In the debate about how to understand the rise of anti-globalism — is it most deeply driven by cultural or economic anxiety — there is little disagreement that the heartlands of support for Donald Trump, Brexit and other anti-establishment movements were areas of marked industrial decline such as the US Rust Belt or northern England.
These areas have been deindustrialising for a long time. The end of the old manufacturing sectors — and the disappearance of plentiful and reasonably well-paid jobs for low-skilled men — started in the 1970s, with British industry going through the most rapid change of all in the 1980s. But we should note that everywhere, it was not the amount produced by factories that fell — it didn’t — but that production could increasingly happen with fewer workers thanks to technological change.
Diane Coyle writes movingly in the FT about the her Lancashire home town which saw huge losses of factory jobs in the late 1970s. Her main point is that the economic damage to such communities, and the anger it engendered, came long before the immigration that was such a big factor in the Brexit debate. And that it was caused not by globalisation but by automation — and the “catastrophic failure by the UK and other western governments to deliver on the most basic task of a democracy: insure people against a system-wide shock that they could not have foreseen or prevented”.