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On a Friday morning last month, Professor Sir Paul Collier sat watching the proceedings of a community meeting at a sports club in Scunthorpe, a steel town in North Lincolnshire. Collier was dressed exactly like the renowned development economist that he is: comfortable hiking boots, checked shirt, beige slacks, tweed jacket, white beard. For decades, Collier immersed himself in the question of what makes poor countries grow, or fail to grow, mostly in Africa. He ran the research group at the World Bank and wrote papers on foreign aid, civil wars, and corruption. In 2007, his work found a global audience with “The Bottom Billion,” an analysis of why the world’s poorest economies were diverging from, rather than catching up with, more prosperous ones. In the past decade, however, for a combination of personal and political reasons, Collier’s attention has returned to England—particularly its struggling, post-industrial communities, like the one where he grew up. Last year, he published “Left Behind,” which he summarized to me as “a diagnosis of the same bloody problem for poor places in rich countries as for poor countries.”
Collier, who is seventy-six, is more shambling than imposing. But when he speaks, and especially when he writes, he is forceful and impatient, like someone who fears that his ideas are running out of time. “Divergence breeds despair—and despair breeds anger,” he writes, in “Left Behind.” By his own admission, Collier’s mind operates at a certain altitude: he thinks in terms of demographics and decades, as opposed to news cycles. In 2015, he was criticized for using the word “indigenous” to describe Britain’s white population, in the context of immigration. Collier often says that the ultra-rational “homo economicus” of traditional economics does not exist. But he can sometimes sound like one.
Collier was in Scunthorpe to attend a meeting of Scunthorpe Tomorrow, a coalition of local volunteers that formed two and a half years ago to, in the group’s words, “change the narrative about what is possible” in the town. Scunthorpe typically makes the news in connection to some crisis at the steelworks. (This spring, the British government took control of the plant, after its Chinese owners threatened to shut it down.) The town fits the profile of other places that Collier identifies as “spiralling down.” In June, the government named Scunthorpe one of Britain’s seventy-five most left-behind communities, owing to a combination of poverty, poor health, and low productivity. Scunthorpe Tomorrow had invited residents to a series of workshops to discuss how to spend a new twenty-million-pound grant from the state that is intended to fix these problems.
Each table in the club bar had a large piece of paper, on which participants were invited to describe their visions for Scunthorpe and its present situation. Sample comments: “No one wants to own the problems”; “nowhere for the kids to go”; “self-deprecation of the area.” In one corner of the room, an artist named Rebecca Ellis was working on a mural, to illustrate more positive ideas. Ellis had painted the words “Youth Clubs” in large crimson letters, along with a futuristic bus and a street-food zone. The steelworks, a two-thousand-acre site dominating Scunthorpe’s eastern side, was depicted as a windowless brick box.
Collier joined in at a table that included a local vicar. He has to be careful not to say too much. “You’ve got to have a modest role, you know,” he told me. “I’ve not got all the answers, but I can suggest things.” In the nineties, after the Rwandan genocide, Collier helped advise the government on how to rebuild its economy. His experiences in Rwanda—along with his analyses of post-independence Tanzania and Singapore, and of Deng Xiaoping’s China—can give Collier’s prescriptions a bracing edge. In “Left Behind,” he doesn’t argue that autocracy can be more effective than democracy in raising people’s living standards in post-conflict situations, but he doesn’t argue the opposite, either. “Critics need to find other leadership teams in comparable situations which did better,” he writes. “They won’t find them in Burundi.”
Collier calls himself a centrist, but his politics are of the left. He is an enthusiastic proponent of the philosopher Michael Sandel’s idea of “contributive justice”—that everyone in a society, including the weak, must have agency in order to contribute to and define the common good. But a lifetime of development studies has also made Collier skeptical of clever bureaucrats and virtuous intentions. He urges self-sacrifice by leaders and experimentation in the face of complex problems. Collier tries to offer what he calls credible hope, but he acknowledges that this can be hard to come by. One of the co-founders of Scunthorpe Tomorrow is Robert Allen, a former civil servant at the Treasury, who grew up caring for his disabled father in the town. “We’re starting to realize that, as Paul would sort of put it, no one’s going to come and save us,” Allen told me.
Scunthorpe’s town crest includes a heraldic emblem of a “Blast-Furnace issuant therefrom Flames all proper.” In the nineteen-sixties, the town’s four blast furnaces, each named after a Queen of England, were the centerpiece of the British steel industry, which was the second largest in Europe, after West Germany’s. Scunthorpe was advanced and aspirational—an industrial garden town—with wide roads, good jobs, and plenty of parks.
But the past forty years have been extremely cruel. Margaret Thatcher’s free-market reforms triggered an economic shock from which the town has yet to recover. The steelworks remains in operation, but employs a quarter of the people it once did. The rest of the town, which sits on a ridge, not far from the North Sea, has a health problem, a crime problem, and a skills problem. It even has a name problem. In the early days of the internet, a “Scunthorpe problem” occurred when a word, like “Scunthorpe,” contained another word, like “cunt,” that meant it got blocked by profanity filters. I have reported from Scunthorpe a number of times in the past ten years, and it is a place longing for its stages of grief to end. The website of Heslam Park, where the community meeting was held, displays its support for the three clubs that use its facilities: the rugby club, the cricket club, and Tackling It Together, an initiative that aims to reduce male suicide in the town.
Each table at the meeting suggested ideas for how to spend the money on offer from the national government to improve Scunthorpe. Most of the proposals were sensible but small-scale: clearing rubbish, improving the parks, reimagining the libraries. Then it was Collier’s turn to speak. He took the microphone and stood, slightly stooped, in the middle of the room. He is not a fluent orator, but he has a gruff magnetism. He praised the energy of the discussion. “That’s your future,” Collier said. “It’s your own energy, right?”
He was doubtful about the ostensible purpose of the discussion: how to distribute the twenty million pounds of national funding. Scunthorpe has a population of eighty thousand people. The money would be paid over ten years. Collier pointed out that this amounted to one cup of coffee a month per adult resident—at Scunthorpe, rather than London, prices. “That’s not going to transform anybody’s life,” Collier said. “But you thinking about ‘What can we do together?’ That will transform.” He ignored the residents’ suggestions and urged them to think more ambitiously, about the kind of work that might keep young people in the town. “There are jobs here,” Collier said. “But they’re crap jobs, warehouse jobs in Amazon, that sort of rubbish.” Quiet, stunned laughter filled the room. “You need jobs that are interesting, worth doing. Where are those interesting, worthwhile jobs in the future going to come from? Well, we don’t know.”
Part of Collier’s role in places like Scunthorpe is to say the unsayable. “He will challenge in, like, really blunt terms,” Allen told me. “And that’s really, really valuable, because we’re all really close to it.” Collier’s idea for what to do with the government money was to start clearing disused parts of the steelworks, in order to make way for a new business park for local entrepreneurs. “Instead of drinking one cup of coffee extra a month for the next ten years, clear that site,” Collier said. “And make it work with your own brilliant talent.” Collier’s boldness was informed, at least in part, by necessity. “You can see the forces,” he confided later. “The steel company’s going to close. The Treasury has got no money to fund it for very long.”
After Collier spoke, the meeting took on a looser feel. Jonathan Frary, another Scunthorpe Tomorrow volunteer, stood up to close the session. Frary is a former triathlete who runs Curly’s Athletes, a sporting-events business in the town. He spent seven years in London, working in H.R., before returning to Scunthorpe. It was difficult to talk about his home town when he lived away from it. “Most people just said, ‘I bet you are glad to be out,’ ” Frary said. “You kind of carry that with you.”
When Collier visits Scunthorpe, Frary likes to give him a lift in his truck and collar him for big-picture conversations about A.I. and the evolution of humanity. He says that the economist’s message is always the same: “You can’t rely on what you already know.” In the bar at Heslam Park, Frary channelled Collier as he exhorted the residents. “Make a start. Doesn’t have to be right. Doesn’t have to be a project,” he said. “It’s a journey. Just do something and find other people that are passionate about doing it. So, go do shit.”
Collier grew up in Sheffield, a steel city in South Yorkshire, about an hour west of Scunthorpe, after the Second World War. His parents, who ran a butcher’s shop, left school when they were twelve. Collier won a place at a grammar school and then at Oxford. He never really looked back. Between 1970, when Collier was twenty-one, and last year, employment in the British steel industry shrank by ninety per cent. People in Sheffield and South Yorkshire suffered just as badly as those in Scunthorpe, if not worse. The Colliers were not immune. “My family back in Sheffield is bimodal,” he said. “Two of us have been really successful, and quite a few who are just total disasters.”
Two of Collier’s young relatives from Sheffield—the grandchildren of his first cousin—were taken away from their parents. In 2008, Collier and his wife, Pauline, who had a young son of their own at the time, became the children’s guardians and brought them to live in Oxford. “We took them when they were nearly two and nearly three,” Collier recalled. “By which time they were already totally emotionally traumatized.”
Collier was deeply engaged with international poverty research at the time. He had returned to teaching, from the World Bank.“The Bottom Billion” had been published the previous year. It struck him that his African friends and colleagues thought that it was perfectly natural for him to take care of his less fortunate relatives, whereas the British response—expressed in undue bureaucracy and raised eyebrows—made him feel eccentric. “It was excruciating, shaming . . . forty pages of questionnaires. ‘Do you unplug your electric plugs every night?’ ” he told an interviewer, in 2018. “At no stage did anybody actually ask whether we were decent human beings who would love these little children.”
Bringing up the children, as well as his own son, made Collier reflect on the fate of his wider family and home city. Sheffield now has some of the poorest neighborhoods in the U.K. After the Brexit vote, Collier decided to study the country’s regional inequality directly. In his book “The Future of Capitalism,” published in 2018, he reflected on three growing divides: within Britain’s borders; between those with higher and lower levels of education; and globally, between the richest and poorest countries on earth. “My own life has straddled each of the three grim rifts that have opened in our societies,” he writes. “While I have maintained a cool head, they have seared my heart.”
Britain’s imbalanced economy is one of its greatest sores. When the country was still in the E.U., its seven poorest regions were poorer than anywhere in France, Germany, or Ireland. The size of the economy of Yorkshire and the Humber, of which Scunthorpe and Sheffield are both part, has more in common with Lithuania than with London. When Allen, of Scunthorpe Tomorrow, first saw the capital, in his late teens, he felt as if he was visiting a different country. “I feel that more keenly now, twenty years on, than I did as a nineteen-year-old,” he said. In 2021, Collier started advising northern towns and cities—starting with Sheffield—on how they might begin to turn their fortunes around.
Boris Johnson was Prime Minister at the time. A policy called Levelling Up was one of Johnson’s favorites, a mission “to end the geographical inequality which is such a striking feature of the U.K.,” as his government called it. Levelling Up had its own government department. (Collier was hired briefly as an adviser). But like most Johnsonian notions—building a bridge to Ireland, or an airport on an island in the Thames—Levelling Up turned out to be more of a talking point than a serious investment program. Johnson’s unflamboyant eventual successor, Rishi Sunak, cancelled the northern leg ofHS2, a multibillion-pound high-speed railway network that was supposed to knit the country together.
Collier was briefly optimistic that the new Labour government would take the challenge more seriously. “Keir Starmer has done enough to be given the benefit of the doubt,” he wrote, last summer. But, like many people, Collier has been baffled by Labour’s incompetence and sense of drift. For years, Collier’s basic critique of the British state has been that it is far too centralized, politically and culturally, in London, and that the Treasury, which controls government spending, has a narrow and reductive approach to how it views investment.
None of that has changed. Except that Starmer and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, who represents a constituency in Leeds, are now much less popular than when they won office. “They realize they’re failing,” Collier said. Last December, Labour announced reforms to local government that will abolish and merge hundreds of smaller councils into larger, more powerful units—a plan that Collier thinks will make matters even worse. “If you diagnose that we’re failing because we don’t have enough control, we need to have more centralization,” he said. “That’s what they’re doing.”
Collier insists that his work is nonideological. But that doesn’t mean it is not political. Six months ago, Lincolnshire elected its first regional mayor, from Nigel Farage’s nationalist Reform U.K. Party. Scunthorpe itself—which has a Labour M.P. but voted overwhelmingly for Brexit—will be a target for Reform at the next election. “Consider two futures: one where all the places like Scunthorpe—working-class—all around England fail,” Collier told me. “Politically, what’s going to happen? Well, we know what will happen. The place will explode. It will explode into despair and anger, and we know where both of those lead.” Allen told me that he saw the previous decade of voting in the town as a series of increasingly desperate choices. “I think it’s really hard to predict with certainty how the next few years are going to play out,” he said.
After the roundtable with residents, the volunteers in Scunthorpe withdrew to a smaller room at the sports club to discuss their progress. A representative from the University Campus of North Lincolnshire, which opened in the town in 2019, suggested an A.I. tool to match students with local mentors and career opportunities. Frary, the former triathlete, offered to host Scunthorpe’s first Soup—a community event where entrepreneurs pitched small-scale business ideas—inspired by regeneration efforts in Detroit. Collier interjected now and then, to emphasize the importance, and the value, of vocational trades, like bricklaying.
Afterward, we took a tour of the university campus. Collier was impressed by the equipment in a robotics laboratory and the fact that there was barely anybody in the building at three o’clock in the afternoon. “It’s like a neutron bomb has hit it,” he muttered. Back in Oxford, the following week, Collier acknowledged both the immense difficulty of reviving places like Scunthorpe and the absolute necessity of doing so. “If it has to work, and you’re not confident that it will, what do you do?” he asked. “You start, and you learn as you go.” A copy of the Spanish edition of “Left Behind” was on the table between us. Collier quoted Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, who is credited with saving the euro during the depths of the financial crisis. “Whatever it takes,” Collier said. “It’s that attitude that is exactly right: whatever it takes to make provincial England work again.” He liked the phrase, so he said it again, this time as a slogan: “Make Provincial England Work Again.” ♦
