Exile on mean street
Newport is a chameleon. In the 60s it was at the forefront of industrial growth, with the massive Llanwern steelworks as its centrepiece; in the 70s and 80s it suffered a catastrophic collapse of its economic and social infrastruture; in the 90s it re-emerged as an economic force, thanks to the growth of electronic and computer companies along the M4 corridor, and was hailed as Britain’s answer to Seattle because of its association with a slew of new rock bands. Now, on the basis of crime figures released this week, it has been tagged “the most violent town in Britain”, not an accolade you want to shout about.
Newport is also in the running to be given city status – to become, in effect, the first new British city of the millennium. It is an outsider in a large field, well behind such squeaky-clean favourites as Milton Keynes, but it would surely be an obvious choice – a declaration of intent, and of war against the criminals.
I should declare an interest. Newport is my home town. I grew up and went to school there in the 60s and early 70s when, while far from perfect, it was economically buoyant and socially cohesive. I left to go to university and witnessed what happened over the next couple of decades from afar. But, in my view, the decline of the town offers salutary lessons for us all.
Even in Britain’s most violent town – 2,039 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 1998-99, according to new home office figures, well above London and Manchester in per capita terms – all things are relative, and my relatives insist that a sense of perspective is kept. It is not downtown Washington and the principal weapon is the fist, not the gun. Much of the violence occurs at the weekend when Newport lives up to its reputation as Wales’s rock capital. Crowds of clubbers swarm around the rundown city centre and visitors from the valleys do battle with the locals.
But some of the crimes are much more than drunken yobbery. On New Year’s Day, 40-year-old Shaun Mahoney died in an arson attack on his house near the town centre, one of four attacks in the same area. One more senseless crime from which it would be dangerous to draw too many inferences but a tragic way to greet the new millennium.
The local council’s executive service leader, Bob Bright, issued a statement yesterday. Clearly, he sees it as a problem that surfaces at chucking-out time. “As a council we have taken steps through our licensing committee and have also introduced a noise abatement zone which will help to tackle this problem,” he said. The police also seem to believe that drink and drug-fuelled weekend violence is the key. “We get up to 8,000 people coming to Newport on Friday nights,” Chief Inspector Ray Wise was quoted as saying. “It is not surprising we get violence.”
In Chief Inspector Wise’s view, the violence is almost a product of Newport’s success – of being a magnet for clubbers and music fans. But such a view is far too rosy and overlooks the fact that many of the town’s long-term problems – the steady rise in drug use and crime over the past 20 years – are the result of economic decline and social dislocation.
In the 60s, Llanwern had a labour force of more than 10,000. In the 70s that began to fall and privatisation in 1988 accelerated the process. The total number of those employed was more than halved; but equally debilitating was the fact that many remaining jobs became contract-based. A large, stable workforce was replaced by a smaller, much less stable one.
The Newport I knew was an old-fashioned, undeniably macho place. Men worked in steel, chemicals or at the docks; women were slowly entering the labour force. Life revolved around home, pub and sport, especially rugby. In the 60s and early 70s, Newport RFC – the team of David Watkins and Keith Jarrett – was a match for any side in the world, including the All Blacks who went down to a famous defeat in 1963. That, a generation later, Newport were languishing and this season have been rescued only by the deep pockets of a millionaire is symptomatic of what happened to the town: a confident working-class community has been undermined and is now at the mercy of the market.
I lived on a vast housing estate which was almost completely crime free. I went to a comprehensive school with 2,000 pupils which, without appearing to recognise the minor miracle it was achieving, taught everything from Oxbridge entrance to remedial forestry. When I was there, the sixth form numbered more than 150 and five in my year applied for Oxbridge. The rugby team – coached by JJ Williams and a host of Welsh stars – was brilliant; the under-13 soccer team, coached by an old Newport County stalwart, unbeatable.
There was little other culture to speak of in the town – none of the great valleys choirs, no backbone of religious non-conformity, none of the multi-cultural energy of Cardiff’s docklands. The society was based on economic confidence: working-class men expressed themselves through work; the bonds between them relied on what they did, what they produced. Once that was taken away, so was the town’s raison d’être.
Estates became riven with drugs; crime spread in their wake; good, confident schools became sinks; teachers – always accorded great respect in Wales – lost their self-belief. Welsh-speaking Wales clawed back some of that confidence in the 80s with the state-sponsored rebirth of the language, but this English-speaking no-man’s land in the east felt excluded from that renaissance, resentful of the money poured into the launch of a channel in Welsh for a country in which only a fifth of the population speak the language.
A community needs a focus, a means of cultural expression. Newport had none. What do you tell a 14-year-old at a failing school with no prospects of a stable job? How do you build a cohesive community when such a high proportion of men are unemployed or have taken early retirement? How does a society that was based on community and solidarity adapt to a world that runs on possessive individualism?
Newport has yet to find a confident cultural voice to replace what a decade of Thatcherism destroyed. It is alienated from New Labour – it is no coincidence that this is where Arthur Scargill, founder of the Socialist Labour Party, chose to stand in the 1997 general election, opposing the Conservative defector Alan Howarth – and feels no affinity with even the half-hearted nationalism that produced the Welsh assembly. There is a vacuum that drink, drugs and crime fill, in Newport and across the valleys. That is both a tragedy and a condemnation of our complacent metropolitan political class. It is not Friday night that is the problem but Monday morning; not play but work.
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