The local doctors have coined the phrase “Shit Life Syndrome” to refer to the common denominator for most of the maladies they see: destitution and hopelessness.[57] The suffering we see in Blackpool is a consequence of deindustrialization—or what some economists have called the “deindustrial revolution.”[58] Work in factories, as well as mines and docks, was often hard and dirty, but it gave people a sense of security, identity and community. Over the past fifty years, most of these jobs disappeared, lost to machines and the flight of manufacturing to countries like China, where production
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