Blair's 'Forgotten People'
# *“Behind the statistics lie households where three generations have never had a job. There are estates where the biggest employer is the drugs industry, where all that is left of the high hopes of the post-war planners is derelict concrete. Behind the statistics are people who have lost hope, trapped in fatalism.”
– Tony Blair, 1997
On June 2nd, 1997, Tony Blair gave his first televised speech as Prime Minister. Selected as the setting was the Aylesbury estate, home to 7,500 people in Southwark.
The clip below begins with a reporter saying: “the choice of this, the Aylesbury estate in South London, was no accident.” Yet if the Aylesbury’s reputation had been poor before, in 1997 this was exaccerbated and cemented through this speech.
Blair famously asserted that there must be no more “no-hope areas” in new Labour’s Britain. With its focus on unemployment and crime, the moralising lens of the speech heralded the role that the council estate, as a broader class, would be set to play under New Labour. This role was a symbolic and ideological one, as a signifier of a spatially concentrated, dysfunctional underclass.
Crutially however, Blair framed The Council Estate (as well as the Aylesbury specifically by virtue of its setting) as deteriorating, as derelict, as dilapidated in terms of its materiality. Within this, physical decay becomes inextricable from moral delay - both a cause and a symptopm of the other. Considering this, it is unsuprising that this moment has been dubbed by Ben Campkin as watershed moment in the " sink estate spectacle."