Another voice

Problems of Merseyside

Auberon Waugh

One of Mrs Thatcher's most enlightened actions in her' second administration 4.10 well prove to be the decision not to have a Cabinet Minister with special responsibility for Merseyside. Obviously, as a poor, battered taxpayer one welcomes any decision by any government not to do anything

those . But there are special reasons why

of us who retain the smallest benevolence towards the people of Merseyside should rejoice at this news. It would not be true to say that all the pro- blems of the area derive from government efforts to improve things, but it would be true to say that all government efforts at improvement have made things worse. In arguing that the relationship between this deterioration and this intervention is more than accidental, one must face the big battalions of the Merseyside lobby: not on- ly local government spenders but also local industrialists, trade unions, welfare moguls, race experts, the education, law and order, building, health and compassion industries an screaming for more money to be spent ?ri Merseyside in acknowledgement of its special problems'. After the Toxteth riots Mr Heseltine, then Minister for the Environment, allowed himself to be convinced by these people. They convinced him in the first place that the riots were the result of social conditions rather than of the rioters' natural propensity to hooliganism. It is certainly possible to show any visitor to Liverpool sights of deso- latton and squalor, particularly in the new housing estates, which give rise to the whole glib vocabulary of Pilgerism — social depri- vation, callous neglect, despair, revolution etcetera. In the second place, they managed to persuade him that this desolation and squalor was the product of unemployment rather than of the natural indolence of the inhabitants the indiscipline of their children and the sluttishness of their wives.

they persuaded him that unemploy- ment could be cured by government spen- ding.

In point of fact, if there is a single silver lining to the cloud of unemployment — I should have thought there were several — it must be that it gives a fellow time to catch

on jobs around the house. There is less excuse, not more among the unemployed for children who play truant, windows which remain unmended, garbage chutes which remain blocked, carpets uncleaned, furniture unrestored. Any sane person would use the opportunity to beautify the home, plant window-boxes and trellis vines.

The Pilger-Kaufman answer to this point

ould probably take two forms. On the one

hand he would argue that the fact of unemployment demoralises those who ex- perience it to such an extent, and induces such a cosmic despair in them, that they no longer have the energy to brush their carpets or improve the social conditions in which they live. To this argument I would reply 'Phooey!' or 'Pull the other one'. Those people in Liverpool — and Man- chester, and Newcastle — of whom we treat do not have the energy to brush their carpets or improve their social conditions even when they are working.

On the other hand, Pilger-Kaufman might argue that they simply do not have enough money to paint their walls, mend their windows or clean their carpets. This is quite simply untrue, based like so much socialist rhetoric nowadays on an ordinary lie. 'How would you like to live on £25 a week?' demands Pilger-Kaufman, and the question is echoed by every beer-sodden demagogue in the land. Practically the only people who have to survive on the basic dole of £25 a week are school-leavers living at home, and they have never had so much money before in their lives. Everybody else has his or her rent and rates paid, plus £15.45 for an adult dependant, and can claim supplementary benefit on top. Ob- viously 1 am not claiming that the economic situation of the unemployed is happy, although they are probably better off than a skilled worker in full employment 30 years ago, and certainly each consumes more by price than 14 African families; but we must not be taken in by this rhetoric of economic desperation. We are talking about com- parative, not absolute disadvantage.

Some idea of their real plight may be af- forded by the situation in the hotel trade, which has an estimated total of 60,000 job vacancies, 20,000 of them in London. Ac- cording to Mr George Lawson, who is na- tional officer of the Hotel and Catering Workers Union, jobs at £80-£100 for a 40-hour week are economically unaccep- table. By the time they have paid income tax, rent and rates, national insurance and fares travelling to and from work, would-be workers are worse off. 'There is no ques- tion at all that they are better off on the dole,' says Mr Lawson. So when we talk of the economic (as opposed to psychological) disadvantage of unemploy- ment, we are in fact talking, in most cases, about the economic disadvantage of earn- ing only £5,200 a year.

But this Welfare Trap, as we call it others insist on calling it by the silly and in- accurate name of Poverty Trap — is a na- tional phenemenon, and certainly not peculiar to Merseyside. The only short-term answer to it is to cut welfare entitlements, which no government would dare to do, or

to inflate the economy, which would very soon make it worse. Let us now examine the

special problems of Merseyside which are said to justify an inflationary policy of public expenditure which, if applied, would ruin the country in a matter of months.

Special Problem Number One is a labour force which is widely held to be unemployable as a result of idle, disruptive and sometimes criminal attitudes towards work. This can scarcely be attributed to government intervention except to the ex- tent that Special Problem Number Two gave rise to a chicken-and-egg situation.

Special Problem Number Two is that since Mr Heath's government (I think) guaranteed dockers employment for life at whatever grotesquely inflated rates they choose to demand, Liverpool's docks once the backbone of its economy — have been more or less idle.

Special Problem Number Three is a par- ticularly disagreeable environment. This is almost entirely the result of government in- tervention which declared Merseyside a special development area and encouraged the hideous devastation of its city centre by `planners', but it is also aggravated by the character of its inhabitants as seen in Number One.

Special Problem Number Four is to be seen in its rotten schools, probably the worst in the country, with no discipline, very little attendance and not much chance of learning anything for those who do attend. This, once again, may be in part a product of Number One, but it was certainly much aggravated by government intervention in the shape of Shirley Williams, Edward Short, Anthony Crosland et al.

Special Problem Number Five, of com- paratively recent vintage, is an extreme left- wing local government, which has already introduced an unemployed school caretaker in his twenti.n as its Chief Education Ex- ecutive among other practical jokes. I would attribute this Problem to the baleful effects of Problems One, Four and Six.

Special Problem Number Six, as I would maintain, is Merseyside's status as an area of special concern, involving vast infusions of public money and encouraging an at- titude of belligerent parasitism towards life in general and the world at large.

On my visits to the area, I frequently hear talk of establishing an independent socialist republic of Merseyside. Inevitably, as a bat- tered southern taxpayer, I encourage these leanings. But it seems to me that the arrival of Problem Number Five may have intrud- ed itself, like a grain of sand, into the oyster of Mrs Thatcher's beautiful mind, to pro- duce the pearl of a solution to Problem Number Six. Remove central government intervention, and at least a third of Merseyside's problems will be over. Perhaps the rest will solve themselves inside the independent socialist republic.