I’ve been working in London for the past week and I’ve been talking to friends here about Detroit and what happened at “Taking Charge of Our Story” a week ago. One friend started talking to me about Dagenham—an industrial town on the east side of London.
In 1924, Ford Motor Company (Anyone in Detroit ever heard of them?) plunked down £167,695 to buy 300 acres of marshland for a car manufacturing complex. The plants opened seven years later, producing Model A’s for the British market. It employed as many as 8,000 people over the next seven decades and was one of the United Kingdom’s largest auto plant complexes, according to the BBC.
Ford Fiesta assembly operations ceased at Dagenham in 2002. Today, employment in Dagenham is half what it was at its peak. So Time magazine swooped down on east London a week ago, mentioned Dagenham’s dismal fortunes and overabundance of pawn shops and used the town as the poster child for Britain’s current political and economic malaise, adding (in case you missed it), “It’s a depressing tableau, one all too familiar: just like Detroit, this once vibrant center of auto manufacturing seems stuck in a spiral of persistent decline.”
I wrote a piece a week or so ago for Huffington Post in which I said that Detroit’s problems are not Detroit’s, they are America’s. I can see that I understated the connections I was trying to make. Detroit’s problems are the world’s—or at least the problems of the West’s developed industrial (now going post-industrial) countries. Apparently, it is beyond either American or British legislators to create industrial policies aimed at preserving communities and stemming the international flight of capital and jobs.
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