Newcastle’s Civic Centre, a grand construction completed in 1967 and formally opened the following year – by King Olav V of Norway, no less – is a monument to civic pride and political ambition. As the headquarters of the city’s council, the building’s huge leather-clad doors, vast chandeliers and abstract art embody not just a strident modernism, but two bigger ideas that seem to have been frozen into every tile and fitting: a determination to pull Newcastle away from long industrial decline, and a belief that city government has the power to do so.

In that sense, though it was conceived before he took office and opened after he had moved on to other things, the civic centre embodies the visions of T Dan Smith, the notorious Labour leader who once gloried in the unofficial title of “Mr Newcastle”. Smith, who ruled the city from 1960 to 1965, was eventually jailed for corruption, and provided the inspiration for Austin Donohue, a central character in the BBC’s epic drama Our Friends in the North. He said he had come to transform a place he thought was “moribund”. “Cities are what men make of them, on land that is given by God,” he said; he dreamed of turning Newcastle into “the Brasilia of the north”.

Whereas Smith drove around Newcastle in a Jaguar with the number plate DAN 68, his latest successor owns a two-door VW Fox whose only remarkable feature is a souvenir teddy bear from the National Railway Museum, tucked into the cup holder next to the passenger seat. Such frugality fits the role forced upon Nick Forbes, who has had to implement drastic cuts since becoming leader in 2011. Forbes and his city are caught in a pincer movement, split between Westminster’s unrelenting austerity and a rise in demand for local services – driven by poverty, economic instability, and an ageing population. As things stand, there is no obvious way out.

Five decades after Smith’s ideas had reached their hubristic peak, I met Forbes, 39, in the council leader’s office; lined with wood panels and plush red carpet, it was recently used by a Japanese television crew as the location for a drama set in 1960s Tokyo. The hallway outside is dominated by a wooden model of Newcastle, which emphasises the more ambitious elements of the city’s architecture, and seemed to symbolise the manic optimism of Forbes’s most renowned predecessor. By contrast, the computer screen on Forbes’s desk displayed a graph that suggested mounting doom. When we first met, in early 2013, he had showed me the same image: two green stripes, representing everything the city could spend on a range of services, which dovetailed to a point representing absolutely nothing.

Since that first meeting, the situation had only become worse. “By 2017-18,” Forbes said, “our estimate is that we will have less than £7m to spend on everything the city council does, above and beyond adult and children’s social care. So it’s completely untenable.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest T Dan Smith, centre, was the Labour leader of Newcastle City Council from 1960 to 1965. Photograph: NCJ

In fact, the city’s predicament already seemed impossible. The council cut £37m from its spending in 2013-14, and another £38m is set to follow this year. Then, according to current projections, there will be further annual cuts of £40m, £30m, and £20m. Over a third of the money the council once spent must go, so Newcastle is in the midst of a dire squeeze on funding for children’s centres, youth services, rubbish collection, parks, aid for homeless people, swimming pools, museums, and the arts. Back in 2011, Forbes said, when he and his colleagues had first confronted the depth and breadth of what they faced, a lot of them lapsed into silence. “People went white,” he told me. “They literally went white, at the prospect of it. There was a sense of disbelief about what it all meant, and the scale of cuts we would have to make.”

Newcastle is hardly alone. Birmingham is in an even more precarious position, as is Liverpool. Last week, the National Audit Office published a report warning that more than half of all local councils in England are at risk of “financial failure” within the next five years. “I think that once the first or second wave of councils has gone down, somebody, somewhere, will have to think again,” Forbes told me. But something in his voice suggested that he was less than certain.





* * *

Two years ago, Nick Forbes said that unless policies being pursued in London were seriously changed, cities such as Newcastle “will see the eventual disappearance of many of our public services, increased inequality, rising crime, a greater sense of desperation and resentment and a feeling of helplessness”. In the civic centre, such words might still sound theoretical and abstract, but you do not have to go far to understand what he meant.

Ten minutes’ drive to the west of the city centre, and north of the River Tyne, sits the area of Benwell. It is one of those places where the post-industrial condition seems to fill everything with a low melancholy; a sense of something that once happened here having been inexplicably snatched away. On a clear day in early October, at the backs of houses, there were great piles of rubbish every 15 or 20 yards – bits of plastic furniture, soggy children’s clothes, discarded food. The bins were overflowing. A few passersby suggested that newly arrived Roma people from Slovakia were to blame; others said that was unfair, and pointed out that the city council had lately halved its bin collections, and reduced street cleaning.

One woman stared out at a shabby alley from a first-floor window: “Not me do rubbish,” she said in halting English, and then disappeared inside. Denise Kelly, 22, led her three-year-old son Aaron-Lee through the mess, on their way back from a play session at a nearby nursery. “I don’t like living here,” she said. “It’s a shithole, and it’s got worse and worse.” Around a year ago, she had moved back to Newcastle from Glasgow; now, she said, she wanted to return to Scotland.

A few minutes away on West Road, I dropped into the As New shoe repair shop, a business that has been in the same family for 75 years. Peter Brien, 70, was behind the counter, lamenting the decline of the cobbling trade and the stilling of local street life. “It’s all takeaways – that’s all there is now,” he said. He put the neighbourhood’s uneasy calm down to simple hardship: “People don’t have as much money, so they don’t get as much done.” He still mended the odd pair of shoes, always handed back to their owners in crisp white paper bags bearing the legend “Executive shoe repairs”. But his key-cutting machine broke a year ago, and two grand was too much to spend on a new one; he said he would be closing the shop in the summer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pre-school age children play at Riverside community centre in Newcastle. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

He talked about the area’s history: the armaments plant owned by Vickers-Armstrongs, the Parsons factory that had once made turbines for power stations, local shipyards, and the sturdy terraces of workers’ houses that were still here, extending towards the Tyne. Now, only a matter of yards away, there stood a signifier for harder times: a branch of Cash 4 Clothes, offering money for “all good quality reusable clothing, paired shoes, belts, handbags, jewellery, perfumes, and soft toys” – a de facto pawnbroker for people with precious little left to pawn. A kilogram of castoffs paid 60p; for a tonne, they’d hand over £600.

In a compact playground to the side of the Riverside Community Health Project on Atkinson Road, a dozen or so toddlers were playing with scooters and trikes. The project’s chief executive, Anne Bonner, 58, explained what it offers: help for recent arrivals from eastern Europe (“the most disadvantaged ethnic group in this area at the minute”), cookery classes, a toy library, support for victims of domestic violence and “activities so that parents learn to play with their children”. Some blame parents’ seeming inability to engage with their kids on their constant use of mobile phones; Bonner put it down to stress – about money, more often than not.

She recalled a woman brought up in care, who had moved to Benwell and come to the project for help. When she had quietly raised her worries and fears at one of the centre’s mother and toddler groups, the project’s staff had helped her get qualifications in basic maths and English, and eventually make it on to a childcare course, as well as helping her through a few bad relationships. One of her children had been bullied at school. “She was nervous about going to see the head, so someone from the project went with her.” Now, both this woman’s children were at university.Almost half of the project’s funding comes from Sure Start, the initiative introduced by the Blair government in 1998, to improve children’s lives by teaching parenting skills, offering support to parents who are struggling, and more. When I spoke to Nick Forbes, he said that Sure Start “was a symbol that we were a progressive country. It was a statement of intent to invest in the next generation of young people.” It was perhaps understandable that he spoke in the past tense, because the programme’s reach is now shrinking across the country: a survey by one children’s charity recently found that spending on Sure Start had fallen by 20% over the three years to 2014, and a third of children’s centres are now reckoned to be at risk of closure. In Newcastle, the city’s spending devoted to children and families, centred on Sure Start, is about to be cut by 40% – a calamitous drop.

In a hall at the back of the Riverside health project, Lorraine Morris, 38 – a mother of six, aged between two and 18 – was sorting out clothes and toys for a jumble sale in aid of the project’s women’s group. All her kids, she said, had been helped by Sure Start or were still benefiting from it. “People have got used to cuts,” she said. “Until things aren’t there, they won’t notice. We’re very good at just making do. We’re very … resilient. And maybe we’ve had it so bad for so long that we just think that’s just the way it is.”They might be used to cuts, but she and her neighbours were seeing new manifestations of austerity. Last winter, when temperatures were below freezing, they had received a delivery of grit, and been asked to spread it over their street themselves. Over Christmas in 2012, she said, their bins had sat unemptied for eight weeks, while “the rats bred like Jack Russells”.

Since last winter, Bonner said, her staff had been giving food vouchers to people in danger of going hungry. “Even on a snowy day,” she said, “they’d be queueing up outside, and we’d be giving out 100 vouchers a day.” Almost exactly half the project’s funds, she said, come from the Sure Start budgets now being hacked back. She had already lost £50,000 of annual funding; chasing donations from charities, she said, now took 10 times more effort than it did even a year ago. Closure, she said, was “something we face all the time. We’re always on this knife-edge.”

* * *

Nick Forbes speaks in a softened north-east accent, seems to never swear, and is unfailingly courteous. Quietly, he has become one of the country’s most highly-rated Labour politicians, winning elections while the party’s leaders pinball from bad headline to bad headline. Jon Cruddas, the senior Labour MP charged with producing the party’s policy review, who speaks regularly to Forbes, describes him in deeply admiring terms. “He sees the future of the Labour party as being very different. He really understands big questions about democracy, and he has a real understanding of the crisis of politics. What he’s dealing with is terribly difficult, no question – but he’s stepping up to how it changes the role of people in his position. Labour leaders outside Westminster have been in that situation for four years now, and it’s given them a real maturity. He’s really interesting.”

Forbes grew up about 30 miles from Newcastle, in Weardale, County Durham – “an idyll or a nightmare, depending on how old you are”. His father was a postman, who then founded a museum devoted to the history of local lead-mining; his mother looked after Forbes and his two younger sisters. At home, they did not talk about politics much; Forbes got his ideological bearings from his maternal grandmother, a former primary school teacher in a pit village – who, he said, was “driven by an understanding of poverty, and the scars that it leaves on people”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anne Bonner, chief executive at Riverside community health project in the Benwell area of Newcastle. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

The fact that he is gay made his school years very difficult. “I didn’t really know what gay was at the time, but I was bullied for it,” he said. “Pretty mercilessly. I used to come home covered in bruises; I had a bloody nose a couple of times. Chinese burns, cigarettes put out on my arms – all that kind of stuff.”

Forbes made it to Cambridge, where he studied social and political sciences, and was elected president of the student union. Though he had resolved to stay away from the north-east, towards the end of his time at university, his parents were involved in a serious car accident – which, he says, reminded him of the importance of family. So he returned, and spent three years as a trainee manager in the NHS, while tentatively taking his first serious political steps, as a city councillor. Back then, he wanted to be an MP, but he now thinks that a life in Westminster would have been no life at all. “I kind of look back and think I wasted 15 years of my life trying to get into an institution which is bust. Why would I want to do it? For me, what’s much more exciting is the idea that collectively, by bringing together the assets and resources that we have here, we can make this a kind of modern-day Jerusalem. That’s a much more exciting prospect.”

After just over 10 years as a councillor, he became leader of the city in May 2011, when a rout of the Liberal Democrats in local elections across England brought Newcastle back to the Labour party. He kept his job as the chief executive of a health charity called Involve North East; his days are split between the two roles, meaning that he often does not finish work until around 9pm. For his work as the leader of the council, he is paid £16,000 a year; an absurdly small amount, perhaps, but one that austerity has locked down.

Other cities have faced even more drastic economies than Newcastle. But the way that Forbes has chosen to deal with his council’s predicament has put him in the foreground of a national story. Three years ago, rather than approach his financial challenges year by year, he decided to take the long view, and baldly set out the impact of the cuts, up to 2016. “What I said internally, was, ‘We have to understand what these cuts mean for us. We can’t simply stagger through year to year, on the basis of shaving off a bit here, and a bit there,’” he told me. “It was becoming increasingly untenable to do that, given the scale of the problem. So I challenged the organisation to profile what three years of cuts would look like.” The basics were clear enough: the real-terms loss of around 40% of the money the council used to get from central government to cover an array of services, along with rising costs – which combined to spell deep financial trouble.

To make things worse, there was what he still sees as the simple iniquity of the government’s actions, which arguably had a distinct flavour of class war, waged from the top: drastically cutting council funding per head in predominantly Labour areas, while more affluent, Tory-inclined places were comparatively untouched. In Guildford in Surrey, for example, the cuts between 2010 and 2013 worked out at £19 per resident; in Newcastle, it was £162. “Even civil servants have given up trying to justify it as objective and rational,” Forbes told me. “It’s entirely political. And I think it denotes an intent by the government to push mainly Labour-run councils into bankruptcy.” The government response to such charges has tended to be curt: according to official statements from the Department for Communities and Local Government, the funding settlements in question have been “fair to the north and south, and fair for rural and urban areas”, and councils can apparently “protect frontline services and save the taxpayer billions in cash if they share back-office services, tap into their healthy reserves and cut out the non jobs and waste”. If they fail to do such things, they are “letting down their hard working residents”.

For a time, Forbes became notorious in his home city. There was resentment about how much basic services were to be cut, while the council was also attempting to fortify the city’s economy via capital investment in housing, broadband, and redeveloping parts of the city centre, which was to be sizeably funded by borrowing. As Forbes pointed out at the time: “In the same way that you could get a mortgage to buy another house but couldn’t get one to pay for food and daily living expenses, the council cannot borrow more money for its day-to-day expenditure.” But such clear points were rather lost in a haze of anger, and personal attacks.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Forbes earns £16,000 a year as leader of Newcastle City Council. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

“I did not go into politics to oversee this level of damage,” Forbes said at the time. However, Lee Hall, the Newcastle-raised author of Billy Elliott, accused Forbes of “trying to cut as much as possible” for “his own political aggrandisement”: in essence, hyping up the severity of what he faced and then decrying the government so as to raise his own profile. The very real cuts that have since been forced upon Newcastle and other councils rather suggest that this accusation was misplaced. Forbes himself says that his categorical rejection of a career in Westminster shows he was hardly set on making any kind of national name for himself. But the hostile noise was inescapable: led by Hall, a number of celebrities born and raised in the city – Bryan Ferry, Sting, Mark Knopfler – put their names to a letter claiming a proposed 100% cut to the council’s arts funding would “decimate the cultural life of the city”, and ensured that a small part of Newcastle’s predicament got the attention of the national media. It was perhaps a shame nobody famous chose to speak up for youth centres, swimming pools, respite care for disabled children, or road-sweepers.

During the six months or so when the city had to digest the scale of what was on the way, Forbes was assailed by strangers in the street; on one occasion, he was attacked by a man holding a placard with his own face on it. “There happened to have been a march on: I didn’t know about it. The picture had a dotted line across my neck, with the words ‘Cut here’ on it.” For a few months, he made sure he did not go out alone. Even now, he is occasionally still the focus of very personalised anger: after a recent Hallowe’en protest organised by a group called Parents Against Cuts who are opposing the council’s moves on Sure Start, the local Chronicle carried a picture of a white-faced protester dressed as “the ghost of regular bin collections”, carrying a placard that decried “Slasher Forbes”.

“I worried, and worried, and worried,” he said. “I could sense that a lot of this would be deeply politically unpopular in the city. I was worried about the public reaction; I was worried about the political confidence of my relatively new group, in power, taking big decisions like this. I knew this would mean big job losses: there was a heavy human cost to this.” He recalled regularly “going home, late in the evening after long, intense difficult, emotionally challenging meetings with officers, talking about the detail of what we were going to have to cut … it was very, very difficult … Being the leader of a council in those circumstances is a lonely place to be.”

Forbes was assailed by strangers in the street; once, he was attacked by a man holding a placard with his own face on it

What kept him going, he said, was his relationship with his partner, a lecturer at an FE college, and weekly rehearsals with the Royal Northern Sinfonia. “I’d go home and listen to all his problems at work, and that would make mine pale into insignificance,” he said, emitting a dry laugh. “And there was music. I’ve always been a musician, so I sing. Baritone. My two and a half hours on a Sunday was the thing that kept me sane.”

I assumed the Labour leader would have been in touch, to hear from someone running such a big city. So I asked if he and Ed Miliband talk, reasonably frequently.

“Um … er … in passing,” said Forbes. Miliband, he said, had recently visited Newcastle on his way back from a campaigning stint in Scotland and done a campaigning tour of the city’s covered market, but they had not spoken since.

What about Ed Balls? “The only conversation I’ve had with Balls,” Forbes said, “ended in an argument – about whether devolution [within England] is the right approach. I think it is, but his view was, ‘We can’t all move at the same speed, and therefore we’ve got to move at the speed of the slowest’ – to paraphrase.”

This exchange happened at a fundraising dinner, as Balls toured the tables. “I was irritated, because it reinforced the Westminster-centric mentality: the idea that you get into power, to pull levers to make lives better for people,” Forbes said. “But I think that experience has shown that they’re rubber levers. People pull them but nothing happens. It makes our politics look even more hollow.”

When Forbes’s anxiety about the cuts was at its height, he had regular discussions with other Labour leaders of English cities, but the party’s national organisation never called them together to work out any collective stance. “We were on our own. Everywhere was on its own,” he said.

To that, there was one obvious response: That wasn’t very good, was it? Across the country, the Labour party was – is – faced with a grave set of circumstances. And of the national leadership wasn’t interested in that, it wasn’t much of a signal to send out, surely?

“I don’t want to be critical of individuals,” Forbes told me. “But for a party that has solidarity as one of its core values, there wasn’t a great deal of it on show.”When I first met Forbes in early 2013, just as popular fury about the cuts was growing, he sometimes had the air of a man in a state of shock, thrown by the business of having to push through economies of which he really wanted no part, and the hostility he had kicked up. Indeed, when I followed him to a meeting about the government’s plans for the benefits system, held at a women’s centre close to Benwell, he came close to looking downright scared. Eighteen months on, he was much more assured, and the qualities that set him apart from much of his political milieu were all the more evident. When he met a dozen-strong group of Labour councillors from other parts of the north-east to discuss radically changing the arrangements for local buses – Newcastle’s fares are a big source of grievance in the city – he was the only person in the room under 50: urbane and drily funny where others were often gruff and withdrawn.

At one point, he spent an hour going through a diary which included everything from plans for visits from Chinese trade delegations to a desperate letter a man who had just become homeless (According to the city council, rough sleeping in Newcastle has trebled since 2011.) Soon after, he met four newly-elected Labour councillors – all women – who bemoaned the city council’s seemingly institutionalised conservatism, and talked about the effects of the cuts on their local wards. Some of them represented affluent parts of the city, but still mentioned the visible decline of Newcastle’s physical and aesthetic fabric: park lawns left unmowed, trees unpruned – and rubbish, always rubbish.

From time to time, Forbes talked more enthusiastically than ever about the current vogue for devolution, the delicate negotiations it entails with national politicians, and how Newcastle might benefit: he thinks taking back power from Whitehall will “help set citizens free from a sense of hopelessness and neglect”. His big problem is the fact that on current projections, his ideas about city government as a powerful force may soon fade into nothing, as Newcastle effectively goes bust.

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Millennium Bridge and Baltic Mill art centre. Photograph: Paul Thompson/Getty Images

Newcastle has attributes that can make any visitor quickly fall in love with the place: a deep sense of history, dizzying Saturday-night hedonism, the swirl of energy and creativity around its two universities, and an addictive sense of life being lived far from the shadow of London. The elegance of much of its city centre rises to a peak on Grey Street, the perfectly proportioned thoroughfare that is arguably England’s most breathtaking example of 19th-century urban architecture.

I walked from my hotel on the south bank of the Tyne, past the hulking Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (opened in 2002), over the Millennum Bridge and into the city. On the undulating roof of the Sage, the concert complex designed by Norman Foster, built at a cost of £70m and opened in December 2004, two men tethered by ropes were polishing the glass panels, one by one; on the north side of the water, people were emerging from well-appointed apartment blocks. It was one of those clear autumn mornings when metal glints and the sun’s rays bounce off water. Superficially, Newcastle and neighbouring Gateshead looked like the embodiment of the post-industrial dreams – “living on thin air,” as one former adviser to Tony Blair put it – that defined the giddy opening years of New Labour, many of whose prime movers – Blair, Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn, David Miliband, Stephen Byers – had parliamentary seats in this part of the country.

This patina of success reflects the story of Newcastle United, the 25th richest football club in the world in terms of annual revenue, who in 2010 were restored to the Premier League. But other aspects of their recent history speak of more troubling aspects of life in the city. The club’s owner – none too popular with many fans, and said to be preparing to sell up – is Mike Ashley, the billionaire behind the retail chain Sports Direct, 85% of whose staff are on zero-hours contracts. The team’s shirts once bore the insignia of Northern Rock, the north-east institution whose demise kicked off the financial crash in Britain; they now feature the logo of the payday lenders Wonga – which even adorned replica kits for children (until they recently decided that this was not quite in keeping with the ethics of a “responsible lender”). In Newcastle, even the escapist pleasures of sport are weighted with the reminder of dire issues: the £83m that has been taken out of the city’s economy every year by benefit cuts, or the fact that the Northeast has the highest rate of unemployment in the UK.

At the Citizens Advice on Nelson Street, where Georgian and Victorian architecture nudges up against the brutalist Eldon Square shopping centre (another monument to the visions of T Dan Smith), I spent two mornings observing encounters with people at the sharp end of those problems, who had come in seeking help. At 10am, they began crowding into the reception area: most accepting the wait, with the odd person crashing in and venting their frustration to anyone who would – or wouldn’t - listen.

Most of the people I observed trying to address seemingly intractable problems were women. One had registered for jobseeker’s allowance, assumed all was well, and had what she assumed would be free dental treatment – only to be hit with a £50 bill, and £100 penalty for saying she was on out-of-work benefits before her claim had been officially signed off. Another woman who worked as a carer on a zero-hours contract – for £6.50 an hour, she said – had been confronted with a £1,500 demand for overpaid tax credits, those supposed kindnesses designed for a world in which people’s hours did not wildly vary. She now also owed £617 in unpaid council tax, and had been threatened with a visit from bailiffs. Debt collectors had proposed that she pay off the debt at the rate of £45 a fortnight. “I told them I couldn’t afford that,” she told me, “and they said, ‘Well you’ve got to’.”“What’s changed is the amount of work that we now do that would have previously been done by the state – by civil servants, or the city council. Particularly for vulnerable people,” said Shona Alexander, the bureau’s chief executive. A quarter of her paid staff had gone. She said she worried that the demise of preventive support would only cause more problems to fester. And within 10 minutes, she mentioned reductions to Sure Start. “We just dread to think what’ll happen when that’s cut back,” she said. “That will be absolutely massive. Without that support, a lot of families will struggle.”

Here was a clue to another aspect of the city council’s problems: it is currently owed £12.5m in unpaid council tax. One woman I met said that until recently, she had worked full-time at a barber’s shop, for a boss who never gave his employees payslips. Determined to get a better job, she had then started training as a lecturer in hairdressing, which meant going from full-time to part-time, and claiming housing benefit. But the latter required the payslips she couldn’t get – and very quickly, she found herself behind on her rent and council tax, and £800 in arrears for both. She had left the old job, and was still trying to get her payslips, to no avail; she had been to the city council for help and advice, but evidently not got very far.

She glanced at a poster about domestic violence. A couple of years ago, she had exited an abusive relationship. “I left with two black bags and my two daughters while he was out,” she said. “And then, I was just putting my life back together, but I keep thinking I’ve done something wrong, because all this has happened.”

She broke down in tears. And then she said something so straightforward that it might easily have sounded banal, had it not reflected both her travails, and those of the whole city. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “You work hard your entire life. And then you need help. But you just don’t seem to get it.”

At a six-day-a-week youth club rub by the YMCA in the faded Newgate shopping centre, nine of its teenage regulars answered my questions with a very adolescent mixture of wry amusement and flashes of insight. Most of them had parents who had come to the city from abroad – Nigeria, Brazil, Zimbabwe and Angola. They made disaffected noises about the cost of higher education, older siblings on minimum wage jobs, and the sense that in the last five years, the opportunities presented to people their age had shrunk. But they talked most ruefully about the council’s closure of the huge City Pool, opened in 1927, where the Newcastle Amateur Swimming Club recently trained three Olympians. “They should never, ever have closed that,” said Marcelo Neves, 16. Until last year, he had gone there every Friday; now, he said, he had stopped swimming altogether.

They were watched by Jeff Hurst, 52, an émigré from Croydon who moved here “for love”, and is now the YMCA’s chief executive. Entry charges to swimming pools transferred from the council to a new trust, he said, have recently gone up by nearly a quarter. At the same time, the increasingly parlous state of the city’s parks was clearly diminishing their appeal. “We’ve got 50% of six-year-olds in our city who are either overweight or obese. We’ve got some of the least active people in the country, and some of the poorest people in the country,” he said. “So where’s the sense in that?”

Among his biggest concerns, he said, was the council’s drastic cuts to youth services and play centres. More cuts in help for young people would affect drug and alcohol advice, and programmes for teenage pregnancy. Hurst mentioned that the recent Jay report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham had made repeated reference to the importance of youth work, and worries raised by the people involved in it about the consequences of cuts. Newcastle has its own sexual exploitation case, focused on the west end of the city, with grimly familiar elements (taxi firms, takeaways, vulnerable girls and young women), which has so far led to over 50 arrests. “Young people need someone they can trust, someone they can go to without it triggering a formal intervention,” he said. “And if you can take away youth workers, they have only have their family. And for a lot young people, the last people they’ll go to are their parents.

“Quite soon,” he said, “we’ll see the results of that.”

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When I spent time with Forbes in early October, there were moments when grim stories would momentarily give way to flashes of optimism, and he and his colleagues would enthuse about the creative ways some of the cuts had been parried. Partner organisations and volunteers had saved nine of 10 libraries that had been threatened with closure: in the middle-class suburb of Jesmond, I spent an hour at a volunteer-run library that now worked as kind of meeting-space and cultural centre, though the people in charge lamented the fact that they had been cut loose from the city’s library system, so that they couldn’t access books kept elsewhere. The city’s arts budget is now to be handled via an independently-managed “culture fund” which will guarantee half the old budget, and offer low-interest loans to arts groups, as well as being able to solicit money from charity. On the face of it, these stories might feed a fantasy about councils doing “more with less”. But in Newcastle, as elsewhere, they have proved to be exceptions: strangely enough, cuts tend to lead inexorably to what politicians would call negative outcomes.

In October, when anyone mentioned Sure Start, a crackle of anxiety would pass through the room. Four weeks on, in early November, the council had decided how it would cut nearly £5m a year from the relevant budgets: folding what was left of a whole host of services for children and families into a new creation called Community Family Hubs, focusing their efforts on communities with the highest level of deprivation. The only certainty was that money would go, and some of the city’s 20 Sure Start centres would close.

Once again, I met Forbes at the civic centre, where he emerged from a long meeting about the city’s new ways of funding the arts, wearing his customary pin-stripe suit. He agreed that there would inevitably be needy children and families who would fall just the wrong side of the council’s new “deprivation” line. He also sympathized with the revulsion about this latest cut, which was bound up with the abandonment of a very powerful idea – that a lot of Sure Start services are universal, and therefore don’t come with the stigma of targeted help for the poor.

“I absolutely understand that,” Forbes said. “But if we have no money, what else can we do?”

But we’ve got to keep our eyes on a far horizon. Because if we don’t, then we simply wallow in self-pity Nick Forbes

On paper, I suggested, perhaps £4.7m wasn’t that much. “It is when the council has virtually no money to do anything else with,” he said. So, metaphorically speaking, he was now down to counting out change.

“In budget discussions, we’re down to talking about the last thousand. Seriously: we argue about where the decimal point goes.” And were these cuts the most painful yet? “No. No,” he said. What could be worse, I asked. “Transport for kids with special educational needs and disabilities.” He paused. “That is in the pipeline.”

Looking ahead, he seemed to worry about one part of the council’s responsibilities more than most. Government funding for children’s social care, he said, has already fallen by a third, while need in Newcastle has gone up by 40%. “We haven’t cut children’s social care to nearly the same extent that we’ve cut other areas of the council’s budget,” he went on, and he said the council’s role in the city’s ongoing sexual exploitation case proved it. “We had the teams in place to go in, and make sure children were safe and they were protected from further harm.” He paused. “And my very real concern is that … well, if this level of cuts continue, even our statutory responsibilities, like children’s social care, will be affected. What frustrates me like nothing else is how deaf government is to this argument.”

“I think we’re into the realm of impossible cuts,” he said. What, I wondered, keeps him going? What is it to be a progressive politician when most of what you do comes down to the administration of a nightmare?

“Part of the progressive nature is dealing with the challenges of today, but also thinking about what tomorrow will look like,” he said. “I am not leading a city in decline. I’m not prepared to lead a city in decline. This is a city with some difficulties, certainly. But we’ve got to keep our eyes on a far horizon. Because if we don’t, then we simply wallow in self-pity.”

To have his picture taken, he went up on the roof. The lights of Newcastle were gleaming; traffic was backed up along the Great North Road. In some inexplicable way, and if only for a moment, the scene seemed of a piece with Forbes’s belief in how Newcastle might sooner or later get back on the right track. But then my thoughts flitted back to Benwell, a place staring into the future with much more uncertainty.

That morning, above an off-licence, I had glimpsed a spectacularly incongruous billboard announcing high-end flights on Emirates, advertising a new daily service from Newcastle to Dubai. “Enjoy business class to over 140 destinations worldwide,” it said, to no one in particular. Bottom right, it featured the airline’s current strapline, which in among the piled-up rubbish and endless worry, was so dissonant that it seemed almost absurd: “Hello Tomorrow.”

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• This article was amended on 25 November. The original stated that the Gateshead Millennium Bridge was opened in 2000. It was in fact 2001.