ABSTRACT
To simplify greatly an immensely complicated process, what is happening this time is that, with the decline of manufacturing, including many of those industries which have arisen only in the last fifty years, has come the collapse of the manufacturing heartlands of the country. The West Midlands has been particularly badly affected and has slumped in the space of little more than a decade from a booming central region to one with an unemployment rate well above the national average. The inner cities too have been hit, especially because much of the manufacturing investment there was older and often less profitable-and therefore most vulnerable when that wave of capitalist growth in its turn ran out of steam.
