This Cotton-Built Town by Trevor Hoyle

[after Betjeman. A long way after]

It once were great, this cotton-built town

A grand night out for half-a-crown,

Go out now you get knocked down

Or summat worse

We had cobbles and ginnels and gaslit streets,

A clip round th’ear from bobbies on beats.

No muggers or druggies, no benefits cheats,

Our nation’s curse.

Gradely folk they were back then

Slogged all week at mill for six-pound-ten:

Lancashire’s best – la crème de la crème,

Gone and forgot.

Walk down Drake Street now and weep

For Ivesons, Fashion Corner, the Carlton creep,

The legacy of civic pride sold cheap.

Who gives a jot?

It’s council top brass in the main

Who’ve least to lose and most to gain.

(1st class seats on the gravy train!)

Just hear their cries:

Sack the workers but keep the bosses!

That’s the way to cut the losses!

And round our necks like albatrosses

Hang the PFIs.

And where do all our taxes go?

You must be joking – don’t you know?

On bods with clipboards on go slow,

On Manchester Road –

Where roundabouts once did the job

The planners have incensed the mob,

Who write in fury to the Ob:

“Stop this load

Of nonsense, quick, it’s puerile,

Are they trying to compete in style

With illuminations on’t Golden Mile

And make things worse?”

Come, gentle Kong, and dump on Dale

Bury it deep so it can’t inhale.

Beyond a joke, beyond the pale,

Armpit of the universe.

**********************************************

A Gradely Book for Gradely Folk!

BOOK REVIEW by Christopher Draper

FOR anyone who imagines Sir Keir Starmer, a sharp-suited, Cambridge-educated lawyer and Knight of the Realm, is the embodiment of Socialism, Paul Salveson’s newly published evocation of the writings and cultural milieu of a pioneering Bolton socialist will prove a revelation.

“Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” celebrates, revisits and re-enacts a classic text (“Moorland & Memories”) published a century ago by Allen Clarke (1863-1935), an astonishingly prolific and wide-ranging radical journalist familiar to his contemporaries as the proprietor, editor and chief writer of such popular Northern newspapers as, “Teddy Ashton’s Journal – a Gradely Paper for Gradely Folk”. Clarke wrote poetry, short stories, social and political commentaries and philosophical essays. Although he was an exceptional talent, the popularity of Clarke’s writings with working folk is indicative of the vivacity and cultural diversity of the North’s pioneering socialist and labour movement before it fell beneath the wheels of electioneering and concentrated on getting careerists and snake oil salesmen into Parliament.

Salveson describes Clarke’s politics as, “Libertarian Socialist” but notes that “quite a big part of him leant towards anarchism of the non-violent Tolstoyan sort”. That’s how I first came across Clarke, whilst researching the street-level origins of British anarchism and John Tamlyn, a Burnley-based libertarian whose stories were published in “Teddy Ashton’s Journal”. Much of this very warp and weft of the everyday lives, political networks and cultural milieu of pioneering Northern socialists is still missed by London-centric historians and ivory-towered academics. In contrast Salveson digs down into his home turf and maintains living links with the people, places and politics he writes about. Through a hundred and eighty pages and twenty-eight profusely illustrated chapters, “Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” meanders around Clarke’s Lancashire homeland on foot, by bike and rail, teasing out the many and varied threads running through Clarke’s original 1920 volume. (If only Salveson had included an index readers would be spared page-turning meanderings in attempting to locate particular topics!).

Firstly we get an introduction to the man himself. Clarke was the son of cotton workers and he joined them as a “little piecer” employed in the mill when he was only eleven but the family were far from passive, ignorant victims of poverty. His father was a union activist, blacklisted for his beliefs and the family were avid readers interested in a range of intellectual topics. Appalled by the working conditions he experienced in the factories Allen turned to writing. Employed as a journalist by a series of Northern newspapers he also experimented as a newspaper proprietor and with publication of “Teddy Ashton’s Journal” hit upon a winning formula, which at its peak in the 1890’s attracted a readership of 50,000 every week.

The paper’s letters column, bulging with missives from weavers, minders and railwaymen, shows his readership was overwhelmingly working class. Clarke considered himself part of that great Northern industrial working class and his stories, both serious and comic, featured ordinary people’s lives in the mills, weaving sheds and mines. His political vision, though, extended way beyond the factories he thought so damaged the beloved landscape as well as workers lives. He delighted in nature and the wild places of the North. Salveson clearly shares Clarke’s wider vision of how socialism should and can offer so much more than higher wages and in tracing the threads of Clarke’s writings Salveson re-enacts some of Clarke’s original geographical and philosophical rambles.

Tolstoy, Gandhi, Whitman, Edward Carpenter and Michael Davitt all appear in “Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” as well as trams, windmills and steam engines. Besides the richness of detailed local history perhaps the ultimate value of this book is as a model and inspiration to readers to dig into their own home turf and rediscover the rich radical networks of mutual aid that thrived before our political vision grew dim. As Clarke recalled in “Teddy Ashton’s Lancashire Annual (1908)”:

“I remember Pendle,

Where in days gone by

Crowds of comrades gathered

‘Neath the moor top sky;

Oh the friendly greetings,

When our hearts were jolly bowls

With fellowship o’er flowing,

And the vision in our souls!”

(“Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” – priced £21 – is available at all good bookshops and WH Smith, or direct from the author at paul.salveson@myphone.coop)

The dark factories in Britain’s garment trade

Leicester's Shameful Industries & Covid-19

ON the 17th,May 2018 Sarah O'Connor in the Financial Times [FT] asked: 'How is it possible to make cheap clothes in a country where the minimum wage for over-25s is £7.83 an hour?' 

She suggested:   'Online retailers’ nimbleness and lower overheads allow them to pay more for products while still giving consumers a good price. In addition, there are manufacturers that use technology to make clothes more efficiently' and she added 'factory owners in Leicester say some take a different route, one more reminiscent of the 19th century than the 21st.  They call these places “dark factories”.'  

At that time it seemed part of May 17 2018’s garment industry in Leicester had become detached from UK employment law, 'a country within a country', where '£5 an hour is considered the top wage', even though that is illegal.  And one man said he had worked in places with blocked fire escapes, old machines and no holiday or sick pay.

Now a week ago Sarah O'Connor in the same FT wrote:
'Covid-19 has found its way into the neglected cracks in our economies. In the US, Europe and Asia, poor working conditions in care homes, meat plants and factories have helped to spread the virus.  This week [3rd, July 2020], a campaign group blamed clothing sweatshops in the English city of Leicester for contributing to a local surge in cases.  The story of Leicester’s garment district is worth knowing, because it reveals something important about how the British economy evolved in the decade between the financial crisis and this pandemic.  It also demonstrates what it will take for the country to “build back better”, as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to do this week.'

Sarah O'Connor describes how in 2018, she investigated Leicester’s clothing industry which she concludes was 'a bizarre microeconomy where £4 to £4.50 an hour was the going rate for sewing machinists in many factories (£3 for packers).'  Based on tiny sweatshops that were crammed into crumbling old buildings and legally compliant factories using expensive machines were being outcompeted by illegally underpaid humans.

When she exposed this industry two years ago she likened it to be more like the  19th Century than the 21st Century.

It seems that large scale buyers of Leicester’s clothes are based online as 'fast fashion' retailers, which have done well in the pandemic owing to the proximity and speed of their UK suppliers.   And Boohoo, which sources about 40 per cent of its clothing in the UK, much of it in Leicester, prospered in lockdown by switching nimbly to producing leisurewear for the homebound, while rivals were left with shipping containers from Asia full of summer party dresses.

It seems that the big boy on the block Boohoo’s co-founder Mahmud Kamani has become a billionaire and is set for a £50m bonus if Boohoo’s share price continues to rise.  And the campaign group Labour Behind the Label has alleged that the some of company’s suppliers contributed to the spread of coronavirus; meanwhile Boohoo says it adhered to all government guidance and that its supply chain adheres to all labour laws, though it does not publish a list of its suppliers.

Sarah O'Connor reports that:
'Leicester’s sweatshops, which comprise part but not all of the city’s garment sector, were an open secret even before my investigation began. In fact, a senior Whitehall official first told me about them.  A local official in Leicester warned me in 2018 that, if I published my story, I would cause mass unemployment for people with no other options. In fact, nothing changed.  After publication, I was invited to testify at a parliamentary select committee hearing into the costs of online fast fashion.  The government rejected every one of the committee’s recommendations.'


Ms. O'Connor writes:  'As unemployment rises in the months ahead, it will be vital to focus on jobs.  But to prioritise quantity while turning a blind eye to quality would be to repeat past mistakes.' 

Tellingly she points to the crucial coming dilemma:  'As well as the feared harm to public health, Leicester’s economy will suffer from a prolonged lockdown and fall further behind more prosperous parts of the UK.  So much for “levelling up”.  In truth, there was always an economic cost to allowing labour exploitation to flourish.  The garment factories are a microcosm of Britain’s productivity problem.  Job creation boomed after the financial crisis and ministers did not worry initially about their quality.  They pushed up the minimum wage but left it badly under-enforced, while cutting back health and safety inspections to free up “entrepreneurialism”.'

This is all too reminiscent of other industries which have suffered like the British building trade and outsourcing.

*******************