Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

In 1974 I left Durham University where I was a Lecturer in  Social Administration and took up the job of Research Director on the North Tyneside Community Development Project with the Research Team employed by Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) but based in North Shields. I was keen to engage in Action Research in practice and had a very clear view that there should be no separation between the processes of research and action. This was not always the case with CDP projects and some research teams were not even based in the locality in which the action elements were being done. The Action Team had already been appointed and were employed by first Tynemouth Borough Council and then  by North Tyneside Metropolitan Borough.  I was actually the only native Tynesider (from South Shields) among the senior employees of the CDP.  The Action Team were initially worried that I might insist on a research / action separation but that was the absolute reverse of my position, so we worked always as a joint team. There has been quite a lot written about the North Tyneside CDP but to understand what it was and what it did you have to look at the Reports published by the team itself. Frankly, subsequent analyses have generally failed to appreciate – in a way absolutely characteristic of conventional social work originating community development – that not only did we adopt a hard line on action as opposed to therapy style interventions – but that action was located in a clear commitment to understanding the CDP area not just as an single deprived area but as a set of neighbourhoods embedded in a wider complex urban industrial system.  We did not call it a complex system then but that is what it was and that is how we understood it without using the expression.

We made extensive use of data especially of Census Data including small area census data. We used data to describe the trajectory of industrial change in the area across the whole of the conurbation but particularly in and around North Shields. Deindustrialization was only just getting going in the 70s. The two great waves of industrial development – the original industrialization of Tyneside on the basis of coal, shipping, ship building (and repair), and heavy engineering still provided a massive amount of jobs. The intelligent attempts at industrial diversification which began with the development of industrial estates by the Special Area Commission in the 1930s had introduced a lot of new light industrial employment, particularly in clothing for women and more generally with firms like Torday Electro Plating (established by Jewish refugees from the Nazis and Hungarian fascists) and Formica on the Coast Road. I am not going to say a lot about the industrial change – for that see  my books Beyond the Inner City (1989) and Class after Industry (2019). What mattered in understanding what we were dealing with was both the trajectories of the system as a whole and of its component parts, and the relations amongst those component parts. Our trending analyses were based on a combination of the use of quantitative data, including very useful data from the slum clearance reports of the 1930s which we found in the basement of the building we worked in, and narrative histories established from looking at policy documents.  Our quantitative sources in included censuses, employment and industrial data series, and housing construction and demolition data series. Our historical material included local authority records, newspaper coverage (very rich in the past – meagre now), and quite a lot of informal oral testimony. We brought all these together through what I have called trending accounts of system trajectories. So a good part of what we did to inform action was to build up histories of the development of the CDP area and its relationships with wider conurbation in which it was located in relation to the impact of national and local policies as they had shaped the trajectories of both the CDP area and the wider urban system. We shared these accounts with local residents and it was in these sharings that much of the invaluable oral testimonies emerged.

During this period I was a very active member of the Political Economy of Housing Workshop and from a combination of participation in its discussions and empirical investigation in and around North Tyneside recognized that housing issues could not be understood without engaging with whole housing systems and particularly with the development of owner occupation not only as a tenure, but as we now know with the creation of wealth inequalities and with the domination in post-industrial urban systems of real estate capitalism – for more on this see the chapter on Urban Crisis in Byrne, Callaghan and Uprichard Global Crises – Complexity Based Research and Practice for Social Transformation (2025 – in press). We looked, with helpful cooperation from their managements, at what a range of local building societies had done in shaping the way the housing system had developed across North Tyneside. Most of these societies were absorbed by Northern Rock which when it became demutualized was so badly managed by its borrowing shift to short instead of long term deposits that if provoked the first bank run in the UK since the 19^th century. When they were small and local they were financially impeccable.  

When I reflect on what we did in the North Tyneside CDP my conclusion is that our biggest achievement was in helping local action groups to stop the Holdsworth (Chief Planning Officer North Tyneside) plan for the wholesale demolition of pre 1914 areas of Tyneside flats in and around North Shields. Here we were working in relation to a shift in national housing policy from clearance of these far from slums – some of the first housing purpose built in industrial Britain (and Belfast as we shall see in a future post) for working class people to a decent standard – to improvement by adding offshoots with bathrooms and kitchens and providing grants to do this.  I was involved in schemes like this a lot subsequently, notably in Gateshead in the Avenues area where we did this in cooperation with pre demutualized Northern Rock on a large scale.  Some of these areas which were not demolished have now been gentrified along with central North Shields as a whole. The urban system of Tyneside looks very different now.  On the Meadowell estate, working with the support of the local Director of Housing, we managed by use of data and photos to get a lot of money to upgrade the housing by showing that the toilets were actually outside the flats, including on a balcony for the upstairs flats. However, the long term effect of that was to remove the existing community through decanting to new council housing in New York (former pit villages often have this sort of name in the NE of England – there is also a Philadelphia but the Washington is the original). Few of them came back so this part of the estate was filled up by unrestricted letting and became a locale of the acutely deprived.

On the industrial front we were working in a time when Tyne Wear County Council – a well run body with some excellent politicians which got Tyneside uniquely in England outside London a proper Metro system – was developing a Structure Plan:

These were designed to guide ‘change on a large scale’ (Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 1970, para 1.10)’.

Structure Plans were to be essentially written statements, accompanied by a key diagram, that set out broad issues and policies concerning all aspects of the development of a local area over the next 15 years or so . The subjects to be covered by this integrated plan included population, employment, housing, shopping, leisure, transport and the environment. The scope of the plan was intended to include the relevant activities of all agencies in the area, including private companies, nationalised industries, central government and households, as well as those of the local authority itself. The general proposals in the plan had to be supported by analysis and reasoned justification, and had to take account of the likely future availability of resources. (Barras and Broadbent 1978 1)

Although Structure Plans and the associated Regional Development Strategies were binned with the election of Thatcher in 1979 and never resurrected in a real form after the abolition of Metropolitan Counties, this kind of planning was serious, unlike the real estate “growth” agendas being pursued by the current North East Combined Authority demonstrate no sense of the fundamental issues and even less, if that is grammatically possible, of what to do about them. Key figures on the Met County appreciated the significance of the work on industrial change and supported its continuation through TUSIU, the Trade Union Studies Information Unit.

My final reflection on this phase of my working life is to recognize the potential importance of people who work within the state, national and local, for social transformation. The CDP collective produced a publication on the contradictions of activist community work entitled In and Against the State. You have to look long and hard to find activist community work in the UK these days. It is mostly a practice engaged with what is really phony consultation / participation in governance processes or with small scale initiatives with no transformative potential. In the 70s a local man, Alex (Spike) Robson who had a long history of activism in the Communist Party, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, and the Seamans Minority (then Reform) movement in the National Union of Seamen, (with some of which members of my own family had been involved), said to me that he thought the Home Office had set up the CDPs to employ people rather than let us establish a Baader Meinhof style of internal insurrection. We did not have to cope with Nazi parents but he had a point – he was a sharp as a needle. Nonetheless, just as and even more so than in the crisis of capitalism in the 1930s we are in a context of crisis now, exacerbated by the election of a heel spurred draft dodging buffoon as President of the United States but essentially stemming from the polycrisis in the era of the Capitalocene. Things are very bad and people who work in the state in the roles Gill, Emma and I discuss in our book are a key target for social action. And so are the middle masses, created across high income countries in terms of ontological security in large part by the development of a property owning democracy which is so dysfunctional in housing terms that my generation will not be able to pass that ontological security to our own children. – and of course the key workers in the intelligentsia of the state now belong precisely to those precarious generations.

With that I will conclude but over to Northern Ireland next time.