Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was secretly urged to consider abandoning Liverpool to “managed decline” after riots erupted in the city in 1981, newly released government papers showed on Friday.
Senior ministers warned her that it might be a waste to pour money into the “stony ground” of Merseyside after the decline of its heavy industry led to high unemployment and social unrest.
In some of the worst inner city riots of the last century in Britain, nearly 500 police were injured and at least 70 buildings severely damaged during nine days of violence in the port city.
Photo: AFP
At a time of public cuts after a severe recession, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe said the government must not “overcommit scarce resources to Liverpool,” despite calls from other ministers to regenerate old industrial towns.
“I cannot help feeling that the option of managed decline is one which we should not forget altogether,” Howe wrote in a letter to Thatcher, according to papers released by the National Archives. “We must not expend all our limited resources in trying to make water flow uphill.”
Thatcher sent a senior minister — then-environment secretary Michael Heseltine — to find out what had gone wrong in the once mighty port that boomed during the Industrial Revolution.
Heseltine said the idea of abandoning the city that produced the Beatles “never got any traction.” Instead, he tried to encourage private sector investment to regenerate the area.
“I simply wouldn’t countenance that you could say that [in] one of England’s great cities, a world city, we’re going to manage decline here,” he told BBC radio. “That would simply be unthinkable.”
Speaking to the BBC, Howe said he did not remember discussing the option of managing Liverpool’s decline.
“I don’t recall how that argument got into the discussion at all. It certainly doesn’t sound very considerate,” Howe said.
Commentators noted parallels between today’s Britain and the one discussed in the government papers. Rioters clashed with police in several English cities this summer, the economy is once again on the brink of recession and another royal wedding offered some light relief.
Thatcher’s press secretary wrote to the prime minister after the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981, saying: “The triumph of the royal wedding has been a national tonic.”
The Iron Lady’s tight grip on public spending was laid bare in another declassified document that laid out the cost of refurbishing her official London residence, 10 Downing Street.
She queried the total bill of ￡1,836 (US$2,850) and said she would pay for her own ironing board rather than using ￡19 of taxpayers’ money.
“I could use my own crockery,” she added, noting the ￡209 bill for new plates.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS