Last Friday was a day of loss for Gateshead, my former home town, opposite Newcastle on the southern banks of the Tyne. On the very last day of the school year, right at the beginning of the long summer holidays and therefore at the very moment it is most needed by low-income families, the local leisure centre was closed.
On our family WhatsApp group, a photograph showing the familiar building, with its windows now covered by screens of plywood, began to circulate, sparking a week of childhood memories and family discussions. While this might sound like a local news story, behind it is a bigger conversation about real-world consequences and short-term thinking and profound unfairness.
I was 11 years old in the early 1980s when Gateshead leisure centre opened its doors. One of my younger siblings was at the opening ceremony, performed by the late Queen. For my family to suddenly have access to council-subsidised sports classes and recreation facilities was transformative and life-enriching. More than school, the leisure centre was the focal point of my life growing up. As it was for my siblings and the generations who came after us – right up until last Friday.
It was within its walls that I learned judo and karate, the sports that cured me of my childhood asthma and helped me overcome my crippling lack of confidence. It was at the leisure centre that my siblings and I had birthday parties with our friends.
The Britain of 2023 is a far richer nation than that of my childhood and yet the local council – its annual spending power cut by £179m since 2010 – can no longer afford to keep the leisure centre open. Its loss will have devastating consequences.
Gateshead is ranked 47th out of the 317 local authorities in England on the index of multiple deprivation. One of those consequences of that deprivation is ill health and poor levels of fitness. Just three months ago, the scale of that problem was highlighted by a health report that revealed Gateshead has levels of obesity and childhood obesity significantly higher than the national average. The same report noted that 7.9% of Gateshead residents suffer from some form of diabetes. These statistics also reflect the fact that Gateshead is ageing. The haemorrhaging of its young people, drawn south in search of work, has blighted the town and the north-east for generations.
In response to the health report, the council committed to exploring ways to encourage higher levels of physical exercise. Yet three months later, that same council closed the central piece of health infrastructure that would have been key to delivering the increase in physical exercise the report recommends. The long-term consequences of this are painfully obvious. The only hope of avoiding them comes from two campaigns led by local people who are fighting to keep the issue in the news and ultimately to take over the leisure centre and run it as a community asset.
Back in 2010, when the word austerity was placed at the centre of political debate, it quickly became shorthand for a set of policies that have changed and diminished the country. The term was borrowed from the age of penury in which Britain found itself immediately after the Second World War and, with its tones of wartime togetherness, austerity – in its new usage – helped not only to justify but also to camouflage the long-term results of the decisions being made.
I predict 2023 will be remembered as the year of consequences. The year when half a century of disinformation by climate change-denying politicians and journalists crashed headlong into empirical reality – the age of global boiling has begun. Here in Britain, 2023 may well be recognised as the year in which the social costs of austerity became impossible to ignore. After 13 years, the impact of such profound cuts can no longer be papered over and nothing says decline like a boarded-up building. The empty leisure centre in the middle of Gateshead is in-your-face proof of what the impoverishment of local government means. It is visible in a way that NHS waiting lists and exhausted nurses are not.
Just like the mountains of rubbish that accumulated in the streets during the winter of discontent (1978-79), once-loved facilities across the country, now either boarded up or sold to developers, are the symbol of another age of political failure. And, like the black bin bags of the late 70s, they may well also become the portents of the end of a political era.
Do the politicians who have taken us down this track really understand what we have lost? Are they truly in a position to comprehend what subsidised sports and health facilities mean for low-income families? If they have acquired such insights, they can only have done so by overcoming their own privilege.
In the same years that Gateshead has been struggling to fund its leisure centre, at Winchester college, where the prime minister spent his teenage years, a new sports centre has been under construction. The place will include a swimming pool, squash courts and a rifle range. It is beyond what even many local authorities at the top of the deprivation indices could afford. Other private schools have comparable facilities and 65% of the current cabinet attended such schools, more than nine times the number among the general population.
Even as the consequences become clear, can politicians with no skin in the game, who have never and will never have to rely on council-run and council-subsidised facilities, really understand – at a fundamental level – what their decisions mean for communities like the one in which I grew up?
• David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster
