Deprivation and Blackpool

(Picture from this depressing article on Blackpool)

A couple of months ago I started a voluntary job with Oxfam. In my constant quest to eliminate poverty I figured they're a pretty good group to side with. I'm pretty obsessed with the whole tackling poverty thing mainly because of where I'm from and how I grew up.

I was brought up in South Shore, Blackpool. I lived here up until I went to university and my parents moved to the slightly wealthier (and older and more Toryish) Bispham.

The other day this news article was on the BBC and it stated that South Shore was one of the top 10 most deprived areas in the country. This does and doesn't surprise me, as South Shore is a really deprived area but I really didn't think it was top 10 worthy. I do think that part of the reason I don't really see the deprivation is because I'm desensitised to it. When I left home for uni I remember thinking THIS IS SO POSH and then I quickly figured out that I think anything that isn't a terraced house or a flat is posh. No joke, guys, I live in a 3 bedroomed semi-detached house now-a-days and I'm still getting used to the fact we have a garage. I mean, we don't use it properly or owt, BUT WE COULD, and that's fancy.




Anyway, back to poverty, my last big blog post that I wrote back in October discusses the perils of seasonal employment, as at the time I was waiting-on for about 50 hours a week and it was killing me. It was the various conversations I had with the people who worked there that gave me a horrible insight into what it must be like to only be able to work during seasonal hours and to spend the other months scrimping to get by. I wrote this (I am so sorry to have to quote myself, but sorry, has to be done)

"I'm ridiculously lucky to have parents who aren't charging me any rent whilst I pay off my overdraft and such. However, there are some people who will be made unemployed when I will - because it's the end of Blackpool's season when the illuminations are turned off - and they have families to look after and rent to pay. The bus I get to work drives through one of the poorest wards in Blackpool and for many people living in that ward it'll only get worse at the end of the season. This isn't a "oh poor them in their poor situation" thing. I've lived in that, I'm not feeling sorry for them, I'm angry. Since I was a kid there's now more help in schools for poor kids and there is more help for parents, but towns like Blackpool still have nothing in the way of good, permanent employment. Masses of people are loaded onto the dole queue every November until late February and it's months of hard winters for all of them. I know Blackpool is undergoing a regeneration at the moment, and fair enough, it's looking nicer and the town attracted 13 million visitors this year, but where are the benefits to those of us who actually live here? Where are the proper jobs? Where is all this money that's being pumped into the local economy going? FOR REAL. So much anger at all of this."

Gordon Marsden, the MP for Blackpool South, had a bit of a pop at the Coalition for depriving an already hugely deprived constituency such as his. Blackpool has been hit so hard by the recessions but it was never that great to begin with. It's an area that needs a lot more investment, not less. My parents moved here in the '80s after not being able to find work in their own towns, because at least in Blackpool there was seasonal employment. It really doesn't seem like a lot has changed since then. The schools have improved and there's been a lot of regeneration of the more tourist-y areas, but there's no real investment that will provide full-time and permanent jobs to the people of this town and that pisses me off.

Poverty is something that has been on the increase for years now and unless areas that are hugely deprived (like South Shore) get the good jobs and the investment they need then they're just going to get worse - and I really don't want to see this happen to the town I was brought up in. It may be a bit rubbish at times, but it's not its fault, it needs help, not abandonment.

(As I haven't actually been blogging at all in the past half a year I feel a bit weird writing something and knowing it can be more than 140 characters, it's very liberating).