Pontypool: We Forgot Them & We Will Pay a Heavy Price

By Shlomo Maital

  wales

   Journalist Aditya Chakrabortty has been covering the “post industrial” depressed areas of Britain for The Guardian. These are the people who once had good jobs in factories and mines, who have been forgotten and neglected by governments in Britain, the rest of Europe and the U.S.   They became invisible.

       Now, after Trump and Brexit, perhaps we are waking up. Perhaps we are beginning to see them.   Here are parts of Chakrabortty’s vivid description of a once-wealthy Wales town.   If Brexit and Trump act to truncate globalization, it will be because we forgot those who lost because of it, and celebrated only those who gained. Post industrial? “Post” implies something came after ‘industrial’. But what? Poverty? Hardship?

     “The story of Pontypool is a story of riches squandered, of dynamism blocked, of an entire community slung on the slagheap. Sat atop vast deposits of iron ore and coal, it was probably the first industrial town in Wales. For a time, under Victoria, it was richer than Cardiff. Even now, to look along its skyline is to see traces of wealth: the park with its Italian gardens and bandstand; the covered market with its olde price list for snipes or a brace of pheasants; the 25 listed buildings that make this one of the most sumptuous small town centres in Britain.

       “Then look down. On a typical weekday, the indoor market is a desert. Those bits of the high street that aren’t to let are betting parlours, vaping dens and charity shops: the standard parade for hollowed-out towns across Britain. The reason isn’t hard to fathom: the mines shut down decades back; the factories have pretty much disappeared. Those big employers still left aren’t big employers any more. One of the staff at BAE tells me that when he joined in 1982, it had 2,500 workers on its shopfloor; now, he reckons, it has 120.

       “Swaths of Pontypool and the surrounding region of Torfaen now rank among the poorest in all Britain. On part of one of its housing estates in Trevethin, 75% of all children under four are raised in poverty. Over half – 53% – of all households who live on that stretch are below the poverty line. With that come all the usual problems: families that can’t pay the rent, that are more likely to fall prey to a whole range of sicknesses, from mental health to cancer. Those people can expect to die 20 years before their near-neighbours in some of the better-off areas in Pontypool. First the economy died out, now its people are too.

     “Pontypool is like the rest of south Wales, like many other parts of Britain I have reported from. It’s what politicians and economists call “post-industrial”. That term, though, implies something coming after; here, hardly anything has come after. A few years ago Pontypool town centre was declared on the verge of death by a local councillor, who bore a coffin lid in a mock funeral procession.”