| who will help a town like Rochdale 09:02 - Mar 4 with 2856 views | modelboydave |
Full page article in the times today about Rochdale, including a bit about the Dale although he does not seen to have got the memo about the Yanks.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/who-will-help-blighted-towns-like-rochdale-zf
link above. or Text Below
he Rochdale by-election has been turned over every which way but one. George Galloway has become the first MP since Winston Churchill to enter parliament for a fourth separate constituency. There has since been plenty of speculation about what all this means for Galloway, what it all means for the Labour Party, what it all means for Reform UK and what it all means for the general election.
Rishi Sunak even dragged the podium into Downing Street for an impromptu Friday-evening press conference to tell us what it all means for the future of democracy. But nobody seems interested in what it means for Rochdale.
Rochdale is one of my towns, if not any longer my kind of town. My father lived there for many years and long ago I wrote a novel about the place. It was a tale of good lives lived and made meaningful with embroidery, gardening and Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. It was, in fact, a nostalgic story about the good that a community provides. And truly, it did.
Rochdale was once the epicentre of a technological revolution. Innovations in spinning and weaving, and the construction in 1804 of the Rochdale Canal turned this small town on the river Roch into one of the most important centres for cotton processing in the world. By the end of the 19th century, the sounds of the woollen mills, the silk makers, the bleachers and dyers meant the town buzzed with the associated trades of textile manufacturing, just like corporate lawyers and auditors gather around the City of London. The Pennine Valley then was Silicon Valley today.
The newspapers of the 1840s conducted a debate about how unequal Britain was becoming. Was there any hope that benighted places down south could ever catch up with somewhere as dynamic as Rochdale? Reflection upon prosperity turned Rochdale into an ideas factory too. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844, created the modern co-operative movement that remains an important part of the federal Labour Party. The Rochdale Pioneers established voluntary programmes that provided affordable food and clothes in their stores, education classes, the building of houses and work for unemployed or badly paid members on land cultivated by the co-operative.
These benefits derived from the “Rochdale Principles”, devised by the Pioneers as the basis of the co-operative movement, which they remain to this day. A better orator than Sunak would surely have used the Rochdale Principles to illustrate how modern politics mocks the ambitions of those who went before. The Rochdale Principles demand that membership be open to all, that the co-operative should be subject to the democratic control that grants one person one vote, that all should be a paid a dividend in proportion to what each contributed, that the co-operative should be strictly neutral with respect to politics and religion.
That doesn’t sound much like Rochdale today. At Spotland, the home of Rochdale’s football club, the present is overwhelming the past. After many and varied troubles, Rochdale AFC, in the pioneer spirit, are owned by their fans. The trouble is that there aren’t enough of them and they don’t have any money. In the shadow of the two big Manchester clubs, Rochdale cannot compete and, on Thursday, unless a couple of million pounds has been forthcoming, 117 years of Rochdale football club may come to an end at an extraordinary general meeting.
It would be terribly sad. Towns like Rochdale need community institutions because the place is visibly struggling. The cotton industry fell victim to cheaper imports as long ago as the 1960s and the whole population can’t work in shops. There are 110,000 people in this town and I worry that too many of them seem defeated. Every time I am in Rochdale I am struck by the fact that this is a sick place, by which I mean, to lapse into the local tongue, that the people are poorly.
In the 2021 census, a fifth of all residents were recognised as disabled under the Equality Act and a fifth described themselves as not in a good state of health. A boy born in Rochdale will have about three years fewer of life expectancy than the average born Englishman. In that census, Rochdale ranked in the bottom fifth of local authorities for the health of its population.
Rochdale is also a poor place. Stand on George Street and count as ten children go by. Three of them will be growing up in a home blighted by poverty. If the gang comes from Milkstone, round the back of the railway station, five of them will. One in six of the families here struggle to keep the heating aflame and one in eight to put food on the table. The census data records Rochdale as the 15th most income-deprived place in the country. This poverty has consequences. The children of Rochdale are behind the national average on language development, reading ability and mathematics capability by the end of the foundation stage. They never catch up.
This is the point about Rochdale to which attention must be paid. Rochdale is a bi-cultural town, 74 per cent white and 19 per cent Asian and there is no question — the election of the divisive Galloway confirms and exacerbates this — that there are tensions. In the case of the Heywood sex grooming scandal, worse than tensions, much worse. But, still, it is reasonable to say that people in Rochdale can live together. The town has not been the site of race riots like Bradford and Oldham.
The core problem that Rochdale faces is not the ethnic composition that will receive too many write-ups but the fact that there isn’t enough money. In Yorkshire Street even the pound shops advertise money off. Fifteen miles away Manchester is thriving but the wealth doesn’t trickle down here. A quarter of the population are economically inactive and this bloodless phrase hides an epidemic of illnesses.
The people of Rochdale have been sounding the trumpets from the city walls. The protests pile up: Gillian Duffy to Gordon Brown, a Brexit vote over 60 per cent, the return of the fedora fool as the next MP.
Galloway has promised he will save Rochdale AFC, move Primark to the centre of town and make the market a rival to Bury. He won’t, of course. He has a historic grievance and a futile campaign to wage about a desperate conflict far away that means little or nothing to most locals. It is obvious that Galloway has nothing interesting to say about Rochdale. The trouble is that nobody else does either. |  |
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| who will help a town like Rochdale on 09:36 - Mar 4 with 2700 views | joecooke |
Ethnic composition has to be in the conversation because when immigration is so high in one area and subsequently not enough money from central governenment is allocated to that area then there will be a lack of doctors,schools and general infrastructure.
Its cheaper for governments to place people in the North of England as opposed to say the home councties and thats why they do it. |  |
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| who will help a town like Rochdale on 12:07 - Mar 4 with 2441 views | 49thseason |
So the Thunderer has awoken to some of the bald facts of our town, well done Philip Collins in putting them into a more public domain.
Where is our moribund Council in all this? What is the " big idea"? Simply snatching at crumbs from the table of Burnhams banquet does not make any impression on what London's educated idiots have taken from us. Our hospitals, our courts, our tax offices, are all gone and with,them 100s of decently paid jobs, did anyone hear the roar of dissent from RMBC? I suppose we should be grateful for having our roads ripped up for the sake of an unused bicycle path, and the tearing up of the promise that the biggest industrial space in Europe, Kingsway, would not become a warehouse wasteland but here we are.
We elect the familiar same old failures to continue to enact failing policies in a failing town , more fool us.. its beyond time to stop the idiocy. If Dave Tully were to build it , the people would come to vote for a new local party. Screw national parties and their foolish policies. Its time for radical change, Galloway proves it, Tully proves it. Its time to take charge of our own destiny, no one else gives a toss.
Our 60 .. yes Sixty, councillors are ripping nearly a million quid a year out of our pockets and yet the council tax and business rates continue to rise, we are desperate for well paid jobs, profitable industry, innovation, everything that once made us strong. Its time to stop the madness and regain some focus on the essentials and if these 60 councillors cant deliver, its time to find some who will.
Galloway is a symptom of our frustration, he has clearly rattled Richie Niknak's cage, but will that be the stimulus to shine the torch on towns like ours and seek to improve them or will it lead to more punishment beatings? RMBC applied for £20m in levelling up money and got precisely.... ZERO. But still , Tewksbury got some, so thats OK then. Never mind the damp flats were kids die, the poor life expectancy rates, the educational underperformance, the levels of disability... Tewksbury FFS. |  | | |
| who will help a town like Rochdale on 12:33 - Mar 4 with 2368 views | D_Alien |
Yesterday i did the tour of the newly restored and magnificent town hall. The queue outside in the sunshine was buzzing with the good citizens of the town, and no doubt from further afield
I then had a great meal and a few drinks in the centre, which is far more inviting than those who don't know the town portray it. Pound shops? They're in every town
Look and you'll find poverty in every town too, including not far from Westminster. Are we deprived of funding? Probably. Are we unique? Are we hell, but journos don't half get off on it... especially one who describes a "Heywood sex grooming scandal" Heywood???
We do need a local MP, not one parachuted in, but the people of Rochdale will not, and should not allow themselves, to be cowed by these descriptions |  |
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| who will help a town like Rochdale on 15:03 - Mar 4 with 2063 views | foreverhopefulDale |
| who will help a town like Rochdale on 09:36 - Mar 4 by joecooke |
Ethnic composition has to be in the conversation because when immigration is so high in one area and subsequently not enough money from central governenment is allocated to that area then there will be a lack of doctors,schools and general infrastructure.
Its cheaper for governments to place people in the North of England as opposed to say the home councties and thats why they do it. |
The vast majority of the Asian population were not placed here, they were either born here or emigrated here to be with family already here. I agree re asylum seekers, too many are placed here without adequate support for them and the town. |  |
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