Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

2. POVERTY AND PROSPERITY IN WALES: POLARIZATION AND LOS ANGELESIZATION Jonathan Morris and Barry Wilkinson INTRODUCTION The censuses of 1981 and 1991 provide us with excellent snapshots of what might be termed the Thatcherite experiment and its impact upon Wales. The 1981 census occurred at the beginning of what was to be a momentous socio-economic transformation: the steel slimline programmme was in full flow and manufacturing industry was paying the price of Geoffrey Howe's fixation with various illusory monetary targets and the holy grail of zero inflation. By the time of the second census in 1991, the experiment had ridden its course, through Howe's 'bust' to Lawson's 'boom' and on to the 'Lamont recession'. The rhetorical claims in 1979 that the transformation could not be achieved quickly but over the life of several parliaments, is open to scrutiny by comparisons between 1981 and 1991. That the outcome of the experiment has been social polarization is now a well-versed argument: whereas the UK in the 1970s had a relatively flat hier- archy of income inequality akin to the continental European countries (partly as a result of tax redistribution mechanisms and social welfare provision), by the 1990s the UK resembled the US's more elongated spectrum. The 1991 data offers a chance to test this argument further. However, the census is a more valuable data source than this allowing spatial disaggregation to fairly low levels, of wards, towns and cities. As such, it enables researchers to address the question, 'Does inequality have a spatial dimension?', which can be exam- ined at a variety of levels county, local authority district or ward. This type of research is not new; Champion and Green (1988) for instance, carried out such an exercise for Britain as a whole, while Morris and Wilkinson (1989a, 1989b) concentrated on Wales, using the 1986 Welsh Inter-Censal Survey. While the former concentrated on the then topical 'North-South divide', the