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.
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.
**********
Posts
