THE “r” word is on everyone’s lips as Britain formally moves into the recession that we all knew about but didn’t quite admit until the figures were too blatant to ignore. However, until last week I hadn’t heard the “s” word – slump – since my father, the greatest Jeremiah on Railway Terrace, and perhaps of the whole of Normanton, used it during the 1950s.
Having been taken out of Castleford Grammar School to work on the LMS railway as a boy clerk in the early 1930s, because he was the eldest and my grandfather’s earnings as a colliery winder were insufficient, he knew about the Great Slump at first hand. It blighted his life. And he never stopped predicting another, with relish.
So it was something of a curious historical throwback to hear the “s” word from, of all people, Tom Riordan, the youthful chairman of Yorkshire Forward, whose job is to be relentlessly cheerful about the region’s economy. On the day recession became official, Riordan admitted that 2009 is going to be a really difficult year, and the first half will be “especially tough”.
Well, it is already, with redundancies piling up like Pelion upon Ossa. Thousands of job losses have been announced at Grattan mail order, Empire Direct, an electrical retailer, at Burberry’s clothing factories in Rotherham and Castleford, in law firms, in banking and financial services, construction (what’s left of it), architects’ firms, parcel carrier HDNL and most other places.
Earlier predictions of 75,000 job losses in Yorkshire and Humberside look likely to be on the optimistic side, with predictable political consequences. In fact, 75,000 was precisely the figure of votes cast for the British National Party in council elections last May.
But Riordan insists: “We could be looking at an end to the slump in early 2010.” We could be, I suppose. We could be also looking at rocks at the bottom of a cliff approaching at dismaying speed. But we will certainly be staring down the barrel of a general election then. And his use of the “s” word in public must have sent shivers down the spines of a million older people in the region for whom this isn’t just a different word for recession, but the calling-up of old ghosts that can still frighten the pants off you.
A new survey pinpoints Hull, Barnsley and Doncaster, which saw the highest increases in jobseeker’s allowance claims of all Britain’s urban areas last year, as most at risk of rising unemployment partly because large numbers of workers are unskilled. But Leeds, the financial capital of the North, will not escape unscathed. More than 28,000 workers in the city could lose their jobs.
Modish metropolitan jokes about it being “grim up north” are beginning to fall flat. They never had much resonance up ’ere, even when Bradford & Bingley was a byword for financial orthodoxy, and now they’re worse than a Jonathan Ross late night phone call.
Stop press: Former minister and Rotherham MP Denis MacShane also used the “s” word on Radio 4’s Today programme, speaking about the crisis-hit steel industry. Stop essing about, lads.
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BUT however inclement the economic weather, brave Tykes still do their best to keep us smiling, with Calder Valley bringing the political pantomime season to an end on a dramatic note.
Amid loud lamentations in deepest Todmorden and Hebden Bridge, the mini-scandal over Labour’s not-quite prospective candidate, Janet Oosthuysen, is concluded. The party’s National Executive Committee dumped her, following her failure to disclose a police caution for damaging her former boyfriend’s car.
The decision follows months of shilly-shallying and plunges Calder Valley into a fresh selection process with – at most – a year and a bit to go before the next general election. This is a key Labour marginal in Yorkshire, vulnerable to a tiny swing. The sitting MP, much-liked Christine McCafferty, who is retiring, had a majority of less than 1,400 in 2005.
There seems to be something in the Pennine air that makes politics a hotbed of intrigue in these old mill towns, because the Tories, too, had problems.
Their original candidate, Sue Catling, was deselected after three attempts to unseat her, while her married successor, Liz Truss, was found to have had an affair with a Tory frontbencher. The current prospective candidate, Craig Whittaker, called in the police when his sexuality was questioned in an anonymous email.
Oosthuysen was unavailable for comment on her ousting, being in America for Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration at the time – perhaps not the wisest place to be just then, all things considered.
The question now is: will Tony Blair’s latest stepmother, Stephanie Booth, who was runner up to Oosthuysen by five votes in last summer’s selection, throw her dainty bonnet in the ring once again?
