Last night I watched Julien Temple’s excellent Requiem for Detroit? on BBC2. It is, after a fashion, a beautiful film: a harsh beauty, but a beauty nonetheless.
The skill is in the storytelling, so I recommend watching it, but the story itself is simple. Overdependence on the motor industry set the stage for economic disaster if anything happened to the car industry; white flight to the suburbs, possible because many people could afford cars, hollowed out the city centre and the loss of a tax base turned it into a ghetto; the oil shock of the 70’s accelerated everything; racial tensions worsened as people moved from the South in search of jobs. The motor industry and the city recovered as oil prices fell, but the motor industry relied on SUVs and Detroit on the motor industry. The recent economic turmoil has dealt a hammer-blow to the city.
Barking is not a direct match for Detroit, but the closure of Dagenham Ford was a similar economic disaster. This was similarly coupled with bad social planning – specifically, right-to-buy (or, rather, the effects when the tenants who became owners moved out) – and now we have a situation in which the BNP can do well.
Perhaps some of the northern cities of England would be a better match, but Barking seems to be the focus, given that Nick Griffin is standing there and the BNP hope to take the council at the next election.
xD.
I thought it was a piece of TV well worth watching too.
It would be really interesting to know the proportions of people living inside each of our town or city boundaries and working there compared to those who commute into work. If people aren’t earning inside city boundaries, then they can’t pay much needed taxes. I suspect many cities have suffered from that problem to some extent since the 1980s.
There is a difference between Detroit & Barking, as I say, because we have different tax systems and different political systems. Nevertheless, I agree it would be interesting, as I share the same suspicion as you.