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Oh, right

There are 225 neighbourhoods in England identified as “left behind”. They are inhabited by about 4% of the population and are places which experience high levels of deprivation and community need and low levels of investment and resources. Often, they are housing estates on the edge of post-industrial towns.

So the slum clearances didn’t work then. Well done to the planners. Clearly this is also an argument for more planning.

12 thoughts on “Oh, right”

  1. ‘Funds should be allocated to the left behind neighbourhoods on a non-competitive basis’

    Just another screech for more dosh then!!

  2. It is rarely the case that slum clearance failed (albeit I do remember knocking on a door in block of council flats only a year or two old and observing that itwas already a slum): it is more that these are on the outskirts of post-industrial towns and they are poor because the men are unemployed. The post-industrial towns are, by definition, those where their factories have been closed and the attempts, if any, to create alternative employment has focussed on shops and offices, providing jobs for women but hardly any for men.

  3. Slums (or “areas left behind”) do not create poor people. (Some) poor people create slums and will do so whatever planners might dream up.

  4. England’s most “left behind” neighbourhoods will remain places where “human flourishing is limited and potential squandered” without changes in government levelling up policy, an all-party group of MPs and peers has said

    Did they happen to mention how importing millions of semi-literate retards and their extended families while making electricity and travel an expensive luxury good and taxing employers into sacking British workers and offshoring their jobs is going to “level up” these shitholes?

    Because me and the lions think nah.

  5. I notice that Sedgefield was mentioned. Wasn’t that the fiefdom of Tony Blair (the man pulling the strings of the current Labour Party leader), for a goodly period? Fancy our Tone leaving it in such a sh*t state, not that he really cared about the place.

  6. I notice that Sedgefield was mentioned.

    The current mp identifies as a “tory”, so the constituency has always been shit. And we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

  7. I object to “deprivation”. Nobody deprived them of anything: mostly they probably have never had much that you could have taken away if you wanted to. Their problem is that they don’t work much. Ideally they would have moved to parts of the country where there was more work to be had.

    I do have sympathy on at least three scores. (i) It was a miserably cruel policy to let in boundless immigrants to do the work that otherwise our less gifted fellow citizens might have done. Toni Blair and Jack Straw were the principal guilty men here.

    (ii) I was also cruel to design a welfare state that would encourage these people not to try but simply to live off the dole. It’s bad for us, it’s bad for them, and it’s bad for their children. Shame!

    (iii) It’s cruel to have housing policies that make it harder for such people to migrate around the country in the search for work.

    Call me a Red Revolutionary but I think that directing cruel policies at our unfortunates is bloody inexcusable.

  8. Blackheath is a schithole
    Every April 50,000 joggers turn up, hear a gun and run away from the place as fast as possible.

  9. In practice so called levelling up will inevitably lead to levelling down. In any case, some people will be poor and deprived whatever you try to do for them. I have a relatives past and present who were always broke. Never had a decent car, always some old banger. In all cases they were working reasonable jobs but just never seem to be able to hang onto their money. In one case said relative, a couple of years ago came into a couple of moderate inheritances, nothing huge, about ten grand. Since then he’s blown through the lot and is broke again. I don’t see how you can help people like that.

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