Getting on yer bike!

I listened to Digby Jones this morning observe that unemployed people in England are reluctant to move away from home to where the jobs are. Apparently this is never a problem in North America and may suggest why they recover from recessions more easily. Yesterday I was talking to a man from Yorkshire who had relocated in my home town - he was surprised to observe how many families he encountered who could illustrate three and four generations of residence in the area.
Two random observations on the same phenomenon. However, in the case of Wolverton it was not always so. In 1838 the manor had a small rural population not much above 200. The new railway works was forced to, and di, reruit from all over the country.The early censuses illustrate this with many coming from Scotland and the North East together with representatives from all across the country. As the century moves on the second generation, those born in Wolverton, were able to find work in the expanding railway works, and so this went on for a third and fourth and fifth generation.
Wolverton was fairly lucky in that the Council, anticipating the decline in the railways, made efforts to attract new companies and the later development of Milton Keynes meant that there was plenty of work. Men did move in the fifties and sixties to Coventry and Luton to take high paying jobs in the car industry, but in the main the population remained settled.
There are however many parts of this country where work is scarce and, if Digby Jones is right, many parts where there is a shortage of workers. Government policy over the past decade or so has been to provide welfare for the unemployed in high unemployment areas and to bring in immigrants where there are labour shortages.
Can this continue to make sense in a weak economy? Perhaps we need to reprise the circumstances which led many of our nineteenth forbears to leave their ancestral villages and find work in the new towns.