Losing the North?

Why Labour is losing the north

 This article appears in the 21 August 2019 issue of the New Statesman
 Republished from Tribune, a socialist magazine of politics since 1937. Read Tribune here

The party’s urgent fight for its traditional heartlands in an era of evaporating loyalties.

By Alex Niven

ON 28 September 2018, the annual South Shields Lecture took place in a school on the River Tyne. Previous speakers at the event had included local lad Sting, and the directors Danny Boyle and Sam Mendes; but this year it took the form of a conversation between an interesting pairing.

On the one hand, Blairite passionara David Miliband, who was MP for South Shields between 2001 and 2013, was a fairly obvious choice. But joining Miliband was the former Tory Prime Minister John Major, a man responsible for the “Thatcherism on autopilot” of the early 1990s, when the shipbuilding and mining industries that sustained north-east towns like South Shields were finally liquidated by a remorseless Conservative government.

In this strange spectacle of a London-based Tory grandee uniting with a New York-based policy analyst in order to, among other things, lecture an overwhelmingly Leave-voting constituency that Brexit would make it “poorer and weaker”, the 40-year neoliberal relationship with the north of England stands summarised in starkly poetic terms.

More specifically, viewed through the lens of recent Labour Party history, the sight of Miliband showing tacit sympathy with the Thatcherite tendencies that destroyed South Shields, while blithely ignoring the experiences and attitudes of his former constituents, highlights the sangfroid with which Labour has severed itself from its northern heartlands over the past four decades.

If it is not quite true that Labour has lost the north – or at least not yet – it is certainly the case that it is losing key northern demographics at a rapid rate, even in the wake of a recent Corbynite takeover that promised to check the London-centric managerialism of New Labourites like David Miliband. While the causes of this shift are deep-seated and long-running, it is only now, as we come to the end of the 2010s, that Labour’s fractured marriage with post-industrial communities is reaching breaking point.

Indeed, it is eminently possible that the loss of a tranche of northern seats at the next general election will lead to the defeat of the Corbyn project, and the return of another botched centre-right coalition to power. In light of this looming catastrophe, there is some urgency in the need to assess the extent of Labour’s northern problem, and to point to ways of halting the defection of “left behind” northern Labour voters to apathy, the Brexit Party, or worse.


Examining Labour’s history underlines that there have always been deep structural weaknesses in its dependency on the relationship between place and political loyalty. As Tom Nairn commented in 1964, the Labour Party “did not come into being in response to any theory about what a socialist party should be; it arose empirically, in a quite piece-meal fashion”. In the context of the English north – as in the parallel cases of industrial Wales and Scotland – this meant that Labour developed more or less organically, as the ultimate expression of the vernacular trade union movements of the 19th century.

In the territorial pattern that guided Labour’s formation, local associations would spring up in industrial areas as a means of empowering communities of workers and their families. As the century wore on, they gradually federalised into a national network of disparate political factions, which was united by a simple, empirical sense that, for its ideological diversity, it always embodied the cause of labour.


The English north played a starring role in this narrative. From the inauguration of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Manchester in 1868, to the rash of local organisations in places such as Colne Valley and Salford that would amalgamate to form the Independent Labour Party in the 1890s, and finally to the historic proposal in 1900 by a Doncaster railway worker that a conference should be held to allow the TUC to establish a parliamentary front in the form of the Labour Representation Committee, Labour was in its early years very much an outgrowth of northern industrial consciousness.

Subsequently, as Labour became an established parliamentary force from the 1920s on, a familiar electoral picture began to emerge. While the vast majority of English rural constituencies – especially in the south – shaded Tory blue in the aftermath of the Liberal Party’s demise, substantial red heartlands started to coagulate in north-east England, South and West Yorkshire, Lancashire, west Cumbria, and north Staffordshire.

On the one hand, it is important not to view “the north” as a monolithic Labour fiefdom. It has always been a politically various region, subject to multiple and continual shifts of allegiance, even after the rise of the Parliamentary Labour Party in the wake of the First World War. Indeed, Labour has never quite been able to rely on its so-called northern heartlands. Even discounting the many solidly Tory northern rural seats, Liverpool returned Tory MPs up to the 1960s, for instance, and even during the polarised 1980s, seats such as Newcastle Central in the north-east could briefly turn blue as a result of local quirks.

But it is true that in the textile districts of Manchester, the port towns of west Cumbria, and especially the vast coalfield areas scattered across the north that nurtured such a large portion of its population and culture, voting Labour was something that was done without a second thought, from the time of the General Strike through the postwar years and the Thatcher nadir, up to the Blairite millennium.
Aside from the brief, partial upturn of the postwar years, this was mostly a period of slow, unchecked decline for the region from its Victorian heyday, when it had resembled hyper-developed modern locales like Shanghai and Silicon Valley. But despite and perhaps partly because of this backdrop of downturn and depression, the Labour Party was throughout this period, for the vast majority of people in the mining districts of County Durham or South Yorkshire, less a political party than a secular church, with all the sense of emotional attachment and injunctions against non-attendance that implies.


But Labour’s foundation in communitarian organisation also offers a good starting point for understanding its tragic drift away from its northern bedrock over the millennial period. For while traditionalist tendencies such as Blue Labour have argued recently for a return to the emphasis on faith, family and localism that sustained the party in its years of formation and maturation, an obvious flaw in this idea is that when families and local communities change irrevocably, as they have done over the past half-century of deindustrialisation, their institutions and places of worship must follow suit, or risk extinction.

To an extent, Labour’s changing relationship with its heartlands from the 1980s on has been shaped by this fundamental truth – the fact that, in an increasingly desocialised and privatised society, the industrial areas of the north no longer have the community infrastructure to connect individuals to the party hierarchy as they did in Labour’s “heroic age” through local union branches and social clubs, national bodies like the NUM and TUC, and parliamentary party proper.

More pointedly, for all that the heritage of the Labour movement lives on – and is even undergoing something of a revival in the form of events like the Durham Miners’ Gala – the industries of the 19th and 20th centuries are now gone forever. This is, obviously, a pretty formidable problem for a historically “empirical” party founded on the experience of workers attached to specific workplaces.

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