A Tale of Two Towns
Sep. 7th, 2009 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
millionreasonsI didn't live in Edlington, I grew up in a village about 6 miles, or a world, away. Our tiny town had a duck pond and a castle and a Norman church and a WI and village in bloom competition. Edlington had a closed colliery and a Netto. School-leavers ("Edlo Mafia") who would have once presumably gone down the mine, hung around the gate terrorising the pupils. It's possible those school-leavers have had kids who have had kids by now and there's three generations of people with fuck all to do. If Tesco moved in, it would be welcomed as the majority employer.
The anarchist group squating the old Vortex bar in Stoke Newington spread rumours that Tesco were interested in acquiring the site as a way of bolstering support for the campaign against the building being sold. When I write about being so lucky to live here, I'm not being disingenuous. It's not as though I would have ever ended up on benefits in Edlington but when younger, a life in Doncaster seemed a possibility, especially when careers classes talked about YTS being the only viable option, despite the school being a mix of middle and working class children of differing abilities (there were only a couple of children from my infant school who went onto to be privately educated). It's probably different now; Harold Wilson have opened the school in 1967 and New Labour may have funded new buildings but they also introduced school selection, allowing middle class families to choose the school rather than the school being chosen by its locality.
Doncaster has a new Mayor from the "UK Democrats" party, presumably some kind of offshoot of UKIP, voted in on what appears to be an anti-PC ticket, he has stopped the funding for the gay pride march and threatened to cut English-as-a-second-language teaching. The (Labour) council has tried hard to move the place from being ex-industrial to call centres and binge drinking to being a shoppers paradise - they lured in Debanhams and Starbucks and (gasp) a bookshop. Stoke Newington would resist a coffee chain but here not only is it welcomed as a sign of aspiration fulfilled, it also keeps the frappuccino slupring teenagers out of the pubs. To resist materialism and consumerism, you first have to have the materials to consume. People without stuff want stuff and the (liberal) people with the stuff want to reject the stuff. The building where I work houses the organic food and veg organisation and a council nursery. The middle class staff of the former cycle to work. The latter, despite being on minimum wage, all drive huge SUVs.
Climate change protesters camped out at Drax power station in order to highlight the ongoing high carbon emissions from coal-fired power but I, despite working for the aforementioned organic organisation, found it quite difficult to support these actions. Monied people from Wiltshire telling people relying on this industry that they should be - what? working for Greenpeace? - sticks in the craw somewhat, just as it did when Jamie Oliver instructed Rotherham mothers not to pass burgers to their kids through the school gates. I know Fatty Short Tongue is right, but it riles me, the mockney Essex boy thinking he knows best, like the lady philanthropists of the 19th century instructing the slum people on how to live. What middle class people always get wrong is that they think working class people want to be like them and only need to be shown how. Middle class people have gone on flights and eaten steak and driven cars for decades, why shouldn't working class people now do the same?
When Doncaster social services had more kids on the at risk register dying than in Haringey the media (until now), weren't that interested. Places like Edlington have been forgotten and it's a lazy cliche, but New Labour has failed them. Labour spent so much energy courting Kent and Essex and middle England that they abandoned their support base and now that support base is biting back - it won't save them in the Tory landslide of 2010. I don't believe that the 19% of Barnsley who voted for the BNP are natural racists, I believe they don't feel that enough is being done to benefit them and I think they're probably right. New Labour has a Milton Friedman-esque vision of the likes of Doncaster and Barnsley - that the market will sort everything out, that call centres and warehouse distribution units will move there because the workforce is cheaper and that workforce will then spend their money on aspirational goods. Everyone's happy. Until recession kicks in, as it tends to every 10 years or so.
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