TOWN & OUT I

Welcome to the small sad life of the corporate UK town. Corporate Watch hears the story of one man trying to stop the destruction...

SUPERMARKET MAN

'On first appearance Wisbech looks OK. The council have made sure of that; they've got trees in the centre and everything. But then you start looking closely. And then you see how many shops are boarded up, and how businesses have gone bankrupt and how many charity shops there are, and shops selling things for a pound, or just bric-a-brac. Unemployment among young people here's realistically running at about thirty percent. They go on courses and things but no-one can afford to take them on. Families are going self-sufficient, not because they want to, but because they can't afford not to. It's desperate. Most people are just hanging on'.

Martin Drew, a 36 year old electrician, lives in Wisbech with his partner Amanda and their two small children. He describes himself as a third generation 'Fenny' - the breed of people who populate the flat, fertile lands of Cambridgeshire and its outlying regions. By tradition, Fennies are a quiet sort of people; more comfortable with getting on with things than with questioning them. But a statue on the town's outskirts, erected in memory to Thomas Clarkson, suggests that the people and the place have hidden depths. Clarkson, a Wisbech man, was the founder for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. His statue was erected in 1880, when Wisbech was still a flourishing market town. It may now be surrounded by boarded-up shop fronts and empty communal spaces, but Clarkson's legacy as a fighter lingers on.

If things had been different, Martin Drew might have been a farmer, like his father. He used to supply Wisbech's shops and its farmers' market, and when the first supermarket, Superkey, moved into the area, supplied that too. But Superkey learnt the art of distribution, and set up on their own. Mr Drew senior lost his business, and his farm, and was forced into bankruptcy. He was not alone. It has, says his son, been downhill for the local traders and the farming community ever since. 'It's all about corporate power. It's completely dominating everything - well, not completely. There's a small corner if you want to struggle on. We're allowed to survive, but not to progress. It's all been cornered. The problem is, when's it going to stop?'

Drive around Wisbech today, and the signs that big business has taken over and cleaned up are everywhere. 'They're so efficient' Drew notes, with understandable bitterness. 'And they put nothing back in to the local economy. They're buying from away, the places are being built with contractors from away. Local firms don't even get a look in. And the farmers are hit, and this was a farming economy. Without the influx of social security money, I dread to think what would happen'.

Like most market towns in the UK, the impression Wisbech gives is already of a shattered community. Soon, you feel, as people start to forget the past, or are born without its memories, there will be no community at all. The road into town is large and unfriendly, littered on either side with badly built industrial estates and business parks, as well as the ever-present supermarkets. In the centre itself, any small retailer who can't compete with corporate pricing - and that's just about everyone - is at risk, whether they run the one surviving music shop, or sell light fittings. The local bakery was recently forced to close down. A couple of weeks later, according to Drew, both Asda's and Tesco's bakeries burnt down, on the same night.

'What worries me' says Drew, 'is that we're going to get a situation like Belfast'. Looking around Wisbech, which seems defeated, rather than angry, it's difficult to imagine, but Drew is serious. 'You've got people who are becoming ill through stress, businesses that are losing everything they've ever worked for. You've got a lot of country folk who don't know how to express themselves - they see politics as totally over their heads and they wouldn't be able to negotiate in that environment. But if they're upset any more we may end up with some sort of terrorism in retaliation. It's best to nip it in the bud now, isn't it, and stop the corporations bullying people before there is that sort of problem, because otherwise I think it will happen. I mean, you've got the anti-capitalist Mayday thing now, which is obviously motivated by frustration. And you get the extremists who get so upset they start planting bombs, which is how the IRA started. People are going to say, look, enough is enough. And you will get citizens' armies, same as Ireland'.

Obviously, Drew and his family do not see violence as the answer. Amanda, his partner, was born in Malta, where, if a superstore moves into the area, it is not allowed to undercut local stores, or is forced to buy the shopowner out at a reasonable price. 'I mean, that seems fair to us. It seems like logical, ethical common sense'. Instead, over the past few years, he and Amanda have become self-taught experts, studying the Planning Act, using the regulations to challenge, among others, an Aldi development in the centre which has now been temporarily halted. Their experiences with the local council and the Chamber of Commerce have done nothing but increase their determination. 'You ask the council one question and they reply to another. According to the PPG6 Guidance for Market Towns, there has to be an economic impact assessment done before a supermarket can expand. The council quite openly admit that in the case of Tesco's expansion, it wasn't done. You start asking yourself, are these people corrupt? What's going on?'. While the Wisbech Chamber of Commerce were, say Drew, also entirely unsympathetic to someone challenging the power of big business. 'When I tried to say something at a meeting, they got quite angry. I was called a carrot-cruncher, and told that we people didn't know how to run our own town. The person's argument was how can you stop business from expansion. They didn't care about the retailers at all'.

Drew himself is now facing the prospect of his own small shop going bankrupt. 'It's opened my eyes to things. And, in a way, it will be a relief when it does go, and I can get on with something else. I'm one of the lucky ones; I've got a trade'. In the meantime, his campaign against supermarkets, and the corporate take-over of his town, continues. His letters on the subject, for a long time ignored by the local press, are now being published, and gathering support. 'I'm going to carry on opposing this. I'm prepared to talk to anyone. We all know that something's on the line. It's just getting it out into the open'.