Every table at the meeting came up with ideas on how to spend the money offered by the national government to improve Scunthorpe. Most of the proposals were sensible but small-scale: cleaning up trash, improving parks, reimagining libraries. Then it was Collier's turn to speak. He took the microphone and stood, slightly bent, in the middle of the room. He is not a fluent speaker, but he has a raw magnetism. He praised the energy of the discussion. “This is your future,” Collier said. “It’s your own energy, right?”
He questioned the ostensible purpose of the debate: how to distribute twenty million pounds of national funding. Scunthorpe has a population of eighty thousand. The money will be paid over ten years. Collier noted that this amounts to one cup of coffee per month per adult – at Scunthorpe prices, not London prices. “It’s not going to change anyone’s life,” Collier said. “But you think, 'What can we do?' together?' This will make a difference.” He ignored residents' suggestions and urged them to think more ambitiously about what kind of jobs could keep young people in the city. “There are jobs here,” Collier said. “But it’s a crappy job, working in an Amazon warehouse, and all that crap.” Quiet, stunned laughter filled the room. “You need interesting and rewarding jobs. Where will these interesting and rewarding jobs come from in the future? Well, we don't know.”
Part of Collier's role in places like Scunthorpe is to say the unspeakable. “He will challenge in very strong terms,” Allen told me. “And that’s really very valuable because we’re all very close to that.” Collier's idea of what to do with public money was to begin clearing abandoned parts of the steel mill to make way for a new business park for local entrepreneurs. “Instead of drinking one extra cup of coffee a month for the next ten years, clean this place up,” Collier said. “And make it work with your own brilliant talent.” Collier's courage was due, at least in part, to necessity. “You can see the powers,” he admitted later. “The steel company is going to close. The Treasury doesn't have the money to fund it for a very long time.”
After Collier's speech, the meeting took on a more relaxed character. Jonathan Frary, another Scunthorpe Tomorrow volunteer, stood up to close the session. Frary is a former triathlete who runs Curly's Athletes, a city-based sports events business. He spent seven years in London working in human resources before returning to Scunthorpe. It was difficult to talk about his hometown when he lived far from it. “Most people just said, 'I bet you're glad you're away,'” Frary said. “You kind of carry it around with you.”
When Collier comes to Scunthorpe, Frary likes to give him a ride in his truck and grab him for a chat about artificial intelligence and human evolution. He says the economist's message is always the same: “You can't rely on what you already know.” At a bar in Heslam Park, Frary directed Collier as he admonished residents. “Get started. It doesn't have to be right. It doesn't have to be a project,” he said. “It's a journey. Just do something and find other people who are passionate about it. So go out and do shit.”
Collier grew up in Sheffield, a steel town in South Yorkshire about an hour's drive west of Scunthorpe, after the Second World War. His parents, who ran a butcher shop, left school when they were twelve. Collier received a place at the Grammar School and then at Oxford. He never really looked back. Between 1970, when Collier was twenty-one, and the previous year, employment in the British steel industry had fallen by ninety percent. People in Sheffield and South Yorkshire have suffered as badly as those in Scunthorpe, if not worse. The Colliers were not insured. “My family in Sheffield are bimodal,” he said. “Two of us were truly successful, and there were quite a few who simply failed.”
Collier's two young relatives from Sheffield – his cousin's grandchildren – were taken 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 got them when they were about two and almost three years old,” Collier recalls. “By that time they were already completely emotionally damaged.”
