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The opportunity to attract industry back to the inner areas now exists in a new way in which it did not a decade or so ago. In all the major urban areas there are large tracts of derelict land and buildings lying idle and often demoralizing those who live near by.

— Peter Shore

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Source: Speech in Manchester (17 September 1976), quoted in Christopher Warman, 'Mr Shore's new policy to bring back jobs to inner cities', The Times (18 September 1976), pp. 1-2
Source quality: Secondhand citation Quoted from another book or article rather than from the original.

More by Peter Shore

Nowhere had the decay of cities in Britain paralleled what had happened to some cities in North America, but the experience of New York should provide us with a salutary reminder of just how rapidly a city could slide into decline if powerful action is not taken.

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More quotes by Peter Shore

Britain's relationship with the English-speaking Commonwealth was closer than that with the Continent. That is how the British people feel.

We don't have to have these passports, do we? Surely we can keep our British ones if we want. ... My children and grandchildren forced to abandon the old British passport!

Cities serve and sustain the whole region around them in cultural, social and economic terms. If cities fail, so to a large extent does our society. That is the urgency of tackling the problem, and why it has to be of concern to everyone in this land.

Of course, to those avowed Trotskyists and infiltrators, the turning over of stones, the exposure to the light of day, will be as unwelcome as sunlight to Dracula—and predictably, we shall hear plaintive cries of witchhunts and McCarthyism.

What is more worrying is the unbalanced nature of the migration, with a disproportionately high number of skilled workers and young people moving out, leaving the inner areas with a disproportionate share of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, of unemployment, of one-parent families, of concentration of immigrant communities and overcrowded and inadequate housing.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Peter Shore (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.