Rethinking the Region

Spaces of Neo-Liberalism

John Allen, with Julie Charlesworth, Allan Cochrane, Gill Court, Nick Henry, Doreen Massey, Phil Sarre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134703883
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Rethinking the Region argues that regions are not simply bounded spaces on a map. This book uses unique research of England during the 1980s to show how regions are made and unmade by social processes. The book examines how new lines of division both social and geographical were laid down as free-market growth and reconstructed this are as a `neo-liberal' region.
The authors argue that a more balanced form of growth is possible - within and between regions as well as between social groups. This book shows that to grasp the complexities of growth we must rethink `the region' in time as well as in space.

Part I

Discontinuous Regions

1

When was the South East?

Spaces/places are constructed both materially and discursively, and each modality of this construction affects the other. Moreover, every place or region ‘arrives’ at the present moment trailing long histories: histories of economics and politics, of gender, class and ethnicity; and histories, too, of the many different stories which have been told about all of these. The complex ways in which a region is constructed and read at any time is a result of these histories and of what is made of them. In the 1980s, the south eastern parts of the United Kingdom clearly had the status of being the dominant region of growth in the country. It was a status which built upon an historical inheritance both material and discursive. Yet, so we argue, economic growth can come in many varieties and each will have different effects. The growth through which the south east evolved in that decade was of a highly particular kind— ‘Thatcherite’, ‘neo-liberal’ —and, while drawing on the inheritance of the past, it was to change yet again the nature of the place and its social construction. What was created in the 1980s—as any region anywhere is constantly re-created—was a new constellation of forces.

For many commentators, the type of growth that brought the south east region to the fore in the 1980s lay at the core of the neo-liberal project. In itself, the region was emblematic of a broader political project which had a particular ‘take’ on growth. This was not just a project which exhorted ‘more growth’: more jobs, more investment, more homes, more money in peoples’ pockets and other such measures; it was a project about growth of a particular kind. It was a project which comprised a cocktail of elements, not all intended, which, when the chemistry worked, produced a ‘south east’ along new lines of difference and inequality, both socially and geographically. As a ‘growth region’, the south east was the site for a remaking of social relations along neo-liberal lines, according to a particular blueprint of ‘success’. Success in this context meant individual success. It meant depending upon self-reliance, personal ambition, an ethic of hard work and the ability to take advantage of what opportunities came your way in a competitive environment, with little or no concern for the inequities involved. And in the 1980s nowhere in the UK encapsulated this particular image of growth more than the south east of England.

In this chapter, we look at the manner in which the presentation of the south east as the UK growth region of the 1980s became one of the ways in which it was possible, not only to ‘read’ what was going on in this part of the UK, but also to see a political project at work. In the 1980s, the regional identity of the south east, indeed its very dominance as a region, took its meaning from the fact of growth— of a neo-liberal kind. Such a representation, however, did not simply fall into place; it had to be produced.

Representing Dominance Through Growth

As a representation of the south east, the notion of it as a ‘growth region’ did not take hold without there being certain legacies of meaning already in place. The identities of regions are constructed through their relationships to ‘other’ regions and naturally they come with a history in which they have already been ‘placed’, so to speak. By ‘placed’, here, we mean that regions draw their meaning at any one point in time through their differences from other regions. They are already inscribed with meaning. They are part of a system of representation which, among other positionings, refers to ‘core regions’, ‘peripheral regions’, ‘manufacturing regions’, ‘wrecked regions’, ‘poor regions’, ‘high-tech regions’ and the like. The regional identities are relational, marking out the differences and contrasts between regions, and, whilst they are open to reinterpretation, they carry a legacy of meaning. It would jar for example, to refer to central Scotland or east anglia as core or lead regions, because the resonances of the past, the regional identities attached to them over the past century or so, render such labels implausible. It is not that the identities of the two regions are fixed; they can and do shift, but only as part of an historical play of differences between regions. Not all regions can be core at the same time, although they may take a variety of other designations.

By the same token, it was possible, in the depths of economic recession in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the south east bore the brunt of the collapse, still to refer to the region as a core region. It was widely assumed that, of all the regions in the UK, the south east was best positioned to lead the national economic recovery when it came. This attribution was not simply because the south east is by far the largest region in the UK, in terms of its wealth, the size of its work-force and other distributional characteristics: it was also because for many people the south east continues to be the dominant region of the UK. As part of an imaginary regional geography of the UK, the south east holds pole position in a discourse of dominance.

It is important to stress here that there are powerful images in play in such a discourse, and they did not take shape overnight. Regardless of the economic fortunes of the south east—whether it is or is not growing—the region has long occupied a dominant position, economically, politically and culturally within the UK. This was the view expressed by Breheny and Congdon (1989) and, although we shall later question their formulation of this dominance, it is not particularly difficult to understand why they and others may easily draw such a conclusion. A ‘two nations’saga—the divide between an old industrial ‘north’ and a prosperous commercial ‘south’ —has been part of popular discourse in the UK for the best part of a century or more. Within such a discourse, however, the ‘south’, and the south east in particular, is already over endowed with meaning, some of which is contradictory in its signification.

Smith, in his account of the growing ‘north-south divide’ at the end of the 1980s, listed a number of grounds for the dominance of the south east and the crucial role of London:

A prime cause of the southern bias of the British Society, is the concentration of decision-making power in London and the south east. London is the seat of government and the home for a huge civil service machine. The financial system is centred upon the City of London, to the virtual exclusion of all the regional financial centres. Most company head offices are in London and the south east, spawning a vast array of support activities in administration, advertising and marketing, research and development, and financial and business services such as banking, accountancy and management consultancy. The national media, other broadcast and print, are exclusively London-based. National opinion-formers, if that is not too grand a term, see things from a south eastern point of view, and attempt to influence national decision-makers, who are subject to the same regional bias.

(Smith, 1989:213)

Reflecting on this account at the end of 1991, in the wake of a full-blown recession in the south east, Smith (1993) saw no reason to alter his view. Having gone from ‘boom to bust’ —the title of his later book—the south east region was still considered by him to occupy a dominant position in the UK economy. There is, he argued, a long-term trend in favour of the south on the grounds of the above fundamental characteristics, plus the ‘pull of Europe’ and the sheer concentration of wealth in the region, which together can be seen to promote economic growth.

Regardless of what we think of this line of argument, it is possible to see how the above series of characteristics is capable of reproducing the dominance of the south east region within a system of representation. The south east remains the ‘core region’ because it continues to host an international centre of finance, because it continues to be the region of government, of media, of corporate services and so on. Conversely, other regions are not characterised in precisely this way, even though—for example—Scotland can lay claim to certain decision-making functions, most notably in the field of legal and educational issues. Thus, the strength of the imagery is as much about what other regions are not, as it is about what the south east is. More importantly, there are a number of different ways in which the distinctiveness, the very dominance of the south east, may be expressed. Not all accounts of regional dominance, for example, need refer to the economic significance of company HQs or the concentration of international finance in the region. The dominance of the region may also be expressed in class terms and culturally. Thus, in the case put forward by Weiner (1981) and others, the anti-industrial governing elites of the Victorian era in the UK laid the basis for an ideology of ‘gentlemanly’ dominance which was centred on London and the home counties. Or again, the stress may be placed upon the location of political power in the region and the concentration there of state administrative elites, or dominance could be expressed in terms of a more general political hegemony, as was the case in the 1980s. Clearly, the lines of justification may overlap, but what matters is that all accounts, despite broad variation in the characteristics or relationships identified, support a common line of thought: namely, that the south east is the dominant region of the UK.

To suggest as much, however, is not to produce a fixed image of the south east region. As part of a discourse of the regions, the dominance of the south east has been constructed over time through a variety of statements and elements drawn from other discourses (discourses of social class, of cultural capital, of political elites and of geographical location in relation to Europe). At any one moment, therefore, if a particular interpretation of the south east is to be sustained, a regional discourse is likely to incorporate and adapt new elements so as to appear plausible in the face of changing events. It is not that the south east lacks the material basis for its dominance, but rather that the form and representation of that dominance have shifted over time as part of a contested process. The ‘pull of Europe’, for example, is one such element, drawn upon by Smith to reaffirm the south east’s pole position at a time when its economy was ‘bust’. Similarly, in the mid-1980s, when the south east was in a ‘boom’ phase, the success of the region was frequently described in terms of its moral culture and the entrepreneurial dynamism of certain social groups. In particular, an enterprising professional and managerial stratum in a range of private services, from banking and finance to leisure and cultural services (which comprised the new middle class), was identified with the success of neo-liberal forms of growth. The iconic figures of success in the south east of the 1980s—shareholders and homeowners, credit-card holders and mobile-phone users, drivers of BMWs and dealers in stocks and shares—were largely different from those of previous periods. Both during the 1980s and before, the stress upon a particular social grouping, or the emphasis placed upon proximity or economic and political connections to Europe, reinforced the idea of the south east as the dominant region. The different elements were drawn into the discourse of dominance and woven into its network of meanings to support a particular interpretation of the region. In the 1980s, the south east reproduced itself as the dominant region in the UK in part through attempts by the neo-liberal right to project it as the growth region. The south east region has manifestly experienced specific eras of growth before, in the 1950s for instance, but in the 1980s its dominance was represented through (this particular form of) growth, through new social groups and institutions, and along new lines of social difference and inequality.

Let us be clear what is being argued here. The south east is in many ways the dominant region in the UK. It is so materially (in class, economic or political terms, for instance) and it is so discursively. The two modes (material and discursive) are largely mutually reinforcing. However, the way this works—both materially and discursively—varies over time. What we shall see in the case of the south east in the 1980s is, first, how the Thatcherite project seized upon this history and both wove a new element into this historical discourse of dominance (the region as home of dynamic entrepreneurship for example) and materially reinforced its dominance over other regions. In other words, the neo-liberal project certainly had something to build on, but it also re-moulded what was found to hand. However, we shall also find—second—that this process had its own contradictions. In the remainder of this chapter, we shall look at the overlapping narratives of dominance and growth which lie behind the notion of the south east as a ‘growth region’ and point towards the ways in which a particular form of neo-liberal growth remade social relationships across the region in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Narratives of Growth

As Murray observed at the end of the 1980s, the economic boom of that decade

has been talked of as a national boom, resulting from the liberalization policies of national government. But quite apart from the strong expansion of the world economy, the boom as it appears in government statistics, needs to be loosened from its ‘national’ moorings in three ways.

(Murray, 1989:3)

The first of these, according to Murray, is that the boom itself was principally a boom in the south. It was, then, if we are to follow Murray’s interpretation, ‘a boom of the core’, rather than a national dynamic of growth. Second, the pattern of growth was uneven in its impact across the south, bringing prosperity to some areas whilst by-passing other locations. And the third observation offered by Murray to disrupt the notion that the 1980s boom was national in character refers to the international nature of much of the growth that took place in the south east at that time.

In part, this last observation prefigures Smith’s reference to the ‘pull of Europe’ —its capital and investments—as a factor consolidating the south east’s importance and perhaps exceptionalism, but there is more to Murray’s argument than that. In particular, Murray wishes to stress the neo-liberal strategies of liberalization and deregulation put in place by successive Conservative governments in the 1980s as a factor in attracting European and wider investments to the south east region (and to its neighbouring regions), especially those of finance and other key private services.

Such an account puts the workings of the ‘free market’, or rather the attractions of a lightly regulated market, at the heart of the south east’s growth in the 1980s. There are many factors which can come to the fore in such a scenario, a number of which can be traced to a series of interventions by national governments. Among the best-known of these perhaps is the broad strategy of financial deregulation which, in the second half of the 1980s, led to a spectacular burst in credit and borrowing by individuals and companies alike. The enticing image of an economic boom as one fuelled by ‘confetti money’, as controls on lending—mortgage and credit-card lending in particular—were relaxed is one that still lingers among popular commentators. And indeed, such imagery is not entirely misplaced, especially as a clue to the kind of growth which took place in the late 1980s.

If, for instance, we take a short-term view of what happened across the south east in the 1980s, stressing events in the recent past, it is possible to weave a narrative of growth which presents this period as an exceptional economic moment, a one-off scenario. It runs something like this.

‘Thatcherism’ as a form of neo-liberal rhetoric may be regarded as a shorthand for the promotion of a market economy and all the individualistic, enterprising virtues that it is said to instil. Together with the ‘Lawson boom’ (Lawson was the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher for six and a half years until late 1989), Thatcherism can be seen as one part of a richer constellation of events which owe their significance to a combination of national and international forces at work across the south east in the 1980s. Nationally, with the lifting of exchange controls in 1979, a chain of events was set in place which would end with Lawson first fuelling a runaway boom in the late 1980s and then presiding awkwardly over its collapse (Smith, 1993). The removal of exchange controls, followed by a number of deregulatory measures, not only resulted in an immediate increase in overseas lending by UK ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps and montages
• Preface
• Introduction: A space of a neo-liberal heartland
• Part I: Discontinuous regions
• Part II: Regions and identities
• Part III: Space-times of neo-liberalism
• Bibliography
• Index