Depressing conversations
First, it’s a tragedy when once-thriving coastal towns fall on hard times, leaving younger generations with few meaningful prospects. There was a time when fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers could expect a job for life in fishing or shipbuilding. The same over the whole country, even the world. That all began to erode decades ago, as globalisation reshaped industries and governments essentially sold off fishing rights with little regard for the long-term consequences.
For a town like Lowestoft, on the Suffolk coast, the decline is not recent. Once a hub of these industries, it was already succumbing to political and economic change by the mid-1970s and early 1980s, arguably even earlier, in the 1960s. In truth, the downturn began at least half a century ago.
It was disheartening to listen to a friendly older couple in the pub recently, eager to attribute the town’s problems to immigration and to champion Brexit as the solution. They had plenty to say, but little inclination to reflect. Large-scale herring fishing, the backbone of the local economy, had already been phased out by the mid-1960s, long before Edward Heath took Britain into the EEC. The town has had over fifty years to find a Plan B. Instead, it has endured decades of stagnation, left, it seems, to weather and decay.
There is a sharp irony in blaming 21st-century migration or EU bureaucracy for a decline that was already well underway by the end of the disco era. For many, the resentment appears rooted in a loss of status. It is easier to point the finger at outsiders, whether migrants or Brussels bureaucrats, than to confront the reality that both local leadership and successive national governments failed to reinvest in the town’s foundations for decades. Brexit, in this sense, was sold as a sea of opportunity, a promise of return to a perceived golden age. Yet the reality, trade barriers, labour shortages, and economic friction, has made clear that you cannot simply vote your way back to an imagined past.
Fifty years without meaningful renewal is a damning indictment. Why hasn’t rebuilding taken hold? Part of the answer lies in geography. Towns like Lowestoft sit at the end of the line. Poor rail links and ageing road infrastructure make them less attractive to high-tech industries that might otherwise provide a viable economic future. As a result, many of the brightest young people leave in search of opportunity elsewhere, creating a demographic imbalance that further hinders regeneration.
What went unmentioned in that pub conversation, however, is the emergence of a Plan C, one that Lowestoft and similar towns are beginning to embrace. As a hub for North Sea wind farms, the town is slowly exchanging its fishing nets for turbines. This high-tech, if not strictly digital, sector offers a genuine chance of economic renewal. The challenge now is ensuring that the local workforce, shaped by decades of decline, can access and benefit from these new opportunities.
This couple, keen birders, did mention one aspect of renewal…Sizewell C…the nuclear power extension that is indeed bringing jobs to the region, but perhaps at great environmental cost, not least to the RSPB Nature Reserve at Minsmere, and in the long-term given the energy, resources, and water that are needed to build such industrial-scale power plants. Thankfully, we managed to steer them on to the topic of birds more directly, and away from the inevitable mention of race, a topic, which as I say, they were chomping at the bit to get on to