Boom town in midst of looming recession
It must be the perverse part of my nature, but when asked to go somewhere that illustrated the looming recession, I chose the place analysts had identified as the most immune to the downturn.
Corby in Northamptonshire is regarded as a boom town: huge expansion is under way - a new shopping centre, railway station, Olympic swimming pool and thousands of houses. But there is no hiding place from the cold winds heading Britain's way.
New Labour's anthem from the mid-90s promised "Things Can Only Get Better". And Corby has been living that dream. It still is - riding the wave of consumerism that has transformed Britain. But now people are glancing at the small print warning how things can go down as well as up.
I met 15-year-old Leanne Noonan learning how to lay bricks as part of a construction course at a local college. After leaving school she hopes to join the local building boom. Talk of recession takes her into scary, uncharted territory: since her very conception, Britain and Corby has always been getting richer.
"There's always something better coming out that you can get," she tells me. Like many of her generation, Leanne inhabits a world where status and self-worth are measured by brands and shopping choices - a culture of materialism built on brittle plastic foundations.
"When you go out shopping you just get a thrill and you want to buy everything. But if you haven't got the money and you've got no clothes and no trainers people will be looking at you dead weird," she admits.
"If I was to wear two-stripe trainers then people would be like - 'hah! what are you wearing?'" Leanne explained to me. If you are teenager, the number of stripes on your trainers can make a difference.
Leanne's school, a brand new Norman Foster-designed academy, was commissioned as a beacon for an expanding, confident Corby. But all is not well. Hundreds of family homes should be under construction just beyond the school gates. Work has come to an abrupt halt.
We looked out of the school window at the empty acres. "That", I told her, "is what a recession looks like." "My future's just going to end up like that if this carries on," she replied.
Corby was once defined by its steel industry. When that died, it reinvented itself as a service-based economy - echoing the changes across Britain. Today huge warehouses circle a town which has become a logistics hub for a nation addicted to shopping.
Janita Mackin was born, bred and is now a successful accountant in Corby.
"Like most girls in this country I was definitely born to shop," she tells me as we walk around the shiny new shopping centre. "In the past we had to go outside of the town to get any kind of variety, but now the shops have come to us and that's fantastic news."
The chain stores which have chosen to open in Corby represent feathers in the cap of a 21st Century British town. "It's quite nice to be able to look through and see some new shops, brand names that we've all wanted for such a long time" Janita says.
A huge Primark superstore will soon open its doors, bringing kudos and, perhaps, a lifeline in troubled times. Janita knows that Corby cannot escape the changing economic climate.
"It's lovely to have all these things, buy the house you want and fill it with all the things that you want. But it can't go on for ever it would be almost wishful thinking."
When the out-of-town shopping experience came to Corby, the town felt a wave of self-confidence. But for Janita's father, Frank Black, the giant Asda tells a more poignant story.
"Literally where we are at this moment was the blast furnaces of the steel plant", he told me as we walked the central aisle of the store.
From steel-making to shopping. From manufacturing to retail.That spot sums up the change in Corby and Britain.
Frank has photographs documenting the moment the furnace crashed. With its destruction, he became a statistic in a town with 30% unemployment. Frank understands what the word recession means.
"At that time there wasn't credit cards to run up bills and hope for the future - we struggled, simple as that." There was a sense of community in Corby which saw people through. Most of the residents were in the same boat, families relocated from Scotland to provide the labour for an industry that had died. This time, Frank fears, the social glue is much weaker.
"There's a lot of immigrants come into Corby - they've been welcomed - I haven't heard anybody speak against them," Frank says. "I just wonder, when people start losing their jobs and the immigrants have got work, I wonder if there'll be any response to that. That does concern me."
He also describes a generation of young people who don't know what it means to tighten belts and go without. He predicts difficult times ahead - but he is not fatalistic.
"We've just got on the bandwagon and enjoyed life. I really think, in a daft sort of way, this might help to save us.Make us see sense."
Corby cannot escape the cold winds of recession, however optimistic the analysts may be. But it is a town that has been through adversity more than once and found ways to reinvent itself. I wonder how different Corby and Britain will be two or three years from now.
I'm 
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building our way out of this crisis will only achieve limited success.
and in two or three years time there will be no independent britain if this government continues as it is we will be so far in debt that we will have been sold into europe by default and our national identity will be declining into the past.
sadly we are all to blame and thus we must accept what ever comes.
its not too late to remove this government and order a general election or to insist upon a coalition of the house to see us through these times.
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I've said on a number of forums and newspapers over the last few months that because of greed (both banks and governments) that this country is heading for the biggest recession in its history, with the potential for millions being unemployed and many thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands ) of houses repossessed. Since 1979, successive governments have decided that those on middle incomes (now around £15000-£50,000) should be taxed as much as possible, now when these very same people are needed to spend the country out of recession, and save in the banks, these people don't have any spare money, especially with the high price of petrol (although prices are reducing, the production is now being drasticaly cut to increase prices).
The government must cut fuel tax by 40p/l and re-introduce mortgage tax relief immediately for any hope of cutting the recession quickly. These two measures will cut inflation (compulsory inflation [necessities like food, travel and heating] is still in double figures for most people), help lower prices - as carriage costs will reduce, give people more of their own money to spend, and for those with mortgages help them to stay away from repossession. So many businesses depend on house purchase, not just builders and estate agents, but DIY shops, carpet firms, furniture etc.
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As a Corby resident I can honestly tell you that Frank Black's comments regarding immigrants coming into the town IS indeed a huge concern.
Corby's employment network is ruled by employment agencies that would preferably hire Eastern Europeans over Corby residents and getting a job in this town today is really hard.
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Once Corby has it's new Railway Station and it's new facilities it'll open up the town. Corby will definitely benefit from what is currently being created at the moment.
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I have lived in Corby since i was 8 years old, i am an English resident and witnessed the closure of the steel works in 1981.
I have no strong political views one way or the other i think much like the rest of humanity: politicians are out to line there own nest and that of there families.
That said however i have worked with a number of local older people who told me about the sleeping all night in the steel works or the clocking in and then driving taxi's all night. Is it any wonder that it shut with this kind of attitude and work ethic?
I worry about the immigrants taking a large percentage of local work, i have worked in the two largest companies in Corby ( 5 years in each ) and now work for a smaller local Corby company and the percentage of UK against European staff is around 20% UK - 80 % European.
The basic fact is that our European counterparts work hard and do not act like the world owes them a living.
If I owned my own business i would undoubtedly employ Europeans and probably Polish as they have a commendable work ethic.
I wish they were not here and i am sad beyond explanation that to be proud to be English is almost a criminal offence in the UK these days.
That said our immigrant Scottish population are without doubt the most friendly and kind hearted people i have ever met in my 38 years that also applies to our Polish contingent.
I do not blame the European contingent for coming to England or the UK (if you still believe it exists) to make their fortune.
If a country allowed me to go there for a few years and earn 3-4 times as much as i can at home i would already be there doing that for my family.
I blame the do gooders in this sad and rudderless little country that has made every single race and religious faction more important than the people who have paid into and supported this country through time,history and all off there working lives so our children can be ignored and condemned and treated as second class citizens for believing in our heritage and history.
My Daughter has never been out of work since she left school at 16 ( she is now 19 ) and my son has gone on to further education he started his A levels this year but has still managed to find himself a part time job at weekends.
Even during our current recession ( sorry we are not in it yet officially ) my family work and improve our overall situation.
I strongly believe that anybody who cannot find work does not want too. granted it is not as easy as 18 month's ago, however if you are willing to work there is still plenty of work available in Corby.
I if you have not guessed by now am proud to be a UK citizen, although our identity is being eroded beyond recognition. I do not begrudge anybody coming to our country and supporting there own family in a way they would probably have never thought possible 10 years ago.
What i do begrudge is the politics that support and is given to every race and religion apart from our own.
The Australian prime minster has got it dead right in my opinion,he said in not as many words ..... "you welcome in our country but these are our rules and our belief's, if you have a problem with these than feel free to stay away or leave. "
In fact i think he was a little more direct than that.
I do not understand how we got this way, i go abroad on holiday every year, i always go somewhere new.
When i go to these countries i always look into and respect there beliefs and rules.
I do not understand how certain factions can come to England and then try and make us respect their way of life, they should be coming to England and respecting ours.
MY back ground is simple, i come from a working class family and my natural bent is toward a labour government. However as i said at the beginning I have no definied political agenda, I will say however that the last prime minister who stood up for the UK as a country to be proud of was Baroness Thatcher.( conservative )
Seems like a lifetime ago now.
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it really concerns me that hysteria is being whipped up by the BBC and the media.
confidence is what will contribute to recovery, along with sustained rate cuts and relaxing of lending restrictions.
to watch the BBC report yesterday from the brand new bristol shopping centre, and the reporter DESPERATE for a bad news story of dire sales and worried shoppers (which he didnt get)was an example of this need for bad news.
im a manager in a large international retail destination.
The people the media find, compared to the customers i see daily, and the life i experience are very different from that im reading about.
out sales are up, my own massively this year vs last, and people are out and about and living their lives.
in a service based high street economy this is precisely what we need to get thru.
shock tactics by the media will not.
Corby will do well if properly marketed with the right brands.
people treat shopping as a leisure pursuit and people still have leisure time, lets not turn this into a bigger downturn than necessary to rebalance things.
Walking round with a large 'were all doomed' sandwich board will help no one.
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Industry used to make this countries wealth.....but then because of the competition, instead of investing in improving our competitiveness.....we simply gave up and allowed industry to close down and then relied on the financial services to make the money.....well now that has all crashed as well.
I really don't know how we can get out of this recession this time because I can't see what else this country can do to earn it's money. I am just amazed by how few people seem to be as worried as I am.
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Interesting.
I wnder what impact the recent recession will have on the young generation who grow up in neoliberal ideology in which a good citizen is a good consumer.
Young people all over the world are subject to various labelling for their potential subversion of the adult social order.
The young generation in Japan who delay marriage or an independent life and continue to sponge off their parents at home are called 'parasite singles'.
Youngsters in big Chinese cities who will spend all their monthly income and are not bothered about saving or future plans are the so-called 'moonlites'.
Whether they are worried about the number of stripes on their trainers or becoming 'moonlites' or 'parasite singles', the life choices of the young generation provide interesting insight into the constantly changing society.
While being subsumed within the shfiting wider conditions, young people today are given more scope, especially in consumer activities, for pioneering new life paths--of course, such controlling forces as education and gender tend to divide themselves and limit the choices that are available to them.
Will the looming global economic recession end an era where consumerism is more important than anything else, thus making the number of stripes on the trainers trivial?
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Ref: 05 akaDesiderata :
I read your blog with great interest and even called my wife to read it.
I could not agree more with your comments. It is something that my wife and I have said many times and that we feel very strongly about. That we admire the work ethic of many who come to work here but wish the we could be allowed and encouraged to be proud to be English and not have to compromise our beliefs and traditions to accommodate those of other races and beliefs who chose or were brought to this country.
The Australian Prime Minister was quite right when he said to those who go to his country " you are very welcome but these are our rules and beliefs, if you have a problem with them stay away or leave". As someone who has had the pleasure and privilege to visit many countries, including Muslim ones, I can honestly say that I have always respected that countries beliefs and traditions and gone out of my way not to course offence.
I feel our real problem is that our current government are so obsessed with their multicultural agenda that they cannot see that they are actually making things worse. Like you, I feel marginalized by what is happening.
I find it incomprehensible, that the Welsh and Scots can have their own Parliament and then be allowed to vote on English issues and furthermore, that our Prime Minister is Scottish and represents a West Lothian, yet denies us many of the things are are available in his own Country eg. free prescriptions, drugs, free higher education ... the list goes on.
One final point; I hear that it is now illegal to have the union flag on your number plate, we must apparently defer to Europe and have their flag. Yet more erosion of our Britishness !!!
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""If I was to wear two-stripe trainers then people would be like - 'hah! what are you wearing?'" Leanne explained to me. If you are teenager, the number of stripes on your trainers can make a difference."
If this is the kind of fatuous, superficial, shallow remark which encapsulates the teenagers our schools are turning out, then we don't deserve to succeed as a nation.
If a severe, drastic downturn is what's required to teach people some values and the meaning of community, then roll on a major recession or even a full-scale depression.
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The anecdotes are depressing ('born to shop'), though I can't help but think that Mark chose the most stereotypical people he could find. They're almost too perfect.
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Im afraid i have to aggree with some of the posts saying we need recession. very sad for those that will loose out, but we do need pulling of cloud 9. The housing market got far to strong compared to the rest of the credit markets, which in turn pushed people to borrow far beyond the modist means most live on. This then created more pretend money that people borrowed...
The sooner the markets bottom out to real money the better for all of us. We already owe most of next years tax before we even get there. We need new industrys and new tech to replace what has fallen stale of this current crissis. I had a bank phone me the otehr day offering me an account.... What an account with a failing bank. no thanks. there is only so many times the banks can be bailed out before even the lender runs short. then public services get cut blabla...
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As someone who has visited Corby preiodically over the last fifteen years to view those logistics centres I recognise the town described in this blog. I also recognise the sentiments expressed by akaDesiderata.
If you want to encapsulate the last fifteen years of British social and economic history it is all there.
The one thing we can be certain about is that this will all change. Worringly, we are be no means sure how it will change.
I pray it does not make us a crueller people.
I do hope we learn the necessary lesson that in hard times we need each other very badly.
It was a manager of one of those logistics centres who told me about three years ago that he would no longer employ UK citizens. He preferred to employ East Europeans as they could be relied upon to be there at the start of their shift, attend work every day and be ready for any overtime at the end of the shift. His objection to UK employees is that they were often late for work, had poor attendance records and would not do needed overtime as they wanted to go down the pub.
This is the problem in a nutshell. I disgreed with him but then I am not running a constant process 24/7 with penalties for non-compliance.
It will help us when we recover a sense of self-discipline, self-worth and social solidarity. The laid back individualism of a consumer society is all very fine but it does not pay the necessary bills.
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"Eskino48
The government must cut fuel tax by 40p/l and re-introduce mortgage tax relief immediately for any hope of cutting the recession quickly."
That wont help. The government should not be looking to bail out the housing market. The greed of idiots buying houses they could not afford in the hope of an infinitely extended housing boom should not be rewarded. Anyone stupid enough not to see the crash coming doesn't deserve any help. The market will find its own level, regardless of govenrment intervention. If you doubt that, ask your friends how many are looking to buy a house now- it will be none as it's now apparent to everyone that house prices have a lot further to fall and the price falls probably won't stop until 2010 at the earliest.
The government should instead look to reduce the dead weight of several hundred thousand unemployable idiots claiming benefits for the rest of their lives. Making the whole benefits system NI contribution based only would remove several hundred thousand from the registers immediately and reduce expenditure. They might even be able to increase benefits for those people who find themselves out of work through unfortunate circumstance rather than choice.
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In response to the comment from "akaDesiderata", I notice that to begin with he starts accusing the English Corby residents of clocking in at the steelworks and then sleeping or driving a cab, and praising the work ethics of the Scottish and Polish incomers, and later on complains about people coming into the country and demanding that their way of life be respected rather than just respecting ours. Do you think they should do as the English of Corby supposedly did - do one job while pretending to do another, and get paid for both? Anyone else notice this contradiction? I don't suppose he notices that most of the "certain factions" are in any case born in the UK, often of two generations standing, and so are not immigrants. If they were white, nobody would notice that they were different.
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Sorry Desiderata, but as you moved to Corby at 8, some 30 years ago you dont know what Corby was like. It has always been multi-cultural, but the social problems there were caused primarily by the Scots. If you can find the stats you will probably find that all the social welfare payments and police time was spent was all because of booze and violence from a significant percentage. As with the Poles the Scots migrated to Corby when iron ore was found and many came from the most deprived areas of Glasgow.The pubs like the Hazel Tree, The Candle and many others were full every night. There were parts of the town that were no-go areas and new estates were turned into slums within a few years of being built. Call me a racist, I don't care; most of my best friends at school were Scots, my bestman was and I still have many scots friends , even though I now live 12,000 miles away. I love the Jocks, they are generous and warm, but I suggest that if the English, (sorry DES, that is bull@#$%) were sleeping and doing other jobs, then the Scots may not have turned up because they were drunk from the previous night, or day. Not politically correct, I dont care. I was there.
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Signing in, then leaving the factory to drive a cab all night, sound familiar? It should if you were a union member of NGA/NATSOPA in the 60s/70s when they would sign in to the Evening News, then go get paid by ther Evening Standard for delivering newspapers all over London. They'd boast about it in the pubs, how they signed in as M.Mouse or D.Duck and be paid for doing nowt. Blame slack managers, greedy unions, whatever, but maybe it was just poor attitude/ rampant dishonesty, and no different from the Corby steelworker who sleeps all night or disappears to drive a taxi. (Ever watch the old movie, "I'm all right, Jack"?)
I was in nearby Northampton when British Steel closed Corby. Well done on the regeneration of the town, but nobody has slept on the job since, have they???
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Firstly "MJ_SMITH" read the comment by "aka Desiderata" again and get your facts right.
They do not accuse Corby English residence as stated in your post.
They first mearly point out that they are English which if you lived in the town you would understand the reasons for it and no where in any post does anyone with anything sensible to say mention colour other than you.
Its a bit small minded to play the race card here isnt it.
You are obviously not from the town but if you had even lived there for any length of time you would know that Corby has always had an imigrant population living and working in the town including the old steelworks and if you had worked there you would even see that these guys slept on night shift or did two jobs.
The guys who pulled these stunts were a minority,with over 5000 people working at the plant producing 24 hours a day they could not all have done this type of thing.
The imigration problem is not an overnight occurance,The UK government has continuously let its people down over the years and now we are paying the price.
People quote the Australian Prime minister allot these days but what he said is right and should apply in the uk also.
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