Word: britishisms
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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...
Someone to Blame Expecting little from the main parties that failed to arrest Dagenham's decay, some locals are turning to the British National Party (BNP), a hard-right party that proposes to repatriate residents of foreign descent and stop all immigration. Charisse, a young, unemployed mother who declined to give her last name, says people will vote for the BNP "not because they like them but because we're so pissed off." Her own grouse: she has three children, and thus her one-bedroom public-housing apartment is too small. Her companion, who has turned his back, growling that...
Barking and Dagenham - the two neighborhoods elect separate members of Parliament but make up a single London borough council - have witnessed rapid demographic change since the last national census, in 2001. At the time, 80% of locals identified themselves as "white - British." There's been a big influx of nonwhite families since then, with many blacks and 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...
...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...
...propose swifter action to reduce Britain's borrowing. That view has been bolstered over recent weeks with the world's three biggest credit-rating agencies raising concerns that the scale of debt puts Britain at significant risk of default. That might seem to raise the mortifying prospect of another British Prime Minister going cap in hand to the IMF. Ironically, the IMF backs Labour's more cautious approach to deficit reduction, warning in February that stimulus packages needed to be maintained "well into 2010 for a majority of the world's economies." (See pictures of the City of London...