BEN CHU, ECONOMICS EDITOR, NEWSNIGHT
It wasn’t for nothing that when I was sent by BBC’s Newsnight to investigate Britain’s yawning regional inequalities, I pitched up, one chilly spring evening, at the Premier Inn on Oldham Broadway. In 2015 Oldham was identified as the most deprived town in England by the Office for National Statistics. When you throw gauges of well-being such as income, health, skills and housing into a statistical cauldron and stir it around, the place that, apparently, comes out the lowest is this former global textiles superpower in the northwest. For a film about the “two nations” of modern Britain—the prosperous and the not-so-prosperous—Oldham, sadly, was a natural place to illustrate the latter.
Jennifer Williams’s report on the town (p2) resonates with what we learned. There was an uncomfortable sense among locals that improved transport connections— through the Metrolink tram—to the flourishing city of Manchester has merely made it easier for Oldham residents to get out of their own town to work, shop and play. “Lots of people are on these trams but they’re not getting off until Manchester”, David Whaley, the last editor of the Oldham Chronicle lamented (the print edition shut in 2017 after 160 years of publication).