A peep into life in 'Little Scotland'
Corby is one of Britain's most unusual places. It's a typical Scottish ex-steel town but one plonked down just 90 miles north of Westminster.
Let me introduce you to Billy. His family story will tell you a lot you need to know to understand Corby and its people.
I met Billy with his mates at the open-air cafe by the boating lake in Corby. This might sound like a "new town" idyll, but the heavy steel security screens, the graffiti and the general air of despondency take the edge off the romantic feel of the place.
Billy is 15. He feels he is destined to become one of Corby's many Neets (not in employment, education or training) on his 16th birthday next month.
Coincidently, Billy's mother was 15 when she had Billy at a time when Corby was often in the news topping Britain's statistics for underage pregnancies.
An intense health education programme was making a real impression on the number of schoolgirl pregnancies, but that campaign was one of the first victims of the coalition cuts.
Drug and alcohol abuse too has seen the town in the news, but again valuable work in this field has been halted by massive spending cuts in both voluntary and public sectors.
Corby has the highest proportion of population in England with low levels of literacy and numeracy limiting achievement and horizons for young people. This bodes badly for the future of the town.
Northamptonshire County Council, with a massive Tory majority, has been an early and enthusiastic supporter of central government's austerity programme.
The county has slashed its youth service to the bone. Another unpopular council cut has seen street lighting turned off, leading to public unease about an increase in street crime. Local trade unionists have launched a campaign against what they are calling the Blitz Blackout.
Ironically, in the real wartime Blitz Corby burnt oil and rubber waste to create a continuous dark pall over the town to hide the glowing Bessemer steel furnaces from nazi bombers. No bombs ever hit the town.
Billy's family and most of his friends and neighbours all speak with a Scottish accent, almost Glaswegian. They call it Corby Scots - yet neither Billy or his mum have ever been north of the border. Billy explains.
"My great, great, great-grandfather - another Billy - walked from Scotland to Corby in the 1930s. He had been unemployed since the General Strike and had heard there were jobs for steelworkers in a new steelworks in Corby."
Corby, it seems, sat on top of a huge deposit of ironstone ore. It gave birth to a steel town big and dirty enough to have featured in Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony.
"It was 350 miles from Cambuslang, Glasgow, to Northamptonshire and he walked every step of the way. It took him over a month," says Billy.
"The walk was worth it. Billy Snr got a job and worked in the Corby steelworks, as did his son and grandson - that's my granddad. Three generations of steelmakers, a common story in Corby.
"Sadly there's no job for me in the steel industry today." Billy continues.
"They are just a shadow of what they used to be, making steel tubes for the Indian conglomerate Tata."
In the war Corby steel tube workers made the "Pluto pipeline" that took fuel across the Channel to the British army.
"Winston Churchill said the Corby steel won the war," Billy tells me, obviously repeating an old and proud local story.
Virtually all the steelworkers came from Scotland, along with a good few from Northern Ireland. The town was known as "Little Scotland."
The Scots and Ulster folk bought their culture and traditions with them. There are still Celtic and Rangers supporters' clubs in the town.
How Corby steel was tempered
Flags fly from flats in Corby as they have been all over Britain for the Olympics, but here they are all blue and white St Andrew's crosses.
Despite being only 90 miles north of London, Corby is a Scottish steel town where the steel industry has shut down.
Most Corby people came to work in the steelworks from Scotland or Northern Ireland bringing their culture and traditions with them.
Some of the traditions are ominous.
Last year Louise Mensch and Labour Mayor Gail McDaid had to get together to appeal, unsuccessfully, to the local British Legion not to let the Orange Order's Corby Loyalist flute band lead the town's Remembrance Day parade.
This in a town that only 16 years ago made national headlines with the sectarian killing of a 13-year-old Catholic girl who was kicked to death by a Protestant teenage girls' gang. Sectarian violence still plagues the town today.
Today Corby's industries are food - potato crisps, breakfast cereals and vegetarian ready-meals are specialties.
Distribution is important too, and huge warehouses circle the town but one, Argos, is due to close in October with the loss of another 440 jobs.
Unemployment in Corby is growing rapidly as local businesses shrink or close. Youth unemployment has doubled in the last year.
So why does the constituency have a Tory MP? When the constituency borders were redrawn in 1983 they incorporated some of the poshest towns and villages in the English Midlands.
The constituency includes traditional hunting Tory shires up to the Rutland border.
Mensch herself lives 10 miles from Corby town in the chocolate-box riverside town of Oundle, best-known for its £30,000 per year public school. It's still common to see the hunt in the countryside round Corby.
One positive factor in Labour winning the by-election would be the re-establishment of the local Trades Union Council.
The organisation came back to life last year as local trade unionists played their part in the fights and demonstrations against the public service cuts from central government and the county council.
Trades Council secretary Natalie Newby sums up the feeling of local people in that fight.
"This is a battle that simply must be won, because defeat will lead to lower living standards for all of us. Let's show this rotten Tory government we stand united and we're ready to take them on."
The Corby by-election will be a test both of the popularity of the Cameron-Clegg coalition and also of the country's attitude to Ed Miliband and the policies that Labour has put forward.
Miliband has already been to Corby to launch the Labour campaign. He has declared that unemployment will be the major issue of the election.
Now he needs to speak out with radical socialist policies that will unite the working people of Corby.
That way the tiny crack started by one Tory resignation could begin to crumble the whole rotten coalition government.
Ed's dad, Marxist Ralph Miliband, could have told him. That's the way the Corby steel was tempered.
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