barge @BenTheBar69 - Twitter Profile

2 months ago

Bank Holiday Sunday in Burnley town centre. The chain shops are open, the family firms are gone, the Wetherspoons does steady trade, and the Weaver's Triangle stands a hundred yards away as a heritage site, like Pompeii. A century ago this town ran close to 100,000 cotton looms. More than any other town on Earth. Burnley wove the cloth of half the British Empire out of the bottom of a Lancashire valley, and the people who did the weaving came home each evening to streets that they owned, that they had built, that hummed with the activity of a town that knew what it was for. The looms are gone. The activity is gone. The streets are still there. Four decades of slow decline have taken the shops on them one at a time, until what remains is a parade of the same dozen chains you would find in any other emptied town from Grimsby to Stoke-on-Trent. The standard explanation is "globalisation." But this is a lie that has had thirty years to harden into a doctrine. Bavaria still builds cars. Lombardy still spins textiles. Lyon still weaves silk. The Northern European cities that once competed with Burnley are still in the productive economy because their governments decided their industrial base was worth a fight. Britain decided otherwise. Specific people, in specific rooms, with specific names attached to specific Treasury submissions, decided that a country could subsist on financial services and call centres, and that the towns which built it could be left to manage their own decline on whatever Levelling Up grant happened to fall out of the next reshuffle. Many families in Burnley today carry four, sometimes five generations of closure notices: pit, mill, foundry, factory, depot. The decline is intergenerational. It is also a choice that gets renewed every parliament. There is no mystery about what built towns like Burnley. Productive industry, paid honestly, generating enough surplus that a working family could afford a terraced house, a few shillings to put by, and the dignity of a Sunday best. There is no mystery about what would rebuild them. Cheap energy. Real wages. A state that bothers to defend its industrial base when foreign competitors come knocking with subsidies the Treasury is too embarrassed to match. It's time to put talks of 'levelling up' to death. The phrase stinks, always did; it belongs to a class of politicians for whom the town has always been a photograph behind a podium, a mere optimisation problem (and an unappealing one), rather than a working economy. It's time to bring productive industry back to these places, not as a sentimental sop to them, because it can be done, and because it ought to be done. Because the country needs it built, and with the right people in charge we can build it at a scale that makes the return of confident, good work visible in the lifetime of the people now grown tired of being told it that, for them, prosperity is the stuff is pipe dreams.

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