The current furore around whether Lord Howe recommended managed decline for the city of Liverpool following the riots of 1981 comes at a time when many question the commitment of the present government to the regeneration of England's major urban areas. If this latest controversy, following the 2011 unrest in English cities, re-invigorates urban and regional policy making it will be a good start to 2012.
However, the debate about what happened in Liverpool should be set in a broader context of the urban and industrial decline which has defined how much of Britain has developed, or not, since the 1970s. For managed decline has certainly been supported by successive governments over the past forty years or so, particularly with respect -or lack of - to the manufacturing base of major cities.
Indeed, anyone who has dealt with government departments knows full well that decisions inevitably resulting in managed decline, whether of particular areas, types of infrastructure or industrial sectors, are being made all the time; although largely, it has to be said, by faceless bureaucrats rather than politicians, who generally play second fiddle to the technocrats to whom England's economic and wider fate seems to have become entrusted.
The advent of regional government, and particularly the recent election of the Scottish National party, has nevertheless challenged the rule of technocracy in the United Kingdom, and a country arguably in managed decline during the latter part of the twentieth century has, with new democratic powers, undergone something of a renaissance. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that an arch-technocrat like the outgoing Cabinet Secretary should feel threatened.
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