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Amid a vast expanse of rubble, dust and noise, a green crane breaks away from a corrugated roof like a frustrated dentist trying to extract a particularly stubborn wisdom tooth.
The Honda factory in Swindon – once one of the most advanced car factories in the world – is being demolished three decades after it opened.
It used to be one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. It was one of the jewels in the crown of investment attracted to the UK by Margaret Thatcher’s brand of enterprise in the 1980s. Swindon, John Major, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson voted for her. It was also one of the first cities to vote for Brexit, at 55%.
Inflation, rising care costs and central government grant squeezes have meant cuts to libraries, Dial-a-Ride public transport and dimmed street lights. Municipal tax increased by almost 5%. The council leader warned that any further cuts would affect frontline services.
What is happening in Swindon is a visible consequence of slow long-term economic growth. Government spending cuts, low private investment, de-industrialisation and shrinking disposable income have scarred even what was one of Britain’s famous boom towns.
The Honda plant is to become a warehouse and logistics facility. In another world, it would be replaced by another major global manufacturer. For example, Tesla was invited. While five years ago the promise was to equalize left-wing northern cities, places like Swindon feel equalised.
The issue of growth in this city is crucial to whoever wins Thursday’s election.
Elsewhere in the world, places like this are being converted to produce electric cars. Americans are pouring public money into their factories to try to compete with China, which will soon be confirmed as the world’s largest exporter of cars. Emerging economies from Indonesia to Vietnam to Turkey are also investing and expanding their automotive industries.
In fact, it was to Turkey that the entire Honda production line, including dozens of never-before-used industrial robots, was packed up and shipped via the M4 and Bristol port last year.
Swindon is not just about Honda. It is part of the M4 corridor, where there are lots of jobs in the knowledge sectors and in finance, such as Nationwide’s headquarters. The overall unemployment rate is just 2.6%, but the number of people neither working nor looking for work is 18%.
Marcus Kittridge, a former Honda engineer who now runs a cafe in the city center with his wife Tracey, admits there are still “good job prospects” but says many are on the minimum wage or “50p above” and says this contributed to a decline in disposable income in the city centre. “It’s like a northern town that lost its industry in the 1970s,” he tells me.
The cafe now closes every day at 14:00 due to the high cost of energy. It expects to see its rising costs reflected in higher prices over the next year or two. They have also stopped selling smoothies after a significant drop in the availability and quality of fresh fruit, which they blame on post-Brexit changes.
“We were told that food quality would go up after Brexit, now I can tell you it won’t. I hardly ever heard a politician mention it, but it definitely had an impact on us,” says Tracey.
Could she have been a little unlucky with her fresh produce purchases? “If I’m unlucky, I’m unlucky every day and I’m probably the unluckiest person in the world,” he says.
Their experience shows that some of the undercurrents of slow long-term growth – high energy prices, low disposable income, low investment and new trade barriers – can combine in unusual ways.
Gary Huett, a former graphic designer also from Swindon who teamed up with you as part of the BBC’s Your Voice, Your Vote project, which invited you to tell us what matters, wanted to know why Swindon town center looks like it’s ‘rotting’ , and asked if anything could have changed.
“Now we have mostly pound shops and the booming yuppie night scene of the 1980s and 1990s has gone and decayed.”
Conservatives say the green shoots are already here. The latest growth figures for January to March show the UK now has the fastest growing economy of the G7 group of advanced economies after a brief recession last year. Swindon’s work record remains strong. New investment has come in Honda’s place, and jobs, albeit in warehouses rather than manufacturing, will return.
For Labour, Swindon – a hallowed town where residents have voted the same way as the eventual national winner for the past 40 years – shows there are no quick fixes.
They do not compete with the US or the European Union (EU) with large public investments in green energy. Council spending remains unprotected and under the same pressure. A looser planning regime could help build more houses or expand the solar farms that cover the countryside around the city. But the work of transformation is very real. When asked what would happen if the economy didn’t grow, Labor responded with some variation of “I’m not a loser” or “we can do it”.
When I interviewed the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in Swindon, I said that if she relied on planning change to transform growth prospects, it would have to be a revolutionary ‘big bang’, almost Thatcher-style. She told me: “We are offering a major reform… if we don’t grow the economy, we will be stuck in a doom loop of low growth, high taxes and poor public services.”
Labor hopes there will be a tsunami of private investment that has been held back from the country by political and economic instability. That, the party says, can free up tens of billions with a strong and stable pro-growth government.
When I met Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in Surrey on the same day, he said the party’s focus was now on bringing taxes – which his party had seen to seven-decade highs – down.
“We introduced taxes because we were helping families in a cost of living crisis. We were very honest about it, it was the right thing to do.
“The difference is that we don’t think it has to be permanent and we are prepared to do the hard work of cutting taxes because we know that a more competitive economy will see more growth and then more money for the NHS and schools.”
Whoever is in No.11 after the election, Swindon shows the huge task ahead of them.
It shows what an economy that is not growing at a normal rate looks like. The former boom town is struggling. The challenge is not just to deliver robust economic growth here and far beyond, but to make that recovery visible to people like Gary, Tracey and Marcus here in Swindon and others like them across the country.
You can find the full list of candidates for the Swindon North constituency hereand those for the Swindon South constituency here.