proceeds from the sales of the “I Love MCR” mugs and t-shirts are to go to two local charities, Forever Manchester and Reclaim, but this one-off influx of funds may be of little comfort considering the council’s children’s services department slashed its spending on charities by 29 per cent in this year’s budget.

Special interests

Photograph: Phil Simpson

In any case, hoping Manchester will be able to muddle through to the benefit of its residents based on the same mixture of attracting private investment and regional consumers is a lost cause. The credit-fueled consumption boom Britain has relied on is dead, even if the spectre of a global economy staggering from one crisis to the next is ignored. The wave has broken on the rocks. The PR campaign to return consumers to the city centre may have as much effect as former President George W. Bush urging Americans to shop in the aftermath of 9/11. Nevertheless, further dangers lie in the way the shocking images and bitter memories of the riots have been co-opted, rebranded and resold.

The weeks since the riots has seen no end of denial that the participants were, as lead councillor for the city centre Pat Karney put it, “fit to be called Mancunians”. Chief Executive of Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce Clive Memmot echoed this disavowal when he condemned the “violent, thuggish, selfish behaviour which affects our businesses, our community and our individual citizens.” But keep in mind how ‘community’ is a slippery word, particularly when leaders invoke it in urging us to pull together for a common cause.

For what is starkly apparent is that the ‘community interests’ served by bringing us flocking back to the city centre is not that of the community as a whole, but largely those elements who are enriched the most. And in conflating the communities of Manchester and its reputation with its retail hubs, bohemian nightlife and gentrified Northern Quarter, the other side to the city – decrepit housing in Miles Platting, closed youth centres in Moss Side and morning queues outside underfunded law centres in Longsight and Crumpsall – is concealed.

The reality of Manchester is that the poverty from which many of the rioters were drawn is not that of the deprived, the socially excluded, or as some would have it the morally or mentally deficient. It is the necessary consequence of Manchester’s method of wealth creation and the brand image that furthers it. No matter how much we protest our love for our city, if the hidden tensions produced by the sale of this brand continue to be ignored then it is inevitable our attention will only be regained by the wail of sirens, the stench of fire and the sound of shattered glass.

Richard Goulding

1981 was the year in which British people of African descent protested against racism and police oppression as never before in modern history. The Black People’s Day of Action on 2 March 1981 brought around 25,000 people on to the streets of London to protest against the massacre of 13 young Africans in a fire at a birthday party in New Cross in South London suspected to be caused by racists. They also attempted to highlight the misconduct of the Metropolitan Police force in their subsequent investigation, the bias of the press, the inadequate response of the government to the tragedy and the generalised racial discrimination in British society. Added to the problem of racial discrimination, the Conservative government’s economic programme was making conditions worse in many poorer communities in inner city areas.

Between April and August that year there was violent urban unrest in St Paul’s in Bristol, Brixton in South London, Toxteth in Liverpool, Moss Side in Manchester, Handsworth in Birmingham, and elsewhere in the country. Gus John lived through these years as a community activist and youth worker in Moss Side, having arrived in the UK from the West Indies in the 1960s. In the aftermath of the riots, he was a key figure in the Moss Side Defence Committee, which assisted with legal support to the youths charged by the police, challenged police violence and attempted to convey to the press and public a different interpretation of the events which had taken place. They would later undertake a detailed critique of the Hytner Report, established by the government to investigate the disturbances and their causes. Here Gus recalls his experiences of the times, in an interview carried out just a week before the recent outbreak of rioting across England’s urban centres.

Gus, what was the reaction among the press and political elites to the Moss Side riots? The MEN’s recent coverage refers to it as ‘an orgy of violence’ and a ‘spontaneous eruption of hatred’. Is there a sense in which there was, and still is, an attempt to depoliticise what happened?

Yes. And it is for that reason that I do not refer to those disturbances as riots, because that is to devalue and detract from the righteous political component of the whole thing. It was a violent eruption of protest, on the part of principally black people, but lots of white people as well, because they too had experienced for generations lots of vicious, disrespectful oppressive forms of policing.

The coverage in the media of Manchester, Toxteth, Brixton and St Paul’s, was just totally racist. The tabloids have a lot to answer for. They were echoing what senior police officers were saying. They were always eager to claim that it was pure criminality – that it came from nowhere. As if these criminals suddenly drank something and decided to go and create mayhem.

I say about that, as I say about the gangs and knife crime now, I cannot believe, I refuse to believe that black people have some kind of congenital propensity to evil. If you don’t believe that, you have to ask some searching questions about what predisposes people to do this, but that’s too sophisticated for these hacks. They display their prejudices, and in a sense mirroring the bigotry of the people in leadership positions in the country generally.

How did you attempt to get your message out about what was happening when the mainstream press was like this?

There is an invention called the Gestetner. Do you remember it? No? That places us in different age bands! The Gestetner was a domestic printing machine. You typed onto a stencil, and attached it to the machine, turned a lever to make sure ink covered the drum, and then you start rolling off your hundreds of sheets of paper. Political activists of my age were friends of the Gestetner. You always knew which people were very active, because they were always covered in ink!

So, we had meetings, for the Moss Side Defence Committee, we produced masses of leaflets and handed them out door to door, outside cinemas, and indeed outside the magistrate’s court. Picketing and handing them out. And we physically hand-delivered our statements to the news media. Some of them ignored it, some of them printed stuff. On a good day, the MEN wrote respectable articles, on other days, they had some very stupid headlines. There were some good journalists at the MEN though – Paul Horrocks was a good staff reporter, more reflective than the others who just wanted to print rubbish and get a story in the paper.

So that’s what we did: loads of community meetings that were very well attended and we handed these leaflets around. And that was our political practice. We organised and campaigned around education issues, we had anti-deportation campaigns. The man in this community, Anthony Brown, who now is one of the organisers of the Manchester Carnival – he was facing deportation in the 1970s, and we launched a campaign and succeeded in having him stay here.

What kinds of people were getting involved in these protests?

Lets differentiate a bit. The anti-fascist demos drew just about everybody: old and young, black and white, as well as people from the Asian sub continent. There were large groups of women, large groups of young people, the core of whom were political activists who were running organisations or members of organisations, who came together to work in solidarity with us to work towards particular ends.

That was a regular pattern. When we established the Moss Side Defence Committee in 1981, we decided there would be a subcommittee called the ‘Labour Movement and Trade Union Committee’. We tried to visit their meetings to get individual unions to pass resolutions and donate funds to the particular campaign.

For some causes, we had university students unions supporting – materially, and with cash. Some union offices allowed us to run off leaflets, some organised coaches to demonstrations. It became a loose coalition of progressive forces, including the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. Particularly in the aftermath of the disturbances, when the police were just dragging people indiscriminately off the streets, we, the Moss Side Defence Committee, met the Haldane Society, and got pretty horrific reports about the how the courts were getting the probations service to write quick reports on individuals – used by the judge before he passed sentence. This was being done in a sausage machine mode, and the people were not getting the personal treatment they needed. It was all aimed at demonstrating to the public that the situation was in hand, and in the firm grasp of the state. As a result of protests, they discontinued this practice.

As far as the disturbances themselves were concerned, there was clearly not a conscious political decision made that this would be a form of resistance that we were going to engage in on this particular night. In any event, people would not do that, because they would be too scared of a Guy Fawkes movement: someone squealing to the police. So it was spontaneous, but attracted people who felt that they had been hard done by for a long time, and that they would take on the police.

On reflection, how successful was Moss Side Defence Committee?

We were moderately successful. Many of the people who were arrested trusted us implicitly to go and assist them in putting their case together, and in getting legal representation. We introduced a way of working with defendants where we ensured that the defendant remained in charge of the case. We took statements from people, saying we don’t care what you have told the police, you can make a statement here not under duress but it has to be truthful, and we will use that statement to organise your defence.

It sent a powerful message to the magistrates, and that was that we as a community are watching the decisions you make. We want to see evidence that you are taking as seriously the submissions of people from Moss Side as you are taking submissions from the police, and we will expose whatever endorsement you as a court give of police malpractices.

We organised ourselves and went to the court. Some of us went and sat in, some were outside giving out leaflets, and that worked pretty well. The only other thing I would say is this. We worked with individuals that had been arrested, and I believe the whole programme would have accelerated quicker if we had worked with other organisations to build a wider body of mass support. There ought to have been many more people on demonstrations outside the court.

It was a politically volatile period, but politically rich in a whole number of ways. I really had hoped that given the careful work we had put into challenging the Hytner Enquiry, boycotting the enquiry and writing a critique of his findings, having all these meetings around the place, picketing the courts every time somebody was on trial, I was rather hoping we might have built a mass movement around all of that, in pursuit of justice and against police brutality and harassment.

But I think people were happy to come together from their organisations as an alliance, which was effectively what the Moss Side Defence Committee was, rather than seeing themselves as integrally part of one collective group, seeking to build a movement of working class people around these issues. And I suppose people got tired: it had been an exhausting few months.

It has always been a regret to me that I personally and others didn’t return to our critique of the Hytner Enquiry and look at it more analytically, making the links to all that stuff I have been sharing with you, to make a more complete story that others today could look at. Young people particularly, should not be encouraged to see the so-called riots in isolation from everything else.

What changed after the disturbances?

Many, if not most young people developed – however temporarily – developed a greater sense of their own power. Many had the feeling that even if the state didn’t sit up and take account of the message they were giving on the street through these disturbances, they had made their presence felt. Not least to James Anderton and his Greater Manchester Police.

The fact that William Whitelaw, Heseltine and Thatcher introduced a range of projects around the place trying to consolidate the black voluntary sector and links with business, with the support of the banks, they gave start up grants for small entrepreneurs.

And then there was a large amount of refurbishment … and the regeneration of the centre radiated outwards towards Hulme and Moss Side, but while there has been a lot of physical regeneration, not as much has been spent on rehabilitating people.

And the demography of the community has changed: large numbers of Somalis coming in, Lebanese as well, even before the Polish started to arrive. There has been a process of constant adaptation to that.

I get a sense though that there is much less community cohesion now than there used to be. I just don’t get a feeling that communities are working together, with a sense of common purpose and a vision of the future. It is not that people are defeated as such – though Thatcherism had a toll on us all God knows – it’s that the climate is not necessarily conducive to civil action or protest, or change coming about through people becoming adamant that the status quo must change.

Maybe people don’t have a sense of their own strength?

Exactly. I tell that to young people all the time, I say, “You have got the capacity to be as organised as the teaching unions are, and within your schools you have got to sit down talk about issues, and find ways to hold the school to account. You don’t have to do it in a belligerent or antagonistic way, but simply to assert your right to comment on and influence the way the community of which you are a part functions.”

Headteachers run a mile when they hear that kind of thing. But I do feel that if all those young black people who are knifing and shooting one another on the streets had had their energies directed into serious political activism, where they consciously attempting to get their voices heard and influence policies on whatever issue it is, there would be such a sense of empowerment of the capacity to get things done and of achievements to be celebrated, people would have neither the time or the stomach for the kind of violence within our communities.

What can reflections on the disturbances tell us in the present? For people who are looking at problems of racism and police violence

Let me preface my answer by saying, I believe the greatest disservice the state does to its population is through the crappy schooling system we have. When you consider that there is such an emphasis on high level exam results, as if that’s the only mark of schools’ effectiveness, the debate about schooling is always about providing labour for the market, Britain’s economic competitiveness, and the extent to which schools and universities are churning people out.

It has nothing to do with giving people the tools to take control of their own lives, equipping people to act collectively to bring about change, and it is certainly nothing to do with understanding the evolution of British social history, such that we can as a society learn from our advances and defeats. That kind of discourse is seen as a throwback to the days of ‘red-led’ protests of the past for lefties. The assumption is that it is not necessary to think in terms of class or the individual up against the state, and that we should be counting our blessings. Meanwhile, stratification within society becomes more entrenched. Those who are poor are not just disenfranchised by lacking wages through which they can live dignified lives; they are also denied the tools by which they can organise in defence of their lives.

People fall prey to an opaque sameness, an assumed consensus in terms of the values we commonly share. Which allows clowns like Cameron to talk about the ‘Big Society’.

It is very important that we understand what led to 1981, and what gives rise to the peaks and troughs as far as the emergence of neo-fascist organisations are concerned. I would not be surprised if in the coming period as European economies begin falling in on themselves you have another upsurge of pan-European fascism.

We need to see ourselves as being in a continuity of struggle, and the struggle is never won until we are living in the kind of social democracies that do not place on a pedestal the market, with all the neo-liberal values that come with it; the rampant individualism, the greed, the abandonment of hope, the abandonment of idealism, the sense that the state has no role in regulating forces within society so those who want to prey on the weak in society have full vent to do that.

It has been taken to extreme lengths in terms of the way schooling is going now: the privatisation of everything that moves. Academies, trusts, and Michael Gove’s assertion that you can open schools all over the place, with no concern about cohesion, no concern about social inclusion.

And in due course all of that must implode upon itself, because it is not just in dictatorships that you find people being oppressed, it happens within so-called democracies as well, and we ignore that at our peril.

I’d like to think in reflecting on 30 years ago we can reflect on what happened since: why did the labour movement that had all these giants, why did it all suddenly get eclipsed? What happened to trade union basic education projects and the workers education movement? What are young people in Moss Side today grounding their sense of identity and purpose? What connection do they have with these lessons of the past? How are they being primed and equipped to make their mark in this present age as each generation has a duty to do?

If anyone tells me that those who are educated will find a way to do that because they have the social capital to do that, I would say that is complete nonsense. Mark Twain said, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education”. The fact is, schooling is dumbing down people’s sense of history, if not their aspirations as human beings working together to shape a future. I believe the country lost a trick when there was a concentration on building a citizenship curriculum, without concentrating on the need to teach British social history: we need to understand the society, how we have come to be as we are, that rich tradition of fighting for rights. Expanding rights in the society, and with that the responsibilities people have in the present, to build a better future for those coming after them.

I don’t get a sense right now, that there is that level of awareness or political literacy.

I don’t know why people don’t ask the question more regularly, if the centralist tendency within the government is leading to the collapse of local government in safeguarding the rights of citizens, then if what matters to me is how my life in Manchester is regulated by those at the Town Hall, then why should I be concerned about what happens in Whitehall? And yet people in Whitehall feel they have the right to cut off local government and leave people to all kinds of forces without understanding that not everyone has the capacity to engage with the market in that way.

I find it a not very hopeful scenario, and that is why I spend a lot of time trying to connect people with that long sweep of historical struggle, and giving them some tools of analysis so they can better understand what is going on around them.

Part 1 of the interview can be found here

1981 was the year in which British people of African descent protested against racism and police oppression as never before in modern history. The Black People’s Day of Action on 2 March 1981 brought around 25,000 people on to the streets of London to protest against the massacre of 13 young Africans in a fire at a birthday party in New Cross in South London suspected to be caused by racists. They also attempted to highlight the misconduct of the Metropolitan Police force in their subsequent investigation, the bias of the press, the inadequate response of the government to the tragedy and the generalised racial discrimination in British society. Added to the problem of racial discrimination, the Conservative government’s economic programme was making conditions worse in many poorer communities in inner city areas.

Between April and August that year there was violent urban unrest in St Paul’s in Bristol, Brixton in South London, Toxteth in Liverpool, Moss Side in Manchester, Handsworth in Birmingham, and elsewhere in the country. Gus John lived through these years as a community activist and youth worker in Moss Side, having arrived in the UK from the West Indies in the 1960s. In the aftermath of the riots, he was a key figure in the Moss Side Defence Committee, which assisted with legal support to the youths charged by the police, challenged police violence and attempted to convey to the press and public a different interpretation of the events which had taken place. They would later undertake a detailed critique of the Hytner Report, established by the government to investigate the disturbances and their causes. Here Gus recalls his experiences of the times, in an interviewed carried out just a week before the recent outbreak of rioting across England’s urban centres.

Gus, what were conditions like when you arrived in Moss Side?

I arrived in Moss Side on the 1 January 1971, having worked on youth and race in Handsworth in Birmingham for the Runnymede Trust. There was a vibrancy about it, in that people had organised themselves around a campaign to do with housing. The local authority was doing compulsory purchases and knocking down houses which were actually rather sturdy – some of them had fallen into disrepair but structurally they were pretty fine. There were campaigns to save these houses because people were not enamoured with what they had seen in Hulme – these deck access crescent buildings, which were not just an eyesore, they became very dangerous after a while.

But the two things that stuck out for me were, first, a lot of young people coming out of school and being unemployed for a long time. It was taking the average school leaver about six months to find any employment, and some of them simply joined an earlier generation of fathers or siblings who had not worked. The second thing that was obvious was the way in which the police operated within the community – they tended to see black people as exotic … and generally formed the impression that the older people were safe and sound: they shared commonly held values, they were disciplinarians keeping the children under control, and it was really the youth which were at odds with the establishment, and the police as the most visible arm of the establishment.

It is true that at that time many parents didn’t want to see the police having cause to come near their home – it was seen as a massive stigma.  It took a long time for parents to understand, based on their own experience, that your child didn’t have to do something wrong for the police to appear on your doorstep. It wasn’t always that young person’s fault that the police got involved in their lives.

In 1972 I had got some money from the British Council of Churches to set up a hostel for young black people, because they were sleeping on their friends’ floors or sleeping rough in Moss Side, the reason being that their parents had been decanted to places like Sale and Partington, as part of the whole so-called ‘regeneration’ business. And they continued to gravitate back to Moss Side, they would be here until after the last bus left, some of them would be in the night time dives – shebeens as we used to call them – and there was generally a sense of drift and disaffection among them. That made them even more in danger of getting involved with the police.

How similar were things in Moss Side to other areas of the UK you had worked in?

The four issues I just mentioned were present in all inner city areas I had worked in. I had just come from Handsworth, and one of the reasons for the Runnymede Trust commissioning the research I did there was that the Birmingham Evening Mail had run a series of stories called ‘The Angry Suburbs’, and one of them I remember was called ‘Must Harlem come to Birmingham?’ There were issues highlighted in those reports of unrest between black and white people which I have to say were not what I found in Birmingham.

Yes, there were tensions, with some white people feeling that black people were coming in numbers, taking homes etc, but what happened in Birmingham as in other parts of the country, was that the newcomers, black people from the Caribbean especially, were coming to find employment in areas where there was already an established working class, a neglected working class. So the quality of accommodation that local whites had was pretty poor anyway. As is typical of these situations, and not just in this country, the incoming black people were blamed for the squalor that had existed for generations.

So there were nuances, but generally you could identify issues which were common to most of those former industrial towns and cities. Many black children were being sent to schools for the educationally subnormal, not because they were in any way deficient, but because the schooling system refused to believe that those children were coming with a language of their own that was not Standard English.

That early period of 1968-73 was also the time when psychologists were propounding theories of scientific racism – suggesting that the intelligence levels of black people were lower than that of whites for genetic reasons. You had to battle against that gunge, especially as it was being taught in colleges that were training teachers – it really was horrendous.

What kind of police harassment did youngsters face in Moss Side?

I remember the first situation in which I personally intervened after arriving here, the police had stopped a young boy of about 13 cycling along Moss Lane West by the Hyde Brewery for riding his bicycle without lights. They were aggressive, and he was frightened. Rather than calming the situation, they started telling him to “stop being cheeky”, and before long there was a confrontation. As you went up and asked what was going on, they would tell you to “mind your own fucking business” or they would arrest you as well, for “obstructing the police in the course of their duty”.

We became aware of how vicious the police were to young people, so that when an incident like this happened, we would begin to gather, because the community wanted the police to know that we were watching what they were doing. The police became very on edge about that, very intolerant of the idea that anyone would witness what they were doing and question their conduct.

Here in Moss Side, as I had also witnessed in Oxford, Birmingham and London, it was not just happening to young people. Caribbean families, the men in particular, were proud of their cars. To own one was prestigious, and these men worked hard and bought their cars, and they were regularly being stopped by the police, for daring to own a vehicle like that: “Is it yours? Can you prove it is yours? What is your address? What is the proof of your address?” Constant petty harassment! There was a level of crime in these urban centres anyway, petty criminals as well as organised criminals – who were white. That criminality had not contaminated the black community in any measure when I came to Manchester.

Yes, some people got involved in crimes, burglaries etc. I used to teach black history at Wakefield Prison, and I was astounded by the zeal and zest with which prisoners there took to an understanding of black history and its relevance to them. They were interested in what was happening in the United States at the time, as they were about the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, the 1968 Race Relations Act.

I told them about the work that I and others who were members of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination did. How I would pair up with a white person and we would go looking for a room to rent or something. The black person would go in first and typically would have the door slammed in their face: “The room’s gone.” Your mate, the white person, would then go and was told, “It’s five shillings, when are you moving in?”

We did the same in relation to job applications. The black person would present a form with the best qualifications, the white person would present a form with lower qualifications, and the white person would automatically be given the job. We did this research up and down the country, and we were able to present the government with incontrovertible evidence of the extent of visceral racial discrimination, and that caused the Harold Wilson government to enact the 1968 Race Relations Act and establish the Race Relations Board which was the precursor of the Industrial Tribunal.

All those people in Wakefield Prison had what I called arrested growth: very bright people. Some could give you the most horrendous stories about their schooling, and why they dropped out of school. In some cases they had had physical altercations with teachers, and were either expelled from school or never went back.

The fact is, there was not a high degree of engagement in delinquency or criminality among the African-Caribbean population … Now relative to our numbers in the population overall, the highest proportion of people in the prisons and young offender institutions are black people.

Ever since the beginning of the 1960s there has been systemic structural and structured exclusion of black people within the society, and that has got certain consequences. It becomes easy to believe that that is because black people don’t have brains, which of course is complete nonsense. All of that is an important back-story to what people in Manchester were experiencing and grappling with in the 1970s and 1980s.

How active were organised racist groups in Manchester during the 1980s? Groups like the National Front?

Very active. In the year of the disturbances in Moss Side there were running battles between us and the NF. They had the temerity to come and hand out leaflets in Moss Side and Hulme, trying to inflame the passions of white people and encourage them to blame black people for whatever social deprivation they were suffering. What was pleasing about that was that the white community determined that they wanted nothing to do with the NF, and joined political activists such as myself, deciding that they as a white community would not allow the NF to get one inch of space within the white community, and physically booted them out.

So you had the harassment of the police, and then you had the planned collective attacks by white racists – people would be physically attacked, have excrement and firebombs put through their doors, or there would be NF signs put up around the place. That didn’t come from nowhere – the neo-fascists became emboldened by the lead politicians gave…

Such as Enoch Powell?

Yes, such as Enoch Powell, but he could be seen as the extreme end of the spectrum. His problem was that he was open and honest about those matters. It was the people who were passing laws in Parliament, one more draconian piece of immigration legislation than the one before, who were constantly conflating immigration and race relations and holding up the spectre of an alien black force destabilising an assumed settled and cohesive society.

It was like a mantra: “You can’t have good race relations unless you control immigration”.  In other words, if you don’t control immigration, the white population will get fed up that you’re expecting them to be too tolerant of these blacks. Or the black population would start creating mayhem. As a consequence, every year at a certain point, even before the Office for National Statistics published their reports; you would find some newspaper, principally the tabloids such as the Sun and Daily Mail, publishing figures about the number of live births to immigrants. It was all scaremongering, a moral panic about black people, and an insistence on keeping Britain white. And people talked openly about the need to keep Britain white.

You have to situate the 1981 uprisings in that broader context, and if you don’t, you fail to understand the structural relationship between the way black people experience living in the society, and the way they choose to resist.

And the resistance took many forms, it took political forms, it took cultural forms, through music, art, publishing or through soundsystems and travelling discos – people find ways of surviving, and not allowing their essential humanity to be debased, and expressing and affirming their creativity. Cultures of oppression inexorably spawn cultures of resistance.

Given all this background, how surprised were you when the riots broke out? A lot of the press coverage at the time, and now in reflection, talks about the riots being a ‘spontaneous’ event.

It wasn’t a surprise to me nor many other people in Moss Side. It could have happened any time before that July. It could have happened in March that year, when a cache of illegal weapons were found stashed in Moss Side police station. Those weapons were found to be knives, hatchets, coshes, clubs, and a considerable quantity of cannabis was also found.

We were alarmed because we knew the police planted cannabis on unsuspecting citizens, and would then throw the book at them for drug possession. They also used to give cannabis to prostitutes to sell, and if they didn’t comply they would be dragged in for prostituting themselves. Typically, when people got arrested and taken to Moss Side Police Station or Platt Lane Police Station, they were likely to get a good hiding from the police, to reveal the names of others or confess to some crime, or just for being ‘lippy’ and standing up for themselves, whether they did or did not commit a crime.

So it was alarming that this cache was found in the police station. What were the police going to do with them? No sooner did the reports come out than everything disappeared. That was on March 12-13 1981. Ten days earlier, six coach loads of people had left here for London, to go to the biggest march black people here have ever organised, the New Cross Massacre Black People’s Day of Action, on 2 March 1981, following the murder of those 13 young people in that Deptford fire.

That massacre did not take place in Moss Side, but it could well have. That became a metaphor for the experiences that we were having at the hands of the racists and fascists across the country, and the way the police dealt with those things. So the events in July in Moss Side could have happened at any point that year.

Part two of the interview can be found here

On Tuesday, the chief executive of Irish carrier Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, gave a press conference at Manchester Airport to announce a massive £175m investment plan. From October Ryanair will have two aircraft flying to 17 destinations from Manchester, rising to four planes to 26 destinations by the summer of 2012.

The Manchester Evening News headline the following day read ‘Ryanair to invest £175m and create 2,000 jobs at Manchester Airport’. Given the current state of the British economy and the scale of public spending cuts locally, 2,000 new jobs in Manchester would be quite a boon for the government, as well as politicians and businesspeople arguing that private sector growth will quickly fill the employment gap left by job losses in the public sector.

However, the figures in the MEN – and reported in the national press – appear to be misleading. Ryanair’s press release states that the airline’s “2m passengers [per annum] will sustain up to 2,000 jobs at Manchester Airport and in the surrounding region”. TheBusinessDesk.com noted the airline will actually only “directly employ 250 people… when all 24 routes are operational”.

O’Leary said this could rise to 450 if plans to expand to 40 routes the following summer come to fruition. A fact which was unsurprisingly missing from Ryanair’s press release, but also from the media coverage, was that when the airline pulled out of Manchester 18 months ago after a spat with airport chiefs, it axed around 600 staff. That means even if there are 40 new routes in two years time, there will still be 150 fewer jobs than in 2009.

‘Sustaining’ jobs

The aviation industry has a reputation for exaggerating for commercial gain the benefits it brings to local and national economies – more so than other sectors. While much debate over recent years has revolved around the environmental impacts of aviation, job creation has long been a bone of contention during expansion plans.

Ryanair’s press office could not be contacted to clarify how the 2,000 figure had been arrived at or which jobs were included within it. It seems probable, however, that rather than any calculation taking local circumstances into account, the company simply used the often-cited – yet dubious – figure that every million passengers in the aviation industry supports 1,000 jobs.

‘Sustaining’ or ‘supporting’ 2,000 jobs is very different from employing 2,000 staff or creating 2,000 jobs. The aviation industry usually uses an economic forecasting model for job creation which includes ‘indirect employment’ and ‘induced employment’. The model is heavily disputed as an accurate indicator of an industry’s economic impact based on “dubious statistical concepts”, according to Brendon Sewill, a former advisor to the Treasury and the British Bankers Association, and author of ‘Airport jobs: false hopes, cruel hoax’.

It tends to double-count jobs across industries, such as including construction workers at airports and oil workers who have already classified as employed within their own sectors. It also produces some unlikely results over whose employment is ‘supported’ by aviation activity – a process which could logically carry on indefinitely.

Because of this the calculations themselves are often wildly optimistic using questionably high multipliers. When Manchester Airport built its second runway – after a long and bitter dispute with local residents and environmental campaigners – it was justified largely on a claim first made in 1991 that 50,000 jobs would be created. The figure was revised during a public inquiry to 18,000, which still included indirect and induced jobs, as well as jobs in firms that would relocate to the area from elsewhere.

The media continued to use the 50,000 figure, as did the airport chief executive in 1997 when planning permission was granted. The runway was built and opened in 2001. According to Sewill, by 2006 Manchester Airport employed 4,000 more staff than 10 years earlier. Adding indirect and induced jobs at the ratios usually quoted by the aviation industry, the increase would have been 6,400 in total.

Questionable claims

There is little information on what jobs will be created by £175m of investment other than there would be 250 and they would include “pilots, cabin crew and auxiliary staff”. One thing for sure is that staff will not be encouraged to seek worker representation. Ryanair has always been doggedly anti-union, and continues to operate a policy of refusing to deal with trade unions.

Manchester Airport Group’s CEO Charlie Cornish said back in February that budget airlines such as EasyJet, Jet2 and Ryanair are crucial to MAG’s drive to increase passenger numbers and profits. Airport chiefs and local politicians argue in turn that passenger growth will drive expansion and lead to the creation of thousands of new jobs. This is central to the development of Manchester Airport City, the recently designated Enterprise Zone, itself one of the major pillars of the council’s future regeneration strategy. The Airport City draft consultation document suggests that up to 15,000 jobs may be created by the development.

According to Regeneration and Renewal, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has no means of verifying the job creation claims made in bids for the Regional Growth Fund – to which MAG Developments recently applied for £10m to accelerate Airport City. The figures were basically taken at face value. It is hard to imagine that none of them were over-inflated. The same is rumoured to be true for the Enterprise Zone bids within the Department of Communities and Local Government.

Meanwhile the first independent analysis of Enterprise Zones by SQW says job creation expectations are “questionable” and the timescales “very optimistic”. Given the ambiguous, if not deliberately misleading, nature of the figures pumped out by the aviation industry and politicians – regurgitated without question by the vast majority of the media – their claims should clearly be treated with the utmost scepticism.

Andy Lockhart

Rally in Castlefields

Members of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) took part in strikes and pickets outside schools with the BBC reporting 550 schools closed in Greater Manchester. The University and College Union (UCU) also staged walkouts, while civil servants from the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS)  took part in strikes across the city.

Several thousand unionists and their supporters marched from All Saints Park for a rally in Castlefields where union leaders gave speeches, outlining the case against the proposed pension reforms laid out in the Hutton Report. It was clear however from those on the street that today’s actions were about more than pensions.

An attack on education and public services

Speaking to MULE at a picket outside the John Dalton building opposite the BBC, vice chair of UCU at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), Christine Vié said, ”This is a fight that we must win and we will win. It’s an attack on our pension but it’s not just our pension – by attacking our pensions they are attacking our jobs, they’re also attacking education and that’s our main problem. As lecturers and teachers education is our life, and by attacking education they are attacking young people and they are attacking this country.”

Students and UCU members from the University of Manchester and the University of Salford – who were not on strike today – also came to support the picket. MMUnion president Rob Croll expressed his disappointment with the university for not backing its staff and “trying to intimidate those who are picketing outside buildings”.

MMU picket at Dalton Building on Oxford Road

“At the end of the day,” he said, “these are the people who are providing a service to society, to our generation and future generations. Cutting pensions shows they don’t respect these individuals. If we’ve got the highest levels of elderly poverty of 27 member states of the EU yet we’re the fifth richest economy in the world it doesn’t add up.

“It’s another attack on higher education,” he went on, “Students are being charged higher fees, teachers are getting their pensions cut – what does it mean for students going to university? And when they leave if they to get a job in the public sector and might not even get the pension?”

Members of UCU were also on strike at The Manchester College (TMC), with pickets on campuses at Northernden, Openshaw, Shena Simon, Moston and St John’s Centre. A spokesperson commented, “It’s about protecting the future as well isn’t it? Because standards of education are going to fall if these reforms go through.”

One PCS striker from the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Manchester said, “It’s not just about pensions though. It’s about services. The cuts the government are planning in regards to the services we provide and use are going to decimate public services and that’s why we’re out today, and that’s why we’ll keep coming out until we change the path of this government.”

Teachers out in force

ATL lead the march down Oxford Road

Much of the march was made up of members of the NUT and ATL, with many on strike for the first time in their lives. Jason Sharp, regional official for ATL, said, “The majority of people join ATL because they don’t want to take strike action ever. This is the first time in our history that we have ever taken strike action and it’s because the government are lying. If they would give us the figures and show that there is a need to pay more money then we’ll pay it. But they’re refusing to – and it’s about a tax on teachers in addition to what they’re already paying. Why should teachers have to pay for the mistakes of the bankers?”

Chris Everitt, a member of the NUT and a teacher at Stretford High School, said, “Essentially what the coalition are trying to do is to privatise as many public services as they can. Part of the fight for public pensions – while it is important in itself – is about defending public services more generally, because if they can bring down the pensions provision, it will be easier to privatise.

“This is why the CBI is supporting reduction of pensions in the public sector, because there will be less liabilities for them to take over. Also, if you reduce pensions, you’ll get a lower calibre of graduate going into the teaching profession. It will make education worse in the long run, and that’s bad for everyone in our society.”

“It is about pensions, but more than anything it’s about the future – our children and grandchildren. We want to ensure that they have a decent future and an entitlement to a decent standard of education, so it’s not just about pensions it’s about everybody else,” said one member of Salford NUT.

Strong support and further action?

Reports from picket lines were overwhelmingly positive. One teacher from TMC described the pickets as “very lively” and getting “lots of support”.

“We had eight members of the NUT on the picket line [at Stretford High],” said Everitt, “but at different times different people were coming out from the school and joining us there. So at one point we had about 30 people there, and it was a really good atmosphere and people were solidly behind it. I think people are just looking for the other unions to join in. So really we need Unison, we need Unite, and we need GMB to be striking in the autumn.”

Greater Manchester FBU

The march included hundreds from non-striking unions as well, including many from Unison and Unite. A strong contingent of 200 members of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) attended the demonstration. Paul Fogerty, Brigade Secretary at Greater Manchester Fire Service, explained why he and his colleagues were out to show solidarity: “This is an attack on all public sector workers, unions and our pensions. These pensions are deferred wages that we entered into in good faith believing that if we paid in a certain amount that at the end of the term we would be entitled to, not a huge pension, but a fair pension.

“We don’t believe the government who are saying they are not affordable now. Changes were made to a lot of the pension schemes four or five years ago. So let the government put up the figures first and foremost and then we can negotiate properly.”

Asked whether he could foresee the FBU going on strike themselves, Fogerty said, “Hopefully not, but if pushed members of the Fire Brigades Union will not flinch and we will take industrial action, but only as a last resort, because we don’t take it lightly.”

“I would have to be on strike for two and a half years to lose what I’m about to lose,” said Vié, “So if that’s what it’s going to take that’s what it’s going to take. I’m prepared to lose quite a lot to save our jobs and our pensions. We started this job and paid into our pension with a promise of what we would get – which isn’t much in any case – and they want to slash it by at least a third. I can’t face working till I’m 67. If I survive till then I’ll have to choose between heating and food, and I’m not the only one like this. We the workers – the majority – are just being hit on the head again and again. Well that’s it – enough is enough. As far as I’m concerned what we need is a general strike. We need to become Greek – to show this government that it’s them or us.”

Andy Lockhart