Word: britain
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This all adds to the daunting challenges facing Britain's next government. Its first priority will surely be to get the economy out of the emergency room. The parties disagree on the speed and severity of action needed to cut the British deficit, but all accept that there must be reductions in public expenditure. Inevitably such cuts will hit the nation's most deprived communities hardest. And it is in such communities that the social consensus that underpins Britain's democracy is fracturing...
...Asians - British-born as well as new immigrants - looking for cheap housing. "There's a sense of competition for finite resources," says Jon Cruddas, Dagenham's MP and a Labour Party member. "These are generic forces, but they collide in an intense form here." (See pictures of 20th Century Britain...
...Come to This? The last time Britain felt this bad about itself was in 1976, when soaring inflation and unemployment forced the Labour government to seek a humiliating bailout from the International Monetary Fund. Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives took power in 1979 and went on to abolish exchange controls, cut taxes and engineer the 1986 deregulation of financial markets, known as Big Bang, restoring London's position as one of the world's most important financial centers. Blair's New Labour did nothing to restrict the unfettered growth of the City, as London's financial district is called...
...expansion of the financial-services sector and growth of the British economy masked a sharp decline in manufacturing. Faced with Britain's notoriously tetchy industrial relations and high costs, many companies chose to relocate their factories to countries offering more pliant workforces and cheaper real estate. With the strength of the pound making its Dagenham plant look wincingly expensive compared with similar subsidiaries in other countries, Ford closed its car-production lines there in 2002 after 71 years. Dagenham MP Cruddas describes the resulting job losses and social tumult as "globalization ripping through a microclimate at great speed...
...impact was greater because Britain's growing wealth has fueled growing inequality. The gap between rich and poor is only slightly narrower in the U.K. than in the U.S. and yawns much wider than in other European countries. Social mobility has stalled. The gulf between City financiers and low-income Londoners is profound. "The bankers look down from their gleaming towers in the City, and they see a depressed and depressing East End," says Dominic Carman, the parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Democrat Party in Barking. "From the East End, the City looks like an El Dorado of gleaming spires...