During the mid to late 1990s at least, the Rolls Royce Sports Club playing fields in Derby were beautiful, and a treat to play football on. Flat pitches, with beautifully cut grass, encouraged even the least elegant non-league players (the cart horses, or “cot osses”) to spray it about like it was Wembley.
With the great pitches were clean dressing rooms and nicely-kept grounds – and the Rolls Royce team playing in smart blue. In those days, Grange Park, Long Eaton United’s ground, was a bit ramshackle and our pitch was a swamp between November and March, so we looked forward to going there.
Rolls Royce was the best of the bunch, but the Derby and Nottingham area seemed full of great sports grounds, founded and funded by successful local businesses. Boots had a nice ground on Nottingham’s south side; a little further back in time, John Player and Raleigh did too. Originally for the exclusive use of the staff, by the 1980s and 90s these football grounds and the clubs that played on them served the working people of the local area. (Locals can still use Rolls Royce’s facilities).
For a city like Derby, it’s hard to overstate the importance of big employers like Rolls Royce. Most obviously, they provide large numbers of highly-skilled technical jobs for local, mostly working class people. They also pay a huge amount of tax locally.
But, equally important, and harder to measure, they also give cities like Derby a sense of immense civic pride. Derby isn’t beautiful like Bath, nor rich like Leeds, nor glamorous like Manchester. It’s a small, working class city that most people either pass through on the train or wrongly conflate with the beautiful county it sits in. It means a lot to local people to be able to talk about Rolls Royce: a world-beating firm in their backyard. The city also has Toyota, but Rolls Royce is “one of our own”.
This is why Rolls Royce’s announcement of massive job losses in Derby is such a catastrophic blow to the city. Of the 9,000 jobs the businesses is said to be planning to cut globally, it’s expected most of these will fall in their Derby-based civil aerospace division.
Job losses had been expected for a time, but the brutal slowdown in civil aviation off the back of the Coronavirus lockdown tipped things over the edge. To the people of Derby, their favourite local employer seems to have been devastated by the virus.
What’s true in Derby risks coming true elsewhere across the country: already precariously-placed businesses, in already precariously-placed towns and cities, will be plunged into crisis by the depression following the Coronavirus lockdown.
At the moment, the public seem to think the only businesses that are going to be affected are high-street shops – which they assume will bounce back when people emerge from the lockdown, spending like drunken sailors on shore leave. The Rolls-Royce job losses are a reminder that cuts might go much deeper.
The pain for local people is real. It’s one thing losing a job in a mega-city like London, but losing a job in a small city like Derby, where alternatives are harder to come by, is a more daunting prospect. Inevitably, there are political ramifications from all this too.
The Conservatives 2019 manifesto, following Theresa May’s lead, put towns and small cities at the heart of its economic and social plan. The Party pledged to “level up” provincial Britain. Coronavirus has set the Government’s plans back years, and made it dramatically much more difficult for the Conservatives to be able to say, next time around, that it has brought about practical economic and social gains locally.
In many parts of the country, Derby being an example, the Government will surely have banked on making progress off the back of a relatively stable economy; now, they’ll have to re-set their ambition merely to defend the relative economic and social status of these towns and small cities.
At a stroke, their expected strategy for the towns and small cities of provincial England has been made redundant. (Although, as I’ve written recently, their biggest challenge now is in handling the Fairness Audit that will come about after lockdown).
People are quite forgiving; they will know the depression resulting from Coronavirus is global in nature, and can’t simply be pinned on the British Government or the Conservatives (although of course, they will make judgements about the Government and Party’s competence in the crisis).
But the problem for the Tories is that people in places like Derby were really only ever giving the Conservatives a chance; nobody “won them over” – they’re emphatically not Conservatives. If they’re only able to show “no further decline”, there’s no reason at all why people won’t decide to give Starmer’s Party a chance – particularly if Starmer can get the Labour Party talking more about, say, Weston on Trent than the West Bank.