So join the union while you may.
Divvin’t wait till your dying day,
For that may not be far away,
you dirty blackleg miner!
‘BLACKLEG MINER’, A NINETEENTH-CENTURY FOLK SONG HEARD IN THE MINERS’ STRIKE
Dan Jackson waited patiently outside West Monkseaton Metro station, after my train decided to break down. The rolling stock on the north-east’s light railway was forty years old and its replacement long overdue – a victim of successive cutbacks to local transport budgets. The sullen exodus of afternoon commuters, from Newcastle to their homes on the coast, confirmed they are well used to this hindrance. Ready in his sleek black BMW, Jackson ushered me into the passenger seat for a trip up the north-eastern coast to the border country of Northumberland (the Mini was parked for now). Forty-year-old Jackson is an NHS executive with a charming young family, but he is also one of England’s finest local historians. Our acquaintance began through his worldly @northumbriana Twitter account, serving up north-east history with sharp dry English humour. His expertise spawned a bestselling book, The Northumbrians, the most beguiling guide to Geordie history, character and culture you can find.
Our first stop was Earsdon, a small village at the southern tip of Northumberland. Departing the leather comfort for the autumn drizzle, we trudged into St Alban’s church – dark, weather-beaten stone surrounded by long tree branches sagging under the weight of the rain. Jackson took me to a commanding obelisk in the middle of the graveyard, commemorating one of England’s most tragic mining disasters. On the morning of 16 January 1862, at the nearby Hartley Colliery, the beam propping up the pit’s steam engine snapped, fell, and blocked the shaft down to the mine.1 Five men in a lift to the surface died instantly. Without the steam engine, the pit was flooded, and by the time the shaft was reached six days later, 199 were dead. The names Jackson pointed to on the monument were chillingly young: J. Foster, aged fifteen; J. Ford, aged twelve; J. Armstrong, aged ten. ‘It devastated a tight-knit community like this. Some families lost several generations of men,’ he said. ‘This’ – he gestured across at the graves of all the men who had perished in successive industrial disasters or had seen their lives end early due to the uncompromising work – ‘was the hard reality of mining life in Northumberland’. Beyond the graves lay rolling countryside: much of it slag heaps that have now been reclaimed by nature and grassed over. I squinted to see Blyth town itself in the distance, with not a single spot of heavy industry visible.
Back in the warmth of the car and motoring to Blyth, Jackson described the area as ‘urban and rural at the same time’. Somewhere that has ‘always been underestimated’ in the shadow of the city of Newcastle as well as the larger towns and the surrounding countryside. Northumberland is one of England’s best tourist spots, with stunning beaches, breathtaking countryside and only occasionally intolerable weather. Blyth, along with the town of Cramlington, sits awkwardly on the tip of urban Tyneside while overlooking beautiful vistas. Throughout the twentieth century, its economy was dominated by heavy industry: mining, but also manufacturing and shipping. As the mines entered rapid decline in the 1960s, so did the surrounding community. Blyth’s railway station was closed in 1964 during the Beeching cuts, and since then the economic news has been almost relentlessly downbeat. The last pit closed in 1986, the vast coal power station in 2002.
Blyth town centre supported thousands of workers who lived in the terraced houses around the shopping streets and further afield in small dormitory villages. On my first visit, it was a rather sorry sight: the town square had received a £9 million redevelopment, which included a swish open-air market but with no protection from the northern elements.2 Jackson said it was barely half full at the best of times. Another redevelopment effort, the Keel Row Shopping Centre, opened in 1991 during the peak of the town’s struggles. It brought more new shops, but with the growth of private housing estates and car ownership, most residents I encountered said they preferred the larger out-of-town outlets where parking is easier and choice more plentiful.
Blyth’s new marketplace had metal artwork and a lovely water feature, but on that gloomy day, it felt anything but fresh. The streets were deserted. Too many of the shops were closed, the shutters defaced with coarse graffiti. Those still trading were predominantly chains aimed at less well-off demographics found in many of England’s small towns: Greggs the baker, retailers Poundland, frozen specialists Heron Foods. Blyth still had a complement of banks, but its biggest amenities were long gone. The only recent addition was a series of vape shops. The cinema is now a Wetherspoons pub, complete with the original projector. Impressively, the Art Deco interior is intact – the screen had become the bar, with the black and silver pillars framing bottles of Jägermeister. There was a hollowness to the town. ‘I used to come here for shopping, or go to the cinema on a Saturday. Now the only reason I come is to get the dog’s hair trimmed,’ Jackson said.
On the waterfront, the impression is similar. The vast warehouses were dilapidated or soon to be cleared away. Some new housing has emerged, but the large green patches of wasteland added to the sense of desolation. Opposite the seafront car park were storage vessels from the Alcan aluminium smelter, which was opened in 1974 as part of a scheme to bring jobs to the area. But the dual pressures of environmental regulation and the end of coal mining led to its closure in 2012, with 515 jobs lost.3 Jackson reeled off the major employers that had deserted Blyth in recent decades: the Officers’ Club clothing company, 500 jobs lost in 2011; the Wilkinson Sword factory grinding out razor blades, 350 jobs gone.
The Port of Blyth has existed in one form or another since the twelfth century. But as mining and manufacturing declined, so did the cargo. One iteration of its management at least had the foresight to retool the port for roll on/roll off traffic, meaning millions of tons still flow through every year. It also diversified into packing. But the economic value of the goods is a fraction of what it was in the past, as is the employment base. The harbour is now more popular for pleasure pursuits: the Royal Northumberland Yacht Club has its base here.
As we drove out of Blyth town, past the vast General Electric cable reels waiting for shipment abroad, Jackson pointed out the names of the streets of tight terraced houses: Balfour Street, Salisbury Street, Disraeli Street, the grandest of Tory names. Blyth highlighted the two disparate nations Britain has become – precisely what Benjamin Disraeli warned of and fought to avoid during his time as prime minister. Towns such as this were emotionally and geographically far away from the prosperous cities that voted Remain in the 2016 referendum and continue to back the Labour Party. Blyth, and towns like it, voted for change: first through Brexit and then with the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson. Dan Jackson was a Labour man by heart and tradition – he once worked for Alan Campbell, the Labour MP for Tynemouth, also on the coast, yet he can’t hide his thrill at the political prominence of his home turf. He read many of the infamously long blog posts by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief advisor and the architect of the Vote Leave campaign, and found much of interest and relevance. ‘I have to say, I was quite excited by it,’ he smiled, as we temporarily parted company. He still voted Labour, if only because his local MP is a long-standing friend.
On 2019 polling night, Huw Edwards could barely hold back his disbelief. An hour or so after the polls closed, the BBC election night anchor declared, ‘It’s neck and neck we are told between Labour and the Conservatives in Blyth Valley, which is a sentence I never thought I would utter on an election night programme.’ Ten minutes later, this southern corner of Northumberland elected its first ever Conservative MP. The constituency is formed around Blyth but includes Cramlington: a village designated as one of England’s ‘new towns’ after the Second World War as part of a national plan to grow the industrial base and encourage fresh investment into some of the struggling regions. Such towns were part of a vision for rebuilding the country and turning it into a paradise based on the National Health Service, private gardens, and solid sources of employment. Many of the red wall seats were home to new towns, although few fulfilled that halcyon vision.
Mining dominated Blyth Valley until the mid-twentieth century, when a consolidation programme saw the smallest pits close and jobs coalesce around the bigger collieries that could be modernized to improve productivity. Until that first wave of closures, there were at least six collieries in the area, all substantial sources of employment by modern standards. Cambois employed 1,261 at its peak, closing in 1968. Cowpen was smaller, but still had employment for 802 when its last coal was dug up in 1969. North Seaton had work for 927 in the early 1950s, which had fallen to 340 when it closed in 1961. New Delaval colliery only had a workforce of 225 when it shut down in 1955. During this era, Blyth was the busiest port in Europe, shipping six million tons of coal every year.4
The mine that held out the longest was Bates. As the smaller pits closed, employment at this colliery remained high. Almost 2,000 miners worked there during its 1964 peak. Bates was earmarked for closure and became a local fixture during the 1984–85 miners’ strike. When it closed a year after the strike ended, 1,735 jobs were lost – including those of two future Labour MPs: Ian Lavery and Ronnie Campbell. There are no physical remains of the pit today, only a plaque at the Morpeth Road Primary School reminding pupils of where their forebears worked.
Another major employer that has been lost is shipbuilding. The Blyth Dock and Shipbuilding Company folded in 1966, when thirty other shipyards in the region had closed due to greater economic competition abroad. HMS Ark Royal, the UK’s first aircraft carrier, was constructed here. Sixty-two ships came out of its shipyards during the First World War, twenty-four in the second. Most of the shares in the Blyth Company were owned by a Hong Kong based firm, which inflicted much pain on the town when the decision was made to shut it down. Eddie Milne, the town’s idiosyncratic Labour MP from 1960 to 1974, said to the House of Commons that Blyth was ‘stunned’ when the yards were closed and the decision made on the other side of the world. Not least as most of the workforce was on annual leave. The first they heard of the news was in the local newspaper, Blyth News.
Milne told MPs:
Workers on holiday received the news from newspaper reports, and many returned from their holidays to receive the news in envelopes marked Hong Kong . . . As anybody in the House will appreciate, it is a matter of great sadness to watch a great industry die. The method of announcing the closure was criminal. No other word could fit the act. Men who had given a lifetime of service to the Blyth Company, in good times and bad, were entitled to treatment better than this.5
That same sense of mistreatment by far-away forces was felt as Blyth Valley gradually shed its traditional political affiliation. In the 1997 election, when New Labour won its first landslide victory, Ronnie Campbell was returned with an immense 17,736 majority – over three times the votes the Conservatives won in a distant third place. His majority dwindled over the subsequent two decades, yet never sunk into difficult territory. In the 2017 snap election, seventy-four-year-old Campbell was re-elected almost 8,000 votes clear of his rivals. While the Liberal Democrats and UKIP had been the runners-up, it was a local NHS mental health nurse called Ian Levy who added fifteen points to the Tory vote. Two years on, Levy squeaked in with a 712 majority – no doubt in part thanks to Campbell’s retirement, as well as hoovering up the votes of the UK Independence Party, who came second in the 2015 election. The new electoral mood was set in the 2016 referendum, when 60 per cent of Blyth Valley voted to leave the EU. The memories of lost industries, a weakening jobs base and a struggling town convinced its people to vote for change. Jackson had dropped me off, so it was back to the port on foot to meet the man who benefited from that desire for change and created a defining moment in modern British political history.
New MPs’ constituency offices share a soullessness: their incumbents are often shocked at finding their livelihoods upturned, uncertain of what facilities and staff they need to serve their new constituencies. The nakedly political ones paint their signs in party colours; the more restrained opt for neutral colours with the portcullis emblem that confers parliamentary authority. Ian Levy has neither: he picked the modern Blyth Workspace, on Commissioners Quay, for his local base. The fifty-five-year-old genially welcomed me into the clean, open-plan space for a strong cup of tea. Smartly dressed in suit, tie and hoodie – typically for Blyth, it is not a warm day – his closely cropped hair was typical for a man of his vintage. In demeanour, he is more Geordie than Conservative. Before we talk about 2019, he launched into his personal journey.
‘I’m born and bred in Blyth, as is my wife,’ he explained in eager tones. ‘Our family has farmed the land in the realm of Blyth that can be traced back 500 years.’ Levy did not farm though, working instead for the health service before politics entered his consciousness. With grown-up children at university, he could have retired and taken his pension. Instead, something snapped about five years before his election. ‘We would often go out for a meal or a drink, me and my wife Maureen. On the wander back, when I’d had a few beers, I would start complaining about the state of the town centre: the state of the bus shelters, the feeling of despondency there was in the town where people feel really, really let down, and that their vote is taken for granted,’ he said.
‘I think she was happy to hear this, once, twice, maybe thirty times. But once it got to forty or fifty, she’d absolutely had enough. I remember this one night in particular she said, “Either do something about it or shut up.” And I said, “Right, OK then.”’ The next day, Levy woke his wife with tea and toast and informed her he was going to run for Parliament. She suggested he should try to become a local councillor first, but Levy insisted that such a position would only bring change on a small scale. He told her, ‘If I want to tidy up the high streets, if I want to try and eradicate crime, if I want to get poverty down, if I want to bring businesses into the area, and I want to bring wealth for people to the area, and training for kids, then I’ve got to be the MP.’
His ‘gut feeling’ took him towards the Tories. ‘The Conservatives will give you the tools to live your life, they don’t want you to live on benefits. Some people will always need to have support, and that is what we’re there for. But having a good, strong economy helps look after the people that need it.’ Levy discovered there was no party association in Blyth Valley and he was uncertain what to do. ‘If I was looking to get a job as, say, a wagon driver and I didn’t know who to contact, I’d write to the boss.’ So, remarkably, he opened up a computer to write the first formal letter of his life (Levy is dyslexic). He addressed it to David Cameron, explaining his passion for Blyth, the problems he had identified and how he intended to fix them. Much to his, and Maureen’s, surprise, he received a positive response. Levy was invited to Conservative Party HQ in 2016 for an interview to become a prospective parliamentary candidate.
‘I was sat with people who had massive amounts of political experience, had all these high-paid jobs with lots of responsibility, and I was thinking, I’ve done a great job that I’ve enjoyed for many years working for the NHS and in mental health and it’s been really fulfilling. But I haven’t managed staff, I haven’t done the things that a lot of these people have done.’ He left feeling that he was on the back foot, but was ultimately accepted onto the candidate’s list. And when the snap election was called in 2017 by Theresa May, he was duly installed as the party’s pick in Blyth Valley.
His first political campaign was run on £500 donated by Matt Ridley, the aristocratic science writer and libertarian campaigner based in Northumberland, and supported by Levy’s daughter and her friends. ‘A lot of the kids turned up and I would bribe them with a pot of broth to put the leaflets out in the morning,’ he said. ‘People got really involved in it.’ On that mere £500, with little assistance from Tory headquarters, he doubled the Conservative vote to 16,000 – a similar rise to the other red wall seats. Two years later, the next election arrived, and the party unsurprisingly chose him to stand for Blyth Valley again.
As soon as Levy started knocking on doors during the winter days of the 2019 campaign, he felt something had shifted, even among those who did not ultimately vote for him. ‘Some of them were chasing us from the door’, but others welcomed his efforts. He recalled one voter saying, ‘Look, son, I’m sorry. I’m still going to vote Labour, my dad voted Labour, my granddad voted Labour, but you’re doing a cracking job.’ Labour was the incumbent party not just in the area’s Westminster representation but across local government: town councillors, county councillors were almost universally of the left. But as the campaign continued, voters became more receptive. ‘One elderly guy in Cowpen [village] said, “I hear you’re standing as the Conservative.” And then he asked “Have you got some more of these leaflets?” I gave him some and he said, “No I want a pile!” I thought he was going to burn them because he was telling us he’d been a pitman at Bates pit.’ But the old fella wanted to take them down to his working men’s club. ‘I thought, whoa, this is massive. This is huge, absolutely huge.’ Levy joked, ‘I’d woken Blyth up, it was like the Sleeping Giant.’
After a ‘horrible, wet and cold’ campaign, Levy felt there was a perfect storm brewing in Blyth Valley, starting with Brexit. Although he backed Remain in the 2016 referendum – ‘I was very concerned that Nissan would be offered a really good deal to move [the company’s plant in Sunderland] to Europe’ – his constituency was Leave and he felt a democratic impulse to support that result. He also knew that the opposition led by Jeremy Corbyn, a character who would not chime in Blyth Valley. ‘They felt very disillusioned with Jeremy Corbyn, they didn’t like what he stood for. They didn’t personally like the guy.’ The personal animus towards the Labour leader may have been born of character, but also his policies too, which I examined later in the trip. He described the typical Blyth Valley first-time Tory voter as a family person, who feels ‘very let down, very despondent, and they’re looking for more.’ Although there was a strong loyalty to Ronnie Campbell, Levy sensed that voters felt the MP and his party had taken the area for granted.
With such a thin majority, Levy has had to provide real change. His focus was securing funding for the reopening of the Northumberland Line railway, which lost its passenger services in the Beeching cuts of 1964. Shovels are due to be in the ground from 2022 and, handily, trains will run again from Ashington to Newcastle around the time the next general election is due.6 As with many of his colleagues, Levy has made a plethora of applications for money from the pots the Johnson government has set up to help the red wall – the towns fund, the levelling-up fund, the future high streets fund. For Blyth, he is hopeful of a new hotel, a three-screen cinema, a visitor centre and a branch of Primark. He acknowledged that the town is never going back to its industrial prime, but signs of investment will boost morale.
The most exciting project is another factory, but of a more modern kind. Britishvolt, a battery start-up, announced plans in 2020 for a £2.6 billion ‘gigafactory’ to produce batteries for electric cars.7 If the plan is successful, it is projected to create 3,000 jobs and another 5,000 in the supply chain. Situated on the site of Blyth’s old coal power station, it could transform the area – and Levy’s electoral prospects. Improving the physical environment of Blyth Valley’s towns is important to create that sense of change voters wanted, but Levy believes lasting change flows from job opportunities. ‘People have given us an opportunity to prove what the Conservatives can do for the area, and we’ll be judged on the merits,’ he said.
His first ‘bloody hard year’ as an MP was dominated by the pandemic and Levy is acutely aware he had little time left to deliver tangible benefits to sustain the trust of his voters. But he noted one positive from the year of successive lockdowns and fears about health and livelihoods: ‘Communities have come together. We started binding and rallying together. People have worked together. People are acknowledging their neighbours, they’re acknowledging their friends and the good work that’s been done in the community.’ From a politician representing a party that has long put the emphasis on the individual, Levy is an embodiment of how red wall success is challenging recent notions of conservatism.
On a sun-kissed afternoon, Middleton Street on the other side of town felt the most contented part of Blyth. Plonked in the middle of this middle-class neighbourhood was a large detached house. Ten minutes’ walk across town from Levy’s office, Ronnie Campbell was waiting contentedly on the patio with a mug of tea. Now seventy-seven and retired after thirty-two years in the House of Commons, his welcome was as warm as the afternoon light. Campbell spoke with a hint of sadness that his exit from politics may have precipitated a first-time Tory victory in his home town. ‘It got to me because I thought, I should have maybe stood. Maybe I could have won it on my reputation.’
He disparaged Tony Blair’s years leading the party, arguing voters were not satisfied with his leadership and his landslide majority was ‘wasted’. Jeremy Corbyn instead received his qualified praise. ‘You have some good policies there that would have been great for working-class people.’ Although his time on the doorstep in 2019 was limited due to a heart complaint, his wife Deirdre canvassed and the pair agreed there was a real issue among his traditional supporters. ‘There were more Labour votes in the posh areas than there were in the council estates last election. The canvassing returns were horrible and yet on some of the private estates it was pretty good.’ Conveniently, Deirdre returned from shopping in time to join us in the garden, after first scolding Ronnie for not offering me a drink. ‘The first couple of nights I’d been out, when I came in I said to you, “We’re not going to win this election.” I knew. I’ve been canvassing over thirty years, and you can tell.’ On the council estates, she was told to go away. Can she imagine the voters coming back? ‘I don’t know what it’ll take,’ she sighed.
Although Ronnie thought Boris Johnson is ‘daft as a brush’, he put the Conservatives’ success down to ‘the best candidate they could have got’ in Ian Levy, who he described as a ‘nice, quiet lad’ although he curtly criticised Levy for taking credit for improvements begun under his watch. ‘I never bragged about anything I did, I just did the bloody thing. This guy’s in the newspapers, he’s standing like this.’ (Campbell gave an exaggerated thumbs up at this point.) Campbell cited the Port of Blyth, which he helped designate as an enterprise zone to encourage inward investment. After Bates pit closed, the land, along with the power station, harbour and shipyard, was repurposed. Now it employs over a thousand people. ‘He can’t take credit for that, that goes to me.’
Our conversation turned to Keir Starmer, who created a dividing line in the Campbells’ marriage. Ronnie does not think much of his leadership so far. ‘He’s trying to go up the middle of the road.’ But his wife liked and voted for him, telling her husband he was critical for Labour getting its act together and becoming credible again. Then a rather different Labour character entered the conversation: the mayor of Greater Manchester. ‘I always say Andy Burnham is the best prime minister we never had.’ Ronnie voted for him in the 2010 leadership contest but changed his allegiance when his old comrade Jeremy Corbyn ran five years later. Deirdre sighed. ‘Oh, Andy. I wish we could bring him up here and let him loose.’ Ronnie’s face suggested he was a little unconvinced.
Ronnie was a true socialist Brexiter, campaigning against every EU treaty from Maastricht to Lisbon, and blamed the rise in the Tory vote on Labour’s equivocal stance. ‘I’ve been voting against it because it’s undemocratic, I don’t like the organization, look what they’re trying to do. Heavens!’ At his local working men’s club, he grasped a feeling that ‘people weren’t happy’ because they had voted Leave and ‘the Labour Party wasn’t taking any notice of it’. Oddly, Blyth Valley ejected its pro-Brexit MP for one that voted Remain simply based on the strength of party perceptions. Campbell made a point to his mates of his Brexit support, but he was no longer on the ballot paper. ‘I was quite proud of the statement from a lot of people, saying they would have voted for me but I’m not standing so they’re voting Tory.’ Before returning inside, Deirdre agreed with Ronnie that ‘Labour’s whole picture on Europe really annoyed people’, as did chucking too many spending commitments into its manifesto.
Before his time in Parliament, Ronnie Campbell spent three decades as a miner and trade union activist. He was born just down the coast in Tynemouth, where his mother ‘jumped on the bus’ to give birth, but has lived in Blyth all his life. He was first elected to the district council in 1969 and became the local mining union chairman in 1982 – putting him at the heart of the 1984–85 miners’ strike. After his pit closed, he worked his connection with Arthur Scargill, then head of the National Union of Mineworkers, to be selected as the candidate for the Blyth Valley Labour Party.
During his life, Campbell noted two major changes to the area. First is more prosperity, seen in the growth of private houses, but also a decline in the town’s facilities. ‘What are you going to come into Blyth for?’ he asked me (having visited, nothing came to mind). He agreed that the town centre is struggling: ‘I knew people came into Blyth for the market when it was flourishing. Now the market is just dead. Once the pit went, Blyth subsided and never came back again.’ He joked that his main occupation has turned into waiting at home to collect Amazon deliveries for his grandchildren.
The second is the end of mining, which ‘smashed’ the area. When he worked at the Bates colliery, 2,000 were employed there. He bemoaned not that the Northumberland coalfield was brought to an end but that the Thatcher governments did not offer replacement jobs. ‘They said, “Well, the pits were wrong and the green people didn’t like the dirty fuels.” That’s fair enough. But if you’re going to close a pit then think of what you’re going to put in its place.’ The opening of the Nissan car plant further south in Sunderland in 1986 may have created 6,000 jobs in the region, but it didn’t come close to replacing the 160,000 lost with mining. ‘Blyth didn’t recover from the closure of the pit. Never did.’
Campbell has devoted his life to the labour movement, but he laughed off the notion that mining was part of a national endeavour, deeming that a romantic view of a society that has gone. ‘It was hard slog. The conditions could be brilliant if you knew the pit. But sometimes, when the water used to come in, oh my god! And the roof started to crack open, stone starting to fall, oh my god! You’re in big trouble.’
Deirdre returned, and chipped in that she was also unconvinced by the Tories’ arguments for major infrastructure projects. What Blyth needs is jobs and a better physical environment – clean streets, not piles of rubbish. ‘You don’t need to give them great big projects to say, vote for me, they’re not interested in that. It’s just a lot of people want decent schools, decent homes to live in, and have a job, and it doesn’t have to be a great big job so long as they’ve got a job, and the environment’s clean and tidy.’
There was a striking similarity in what the Campbells and Levy said about the collapse of traditional community life. The world Ronnie inhabited before politics was highly collectivized: work, life, community were all based around the pit. After the miners’ strike was beaten by the Thatcher government and its successive electoral mandates for economic reform, that disappeared. Out of Blyth centre and into the suburbs and countryside, the recent prosperity is apparent. Few of the cars in the streets around the Campbell residence hold registration plates older than five years. New detached homes dwarf the terraced miners’ cottages that Ronnie lived in as a pitman. This new side of the Labour heartlands has created a more individualistic culture, which in turn played into the increase in support for the Conservatives.
Who better to run this theory by than a man who devoted much of his working life to explaining the changing moral and philosophical shape of England. John Gray is a Tyneside lad, he grew up in South Shields and attended grammar school before growing into one of Britain’s pre-eminent political philosophers. Despite his decades lecturing at Oxford and the London School of Economics, he has maintained a delightfully soft Geordie lilt; I could listen to him say ‘bourgeoisification’ all day. Typically for someone brought up in the industrial north-east in the 1950s and 1960s, his politics were Labour left. Along with many contemporaries, he made the journey to the new right in the 1970s after the industrial strife and Labour’s failure in governing. He was closely associated with Thatcherism, yet today, his political views are fluid. He does not assign himself to the left or the right, Labour or Conservative, but he is fascinated by what may be emerging as Johnsonism.
Speaking from his home, the seventy-two-year-old eagerly agreed that what happened in the Labour heartlands in the early years of the twenty-first century was based on a deepening individualism and the dissolution of a traditional way of life. ‘They were working communities, embedded in street life and human settlements in towns and terraces,’ he said, recalling the homogeneity of his childhood. ‘They were organized around work, most people walked to work. Crime of the kind you see these days was low. They were safe communities. But they could be repressive; the position of women was subordinated. There was a mixed attitude to people who were socially deviant or people who were known to be gay. To my knowledge they weren’t harassed, I never saw anyone being beaten up or anything like that. On the other hand, they were not positively embraced.’
Gray described Tyneside society of the mid-twentieth century as cohesive but inhibited. ‘I didn’t see them as being notably racist. When I grew up there was very little, if any, anti-Semitism. But it could be repressive on individual aspiration both in men and women. And if you really felt that, you just left. The common way of leaving was to join the merchant or Royal Navy. Or move down south.’ The ending of the patriarchal family structure prompted a ‘colossal change’ in how these societies were structured, as did the changing nature of work. ‘It had partly gone because the wage structures had gone. The forms of steady industrial life too – not commuting for work, or not having to go long distances to find work. If you were a miner, you just had to walk down the bottom of the street and it would be there. If that’s what you wanted to do, and most people did up to the sixties, they just accepted they went to the mines.’
Although the industrial decay can be traced back to the end of the war, Gray marked the liberalization of society in the 1960s as the turning point, which accelerated in the 1980s with deindustrialization. Gray was personally close to Margaret Thatcher, but reflected she made some major misjudgements. He said of that period, ‘up in the north there was a profound sense of grievance, which has lasted to this day. There’s also the issue of security for working people: they were kind of tossed on the scrapheap in the steel towns because of economic change. Telling them to “get on their bike” was just a further insult [a reference to Norman Tebbit’s infamous remark that the unemployed should get moving to find work].’
But what defines the new culture of the English heartlands is not a sudden love for Thatcherite individualism – Gray wryly stated ‘There’s not much call in Blyth Valley for Friedrich Hayek or Ayn Rand’. The new spirit is not economically right-wing now, nor is it countercultural in the way Jeremy Corbyn attempted to pitch himself. ‘Along with Corbynite collectivist economics, there was a kind of postmodernist individualism that you can be whoever you want to be, you can just create yourself, you can choose your identity. None of that meant anything to the people that I knew.’
Gray and I attempted for an over an hour to define exactly what this new societal view is. The nearest we came is describing an attitude that is flexible, commonsensical and tolerant of gradual change. ‘To make your life as you go along,’ as Gray summed up. This new outlook is not about moralizing, but it does treasure family structures. It is not about pursuing an ever smaller state, but nor is it welcoming of collectivist economics. It depends on a welcome physical environment and strong local services – many of which were wrecked during the Tory-led austerity years. Gray agreed municipal, local and health services are key but added there is also a coarse edge. ‘It can be hard, mind you, hard on welfare cheats and stuff like that.’
First-time Tory voters, Gray felt, ‘would be turned off by Thatcherism, naturally because of historical memories, but also because of its indifference to fairness. The suffering that was involved was forgotten by many of the Thatcherites. It’s often terminal if you’re cast out of work in your late forties, whether you’re a man or a woman, in a town that was heavily dependent on a certain kind of industry. It’s very difficult to get back into work at all.’ Such a hard-nosed approach to employment created ‘a lifetime of unhappiness and frustration and defeat’ for these communities.
How does Boris Johnson fit into this? The prime minister wears his politics and ideology lightly, shifting from right-wing magazine editor, to metropolitan liberal mayor of London, to the voice of England’s forgotten regions. On economics, Johnson is no neoliberal. He may have an instinct for lower taxes and thriving business but his love of grand projets and a desire to be liked by the electorate nudges him towards more spending. Gray reckoned all of Johnson’s policies are based on intuition. ‘I don’t think he sits back and theorizes about anything.’ During his first year in Downing Street, the prime minister drifted towards expansionist economics, as shown by the £300 billion pumped into the economy during the coronavirus lockdowns, despite ministers in his Cabinet holding opposing views. On the surface, Johnson was reverting to a pre-Thatcherite form of conservatism, more akin to Harold Macmillan’s approach of the 1950s and 1960s (Gray pointed out that Macmillan was an early disciple of John Maynard Keynes). But that era was dominated by class politics – most of the Conservative cabinet was aristocratic – which has mostly disappeared from society: ‘I remember there was something impossibly snooty about it,’ Gray said simply.
Johnson, in his view, was combining the caring parts of middle-ground conservatism with aspects of ‘Old Labour’ that were eroded by Tony Blair’s modernization project. ‘It is the combination of a certain kind of instinctive patriotism with a big protective state. High spending and aiming for full employment, not letting the market do anything really important, and a non-dogmatic approach to personal freedom. And patriotism. That’s actually what the centre ground is now. The closest you can get to it in English politics is Johnsonian Conservatism.’
If Johnson is as in tune with the new communities of the heartlands as Gray, it would suggest there is scant hope of Labour rebuilding itself. The charge Gray has laid in successive essays is that the party has gone in the opposite direction of the communities it was founded to support and has become middle class. It was therefore only a matter of time before a voting fissure emerged at the ballot box. He thinks Blair’s efforts were necessary for the party to win the more prosperous south of England, but set the course for long-term decline in the heartlands.
‘The Labour response under Blair was to bourgeoisify, which worked for a long time. He did do pretty much what he said he would do. So the question is, who now has the sense of this fluid, non-dogmatic, flexible, working class, individualism and is non-Thatcherite? Who has it? The only person that has any kind of instinctive grip on it is Johnson at the moment.’
Before returning to the streets of Blyth Valley, I wanted to delve a little more into Thatcher’s legacy in the red wall. Even those on the left who are harshly critical of her efforts to modernize Britain’s economy do not deny it was necessary, but I wanted to know whether this more individualistic society was a determined part of the project to reshape England – or a side effect of economic renewal. Few ministers of that era are still alive or active in politics, but I tracked down two. Norman Tebbit, who was in charge of industry and trade during the miners’ strike, made a startling but little-noticed admission of failure about deindustrialization. Speaking to Francis Beckett and David Hencke in 2009 for their book on the strike, Marching to the Fault Line, he admitted that the destruction of the collectivized communities had a negative effect on British society:
Those mining communities had good working-class values and a sense of family values . . . [and they] were able to deal with the few troublesome kids. Many of these communities were completely devastated, with people out of work turning to drugs and no real work because all the jobs had gone . . . The scale of the closures went too far. The damage done to those communities was enormous as a result of the strike.
Now eighty-nine, Lord Tebbit, speaking from his House of Lords office, admitted that his policies were driven by the hard economics of the UK’s situation but also mentioned the Tories were eager to foster the spirit of small business that would not be dominated by troublesome trade unions. But Thatcher underestimated the lack of alternative employment options. ‘There were mining communities in rural areas where there was very little other work. Unfortunately we could have run those mines down much more slowly. We could have done more to help to bring jobs to those areas. There was a deep and profound economic and social change that went on, which was adverse to those local people.’
Tebbit cited again the success of Nissan as one example of bringing new employers to the north-east. He recalled a scheme where unemployment benefit could be drawn for twelve months while individuals tried to set themselves up in business. ‘So for twelve months you’ve got the security of that income while you’re setting up. A lot of people set up businesses, some of which have become reasonably large employers now. That type of scheme was successful, but it was limited.’ But he admitted the miscalculation was the singular employment base. ‘There’s a much greater variety of employment available if you live in Essex as opposed to living in Durham for example, and so when people are given more choice they are more likely to find what suits them and what suits their kids.’
The other dominant figure in the 1980s debate about regeneration was Michael Heseltine, who served as environment and defence secretary. The eighty-seven-year-old, who was and is the political nemesis of Tebbit, was at the forefront of the Thatcher government’s efforts to counter deindustrialization. From the grand study of his countryside residence in Oxfordshire, Lord Heseltine argued that the caricature of an uncaring government driven purely by economic force is false. Starting in 1979, the Conservatives pursued ‘a very interventionist policy of restoring hope and opportunity to some of the most deprived parts of our economy’. Heseltine founded so-called development corporations to stimulate the struggling docks of Liverpool and London; he ordered grants to clear up toxic waste from coal mines – but only if public and private partnerships could be agreed.
Taken inspiration from the post-war Bundesgartenschau in Germany, Heseltine held five major garden festivals across the UK on derelict land to encourage tourism, generate employment and reclaim the toxic land. I have personal experience of Gateshead’s 1990 festival: my family moved to a newly built home on Festival Park during my childhood. The 200-acre site near the River Tyne once housed a gasworks and coking plant.8 Around 50,000 tons of discarded coal was heaved out and 5,000 workers created the festival. After the festival was over, new housing was built. According to the Evening Chronicle newspaper, Gateshead’s festival marked the start of a cultural renewal in the urban Tyneside region that eventually led to the much-lauded Sage concert venue and Baltic contemporary art gallery. Heseltine believed this combination of public-private partnerships and strong local leadership was a formula for success: ‘By the end of the decade, in the eighties and early nineties, we knew how to regenerate urban areas.’ But he lamented the stalled progress on devolution, which he thought had ‘died on the vine’, leaving Whitehall fully in charge of policymaking. ‘What they never do is go to local people and say, “What do you think is the best way to do it for you?”’
Where Tebbit said the Thatcher project was mostly economically driven, Heseltine disagreed and said there was a driving belief that ‘you want to enthuse and encourage people to own a stake in their society’. The most striking example was his Right to Buy policy for council homes, which my paternal grandparents eagerly took up. ‘That had a transformational effect on a generation of people who had missed out on the benefits of property ownership.’ The much-made criticism of the scheme is that too many of the funds that flowed into the Treasury were not ploughed into new housing stock. Before Heseltine moved to the Ministry of Defence in 1983, he said 75 per cent went into new social housing. ‘Look at the problem with social housing as a consequence! The criticism I have of the Thatcher governments – and one I stressed constantly at the time in the Cabinet – is that we stimulated consumption at the expense of capital investment.’ In other words, the Thatcher government was focused on getting people to spend instead of investing in infrastructure. Reflecting on the miners’ strike, Heseltine acknowledged that more could have been done to carefully phase out the mining ‘but it wouldn’t have changed the outcome’.
Although he was booted out of the Conservative Party for advocating backing the pro-Remain Liberal Democrats in the 2019 European elections, he was intrigued by the collapse of the red wall and thinks the economic and social changes that started forty years ago have come to fruition. ‘They’re not the same communities, a lot of people have joined the electorate and a lot have gone, but that is a consequence, and I suspect one of the reasons is that the over-dependency on one union, one industry, has been broken up in those areas. People may be travelling further to work, but they’ve now retrained, regrouped, reskilled, and they’ve got different jobs in different industries.’
While the post-Thatcher economy is often criticized by the Tory left and Labour for its careless attitude towards strategic industries, Heseltine offered a recent counter example. When the Redcar steelworks in North Yorkshire closed in 2015, he was sent by David Cameron to investigate its impact on the local economy. What he found was not mass unemployment but resilience. ‘It was extraordinary that despite the closure of this major employer, the unemployment figures hardly changed because the local people were absorbed into a very diverse economy. And I’m proud that I was part of a Conservative government that brought about those shifts, because they are shifts to higher standards of living.’ The Redcar constituency went Conservative for the first time in 2019.
His advice to Boris Johnson was to focus on skills and education, combined with a major push on devolution. ‘The Tories have it within their gift to transform these places . . . but to do that they have got to have ministers who are there, who sound like they know what the situation is, who sound like they have the experience to understand the problems and the concerns as well. The voice and tone is a very important part of the policy initiatives of devolution that are required.’ But without Jeremy Corbyn and with the ‘good sense’ of the Labour Party to realign around Keir Starmer, he admits the next election will be ‘much different’ to the one just passed.
Finally, it was time to find Dan Jackson again for a pint in a unique pub. On the platform of Monkseaton Metro station, the Left Luggage Room offered six locally brewed beers. The pub was housed in the old parcel office and cheerily busy on a Friday afternoon. It was perfectly set up for the pandemic, with antiseptic and tables spaced out across the platform for watching the trains flow by. The atmosphere was markedly different from the declining, musty working men’s pubs and clubs still in the area. As well as the pints, tables of women were enjoying large glasses of wine after work. The new culture, if you like, versus the old.
Over a couple of pints of Two by Two IPA, brewed in Wallsend, where my grandmother was born among the thriving shipyards and terraced houses around the turn of the twentieth century, we chatted more about Jackson’s upbringing: he was born in the tiny village of New Hartley, one of the ‘work camps’ supporting the coal mines. His childhood was in step with the gradual decline of heavy manufacturing. I had passed through the village and seen the old terraced miners’ cottages facing off with the more spacious 1970s housing estates (he grew up in the latter). Jackson’s father still lived in the village and is a regular patron at the Victory working men’s club, built after the First World War. All of Jackson’s forebears worked in heavy industry – he was the first in his family to go to university and the first to do white-collar work.
For his peers, most of the job options after school were in mining, oil rigs or the public sector. Further and higher education were not widespread. He agreed with my conclusion that the overall economy of Blyth Valley today was more diverse and had greater pockets of prosperity, even if much of it is still struggling. The upheaval is ‘something we have been coming to terms with for fifty years,’ he said. Although Ronnie Campbell did not recall his days in heavy industry with pure fondness, Jackson argued that something is missing from the area’s new economic base in the small industrial parks. ‘People had a sense of pride, of national purpose, working in the big industries. They were fundamental to Britain’s role in the world. You don’t get that from a production line.’
As Deirdre Campbell put it, what people care about is jobs, jobs, jobs, which Blyth Valley is still struggling with. Prior to the pandemic, the unemployment rate here was 7.8 per cent, above the national average. The median age is forty-four, again above the national average, and the median salary is below the average. For Ian Levy’s hopes of re-election, better employment opportunities are as vital as a new railway line and new businesses in the town centre. Some of the folks I spoke to in the marketplace insisted that a better physical environment would brighten their outlook. But much of that rests on improving personal prosperity.
If Britishvolt is successful with its battery plant project in Blyth Valley, it would revolutionize the local economy. At time of writing, construction was set to begin in the summer of 2021.9 It feels almost too good to be true, but if it comes off there will be one marked difference from the days of heavy industry. The workforce will not have the same collectivism and community spirit of old. Society has moved on, families have two working parents and battery factories are not heavy mining. Those that look back on the salad days of manufacturing overlook women, who were stuck at home while their husbands were at work all day and down the pub at night. In his childhood home, Jackson said that his grandfather was insistent ‘no wife of mine’ would work. ‘It was unsustainable, it was a way of life that was in decline since the 1950s. A very patriarchal society that was on its way out.’
After a second round of pints, Jackson returned to sort his family’s dinner. I made my way to the Metro to head back to Gateshead. As the train rolled through Newcastle and across the River Tyne – not breaking down this time, thankfully – a wave of sadness flowed over me, only slightly related to the hops and days of travelling in the cold. I was thinking of Blyth’s dilapidated town centre, the empty shipyards at Wallsend, and the long stretches of grass once dominated by industry. The work founded on the area’s natural resources was tough, unforgiving and ultimately economically unsustainable. But it gave the region its pride. The communities were small, interwoven, but as John Gray set out, that era is gone. The pull of nostalgia is powerful, and I was struck at how Conservatives and socialists have both spoken of the desire to return to some of that togetherness. There was some panic buying, particularly of toilet paper, and ministers encouraged neighbours to report those who broke the lockdown rules. But the way communities supported each other during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 suggested individualism has its limits. Little I had seen on the first stop challenged my scepticism about just how much New Labour had actually done for its northern heartlands, although the successful remodelling of the Port of Blyth is a clear boon. The schools may have been improved and the housing stock better, but it did little to revive a town that gradually lost its purpose.
Maintaining some sense of community spirit is a crucial part of where English politics heads next. Jackson’s departing remark circled in my mind. ‘The north-east was about big industry, we never did small boutique firms. That’s why the region was hit so hard when the heavy industry began to close.’ Whatever comes in the years ahead, the future is unlikely to be big. Coming to terms with that is important for understanding both what has been lost and what can adequately replace it. In 2017 and 2019, Jeremy Corbyn offered a striking new vision for these communities. On my next stop, thirty miles south to County Durham, I wanted to find out why it was so heartily rejected.