Upstream - Documentary #2: Welcome to Frome Pt. 2 - A Town Divided

Episode Date: August 31, 2016

In this second episode of our 3-part series, "Welcome to Frome", we explore the darker history of the small Somerset town of Frome.  ​ In this episode, you'll meet more Frome residents, more politicians, local historians, experts in the field of inequality, and a filmmaker. We'll tackle some timely topics and ask some difficult questions. What are the scars left from thirty years of closing factories and cutting government services? How do these scars reveal themselves in our hearts and in our communities? Is it possible to bridge the economic, social, and psychological divides that carve up our societies? If it's possible, then how do we do it? Featuring: Des Cornish - Born and raised in Frome John Payne - Local historian and author Annabelle Macfadyen - Co-organizer, Home in Frome Bob Ashford - Chair of Trustees, Fair Frome Sam Phripp - Somerset District Councilor Richard Seymour - Marxist writer, broadcaster, and activist Joseph Choonara - Spokesperson, Socialist Workers Party Richard Wilkinson - Co-author of The Spirit Level Kate Pickett - Co-author of The Spirit Level Katharine Round - Director of the film The Divide Music by: Molly Murphy (a million creatures) Annabelle Macfadyen Frome Street Bandits Theme music by Lanterns (Robert Raymond & Molly Murphy) This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A radio documentary series that is part of the Economics for Transition project. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond.

Join us as we journey upstream to the heart of our economic system and discover cutting-edge stories of game-changing solutions based on connection, resilience, and prosperity for all. Welcome to part two of our three-part series on the town of Froome. In the last episode, we talked to members of the radical new council behind a number of revolutionary new policies and economic initiatives. We also heard a bit about some of the challenges Froome faces and explored some of the town's old scars.

In this episode, part two, we're going to dive deeper into parts of Froome's darker history and explore the divisions within the town. We'll hear about how some of these divisions are part of a much larger story, a story which goes back almost a half a century and which spans the entire globe. Welcome to Froome, home in Froome, so happy to be here in wonderful Froome. Home in Froome, home in Froome, when you're in its bosom you're never alone. Home in Froome, home in Froome, so happy to be here, wonderful Froome, Home in Froome, Home in Froome, new, new, new, new. Growing up in Froome was a great place. It was a lovely place to live. It was a lot smaller in them days.

And everybody knew everybody. And it was a fabulous place to grow up. I could never imagine living in anywhere else because that's how good Froome was back then. This is Des Cornish. Everybody knew everybody. That's how it seemed. You knew everybody. And if how it seemed you knew everybody and if anything

happened you were there everybody was friendly everybody got on with everybody everybody would help each other if there was something wrong you could guarantee somebody would be knocking on your door to help you or but it's not like that anymore sometimes you don't even speak to your neighbors anymore because you don't know them. What changed? What was kind of the turning point? Or when did you start to see changes? I left school in 1970, and that's when it started to change, really.

Things started slowing down, things moving out. The town died back in the 70s, and it never took off again, never. Why, I don't know. I don't know why. All the big factories were laying off and closing down. Unemployment was quite big, quite vast in Freen. Even the big factory, when I met my wife, she worked in a big factory and they closed down and moved down. And so she had to find other work. The firm was called Besics, B-E-S-W-I-C-K-S.

This is John Payne, an author and historian who lives in Froome. He co-edited a book published in 2012 called Working Memories, which is a celebration of Froome's history presented through a collection of the memories of over 80 Froome residents. It was slightly odd for him. It had begun in someone's back garden, I think in North London in the 1930s, and it eventually moved down to Froome. And it ended up employing large amounts of local women in particular. This was supposed to be something to do with the size of women's fingers and the fact that they were supposed to be much better at doing fiddly jobs of that sort. But there was also obviously the small question that if you employed large amounts of part-time women, you could pay them far less than you would have

had to pay men. But having said that, I mean, the overwhelming response we got from the women who had worked at Bessix was actually what a bright and cheerful place it had been to work. They organised the work in a way that the women were able to chat and to gossip and to listen to music while they were actually doing the work. And they also tended to go out together and if you ask older people in Frome about the Beswick girls they were the absolute terror of the town because they they used to hunt in packs and they were sort of hard drinking and pretty hard on men too at times so this factory was sold lock stock and barrel to china all the equipment was actually taken out to china and we now have virtually no industry anywhere in this country which is actually making something as simple and basic as industrial fuses but not one of the people we interviewed actually said this is

ridiculous or evil or this is the result of this dreadful process called globalization unfortunately they simply accepted it that that was the way of the world. And in a way, I think they're actually right. And exactly what they could have done about it, I'm not too sure. If you can make it cheaper somewhere else, you're going to make it cheaper somewhere else. Here's Des again. People aren't sentimental anymore.

Those days are gone, long gone, aren't they? Hence why the factories are closed down. Because they can make it cheaper somewhere else so what was the yeah what was the sense from the workers that you knew who worked at these factories how did they feel about it well everybody was like up in arms you know everybody was doing their best with the unions and everything to keep the employment but if it's going to close down it's going to close down, it's going to close down. You couldn't do nothing.

Your hands were tied, you just had to accept it. In some cases, these industries were just closed overnight. This is Annabelle McFadden, part of the group which set up the Working Memories Project. She's also the partner of former Froome mayor Peter McFadden, who we heard from in part one. It was devastating for people, and they really lost all their social ties, as well as their work and, you know, what that meant for them, obviously.

And so what was your sense of how people responded at the time? It's quite likely that they took it as just something that had happened to them and that's probably my take on it. From the people that I've met, there is a sort of fatality or sense of fatality about it. There wasn't anything that they could do about it, do you know what I mean? Working Memories was inspired by a photo exhibition that came through Froome. It was called Home, and basically it showed the experiences of working people in the 70s, 60s and 70s, and about the human costs of globalisation and the effect that it had on

people. It was a very moving show. A lot of people in Froome came along from all different walks of life and from across the divide, if you like, and they had very strong responses to it and they also wanted to tell their stories. They found it was a kind of mirror to some of the things that happened in Froome in terms of the industries closing down, their feelings about that, and how Froome had changed.

And so that's really started us thinking about how we might begin to listen to stories of people in Froome. One of the joys of actually doing this project has been in an odd kind of way to actually validate the working lives of those people to say actually what you did was of value and that the fact that things have changed you know that is not actually your fault that is actually nothing directly to do with you i'm wondering you, you know, as someone seeing all the different things happening in the bigger picture and the themes, did you ever feel like you wanted to engage in those kind of conversations? Yes. And did you try to have

those conversations or talk about that at all? No, no. I didn't want to appear to be forcing people to say things that they didn't particularly want to say. But I did sometimes have an informal chat with people after the interview about it. But it was quite clear that none of them had any kind of political analysis of exactly why these things were happening. I mean, there was a sense of fatalism about it. I was simply waiting for them to tell me how dreadful these things were. But that was something they weren't telling me. but that was something they weren't telling me. And I have wrestled with that one. I've actually written about it.

And my conscience is not clear on the matter, and I don't know how I could really have done otherwise. The book Working Memories has become a kind of town treasure. You'll find it on coffee tables and bookshelves of many of the homes in Froome. Some of the people in it have said to me that they're always showing it to their neighbours and their friends and their children and their grandchildren, and in some cases their great-grandchildren too. And I mean, it's become a very proud family heirloom for quite a lot of these people. When people pick up the book, political analysis is not what they're looking for. I think what they're looking for is positive stories about their friends and neighbours and their old workmates and so on and so forth.

So in that sense, I mean, I think it has made a contribution within the town to making people feel more positive about their own working lives. I mean, more positive about the town that they live in, but it's done absolutely nothing at all to increase understanding of exactly why these things have happened. We asked Des to tell us what happened to the people who lost their jobs. A lot of people went self-employed like I did and were finding work that way and like I say a lot of us was finding jobs in other towns you know some close towns like Worms, Dirtrow, Ridge but there's no employment in Friam as such there's no big employment in Friam. Other people retired I think for them it was probably the most difficult group because they felt that somehow they had failed in a rather sort of strange kind of way that the job they'd been doing, and which particularly for the men had been the thing that gave real meaning to their lives, had suddenly been pulled out from underneath

their feet. The firm had been closed down as if it had never existed and had never really been making any kind of useful contribution to society. Here's Annabelle again. There certainly was a sadness with talking to those people about the way that that whole, the whole shutting down of the industries had affected them. And I think there's probably a legacy of that now. There are small industries in Froome now, a few, but mostly they are a small scale, like this kind of office-based work. So it's a different kind of world now that people are in and I suppose they find their social connections in other ways.

We asked Des what happened to the buildings. Well, they pulled all the factories down, they demolished them and built houses on them. For one instance, the carpet factory is, you know, where Asda Superstore is. Well, as you come back, there's the river. And all them houses that was built by the river, that is where the carpet factory was. And it's all houses now.

But they don't build anything else. They just keep building houses. So lots of houses, but not as many places to work. No. What is it supposed to be the seventh best place in Britain to live, Fring? What do you think about that? Well, I can't see that because there's nothing here. Absolutely nothing.

So over the past few decades, industry has largely left Froome, and the space which it occupied has been replaced by housing. Much of this housing is being developed to accommodate newcomers to Froome, but very little is affordable. The cost of housing in Froome is just mad now. This is Bob Ashford of the organisation Fairfroom. We spoke with him in part one. Both in terms of house purchasing and rentals.

And from the market, even three years ago, there was a property market which had a lot of property on the market. Go to estate agents' windows, lots of stuff there now. Now, stuff comes on, goes almost immediately. People pay the asking price sometimes even more than the asking price. So there's a house inflation, which is going on here, and a rent inflation also, which is going on here, which is great for the estate agents, it's great for landlords, great for people selling houses. But if you're living in Froome, and you've been here,

and you've been living in Froome for some time particularly young people who want to actually stay in Froome get a job in Froome find somewhere to rent in Froome or find somewhere to buy in Froome that's becoming increasingly sort of distant for them now and they really struggle and there is you know there is a feeling that you know for many people in the town that actually whilst this kind of gentrification is good for many people, for them, it's actually not and they're suffering. They've got their noses pressed against the window of opportunity and they're standing outside of it. So I guess my background is I was born and raised in Froome. So I kind of lived in Froome all my life. This is Sam Fripp. I was a councillor for Froome on the district council and the county council and sat as a Liberal Democrat councillor.

I worked in Froome until very recently. And yeah, I feel like Froome kind of runs through me in one way or another. So this idea of a divide between old Froome and new Froome, what's your sense of that? Do you think it exists or what's your interpretation? Do you know, a lot of people don't agree with me that it exists. And often, and I don't want to sound like a stick in the mud when I say this, but often that's because they probably are new Froome and so they don't realize that it exists. But I do think that exists because for me, a lot of the people that have moved into Froome from London, from other places in the world sometimes, but I notice it much more from people who moved to Froome from London, who moved to

Froome because of the great arts culture and the vibrancy and house prices are a lot cheaper than London, but they're also lovely houses and that kind of thing. And the kind of laid back culture and cafes and theatres and things like that is It's lovely. But actually, for people who, like me, grew up on the Mount, you know, which is a pretty deprived area, Froome has the most pockets of deprivation within the local authority area. And for those people, I don't think the theatres matter that much because they're not really accessing it.

And for those people, there is still a likelihood that their life chances just aren't as good as everybody else's. So I guess guess for me, there is the new Froome, old Froome dichotomy, because there are still a bunch of people who, in my heart, I still think are kind of being left behind. And I know that's not anybody's effort. You know, I know that nobody's trying to do that. But I just think that's probably still the case. So just for the audience that might not understand, can you just clarify a little bit around the Mount and you're saying it's the most deprived area where? Okay, so I was a

district councillor. So for the Mendip district council area, which is 70,000, 80,000 people, I think that's probably wrong, but somewhere it's a lot of people. And I know that Froome in itself has the pockets of worst deprivation within that area. So, you know, people think that the southwest of the UK is kind of affluent. And certainly Froome, you know, with house prices going through the roof and all this lovely stuff going on, that that's happening. But we still have those areas of deprivation. And as far as I've seen, that deprivation isn't necessarily getting any better. You know, I know that the town council has certain programs and things to help that and to make that better and to kind of bring things together. And that's really

important. I'm just interested as to how much that's working. I hope I'm not, I don't think I'm saying anything super controversial or anything. I feel like councillor senses are thinking you shouldn't be saying this. Do you feel uncomfortable talking about this? I don't. I think because I was on the council for a period of time, you would constantly look to bring people together and not divide. I don't think anything I'm saying is dividing people. But I guess it's that kind of putting people into boxes, which I, yeah, I think I struggle with a little bit. But what would be the better way to talk about it? Do you think?

I don't think there is any better way because the divide is there. The divide is real. So, yeah. I mean, I never imagined that I'd be, you know, helping to run a food bank. Here's Bob again. If you'd asked me that 10 years ago, I would have thought that was just ridiculous. Why not? That we need food banks, you know.

Why would people need to go? Why would people, anybody, you know, be so desperate that they'd actually need to go along to ask for food, you know, when you would think in a Western civilised country that, you know, that just shouldn't occur, really. Even now I talk to people and they say, why is there a food bank in the town? Why do you need to provide this? Surely, you know, people find

themselves in dire need. There's a welfare state around them, you know, and there used to be. And it used to be, as I said just now, that if you found yourself, you know, 20 years ago, out of work, or even 10 years ago, or even five years ago, out of work, then you could claim benefits, you can claim benefits you get benefits straight away and that would sort of that would help you over that period now what happens now is it and people are amazed to discover this that one day you can be in employment and in a really good job and the next day you can find yourself out of work and you expect that you can go along and you can get help from the state well Well, you might get it, but it

won't be anything like the level that used to be provided at. And the chances are you won't get it for many weeks either. So unless you actually know people or you have family to support you around you, then you're going to really struggle or you're going to go under, which people actually do. So there's changes in welfare benefits, there's changing in housing, there's changing and welfare benefits, not just for workers, but also for people with disabilities, etc. They've been reduced. Welfare benefits haven't kept up with inflation. There used to be grants provided for people. If you were lucky enough to get a social housing or somewhere you could afford,

then you could get grants to provide you with furniture and all that kind of thing. Well, all those things have gone now. Des told us about his personal experience with cutbacks. They were always cutting back on health. The NHS, they were cutting back on. For our listeners outside of the UK, the NHS is the National Health Service, the publicly funded healthcare system in England.

Like, I was getting housing benefit for being disabled, they cut back on that. Council tax benefits, all that stopped. What Bob and Des are describing here is the process of reducing government expenditure known as fiscal austerity, or government cutbacks. It's a series of policies being implemented worldwide, and it's part of the larger neoliberal project that began in the 70s and 80s and continues through today. They say they put up the minimum wage to £7.20 an hour,

so you get £300 a week. Now, this government government they still state it that you need 300 pound a week to stay above poverty level but they'll give a disabled 110 pound a week so we're allowed to be in poverty and when i had that discussion with a tory mp oh no it's not like. I said it's fact it is like that. I get £110 a week. That's nowhere near £300 a week, is it? They say you need £300 a week

to stay above poverty level. So this government is making poverty. Another quick note. Tories are the Conservative Party in the UK, similar to the Republicans in the United States. And MPs, they're members of Parliament, like a congressperson. What did the MP say to that? She got funny and walked out.

She was sat where you are, and she couldn't answer me. She just went. I even said to her, you have a month of my life. I'll have a month of yours., I'll have a month of yours, and we'll see who changes first. And it was that, where it's always, oh, don't work like that, she stormed off. If you didn't want to know.

And then she turned around at the door and said, I don't think you'll be voting Tory then, do you? And I said, no way in this world. So who would you vote for then? Or what party are you feeling better meets your needs? I would find it hard to vote anything else, but I did have a soft spot. If I was going to vote for somebody else, it would be UKIP. UKIP is the UK Independence Party, a far-right party which pushed hard for the UK to leave the EU during the lead-up to the referendum.

The head of UKIP during the campaign was a politician named Nigel Farage, who many have likened to Donald Trump because of his strong rhetoric around immigration and nationalism. What is it that they say that resonates with you? Well, because they sounded compassionate. resonates with you well because they were they sounded compassionate they they wanted to to help the health service and all that generates i mean the disabled everything i know it was only talk but they were saying the right things but it would have been hard for me to vote for somebody else because i've always voted for her i was a big a big Margaret Thatcher fan when she was in charge of this country. I loved her.

I loved everything about her. What about Margaret Thatcher did you like or appreciate? Because she could connect with the normal people of this world. You know, I mean everyday people. I don't mean the rich, high, almighty up in London. I mean the everyday people. She connected with us in what way like what would she say it was only talk but she would say things that you wanted to

hear and her ways was she pushed for them sort of things this is why people voted for maggie patrick which is not everybody but the majority did because she got in, didn't she? Because she said the right things and she tried to do it, didn't she? So one of the things that Margaret Thatcher is known for is something called neoliberalism. I'm wondering what you think about that phrase or term. I can't say I really understood it a lot because I have a tonal vision. I'm not big on politics.

My understanding about neoliberalism is because both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, they both did come in with this idea of trickle-down economics, that if they make it easier to create big businesses, it'll create more jobs and more wealth at the top, and then that'll trickle down to workers. And that'll help everything in terms of economics of a country. But that neoliberalism is creating more and more free trade so that there's more ability

to trade with other countries like, say, China or just less and less restrictions. and less restrictions. So more and more free trade, less unions, so that people who own businesses can pay less to the workers and kind of make more and more profit. But that's all backfired, isn't it, basically? Yeah. What do you mean by backfired? Well, because the government now have come out and said, haven't they, that minimum wage

has got to be £7 so they are trying to get that above poverty and I can understand that side of it where now they can't employ people and just pay them peanuts can they they've got to pay them this

minimum wage which to me that's a good thing and destroying the unions or she tried to probably They've got to pay them this minimum wage. To me, that's a good thing. And destroying the unions, or she tried to, probably brought her down in the end. Because you need unions. So the erosion of unions and then the more free trade, this actually made things worse and worse for the working class over the years, both in the United States and in the UK.

It made inequality between rich and poor wider and wider, so more and more. And it actually is part of the reason why so many industries went overseas to, say, China or India or somewhere else, because they could move the companies more freely and then they could have less environmental regulations and lower wages and that kind of thing. So it actually kind of backfired. And nowadays, you know, we've heard people who worked alongside Margaret Thatcher and other people that they were wrong. They probably were wrong. I've never been in a union in all my life. They probably were wrong.

I've never been in a union in all my life. But like I said, my wife was in a union and they really fought to keep her jobs. They didn't succeed. Yeah. But he didn't just say, oh, well, that's the end of that then and move on. They did try. And without unions, you wouldn't have had that. Yeah.

So I think it's a good thing for a union. I think we need unions in the world. So what about the Socialist Workers Party? I know that's kind of a smaller party, but I just mention it because it's another party in the UK that also is really about the ordinary people and the working class, and it's very pro-union, and it's very pro... I don't know much about it, to be honest.

Well, one of the big differences, let's take UKIP and the Socialist Workers' Party, for example, is that UKIP is, would you say, pretty anti-immigrant? I've got nothing... It's the same that's going on now. I've got nothing against people coming to this country, as long as they're... Whatever they're coming to do in this country is an advantage. I don't want it to be a disadvantage to the country

because how does that work? If they're bringing something to the country that's going to help this country, great, bring it on. I'm all for that. But I don't see the point in these people coming over here and just making our dole queues even longer i don't see the logic in that i don't see how that works you know there's homeless people in this country english homeless people in this country so why are we bringing people in from other countries to be homeless? UKIP are partly based, actually I would say predominantly based,

on a sector of the middle class, the traditional lower middle class. This is Richard Seymour, a Marxist writer, broadcaster, and activist. This is Richard Seymour, a Marxist writer, broadcaster and activist. He lives in London, where he spoke with us via Skype during the lead up to the Brexit vote in June. That sector of society has always been a bedrock of hard right Thatcherism. And when you've got a sort of an economy that is in a very bad way, that has been in crisis for a long, long time. And I'm not just talking about the credit crunch. I'm talking about the fact that profit opportunities are so poor that businesses everywhere, but particularly in the United Kingdom, are hoarding cash, hundreds of billions of pounds worth of cash that they're not investing and could be investing.

In that circumstance, they'll look for anything to try and restore profitability. This government is essentially giving us neoliberalism max, which basically means trying to use as many policy instruments as possible to reduce wages, to increase the dependence on debt and speculation, and to open up the public sector to more and more encroachment by the private sector. So if you can't make a profit in the private sector, you can come into the public sector if you're a privileged corporation and make money off the NHS, make money off the schools, make money off some other area that has previously not been privatized. So that's what we're getting here. And the choices are between, at least in the sort of mainstream debate, are just between different iterations of neoliberalism.

What we've been seeing in the UK with the rise of parties like UKIP and in the US with the increasing popularity of Donald Trump is that there are a large number of people who've abandoned mainstream politics. The Labour and the Tory parties in the UK, along with the Democrats and the Republicans in the US, both hold fast to neoliberal ideologies that have disempowered the vast majority of people in both of these countries. So the big question now is, is there a way to include these disaffected groups into a progressive politics that fights for real economic empowerment and embraces diversity.

We asked Joseph Chunara from the Socialist Workers' Party in London for his perspective on right and left politics. We shouldn't accept this argument. There are two groups that have biometrically opposed interests. All of us in those positions are exploited by capitalism, by capital in different forms. All of us suffer from oppression. All of us in those positions are exploited by capitalism, by capital in different forms. All of us suffer from oppression. All of us suffer from the growing gap between the 1% and the 99%. So let's start from what actually we have in common here. Secondly, yes, we have to be very, very clear that we are not here to condescend to and patronise working class people. We don't start from saying you're an educated, therefore you're stupid.

We don't start from saying you're racist. We don't start from that kind of approach. Where there is racism, we call it out and we challenge it. But we also have to listen to the voices of those people when they say we are under attack from this political system. We're suffering under austerity. We're suffering under the growing inequality, which has grown over 20, 30 years across the developed world.

And we want to do something about it. And the question then is, what can you do about it? One of the things we can do about it is get in and help with the process of organizing those working class communities. And that means linking up the struggles that are going on at the moment. You see, there are struggles going on. There are massive battles in Britain over the question of housing. And if you get involved in those kind of struggles, what you find is precisely those kind of disenfranchised,

angry, working class people who feel they simply can't get a home in this country because houses are so extortionately expensive and social housing and council housing and so on has been under attack for 30 years. We can help to organize those campaigns to engage in those struggles and so on. Within those campaigns, other issues such as issues of racism always come up. Now we have to respond to that. We can't do that unless we first of all fight alongside those people. So we have to both fight alongside people and begin to challenge some of the arguments about racism that are thrown up in the course of those struggles. Remember that

politicians have been feeding us a diet of racist divide and rule for generations now. This is not something that's just emerged with the referendum campaign in Britain or Donald Trump in the USA. It has much, much deeper and more long-term roots. So some people uncritically accept some of these ideas. They're always combined with other more progressive ideas some basic memory of struggle of the time that we got one over on the boss of the way that we joined hands in solidarity with other people or something that our parents told us or something we heard from someone once about how you could go on strike and how you could win stuff and the role of the left i think is to try to tap into and build on the progressive element of that contradiction to develop it to draw out the logic and so on it's not about the

left coming into these communities and saying you're all stupid and we're going to take these stupid ideas out of your head and fill them with good ideas it's about saying that there is a basic good sense in working communities there is a basic notion of solidarity there but it's in tension with other ideas that talk about individual individual competition and so on and so forth we have to draw out the logic of the good side of consciousness and that has to be the starting point for us so it's not about having been patronizing to these people or treating them with contempt it's about drawing on the good sense that they have in their heads and trying to challenge some of the more problematic ideas that people sometimes uncritically accept from society

how do you engage those people that are the most kind of isolated or the most estranged from mainstream society. It's a challenge. But when you do it, the voice that they've got is an incredibly powerful one because the kind of messages they have never ceases to amaze me, to be honest. The messages that they've got and the kind of questions they have are ones that you just don't hear. And they have really good ideas. And they're not, I say, esoteric or expensive or anything else very, very often. They're just kind of solid stuff, really,

that it will make a real difference to them and their local communities. We asked Annabelle for her perspective on the divides in Frome. I would probably say it's cultural and there's class in there as well. And that maybe we are also quite tribal and we need to feel safe and that we belong and we bring people around us who represent that sense of you know feeling feeling we belong and maybe it's a question of how strong that is, that sense of belonging, whether or not we're able also to open out to others

and to think of others as not being some different kind of person that's not like us. I think it's a very relevant issue at the moment. You know, how do we have a sense of safety and how do we also maybe disagree with others maybe they're politically or in terms of what people do how do we disagree but not distrust i think is maybe something i would i would think about because certainly i think there might be an element of distrust or unsureness about getting involved in something or being part of something that you don't know.

So if you were to go to the downtown, would you feel like you belong there? No, I feel like a stranger when I'm in tanks. I don't know anybody anymore. Most people you talk to have got different accents and different... They're not freeing people. No, I've got nothing against anybody else, but I can only talk on experience of growing up here and seeing how the town grew and how it's changed.

It's just a shame. How much of this divide do you think is about class? There's always going to be class. There's always been class all through history, and there's always been... I always said there's always been free. There through history and there's always been i always said there's always been free there's upper class middle class and lower class and there's that's always going to be we can talk forever that's never going to change that's another politic thing and that's just the way it is that's the way of life and

that's not going to change but whatever class you're in why should you feel that you're better than the classes below you or above you well you're not any different are you you're brought into this world the same that's how i look at things it's not fair why should if you only get 100 a pint a week why should your life be different I know money can make a difference but I don't mean financially but your movement, your circles in life are better if you're earning a thousand a week

than it is if you're earning a hundred a week and you're just as good a person probably more hard working person well they don't listen, no one listens to us do they There's lots of data, lots of studies now showing that community life weakens where there's more inequality. This is Richard Wilkinson. People trust each other less, there's more inequality. This is Richard Wilkinson. People trust each other less. There's more violence and so on.

One way that expresses that rather well, I mean, there are studies which show that in more unequal countries, people are less helpful towards each other. They're less willing to help old people and less willing to help disabled people. Richard co-authored a book called The Spirit Level, which has become a highly influential exploration of the effects of inequality. In the book, we simply looked at the scale of income differences in rich developed societies

and related that to a whole range of health and social problems, basically showing that more unequal countries, like Britain and the United States, have higher levels of homicide, more people in prison, lower levels of child well-being, weaker community life, people trust each other less, there are more drug problems, there is more mental illness, there is more mental illness, there's worse physical health, a whole range of outcomes like those are worse in more unequal

societies. And then when you look at the more equal ones like Japan or the Scandinavian countries, you find they do much better on all those things. A whole range of apparently unrelated problems, Much better on all those things. A whole range of apparently unrelated problems, all bad in some countries and better in others. So the thing that unites them is that they're all related to relative deprivation in each society, and they all get worse when you increase the scale of income differences in each society.

And the other really important thing... This is Kate Pickett. She co-authored The Spirit Level with Richard. ...is that it appears that income inequality affects everybody in society, and so that these aren't just effects that relate to poor people or uneducated people or people at the bottom of the social scale.

They affect those people more, but they affect even those who are well-educated, with good incomes, living in affluent neighborhoods. And so both the average level of problems and the social gradient in those problems is different in more equal and more unequal societies. So when we say that everyone would do better in a more equal society, I mean that if we take you with your, whatever your income level is, your education, your job, you would, if you lived in a more equal society, probably live a little bit longer. You'd be less likely to become a victim of violence. Your children might do a little bit better at school in these international maths and literacy tests. They'd be less likely to become teenage parents or get involved in serious drug addiction. And a nice phrase that our colleagues at Harvard have used is that inequality is like a social pollutant.

Its effects are so widespread. Sometimes inequality is seen as an issue about poverty. This is Catherine Round, director of the film The Divide, which was inspired by The Spirit Level. Bob Ashford and Farrah Froome recently hosted a screening of the film in Froome. There is an issue about poverty, of course, and because the two issues intersect hugely, if you are absolutely poor,

you are obviously going to have the material disadvantage, which leads to a lot of these issues. But it's not just an issue around whether you're absolutely poor. It's an issue on how you change the whole nature of a society and social distances between people. So we know that there are deep pockets of poverty within Froome, and that initiatives like Fair Froome are addressing some of the effects of this poverty. But it's kind of like plugging up leaks in a bathtub while the faucet is still on full force. People are still flooding to Froome, which is driving up housing prices and contributing to the social and economic divides within the town.

But it's much easier to blame individuals than a system. And the forces driving issues like income inequality and gentrification go far beyond the physical borders of any single town. So what's to be done? Here's Richard. The main thing is building a sort of social movement that's able to start to shift policy related to income differences. Basically, two ways. You can redistribute people's incomes through taxes and benefits.

That's rather the pattern of the Scandinavian countries. But you can also start off with smaller differences in earnings. And of course, one of the major reasons why inequality has increased so much in many developed countries is that the rich have run away from the rest of us, you know, the bonus culture and those huge salaries at the top, and that disease has spread downwards a little bit. And that disease has spread downwards a little bit. So more inequality. And I think that it does take a large social movement to make a major difference. And if you look at income differences in most of the developed world in the 20th century,

the very high inequalities in the 1920s, but in the 1930s, they start coming down in the United States under Roosevelt. But inequality has gone reducing almost continuously until the 1970s. And it's from about 1980 on that you get the modern rise of inequality with neoliberalism, Reagan and Thatcher. But if you look at a marker of the sort of strength of the social democratic movement, the strength of the labor movement, or what I call the countervailing voice in society, trade union membership as a proportion of the labor force,

you find it's exactly the opposite of that U-shaped distribution of inequality during the 20th century. Inequality comes down when the labour movement is becoming stronger and inequality rises again when the labour movement gets weaker. And that's a very strong relationship and you see it in lots of different countries. And it tells us something about the scale of movement we need to really shift to a different kind of society that we have to do not just for the sake of inequality, but also to move towards sustainability. We do have to see that our income distribution was not the same at the beginning as it is now. It's not the same 35 years ago as it is now, or even further back when it was post-war, when it was much more equal.

So if it was different then, it can be different now. This is not a completely natural course of events. These are changes that have been made ideologically, on a policy level, politically. And if the will is there, and if the organisation is there, then it can be changed. Where does political will come from? So clearly inequality is driven by politics, what politicians do. So where does their political will to create change come from? And there I think we draw hope from looking at all of the huge social change that's happened over the past 50, 60, 70 years, where nobody would probably have anticipated the fast and rapid changes we've seen in how people view other people from different ethnic racial groups, how people view women's

roles, how they view those who have different sexuality. So suddenly we find ourselves in the 21st century in most Western developed nations, thinking it's not okay to be racist. It's not okay to be a misogynist. It's not okay to be homophobic. Of course, there are still pockets and battles to fight, but we've seen huge social change in those particular arenas. None of that came about because a politician decided to push that or grant people those rights. That all came about because grassroots movements called for it and called for it persistently. So if we talk about what creates political will, it is the will of the people that shapes political will and the ability, willingness of politicians, policymakers to do what the people are calling for. And so I think what we're hoping

and what we hope to see the shift being is that in a few years, I don't want to put a number on it, it will be as socially unacceptable to be seen to be greedy and out for yourself and materialistic and just fighting for what you can get as it is now to be seen to be racist, homophobic, etc. Throughout the making of this episode, we came across a lot of discomfort around talking about divides and even encountered some people who said that talking about this kind of stuff just makes it worse. We asked Kate and Richard what they thought about this. I don't think people feel worse when they feel more informed. I think they feel more engaged and capable of perhaps taking action.

And actually it's validation of what it is that they're actually experiencing. It's not that they didn't know that they had these feelings or didn't know that they have this status in their society. It's that they don't know necessarily what it means and that that can actually be seen in the data, can be seen in the outcomes. I think the analogies with feminism in the 70s were the high rates of depression amongst women at home with small children

and the sort of sense that it was a personal failing, a personal weakness or inadequacy which feminism helped to overcome. It's the same with the various social anxieties around inequality. And I think that realizing that this is not just my private inadequacy or something, but a problem we all share. Yeah. I don't think our research can be presented to people and they go, oh, I didn't know I was suffering from that. Of course they know they're suffering from that. They just didn't know the label.

That it's so widespread. That it's so widespread and everybody else're suffering from that. They just didn't know the label. And that it's so widespread. And that it's so widespread and everybody else is suffering from it and that there are things they can do. Inequality, we talk about it and we talk about it as a system. It's a distribution. It's something which just sounds like a theory. And whether you could actually link economics to the individual on that level, you know, the idea that there would be a psychological mechanism that you could see an individual because of how the economic system was affecting them. That to me was a challenging thought, even though I liked the thought and I thought it made sense. Whether you could actually see that in reality, I was unsure of. And it was really only going through

the process of talking to thousands of people that I got a handle on how those mechanisms were working and how economic insecurities are feeding a huge number of attitudes and behaviours, some of which are quite negative for the people that are affected by them, but that isn't an individual failing. That's, in essence, what the system is gearing towards. You shouldn't really expect anything else. In a way, if you're creating a hugely unequal society, of course, you're going to be driving people further apart from each other you're going to be feeding into these ideas about some people as being other to you and you're going to be feeding this idea of worthlessness and and through that you're going to see outbreaks of

frustration violent behavior an attitude of of whether we all these people we need to lock more people away because this you know we're scared of other people, alongside the huge rise in anxieties, and not just at the bottom. I mean, we certainly saw in the film the amount of anxiety that was being felt by those who were relatively better off in the film. And it's a tragedy, in a way. It's a tragedy that the people that you would think should have it all are also, if you're aspiring to that next level, then you get there and you're aspiring to that next level and you'll never make it. And it's a very sobering realization, actually, that you're creating a system where nobody can ever feel like they've kind of achieved true happiness. have you found any spaces where you could talk to some of these people who've moved to Froome? No, because there's no community.

It seems to be like you're alienated. You're either a Froome person or you're from London or from wherever. It's like little societies now. What would your mom say if she was here? My mom would be going ballistic. She wouldn't be sat here like me. She would be really... She'd be tearing into you.

It's not your fault. It's not, you know. But then my mum's old school. You know, I'm old school, but she's before me. She can remember it as, like... She was born just before the second world war so she she's seen all the hardships and she's seen the time move on and she would tell you the same she could remember the good times in the time in the frame but then good times are gone how did you feel having this conversation with me it was it was nice because you're listening

it's first time somebody's listened you know i'm a frown person and i just want to be listened to i want and not oh he doesn't matter and that's how it comes across and it's what whatever it achieves it may be nothing i don't across. Whatever it achieves, it may be nothing, I don't know, but if it achieves anything, just 1%, it would be great, wouldn't it? If it makes somebody just sit up and listen, that would achieve something. That's all I want, for someone to listen. What do you do when you get frustrated?

I beat Ellen to me drums. Absolute rubbish. Join us next time for episode three of this series, where we'll travel to a small kingdom in South Asia, an indigenous village in the Sierras of Peru, and the headquarters of Happy City to talk to the visionaries of new cultural paradigms. We'll ask them to reveal the secrets of happiness and well-being

that are hidden right beneath our noses. Don't miss it. If you start to think about it, you think we are collectively insane. And it really is. You think deeply about what we're doing. We're basically destroying the basis of life on Earth so that we can watch television and eat junk food the beyond gdp movement the gross national happiness movement the well-being movement so there are people across the world who are recognising that our traditional methods of measuring the progress of a society, GDP, is really awful.

Altruistic behaviour and compassion and altruism, actually they trigger, from the point of view of the brain, the same circuits that are activated when we experience pleasure. Thank you again to Annabelle McFadden, The Froome Street Bandits, and Molly Murphy of A Million Creatures for the music. For the last episode of the series, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash Froome..