Tag: England

Each table at the meeting suggested ideas for how to spend the money on offer from the national government to improve Scunthorpe. Most of the proposals were sensible but small-scale: clearing rubbish, improving the parks, reimagining the libraries. Then it was Collier’s turn to speak. He took the microphone and stood, slightly stooped, in the middle of the room. He is not a fluent orator, but he has a gruff magnetism. He praised the energy of the discussion. “That’s your future,” Collier said. “It’s your own energy, right?”

He was doubtful about the ostensible purpose of the discussion: how to distribute the twenty million pounds of national funding. Scunthorpe has a population of eighty thousand people. The money would be paid over ten years. Collier pointed out that this amounted to one cup of coffee a month per adult resident—at Scunthorpe, rather than London, prices. “That’s not going to transform anybody’s life,” Collier said. “But you thinking about ‘What can we do together?’ That will transform.” He ignored the residents’ suggestions and urged them to think more ambitiously, about the kind of work that might keep young people in the town. “There are jobs here,” Collier said. “But they’re crap jobs, warehouse jobs in Amazon, that sort of rubbish.” Quiet, stunned laughter filled the room. “You need jobs that are interesting, worth doing. Where are those interesting, worthwhile jobs in the future going to come from? Well, we don’t know.”

Part of Collier’s role in places like Scunthorpe is to say the unsayable. “He will challenge in, like, really blunt terms,” Allen told me. “And that’s really, really valuable, because we’re all really close to it.” Collier’s idea for what to do with the government money was to start clearing disused parts of the steelworks, in order to make way for a new business park for local entrepreneurs. “Instead of drinking one cup of coffee extra a month for the next ten years, clear that site,” Collier said. “And make it work with your own brilliant talent.” Collier’s boldness was informed, at least in part, by necessity. “You can see the forces,” he confided later. “The steel company’s going to close. The Treasury has got no money to fund it for very long.”

After Collier spoke, the meeting took on a looser feel. Jonathan Frary, another Scunthorpe Tomorrow volunteer, stood up to close the session. Frary is a former triathlete who runs Curly’s Athletes, a sporting-events business in the town. He spent seven years in London, working in H.R., before returning to Scunthorpe. It was difficult to talk about his home town when he lived away from it. “Most people just said, ‘I bet you are glad to be out,’ ” Frary said. “You kind of carry that with you.”

When Collier visits Scunthorpe, Frary likes to give him a lift in his truck and collar him for big-picture conversations about A.I. and the evolution of humanity. He says that the economist’s message is always the same: “You can’t rely on what you already know.” In the bar at Heslam Park, Frary channelled Collier as he exhorted the residents. “Make a start. Doesn’t have to be right. Doesn’t have to be a project,” he said. “It’s a journey. Just do something and find other people that are passionate about doing it. So, go do shit.”

Collier grew up in Sheffield, a steel city in South Yorkshire, about an hour west of Scunthorpe, after the Second World War. His parents, who ran a butcher’s shop, left school when they were twelve. Collier won a place at a grammar school and then at Oxford. He never really looked back. Between 1970, when Collier was twenty-one, and last year, employment in the British steel industry shrank by ninety per cent. People in Sheffield and South Yorkshire suffered just as badly as those in Scunthorpe, if not worse. The Colliers were not immune. “My family back in Sheffield is bimodal,” he said. “Two of us have been really successful, and quite a few who are just total disasters.”

Two of Collier’s young relatives from Sheffield—the grandchildren of his first cousin—were taken away from their parents. In 2008, Collier and his wife, Pauline, who had a young son of their own at the time, became the children’s guardians and brought them to live in Oxford. “We took them when they were nearly two and nearly three,” Collier recalled. “By which time they were already totally emotionally traumatized.”