Hats off for Luton!

And I am afraid hats ARE off. Luton was once the milliners’ paradise. Not any more – there’s hardly a hat mould, outside a museum, in the place.

Whilst, like the Campari girl, I have often been to Luton Airport, I have never spent time in Luton itself. To do so is to experience something of a roller coaster. 

One moment you are on a leafy bowling green taking gin and tonics with the Committee; the next you are on one of the most dispossessed housing estates imaginable; and the next you are buying nectarines on a street bustling with business – with shops selling saris, pots and pans, hi-tech produce, and littered with excellent Indian restaurants.

So, why bother spending time in Luton? Well, ahead of the budget and the general election, I wanted to find out what a deficit of £178 billion looked like from street level. I wanted to see what the present Government’s injection of tens of millions of pounds to try to regenerate Luton looked like and whether it had succeeded.

Above all I wanted to take the temperature of the place. Is the town yearning for change? Is it a town seized with a vision offered by one of the alternative parties vying for power?

Luton was once a white British town dominated by the massive Vauxhall car works which in its heyday employed 22,000 people.

Today Vauxhall is a rump, making vans and employing little more than 10% of that number. Many of the surrounding manufacturers who supplied Vauxhall have long since gone to the wall.

Today Luton is a Mecca of many races. One of the days I was there, the streets had been taken over for St Patrick’s Day by the town’s earliest immigrants, marching through the town with their shamrocks, their bands, and their greens. Even in this parade there was a strong sprinkling of the multi cultural: Afro-Caribbean drummers and percussionists, and even a full-blooded samba band.

But what you will see from my report tonight is the deep segmentation of the town, the Asian area booming; the white middle classes, still attending their old golfing, Masonic, and bowling clubs – but having moved out to the edges of the town and beyond.

Above all you will see the daunting challenge of Luton’s sink estates, where 70% live on benefit and where whole families have no one who has been in dependable work for a generation.

I found spending just a few days talking and listening to the people who eke out an existence here harrowing. Hope is in very, very short supply amongst the tens of thousands of people who live in such circumstances. And as I reported from Hull last night, those estates are not peculiar to one English town.

I believe that I have encountered merely the tip of a very British reality, a snapshot of a country with vast social challenges extending far beyond what we mainly talk about – fixing the deficit.