In Gateshead the first council houses have been built in years. Only 100 houses have been built but it's a great start. This is at the end of a decade of housing failure throughout the North of England created by a bizarre academic theory and a government looking for a big idea.
Recently the sad story of pathfinder has been told in the Times. Environmental journalist Charles Clover has been one of few members of the national media who has noticed that the north has been bulldozed. The supporters of pathfinder housing renewal would like to persuade you that demolition and re-shaping the north has been a re-start of slum clearance. However this is a false impression. The vast majority of the older housing stock in the north was built for the well off working class who could afford decent well built properties. This is the case in Saltwell and Bensham.
Chares Clover wrote in a recent Times article that the origins of pathfinder are to be found in the academic ideas at Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) in the University of Birmingham. In the late 1990s academics led ny Brendan Nevin studied Liverpool and came to the conclusion people were leaving the north becuase there was insufficient good quality housing and if 400,000 homes were demolished this would provide a market incentive for re-development by the private sector.
You would have thought that the Labour Party, whoose core vote was in the north, would understand that it was jobs that had move people south not house prices. However Nevin's bonkers ideas gained credence in the DLTR - John Prescott's monster department. In 2002 a little noticed pledge to spend billions on demolishing the north was passed by Parliament. This created a number of well paid executive jobs in undemocratic bureaucracies to carry out the work. Not surprisingly the guru of housing demolition, Bernard Nevin, is now Chief Executive of the pathfinder demolishing Bootle and Edge Hill in Liverpool.
Prescott found the £2 billion to pay for demolition from Ed Balls at the Treasury and by coincidence Ed's wife Yvette Cooper became the minister responsible for demolition and chief supporter. If anyone with commonsense had been involved they would question the premise that you demolish houses working people can afford and replace them with houses they can't afford in order to stimulate the housing market. Unfortunately for the Labour Party no one with commonsense was available for the rest of the decade. While New Labour was winning huge landslide victories it's core vote in the north were having their housing costs artificially raised by lack of housing and demolition. In Newcastle the enthusiastic demolition of traditional working class areas led to a decline in the Labour vote and the city council was lost in 2005. The population decline lost the city half a Parliamentary seat and the boundaries have now created two potentially marginal seats.
Looking into Liverpool, Manchester and Lancashire where elections can be won or lost Labour would dearly like it's traditional supporters to come out and vote in force. Unfortunately many Labour voters have been affected by the mis-directed pathfinder. Young people can't find the cheap housing because it's been demolished. They no longer have to move south for work but they have now found New Labour have scuppered the chance of them owning their own home.
In Gateshead the businesses of Saltwell Road are already suffering a dive in trade due to people being moved out. The prospect of 440 demolitions will reduce the affordable houses that are available for people. Unfortunately Gateshead's Labour Party, despite seeing the disaster that happened in Newcastle, think demolition won't take them out of power. So far Gateshead's Liberal Democrats have not worked out how big an issue housing is.
All of this is the perfect example of the butterfly effect. This is the semi-scientific theory that a butterfly flaps its wings in New Zealand the unintended consequence is a hurricane force wind Europe. In the same way a highly specialised academic theory on housing that should have been ignored by sensible people became Labour Party policy and may help those in the pathfinder areas abandon Labour.
If the Conservatives were in power this drive headlines ot "the ethnic cleansing of the working class", as one Labour MP claimed, fortunately the London based media rarely cover the North and Labour have gotten away with mass demolition. However the housing crisis may come back to bite them!
Links
The Times
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