‘Here lies Consett Steelworks, born 1840, died 1980, not peacefully, but after a brave fight for life. Those who seek a true memorial should look about them at those who lost 3,700 jobs and at the community whose health and prosperity it sustained.’
NEWCASTLE EVENING CHRONICLE,
SEPTEMBER 1980
The bone-chilling wind from the Pennines smacked into every crevice of West Wylam: a former colliery village with commanding views of the Tyne Valley, on the edge of the North West Durham seat. Having picked up the car in Gateshead, I drove the ten miles west to meet Barry and Irene McElearney, recommended to me by a mutual friend as typical of the voters Labour has lost. Working-class retirees, they are deeply proud of the vibrant patch in front of their bungalow: full of ornaments, colourful bushes and knick-knacks. Over their fence – with a dog frequently interjecting, awaiting his lunch – Irene enthusiastically dived into politics. She was a lifelong Labour supporter. ‘I came from a colliery village . . . no matter who stood as a Labour candidate, they got in.’ Irene voted Conservative for the first time in 2019, driven by Boris Johnson, who she ‘absolutely loves’. ‘I love him because he seems straightforward, he’s positive in his thinking, he doesn’t give any negative waves off. There’s no such thing as “no” in his vocabulary. It’s “yes, we’ll do it.” Sometimes you think, Well, will you? But it’s nice to know he’s a trier.’ His pro-Brexit stance also chimed with hers.
Barry’s electoral history is more mixed: he was also originally tribally Labour but has flirted with the Tories. ‘I voted for Margaret Thatcher, basically because she was a woman. Women generally do things quite well. Just watch Last of the Summer Wine [the BBC sitcom set in Yorkshire] . . . I voted for her because I thought she would do well. A woman’s way of thinking, you know. But she made too many mistakes.’ After flitting between the parties, he also voted for Johnson in 2019 and now sees himself as a Tory, despite feeling uncomfortable at the thought of telling his family and old friends. ‘Oh, you’d be lynched,’ he said. ‘My Mam and Dad would be doing somersaults in their graves if they knew,’ Irene adds.
The pair were both Labour Party members and fervent supporters of Tony Blair. Their membership cards were shredded when David Miliband failed to be elected leader in 2010 and his left-leaning brother Ed won instead. The final break came five years later. ‘When Jeremy Corbyn took over the Labour Party, that was it . . . I didn’t trust him with anything,’ she said. Both were particularly put off by his attitude towards national security. ‘I’m a big believer in defence, particularly Trident, which can launch a nuclear missile anywhere. He wanted to scrap all that and he wouldn’t press the button. If somebody chucks a stone at me, I want to chuck it back,’ Barry said. ‘The thought of him actually leading the country. His principles were “Well, we’re CND, ban the bomb”, but leading the country you’ve got to look to the future, not what you think.’
Ahead of the last election, the Conservatives were twenty-five points ahead on the polling question of which party is best at handling defence and security.1 Polling was similar on the economy and the health service, and Corbyn’s perceived lack of trustworthiness on these three policy areas proved disastrous in Labour’s traditional heartlands. During the 2017 election, his argument that ‘you can’t protect the public on the cheap’ connected with voters.2 But by 2019, he had almost nothing to say on security beyond staid arguments about reshaping foreign policy into what his fans call ‘anti-imperialism’ (in other words, anti-American).
I met Barry and Irene a year on from the election, just before the second nationwide lockdown hit England, and they both were full of sympathy for Johnson and his pandemic efforts. ‘I feel so sorry for the prime minister and the government. They had all these aspirations when they got in and this has happened, which nobody anticipated. I think he must be so frustrated, because I would be,’ she said. ‘There were a lot of people, Labour people, who voted for him in the north of the country that had never had a Tory MP before and he said, “We’re going to thank those people by delivering.” But he can’t because he’s stuck with this virus.’
Given Corbyn’s departure from frontline politics after his election failure and Johnson’s travails in dealing with Covid-19, could the pair imagine voting for Keir Starmer? (Neither could actually name the opposition leader.) Barry was ‘very, very doubtful’. Irene acknowledged that ‘the leader is better than the one they had certainly, but he doesn’t inspire any confidence’. With that, the McElearneys went inside for their lunch, and I hopped back in the Mini to drive through the lovely winding lanes to Consett, the heart of one of the most surprising seats to flip Conservative for the first time.
North West Durham, a large, mostly rural seat is a Petri dish of Jeremy Corbyn’s political project and how it lost Labour one of its historically safest seats. The area is dotted with small villages like West Wylam, which once supported heavy industry. Its most notable attribute is the chill, blowing in from the North Pennine hills. The temperature adds to the area’s sense of isolation: a local joke in Newcastle goes that you can tell someone travels in from County Durham if there’s snow and skis on the back of their car.
This corner of North West Durham was once renowned for its mines and manufacturing. During its 1950s peak, the constituency had seventy-two mines, employing thousands of men who lived in the bracing colliery villages across the countryside. One of the lost pits, Eden in Leadgate, lasted until 1980. Even though its workforce had shrunk to just 194 by its closure, the loss was acutely felt. As a community historian reported, ‘The last shift was on 18 July 1980, a sad day for many in Leadgate, not just the mine workers but for the local economy which was greatly affected by the loss of traditional working in the area.’3
The major wave of closures in County Durham began in the 1960s, when the burden of the smaller uneconomical collieries became too much for the state to cope with. The decline in their employment was long and gradual. In the village of Chopwell, the pit employed 2,185 at its peak in 1921, which had fallen to 210 when it closed in 1966. When the colliery was shut down, the surrounding village was categorized as a place to be put into managed decline. Annfield Plain village is now most notable for the Tesco superstore and the Krazy Kingdom children’s leisure centre, but was once dominated by the Morrison Busty Colliery. In the middle of the twentieth century, it employed almost 2,000 people, dwindling to 548 before it closed in 1973.
North West Durham’s major town is Consett, the heart of the north-east’s iron industry for 140 years. During its peak in the 1960s, 6,000 workers were employed at the steelworks. When the works closed in 1980, it still employed 3,700 people, and the ensuing poverty was called ‘the murder of a town’.4 Well over a century of steel-making along the River Derwent Valley had come to an end, and 20,000 people moved out of the area.5 The plant was still profitable, but the decision was made by British Steel headquarters not to modernize and restructure its operations. Unemployment – which hit 36 per cent in 1981, quadruple the national average – did not return to normal levels until Tony Blair came to power.
Consett has undergone a major regeneration since the closure of the steelworks, impressively titled Project Genesis.6 Launched in 1993, it had a brief across 700 acres of former industrial land. After £10 million was spent to decontaminate the steelworks site, hundreds of new homes were built, along with Derwentside College for further education, a McDonald’s and scores of businesses and small manufacturing outfits. The sums invested in Consett have been significant: £45 million in total by 2006.7 The new housing developments have made the area a popular commuter belt for the cities of Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne. These estates are palpably middle class. As Irene McElearney put it, ‘You’ve got a lot more commuters going to Newcastle. The demographic is different now. All these new houses, all these new builds. People are living here and commuting to work. You’re getting a different type of person coming in.’ Consett has become such a draw that its population is now larger than in its manufacturing prime. Despite Project Genesis being part-funded by a grant from the European Union, 55 per cent of North West Durham voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.8
The area’s jobs base is more diverse than when the steelworks were the main employer. International Cuisine, opened in 1988, prepares ready meals and employs 500 people. Erwin Hymer, the caravan and mobile-home manufacturer, employs a similar number. Lanchester Wines, one of the UK’s largest wine importers, hit record turnover in 2019 and is another significant employer.9 Elddis Transport, a family run firm, was started to shift steel around on flat trailers. The company reimagined itself when the works closed to focus on consumer goods and continues today, employing 330 people.
Consett’s latter-day jobs story, however, is not entirely one of success. Phileas Fogg crisps was founded in the town in 1982, and gained international popularity due to its quirky marketing campaigns. But the company was sold to KP Snacks, who shut the factory in 2015. Some jobs were transferred, some were lost, but one of Consett’s success stories came to an abrupt end. At the time, Suzanne Reid, a union organizer, said the closure of the factory was ‘devastating’, adding ‘people have worked there for twenty, twenty-four, even twenty-six years – it’s like family. They have been through so much together; marriage, children, even divorce. People are really lost.’10 Much like the steelworks, it was a decision made by managers far away that deprived North West Durham of both an employer and a source of local pride.
Similarly to Blyth Valley, the train line into North West Durham closed during the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. Both the Lanchester Valley and Derwent Valley railways closed first to passengers and then to goods, in a pattern familiar to England’s smallest branch railways. The natural beauty of the area was put to good use when the former tracks were turned into the Derwent Walk, an extremely popular country park and cycle way. Walking through the woods, along the river, underneath the old pedestrian bridges, showed me the 175 hectares reclaimed by the countryside have given County Durham an outstanding attraction.
While the area’s dominant economic narrative is one of decline and depression, the overall picture of North West Durham is more nuanced – particularly among the new businesses that emerged in the post-industrial era. Before exploring Consett town centre, I drove ten minutes east to the sprawling factory of the Lanchester Group in the village of Anfield Plain, once home to several collieries. One of the UK’s biggest wine importers is also one of the biggest employers here. Tony Cleary started the firm in his lounge in 1980, the year the steelworks closed. By 2020, Lanchester reached a turnover of £94 million. Cleary told me, as we wandered through the firm’s sweet-smelling warehouse, he was hopeful of breaking £110 million in 2021. He was born and bred in the area, growing up just south of Durham city, and went to school in the village his company is named after. From an early age, he had no interest in working for a big organization and was happy to take risks. ‘I’ve always wanted to work for myself. I’m in charge of my own destiny rather than other people, which was hugely important to me.’ That motivation is behind many of the small businesses that have started in the wake of deindustrialization.
Lanchester Wines began with three vans. Wine was imported by Cleary and stored in a bonded warehouse. He would go around local off licences and pubs and do business cash in hand. From his house, the business soon moved to an office in Lanchester village. Then he leased his own bonded warehouse. The group expanded beyond wine to all sorts of produce – ciders, perries, spices, hampers and confectionary – and employs 550 people today.
Cleary’s father worked for the National Coal Board, and he recalled Consett was ‘a bit of hellhole’ in its steel days. ‘Red dust everywhere. I mean, god almighty it was filthy.’ He also had no time for the unionized workforce. ‘We used to have contractors who were really really good, but they were all unionized. At 12 o’clock they would head out and you would say, “Look, if you have two minutes we can finish that order and get it out today.” They would respond, “Oh no, it’s lunchtime, we’ve got to go.” That used to really drain me, that attitude was not where I wanted to be.’ Unsurprisingly, he has little time for the political party that once dominated the Consett area. ‘Labour is yesterday’s operation – all about unions, all about strikes. Lanchester is not about that, it’s about people who look after people. We don’t need any union on our side.’
Cleary has built a successful company and claimed to look after his workforce well, but many of the new industries that have emerged do not. How does he feel about the people of Consett who work in other warehouses on zero-hours contracts with no rights? He answered with Covid in mind. ‘There’s some good companies going to come out of this, I think we’ll do well in the next two or three years. We’ll lose a lot of zombie companies but we should have lost them anyway. Some of them should have gone ages ago, because they weren’t making money and they just plod along.’ He returned again to his management ethos. ‘Employ good people and pay them well and give them interesting jobs. That is where people want to be.’
He recalled how Consett has changed during his lifetime: ‘It’s gone from an industrial area of miners and people working with their hands, going to workmen’s clubs at lunchtime and drinking three and four pints then going back into steel furnaces, into different industries.’ The transformation to these new industries is one Cleary welcomed but he argued the shift should have been ‘quicker and better’. He is positive about the opportunities ahead: ‘You’ve got all sorts of new industries coming into the north-east, but I think we’ve got a little bit of a chip on our shoulder, I think we could do with a bit more gumption. We’ve got some good people in the area who represent the area quite well.’
The most exciting development for Cleary is green energy, where he thinks the government should be investing more in their efforts to rebalance the economy between the north and south. ‘We’ve got some good industries and I think we’re way ahead on sustainability in the north-east.’ He is in the midst of building a larger 22,000-square-foot bottling plant which will be almost entirely powered by renewables. Outside Cleary’s window, there is a tall white turbine spinning around that helps power the current plant. Boldly, he claimed, ‘When we get this bottling building up, it’ll be the most modern, sustainable building of its size worldwide. It’s a big investment, we’ll have a million watts of solar on the roof, we’ll have the heat pumps and massive batteries.’ He predicts that just 2 per cent of Lanchester’s power will come from the electricity grid. Cleary thinks that the green message is important for giving the area a sense of optimism about the future. ‘It’s a positive message that you’re sending out.’
For Lanchester’s future, Cleary believes that having a sustainable business is going to be vitally important, and he wants to ensure his businesses do not go the same way as the steelworks. ‘I believe we’re future-proofing the business by doing what we’re doing. It’s number one on our agenda.’
The Conservative victory in the North West Durham seat was, in 2019, utterly unexpected. The seat was solid red since its inception in 1950, and its predecessors had a Labour heritage extending even further back. Prior to 2019, the Tories’ most notable claim on the seat was as a pit stop for Tories on their way to occupying safer seats. Theresa May stood in 1992 before winning Maidenhead in Berkshire five years later. The Conservatives gradually increased their vote share through the New Labour years, and then in the 2017 election they jumped 11 percentage points and their vote share rose to 35 per cent. Two years and another seven points later, the Tories won with a 1,144-vote majority. The loss was especially acute for Jeremy Corbyn and his project, because North West Durham’s MP, Laura Pidcock, was a shadow minister, a wholehearted devotee of his leadership and a protégée frequently tipped as a successor. Alas, we struggled to arrange an interview.
Richard Holden did not expect to be North West Durham’s first Tory MP. I knew Richard from the Westminster bubble: he was a well-known political advisor to the Conservative Party, served several Cabinet ministers, worked at Tory Party HQ and campaigned for Boris Johnson to become leader months before the election. His last job before the election was as an aide to the education secretary, Gavin Williamson. During my election travels, Holden spotted on social media that I was in County Durham and tried to entice me to go on the stump with him, his campaign little more than a tatty red van with his face sellotaped to the side. With limited time, I am afraid I missed out on his efforts and focused on covering apparently more winnable seats.
A year on, Holden had settled into his new life as an MP with a new constituency office in the heart of Consett, opposite the bus station and a few doors up from the working men’s club. Before our appointment, I parked up in the town centre and took the opportunity to explore the high street and scoff a sausage roll for lunch. The town centre is small and most of the shops are discount outlets: Barry’s Bargain Super Store was full of masked-up customers – my uncle Martin, a local resident, proudly purchased forty-eight small bottles of sauvignon blanc here for £24 – while one farmer was selling meat and fresh produce out of the back of his van. There were sadly many abandoned enterprises too: the Zone bar and nightclub had not welcomed dancers for many decades. But the basic amenities were still present: opticians, cafes, clothing and sportswear. Between this and the new out-of-town shopping parks, my uncle reports Consett has everything you need (and much of it at great discounts too).
Lancashire-born Holden has adopted affectations as part of his embracing of the area, arriving in his office with a flat cap and football scarf for Consett FC. Over tea, he reflects on his nigh one-man campaign. ‘Candidates can only swing a couple of hundred votes really, and, you know, they might be able to drive a little bit of turnout. But what really struck me about two weeks in, when postal votes were landing or people decided to post their postal votes, people were telling me, oh, I’ve already switched, I’ve already voted.’
Jeremy Corbyn was the primary motivator in his victory, he thinks, as red wall voters had realized he could actually be prime minister and saw him as a threat to their values. During the 2017 election, when Holden stood in the safe Labour seat of Preston in Lancashire, voters ‘genuinely didn’t think it was possible that Jeremy Corbyn could be prime minister’, adding, ‘Nobody liked him, but nobody thought it was a serious threat.’ But in 2019, Laura Pidcock was a potent reminder of Corbyn’s politics. ‘Speak to people – this is not a sort of Marxist Socialist debating club, on the high street or in the pubs here in Consett, or in the former pit villages.’ He also mentioned the significant swing rightward in next-door Bishop Auckland, which the Conservatives gained from Corbyn’s Labour despite the presence of a more established, more centrist Labour candidate. ‘For Labour’s vote to collapse by nearly a third here, from 55 per cent vote share to under 40 per cent vote share, is very significant.’
Holden argued that the electorate was attuned to the cultural Toryism that has emerged under Boris Johnson, one that is rooted in family and community. ‘And that doesn’t mean like necessarily, very traditional two parents, two children,’ he said. ‘It’s that broader family thing. It’s the extended family: granddad and grandma might play a role in lives, or aunts and uncles. Community is such a vague term, but the sense of town, street, and village. Some little place like Tow Law [a small town near the Pennines] has got its own proper centre, its own little football club, its own community, councils, these are places with a real sense of their own identity as well.’
During the campaign, Holden identified two Labour policy pledges that struck a discordant note with residents abandoning the party. The first was the party’s pledge to offer £58 billion of compensation to women born between 1950 and 1955 suffering from historic pension inequality, the so-called ‘WASPI women’. The sheer scale of the pledge, after the manifesto was published, lost the party credibility, Holden said. ‘I spoke to a woman in the prefabbed bits of Dipton [village] who said to me, “I’m a WASPI woman. Am I going to get thirty grand?” And then she was like, “He’s not going to give us it if he gets in, is he? There’s no bloody money there.”’ The second was Corbyn’s pledge to deliver free fibre broadband to the whole country by 2030. ‘In the Black Lion [pub] in Wolsingham, I heard two chaps talking about it. One was definitely Conservative, probably came over in 2017, and the chap he was talking to was going to be a first-time Conservative voter this time. “This free broadband thing,” one said, “what’s it all about? And where is the money coming from?” And their conversation became, “Why would we want go back to BT, a nationalized BT, it doesn’t make any sense.”’ The nationalized BT of the 1970s is a far cry from the international private company today, which voters can appreciate.
Holden’s first parliamentary term will be devoted to holding on to North West Durham. With such a slim majority, it will only take a minimal swing towards Labour for the seat to flip back. His infrastructure efforts are focused on transport. ‘I was really unaware of how few seats didn’t have any dual carriageway, didn’t have any train line at all, those transport links are massive in the bottom of the constituency. The bus routes are a major issue for young people . . . I’m convinced that part of the drain away of that age group to other areas, as much as anything else, is that sense of rural isolation, that is a real problem.’ He is also campaigning for a new rail line to transport passengers from Consett to Newcastle in thirty minutes, instead of the hour’s drive during peak times, opening up further opportunities for the seat to become a home for commuters. ‘It’s got to be quicker and more convenient than the car.’
Corbyn’s leadership will no longer be a first-order political issue come the next election, but Holden thinks a cultural divide will persist. What he calls Keir Starmer’s ‘pandering to certain political movements’ that want to tear down historical statues will further exacerbate the divide, and he believes the bond between Labour and its heartland voters has been broken. Nor can it be simply repaired. ‘They’ve broken it properly. A lot of what happened was a wife or husband voted Conservative in 2017, then the other one came across this time, or families switched over. You now have the Brexit vote, plus the Conservative vote,’ he said.
‘Are those people going to be convinced by Keir Starmer, who basically told these people he was sort of on the pro-EU side of the Labour Party? He was in the shadow cabinet, rammed it down their throats in 2019 that we are definitely going have a second referendum, meaning we’ll ignore the votes of people in this area. Are they going to trust him?’
Jeremy Corbyn went into the 2019 election as the most unpopular leader of the opposition since polling began.11 Before the election was called in September that year, his ratings were -60, with just 16 per cent of voters expressing satisfaction with his leadership. For comparison, Ed Miliband scored -44 the year before he attempted to win a general election. In 1983, Michael Foot – another notable figure of the Labour left – scored -56. While Corbyn was unpopular across the whole country, it felt especially potent in Labour’s former northern heartlands. Voters in the C2DE social economic group – defined by the Market Research Society as skilled and non-skilled working-class – had significantly worse perceptions of the leader than those in the wealthier ABC1 category, which includes upper- and middle-class voters, accounting for around 45 per cent of the population.12
Corbyn still has his followers, who believe that other factors broke down the red wall. The most prominent and boisterous voice of Corbynism can be found a little way up the coast, so a quick detour from North West Durham is required, back up to Northumberland to find Ian Lavery, in lieu of speaking to Laura Pidcock. A former miner and controversial leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, Lavery entered Parliament in 2010 for Wansbeck in Northumberland and initially garnered little notice. But the rise of Jeremy Corbyn led to the rise of Ian Lavery, as he became one of the leader’s staunchest supporters – particularly in the broadcast media, where his sharp Geordie lilt and broad stature added diversity to the primarily southern, softer tones of Corbyn’s front bench. Lavery was appointed Labour’s election coordinator for the 2017 campaign. A rare ardent Labour Brexiter, he consistently warned that edging towards a pro-Remain position would cost Labour the next general election. He was proved right: Lavery clung onto his constituency in 2019 with a mere 814 votes, compared to a 10,435 majority two years prior. Wansbeck is already on the radar of northern Tories, who would love nothing more than to de-throne one of Corbyn’s few remaining supporters in Parliament (although his constituency is likely to be subsumed into Blyth Valley in the upcoming boundary reviews).
Lavery is out of front-line Labour politics, one of the first casualties of Keir Starmer’s efforts to refurbish the party’s image and make a clean break with the Corbyn era. We met at his constituency office in a modern business park on the outskirts of Ashington. The first notable sight was a maroon Jaguar saloon, a car for the man of the people only in colour. Lavery was waiting in the boardroom, full of mining memorabilia and a tapestry for the NUM that is still paraded during the Durham Miners’ Gala, the annual celebration of mining heritage. He is proud of his militant union background. ‘I’d been on strike for a year . . . I was in a police cell on a regular basis,’ he recalls of the 1984–85 miners’ strike. ‘I like to call myself an industrial leftie. I rarely call myself a socialist, it’s just what I am, and I’m a product of the coal-mining industry, of this place where I grew up, I’m a product of fighting and supporting the people who I worked with all my life.’
Lavery is full of lyrical memories of the halcyon days of mining and how the pit communities were bound up in work. In a two-mile radius around his constituency office, 10,000 men worked in mining. Miners who found themselves in trouble on a Friday night would be put in their place by the men at the pit. ‘All this fantastic stuff, gone,’ he said of the days when the pit was the entire community. ‘I’m a dying sort, but there were such things as sports days arranged by the community. You would have the big leek shows, the vegetable shows, flower shows – you’ll remember from Gateshead [I do not] – there was the whippet sweeps, every week there was the pigeon racing. We still have that social culture here, but not to any degree like what it was.’ Social indeed: there were more drinking establishments per head of population in the pit town of Ashington in its industrial prime than anywhere else in the country.
Lavery recalled his childhood, when there were five working pits that ‘everything was based around’ and you didn’t need to think about education. ‘We would never ever think of a future without the coal industry, because you would leave school, very few people went to university . . . you were lucky if you got an apprenticeship somewhere, but the lads were OK, because they would get a job in one of the pits or the supply chain for the pits, in engineering, mechanical, electrical engineering, fantastic stuff. There was always the understanding that things would be fine, because the pit was here. You had the unions that basically took up disputes for anybody, you didn’t have to be a member of the NUM to get support from a union, the community looked after itself. Mainly the wages, terms and conditions at the pit were fairly good, there was free council housing. You got a house, and the miners paid for the swimming pool, the leisure facilities, libraries, and paid initially for schools.’
Now, in his constituency, that infrastructure and collectivized community has gone. ‘What we’ve got now is a high street full of bookmakers, kebab shops, charity shops, and Ramsdens [pawnbrokers] . . . the industry is gone, there isn’t any huge industry that’s come in here despite many pledges of investment.’ The working classes of England have become what Lavery calls ‘the Homes under the Hammer brigade’, the BBC’s mid-morning home renovation programme watched by millions. ‘They’re in their house, they get up, they have their brekky, they haven’t got a job. They’ll watch Homes under the Hammer, they become secure in the knowledge that if things just continue the way they are, nothing drastic is going happen to them, therefore they’ll think, whatever’s to their advantage, whatever will keep their life in a stable direction, is best for them.’
Lavery is eager to stress that voters who left the Labour Party were not brainwashed by the Tories, but eager to find an alternative to their status quo. ‘These aren’t all daft people, it’s not that they haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. A lot of these people have had a real rough ride over decades. They’ve lost their job, the community in which they’ve lived and loved has been systematically destroyed, there isn’t anything there. They’re seeing their clubs – social clubs, working men’s clubs – close, libraries close, public services reduced, and they blame Labour.’ It is curious that despite a decade of Conservative government, they do not blame austerity for these challenges. The sad truth is that that happened many years ago, we had the Blair years where we were allegedly really popular. We weren’t popular in the red wall areas.’ What happened in 2019 was ‘all those people who had possibly abandoned politics, disenfranchised from politics, a lot of them then came back with a vengeance’, and backed the Conservatives.
But Lavery refuted the suggestion that left-wing policies were to blame for Labour’s troubles. Under Corbyn’s leadership, the 2017 and 2019 manifestos were ‘absolutely magnificent’, full of what he describes as hope, aspiration and equality. ‘Everything I’ve ever fought for since I was a little laddie in the playground, right the way through my time as a miner, right the way through my time as a trade union rep and an MP.’ Those policy documents were ‘political utopia’ for Lavery and he ‘naturally thought that it would be for many others’. When I pointed out that voters rejected them, he exploded. ‘Listen, Sebastian, how many people read the manifesto?’ I had to admit not many. ‘The majority of people will not have a great idea of what the headline policies are of any party.’ But what about Get Brexit Done? He was having none of it. ‘We’ll get Brexit done, we’ll take control of our own finances, take control of the borders and take control of the judiciary system, Make Britain Great Again.’ He slammed his hand on the table. ‘It’s Trumpism, man. It’s the Trump playbook, but it worked so effectively.’
He takes particular affront at suggestions Jeremy Corbyn was to blame, even if he has concluded that he was not the best man to lead the party. ‘I’ve got to tell you, Jeremy Corbyn is a very close friend of mine, he’s one of the nicest individuals I’ve ever met, certainly one of the nicest politicians I’ve ever met. But he wasn’t ruthless, he always tried to compromise with people in politics. You’ve got to be ruthless, you’ve got to strike at the right time, you’ve got to make decisions, can’t dither.’ Labour became one of the largest political parties in the Corbyn era but not many of those members were in places such as North West Durham. ‘The majority of people are away from the heartlands, away from the broken heartlands’ – it is nice to hear him embrace this book – ‘away from the red wall areas, the majority of the membership are in the south, and a lot of them are . . . from left-wing backgrounds.’ And all this plays into his conclusion: ‘The Labour Party took northern heartlands for granted, “they’ll not vote for anybody else”, and I was of that view, right up to the last election. But Brexit broke all that.’
With Corbyn gone, Brexit delivered and Labour moving back towards a more moderate policy platform, how does Lavery feel about Labour’s prospects in these heartlands? ‘My view is that Labour can win back, but I think we’ve got to make sure that we are different, it isn’t any good just continually saying we support the government.’ But he is aware that the Tories will ‘pour money’ into the places they won for the first time. ‘They’ll deliberately starve my area, I’m telling you, because I’m a Labour MP and the only one in Northumberland now, and I’ve got the pincer movement around me.’ But he acknowledges the events of 2016–19 have broken a bond between England and the Labour Party. ‘Brexit changed the world, Brexit changed British politics forever, and there’s no going back on that, that’s a fact of life, and it changed people’s views on politics.’
Lavery concluded our ear-boxing chat with a prediction that has not come true. ‘I’m not sure by the time you write your book that Boris Johnson will be leader of the Conservative Party.’
If Lavery is the working-class hero of the Corbyn project, now is a good moment to temporarily leave the North West Durham story and compare his views with a similar figure from an earlier Labour era. Alan Johnson took a similar path into politics: he became a postman after leaving school at fifteen, joined the trade union and rose up to become its general secretary. His memoir, This Boy, charts an extraordinary story of childhood poverty and is easily some of the best political writing of the last decade. He entered Parliament in 1997 for Hull West and served in the Cabinet as Home, Health, Business and Education Secretaries. He was one of the New Labour’s most authentic working-class voices and one of Blair’s closest allies. In an interview in 2013, Johnson said, ‘I remember once talking to Tony Blair about family, as my youngest was around the same age as his son Leo. When I told him I was married and living in a council house with three children by the age of twenty, his response was, “Gosh, you really are working class, aren’t you?”’13 He exited front-line politics in 2010, reinventing himself as a lucid author and political commentator. On 2019 election night, he sat in ITV studios beside Jon Lansman, Jeremy Corbyn’s key grassroots organizer, as the disaster unfolded for Labour. He told Lansman to ‘go back to your student politics’ and to take his ‘little cult’ with him. ‘Corbyn was a disaster on the doorstep . . . everyone knew he couldn’t lead the working class out of a paper bag.’14
Almost a year on from the election, Johnson was delighted to have a long chat about what went wrong for Labour, but also what went right. ‘We would have lost all three Hull seats, as we would have lost all of Doncaster, if the Brexit Party hadn’t stood candidates and split the votes.’ But based on his experience, voters abandoned the party for one reason: ‘Absolutely no question, they hated Corbyn.’ His anger hadn’t yet abated. ‘They had sussed out his hard-left politics, his lack of patriotism, this view of the working class, a patronizing view, that we had no agency whatsoever, we have to be moulded and directed by middle-class people from Islington. They hated him on the doorstep. He was useless as a leader of the opposition.’
There is particular animosity between the pair over Brexit: Corbyn’s self-confessed ‘seven and a half’ enthusiasm for remaining in the EU was less than welcomed by much of the party. Johnson led the ‘Labour In for Britain’ campaign during 2016 and had to spend much of it making up for Corbyn’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘Brexit was 95 per cent about immigration’, he asserted, and he recalled during his tenure as Home Secretary ‘being told we could never debate these things’, especially the controversy over asylum seekers that successive New Labour governments struggled with. The governments implemented a system of dispersal of asylum seekers across the country that Johnson believes led to problems locally. ‘So, in places like Hull, I likened it to being in London in the 1950s. It was happening fifty years later, but you could see the same tensions as suddenly lots of, particularly, Iraqi Kurds were walking round the streets of Hull, which was 98.9 per cent white, indigenous. But actually, to be fair to the people of Hull, they handled that quite well.’
Johnson could understand such tension, ‘particularly when you got the odd story of an Albanian who murdered someone in Albania and then murdered someone over here, and no one knew about their criminal record. That was part of the problem, European countries not giving us information about people coming over here. But we could say until we were blue in the face, “Look, it’s not an open-door policy”, but it was for the EU. You could go anywhere you wanted in the EU and live there with very few constraints, and that meant to the public, quite rightly, that’s uncontrolled immigration.’
He believed that New Labour’s reputation for economic competence, shattered during the financial crisis, helped to break down a ‘blue wall’ of traditional Conservative seats. ‘Forty-seven successive quarters of growth, the lowest unemployment . . . in 2004 we were at 75 per cent employment rate, looking to go to 80 per cent, which is one of the reasons why in 2004 we had Polish workers and Czech workers and Hungarian workers and all that coming straight in at us, Ireland and Sweden, because we were the three most successful economies, and in a way that might be where our problems started.’
Despite his prominent role as a Labour Remainer, he agreed with Ian Lavery that there was a major missed opportunity for Labour to hold onto their heartlands. ‘Oh, that’s easy. It would have been supporting Theresa May’s deal. The problem with Labour is on the other side of Corbyn, if you like. My good friends, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair, Hilary Benn, were obviously holding out for a second referendum. Whether it was intended or not, they were saying “Look, you didn’t know what you were voting for, you were too silly, there’ll be another referendum and we’ll stay in the EU.’
Johnson is optimistic that the English working class will return to Labour, unlike their defection to the SNP in Scotland. ‘It doesn’t feel like Scotland in 2015, when that was a definite, no return. It doesn’t feel like that with the Tories, they’ve got no infrastructure up here, no councillors, it would have been interesting if those local authority elections had taken place this year that were put back because of Covid, to see whether their success in December 2019 translated. I doubt it will.’ The results of May’s 2021 local elections, where the Conservatives made significant net gains across England – including in County Durham and Northumberland – suggested his view was inaccurate. With Brexit subsiding as a major political issue, the challenge is to convince traditional supporters that ‘Keir Starmer and Labour have recovered from Corbyn’. But Johnson is upbeat that the end of immigration issues will help the party. ‘There won’t be the same rancid atmosphere around free movement, that will have gone. And free movement, of course, went in Theresa May’s deal, which is once again why it would have been so easy to sell, except she couldn’t sell it herself.’
Unlike Ian Lavery, Johnson is not pining for a return to the collectivized communities that empowered the Labour movement. He recalled his organizing days for the union at the Post Office: ‘It was easy to recruit when you had thousands of people in the same place. Now it’s a much more diverse labour market and more difficult to keep recruiting. I think of BT. You had telephone exchanges, telephonists and telephone engineers who came in every day, that doesn’t happen now, they work out of Openreach [the infrastructure subsidiary]. They’re in their vans, they’re almost self-employed. So yeah, it’s a very profound change.’
Johnson, who has kept a diary since the age of twenty-six, found an entry from a trip he made to Consett during his postman days soon after the steelworks closed. ‘The guy I went to, the local Post Office union rep, took me to his social club that evening. The solidarity was palpable, I recorded that in my diary because I’d never been anywhere like this club, a big club with the sense of community. Various things were announced throughout the evening about someone needing help somewhere; there was a general raffle which was all going back into the community fund; there were people, highly educated but self-educated, discussing all kinds of things about politics or whatever; they had all kinds of societies listed on the walls. I’ve never forgotten that evening in Consett in County Durham. But I bet that club’s gone and I bet that, if the club hasn’t gone, that sense of community has gone.’ He mused on whether the return of community spirit we saw during the coronavirus pandemic would see people ‘looking out for each other’ to this old degree when normal life resumes. He welcomed the fact people have been doing each other’s shopping while shielding from Covid, but wondered whether it will be the Conservatives that ‘pick up some of the political capital from that.’
After these grandees, it was time to return to North West Durham for an evening of pints with someone who encapsulates its past and potential. The Steel Club in Consett is the only obvious reminder of the town’s industrial heritage. A mix of pub, bar, and north-eastern working men’s club, it frequently hosts live music and is the main social draw of the town centre. Dave Skelton stands out among the drinkers for his fedora and tweed jacket, but he is as authentically from North West Durham as the other patrons and their pints. The forty-two-year-old is a Tory, an ardent Brexiter and a citizen of the world: Google’s head of global strategic planning. But he also feels an emotional pull back to his childhood. He left Consett after school – only 10 per cent of people in his class received five or more decent GCSEs – but returns often. ‘There were very few opportunities in Consett, which makes me even more determined to create a country where people don’t have to leave home to get by,’ he said.
Both of his grandfathers worked in heavy industry: one in the steelworks and the other in the mines. The latter died in his fifties of a ‘horrific lung problem’ that many of his colleagues also endured. ‘So many people kind of glamorize life in the pits, but it wasn’t a very pleasant job for many people.’ He was born in 1978, two years before the steelworks closed, and his childhood was overshadowed by its legacy. The old works were visible from his home, his school a couple of miles from the works. ‘I saw when I was growing up what the social impact was of the steelworks closing.’
His family were all Labour people but also quietly religious. ‘It was very much the thing that they believed in socialism and Methodism in equal measure. My grandma was one of the only people who bothered putting a Labour poster in her window when she knew that all of her neighbours were going to vote Labour. I think there was something about the mining villages where they lived, where being Labour was part of the identity.’ He remembered that the party’s heartlands formed a Labourism that was ‘about the union, the pit, the community, the chapel, it was about all of these elements of working-class life and being Labour was part of that.’
As we drained further down our pint glasses, he reflected on his childhood and how the values of his Labour-supporting family have fallen out of step with the party of today. ‘I remember going to my grandma’s house and seeing as many plates and tea towels of past monarchs of England as you possibly could want. And I think that there’s a sense of a kind of working-class patriotism, and that real sense of Labourism, which has been lost in those communities. I had that sense when I was growing up, even though Tony Blair was to an extent “one of us”. There was much pride when Tony Blair was elected in 1997, that he was a north-east MP, and he was from Sedgefield, but there’s been a growing realization that the Labour Party was no longer the kind of party that came out of those communities, and represented those communities.’
On his mother’s side of the family, which was especially Labour, they spoke of the prime minister as ‘Our Tony, like a member of the family’. They all voted for Brexit in 2016 and 2019 and now speak of ‘Boris’ in the same way. He sees the transfer of the values of patriotism and self-reliance from the political left to the right as essential in the town’s shift.
Skelton is the author of Little Platoons, a polemic inspired by philosopher Edmund Burke on how England’s towns can be revived and given a new purpose. His vision speaks of his life experience, and he believes England’s towns ‘should not be places where you have to go to university and leave in order to have a successful career.’ Consett is a case study for much of his book, owing to both Skelton’s personal connection and its success in regeneration. ‘It did recover better than a lot of places did. The community often said the impact in Consett was the biggest and the greatest of the industrial towns because it was probably the first of the major, major industrial towns to lose their base,’ he said.
It was a particularly cold evening and our conversation turned to the isolated nature of Consett and how it has maintained its population despite the loss of its main industry. Skelton pointed out that the town started as a camp formed around the steelworks, morphing into a ‘very settled’ community with deep roots. ‘It’s partly isolated because of decisions that were made by government, because there was a railway that the government removed. There could have been better road links, but the government decided not to invest in them over many years. So yes, it is isolated, but no more isolated [in terms of physical geography] than some south-eastern places, which do have good transport links and have always had the right kind of investment.’
Much of Skelton’s critique of how Westminster has failed Labour’s heartlands focuses on the centralization of decision-making, which reached its zenith in the post-war Labour governments that nationalized much of Britain’s heavy industry. Prior to the Consett steelworks renationalization in 1967, Skelton argues ‘a lot of decisions were made locally by people who understood what had to happen as opposed to guys in Whitehall who said that that can’t be done. This needs to be saved, because we’re talking about the British Steel budget as opposed to the Consett Steel Company. And so when it becomes a far-away town to someone in Whitehall, that’s very different to the beating heart and soul of a local community.’
Despite his Tory leanings, Skelton is no fan of Margaret Thatcher. Her pursuit of growth rested on deindustrialization, resulting in the 1984–85 miners’ strike that left psychological scarring on the area that took three decades for her party to overcome. Growing up in Consett, he concluded ‘a free market left alone does not solve all problems’. When he moved to London, he was not only unimpressed with the dominant laissez-faire doctrine in Westminster but also the ‘top-down socialism’ espoused by Labour, which meant Consett did not receive the modernization needed to remain competitive.
Thatcher’s use of the phrase ‘the enemy within’ to describe the striking miners was ‘done unapologetically’, in Skelton’s view, and there was little thought ‘as to what might follow in the wake of heavy industry’ – something Norman Tebbit acknowledged during our chat in Blyth Valley.
‘There was less thinking about how people could be properly reskilled, how you could maintain social capital, how you could have jobs that people could be proud of. And still when you speak to people who worked in the steelworks’ – he pointed around the bar of the Steel Club – ‘and sadly there’s less of them every year, they’re still very proud about what they did, very proud about the fact you could go all around the world and see things made out of Consett steel.’ His grandfather did a skilled job in the mines, and he worries that these jobs were replaced with ‘packing boxes of crisps’ that may be ‘important for the economy, but don’t have the same dignity of labour.’
As our evening drew on, we returned to the theme of North West Durham, Jeremy Corbyn and his political project. Skelton thought that the party of today has moved beyond ‘the Labour Party that my family almost brought me up in’ and is not returning. The values he believes in are ‘patriotic, relatively communitarian but with a streak of individualism’, which I pointed out sounds very New Labour and Tony Blair. He acknowledged this matches New Labour’s rhetoric, but not what it achieved. ‘I certainly don’t think New Labour made community stronger in the north-east of England.’ He added, ‘I think it’s [Conservative values] an absolute belief in the potential of the region, an absolute belief that our economy is held back by so many parts of the economy not fulfilling their potential. This isn’t just about Consett, this is, for me, about a failing political economy over the past forty years’.
This man of Consett has become a man of Big Tech and Silicon Valley, but Skelton’s heart still yearns for a return to manufacturing in his personal heartland. His rhetoric was strikingly similar to that of many Jeremy Corbyn supporters, who argue that ‘forty years of Thatcherism’ have failed to create a sustainable economy. Skelton laughed, but rebutted: ‘Jeremy Corbyn didn’t believe in a thriving private sector. I do.’
Consett is one of the earliest examples of the deindustrialization that swept through England, and that brought along with it the gradual decline in support for and connection to the Labour Party. It is a similar story to that of Youngstown, Ohio, which was dominated by iron and steel works that closed at the same time as those here. Bruce Springsteen wrote a hymn to the town, charting how the rise and fall of its plant followed the contours of America’s wars. Ohio supported Donald Trump in 2016, just as North West Durham supported Brexit. Consett’s decline and resurgence has broken the historic bonds between its residents and the Labour movement.
The long legacy of deindustrialization made the Conservatives anathema to aspirational working-class voters. The events of 2016 changed that, but what many observers have failed to realize is that North West Durham has changed too. The mining and steel industry forged a bond between the workers and the labour movement, but now the area’s economy is more fragmented. Communities may be less united but small-scale manufacturing continues. North West Durham’s residents today are more likely to be commuters who have opted for the charm of the countryside over city life. As these wealthier residents have arrived, and the last generation of heavy-industry workers dies out, the area has naturally become more prosperous and therefore more likely to vote Tory. The town centre of Consett is hardly the most vibrant place, but the shoots of renewal elsewhere in the seat are real. Driving through the windy hills, with the sights of heavy manufacturing gone, the sense is of typical pastoral Tory England.
Again I was struck by the missed opportunity of 2017. Alan Johnson and Ian Lavery both noted the moment Theresa May lost her majority as Labour’s opening. Had Jeremy Corbyn held his nose and done a deal with the Conservatives, Brexit would have been delivered on softer terms. As well as splitting the Tories – the hard-line Brexiters would have baulked at remaining in a customs union with the EU – it would have likely gone some way to propping up parts of the red wall. The Parliament of 2017 to 2019 was so fraught that nothing is certain. Corbyn could not have saved all the seats, but the party may have clung on in the more marginal ones.
With its 1,144 majority, North West Durham will be one of the Conservatives’ toughest fights come the next election. But the scale of change is astounding: in 1997, the seat’s majority was almost 25,000 votes for the Labour Party. Now it has gone. Much of that may be down to politics, but so are the changing economies of the former heartlands. The question of what happened between 1997 and 2010 is the topic for our next stop, a forty-minute drive south through County Durham to Sedgefield. Richard Holden, David Skelton and Ian Lavery all think New Labour failed to deliver for their heartlands while they were in power. Are they right?