But before changes at a national level can be enacted by governments of the radical left, locally we can start right away. Indeed, in its own way, a revolution from below has already begun.
Ending Neoliberalism 1: The Preston Model
Two centuries ago the inventor Richard Arkwright’s home city of Preston was at the leading edge of the Second Disruption as it, like towns and cities across Lancashire, embraced the new technologies of steam-power and coal. More recently, however, Preston had become a backwater, with manufacturing going elsewhere and its early advantage in the Industrial Revolution exhausted long ago. As a result its economic future resembled that of Britain more generally, its best bet being to attract as many low-productivity, service-sector jobs as it could. That explains why, until 2011, local politicians bet the house on a proposed shopping centre, named ‘Tithebarn’, which they reckoned would create thousands of new jobs.
So when the Tithebarn project finally sank, the city’s politicians found themselves out of ideas. The truth was that the global economic crisis which started several years earlier made the development highly unlikely, no matter the wishes of local government. Premised on an economic model of retail and consumer debt, the numbers no longer made sense. Within the broader context of austerity and spending cuts, imposed most harshly on local government, prospects for Preston’s economy appeared bleaker than ever.
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