Faisal Islam: The big problem for whoever wins the election – BBC News

Amid a vast expanse of rubble, dust and noise, a green crane tugs at a corrugated roof, like a frustrated dentist trying to extract a stubborn wisdom tooth.

Honda’s Swindon plant, once one of the most advanced car factories in the world, is to be demolished thirty years after opening.

This used to be one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. It was one of the crown jewels of the investments that Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s venture attracted to Britain. Swindon voted for her, John Major, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. It was also one of the first cities to vote in favor of Brexit, with 55%.

Inflation, rising healthcare costs and cuts to central government subsidies meant cuts to libraries, the Dial-a-Ride community transport service and dimmed street lighting. Municipal tax has increased by almost 5%. The council’s leader has warned that further cuts will impact frontline services.

What is happening in Swindon is a visible consequence of slow long-term economic growth. Indeed, public spending cuts, low private investment, deindustrialisation and shrinking disposable income have left scars on what was one of Britain’s famous booming cities.

The Honda site will become a warehousing and logistics facility. In another world, it would have been replaced by another major global manufacturer. Tesla, for example, was invited. While five years ago the promise was to uplift the depressed northern towns, places like Swindon feel neutralised.

The question of what growth will emerge in this city is crucial for whoever wins Thursday’s election.

Elsewhere in the world, sites like these are being converted for the production of electric cars. The Americans are pumping government money into their factories to try to compete with China, which will soon become the world’s largest auto exporter. Emerging economies from Indonesia to Vietnam to Turkey are also investing in and growing their auto industries.

Last year, Honda’s entire production line, including dozens of unused industrial robots, was packed up and shipped to Turkey via the M4 and the port of Bristol.

Swindon is not just about Honda. It is part of the M4 corridor where there are plenty of jobs in the knowledge sectors and in the financial sector, for example at Nationwide’s headquarters. The overall unemployment rate is only 2.6%, but the number of people not working and not looking for work is 18%.

Marcus Kittridge, a former Honda engineer who now runs a cafe in the city center with his wife Tracey, acknowledges there are still “good employment prospects” but says many are earning the minimum wage or “50p above”, saying that this has contributed to a decline in disposable income in the city centre. “It’s like a northern city that lost its industry in the 1970s,” he tells me.

They now close the café every day at 2 p.m. due to the high energy price. He expects to pass on his rising costs in higher prices over the next two years. They have also stopped selling smoothies, following a notable decline in the availability and quality of fresh fruit, which they blame on post-Brexit changes.

“We were told that the quality of food would improve after Brexit, but I can tell you now that it hasn’t. I’ve hardly heard a politician talk about it, but it’s definitely had an impact on us,” says Tracey.

Could she have been a bit unlucky with her purchases of fresh produce? “If I’m unlucky, I’m unlucky every day and I’m probably the unluckiest person on earth,” she says.

Their experience shows that some of the underlying factors of slow long-term growth – high energy prices, low disposable income, low investment and new trade barriers – can come together in unusual ways.

Gary Huett, a retired graphic designer, also from Swindon, who contacted us as part of the BBC’s Your Voice, Your Vote project, inviting you to tell us what matters, wanted to know why Swindon town center looked “rotten” and asked if anything could change.

“We now have mainly pound shops, and the thriving nightlife, full of the yuppie set of the Eighties and Nineties, is gone and in decline.”

The Conservatives say the green shoots are already there. The latest growth figures for January to March show that Britain now has the fastest-growing economy in the G7 group of advanced economies, after a brief recession last year. Swindon’s jobs record remains strong. New investment has come into the Honda site and jobs are set to return, albeit in warehouses rather than manufacturing.

For Labour, Swindon – a major city whose residents have voted in the same way as the eventual national winner for the past forty years – shows that there are no quick fixes.

They are not competing with the US or the European Union (EU) with large public investments in green energy. Council spending remains unprotected and subject to the same persistent pressures. A looser planning regime might help to build more houses or expand the solar farms dotting the countryside around cities. But the task of transformation is very real. When asked what will happen if the economy does not grow, Labour has responded by saying some variation of “I’m not defeatist” or “we can do it”.

When I interviewed Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves in Swindon, I said that if she relied on planning changes to transform growth prospects they would have to be a revolutionary, almost Thatcher-esque “Big Bang”. She told me: “It’s a big reform we’re offering… if we don’t grow the economy, we’ll be stuck in a vicious circle of low growth, high taxes and poor public services.”

Labour’s hope is that a tsunami of private investment that has been held back from this country by political and economic instability can be unleashed, the party says, by tens of billions of people with a strong and stable, growth-promoting government.