Word: dagenham
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...quid for this?" she asks. After haggling with the assistant, she leaves with half that sum, passing a display case of trinkets earlier customers failed to redeem, including a clutch of diamanté rings spelling out the word Mum. Sentimentality is an indulgence nobody in Dagenham can afford. (See pictures of the U.K. at home...
...Dagenham's decline is emblematic of the ebbing of Britain's manufacturing prowess - and the way in which shifts in the global economy can strip a place of jobs like a hurricane takes leaves off a tree - then its main street captures a national mood of hopelessness and anger. All of Britain is in a deep funk: although its economy is finally growing after a prolonged recession, that growth is so tender that many fear it will shrivel and give way to a second, deeper contraction. Britons are downcast, their politicians discredited. In one of the world's oldest democracies...
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...
...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...