Breaking the Nation

The Paul Richards column

As temperatures drop, spare a thought for those sleeping rough this winter. As the cash for helping rough sleepers through Labour’s ‘Supporting People’ grants is spread ever more thinly, the need for help is increasing. Already, rough sleeping in London is up by a fifth in the last three months. St Mungos, the homeless charity, calculates that the numbers of people sleeping on London’s streets will increase next year, yet the charity’s funding has been cut by the government, and its largest hostel is threatened with closure.

The sight of homeless people in doorways, drinking, sleeping or begging, most with mental illnesses, some with service records, was familiar in the 1980s and 1990s. Sir George Young, one of Thatcher’s ministers, said that the homeless were ‘the people you stepped over when you leave the opera.’ In May 2010, David Cameron appointed him Leader of the House of Commons.

Labour all but eradicated rough sleeping. In coming years, the sight of shivering beggars on our city streets will become commonplace, because of the policies pursued by the Tories and Liberal Democrats.

In the 1980s and 1990s, mass unemployment was a permanent feature of British society. It dominated politics, popular culture, and thousands of communities. Every town had an unemployed workers’ centre. UB40, named after the form you filled in to claim the dole, had number one records. In 1981, the year of Charles and Diana’s wedding, the TUC organised the People’s March for Jobs, and 100,000 hit the streets. In December the Office of National Statistics (ONS) announced that unemployment had already reached 2.5 million, and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), predicts that about 330,000 public sector jobs will go over the next four years. Like rough sleeping, mass unemployment is back with us, snuffing out the hopes of millions.

In 1985, a book appeared called Breaking the Nation a Guide to Thatcher’s Britain. Aged 17, I ordered a copy from my local bookshop, and my dad brought it home in a brown paper bag in case the neighbours saw it. I have it in front of me as I write. It was produced by the Labour Party’s research department (including Geoff Bish, Julian Eccles, Mike Gapes and Gordon Prentice) and published by Pluto Press and the New Socialist magazine (both now defunct). Tom Watson gets a mention in the acknowledgements. Aneurin Bevan used to say ‘why gaze into the crystal when you can read the book?’ We don’t need to be clairvoyant to work out what the Tory-led government’s policies will do over the next decade. We can read Breaking The Nation to see what the bastards did last time. It states:

“Britain is a divided, demoralised, broken nation. Instead of heading for the twenty-first century, we are being plunged back into the dark days of the nineteenth century. Back to the days of the Victorian values so beloved of Margaret Thatcher. Six years of Tory government have left Britain a more uncaring, unproductive, unjust, unfair undemocratic nation. Ours has become a nation in which the jobless are pitted against the employed, where the poor get poorer while the rich get richer, where the wealthier South prospers at the expense of the impoverished North; where the sick suffer to benefit the healthy.”

This was the real Broken Britain: a society with shameful differences in wealth, income, and life chances, public services such as the NHS on their knees, a harsh, individualistic public discourse, and rising crime and civil disorder.

It’s happening again. You can see it on the news and on the streets. This is a right-wing government, ideologically driven to cut the size of the state, and the consequences will be the same. When the authors of Breaking the Nation published their work, I doubt they believed it would get worse, or that it would be another 12 years before the culprits were ejected from office. This government is less than a year old. Its cuts to public bodies and local councils are merely baby-steps.

It’s winter in Britain, and it’s going to get a lot colder.