‘All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures, the roads defined the form.’
BARBARA HEPWORTH, ON HER YORKSHIRE UPBRINGING
Simon Wallis was fired-up to show off his new wares as he greeted me at the front of the Hepworth Gallery, a low-slung, brooding structure on the banks of the River Calder in Wakefield. The gallery’s car park, shared with a National Rail construction site, was deserted except for workmen in high-vis orange jackets and matching facemasks. The dark grey asymmetrical blocks fit neatly into the gritty landscape: rusting barges, decaying small factories, the grinding hum of afternoon traffic. Wallis founded the gallery in 2008, when the site was a muddy riverbank, and has been its director since opening to the public three years later. Before enticing me inside, he took me on a brisk turn around the well-pruned gardens. The plants were carefully allocated into themes, mixed with tasteful sculptures. A photographer from the Guardian was present, ducking in and out of bushes to capture the autumnal hues. My horticultural knowledge is next to zero, so I won’t try to explain what was there. Wallis, it turned out, also knew little beyond the fact it looked pretty and was commissioned by architect Tom Stuart-Smith. He was more enthused about the building work.
Behind the gallery and gardens, red-bricked Victorian warehouses have stood abandoned for decades. They have been renovated as rehearsal and recording studios during the first Covid lockdown and, during my visit, were on the eve of completion. ‘We have artists booked in to come to practise and rehearse from London once they’re open,’ Wallis said, pointing at the blue tarpaulin. The call for such spaces was reduced during a year without concerts, but he was delighted to add another destination to Wakefield’s cultural offering – first the Yorkshire Sculpture Park on the outskirts of the city, then the gallery, now the rehearsal space. Art may not be the first thought that occurs when thinking of the small west Yorkshire city – actually a large town with a cathedral – but Wallis reminded me the area boasts two renowned artists: Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. ‘Any other continental European place would have celebrated that fact decades ago. But in typical fashion for this country, we’re just waking up to celebrating our own homegrown talent’.
The airy gallery was designed by David Chipperfield – one of the world’s most prestigious architects, meaning Wallis had the onerous task of making good on the £35 million investment.1 When the Hepworth opened he hoped for 80,000 visitors a year. The first year saw 700,000 people pass through its doors and, before the pandemic, it was drawing in a quarter of a million annually. ‘The substance of having a great architect, celebrating a great artist, already having an art collection, and working with some of the best contemporary artists has turned into a formula that’s really great,’ he said, as we arrived at a glass-walled conference room at the heart of the gallery. He launched into his case for why the gallery has been ‘absolutely fantastic’ for the area.
‘Wakefield doesn’t have an awful lot to draw people down here . . . the actual city centre isn’t packed with destinations so it’s helped build that profile. The fact it’s called the “Hepworth Wakefield” and we get such a regular media presence means there is a brand.’ The gallery has endeavoured to integrate with the local community, especially through education. Wallis has partnered with Burberry, which has its clothing factory in the nearby town of Castleford, to put an artist in every local school. ‘Using creative and cultural education to boost the performance of kids has been really heartening and Burberry are delighted. They’ve now rolled out the programme to New York – Castleford and New York are collaborating, together at last!’ he beamed.
Since its inception, Wallis has strived to ensure all residents feel welcome at the gallery. ‘It’s a hugely important part of how you get people feeling that these kinds of institutions are resources for them to use throughout their life and are not just for the privileged broadsheet-reading middle-class people.’ It appears to have worked: around a third of the Hepworth’s visitors come from the Wakefield district, two thirds from within an hour’s drive and the other third from the rest of the UK. Two summers ago, Wakefield hosted the Yorkshire Sculpture International, which promoted the area’s culture abroad.2 ‘I began to get people realizing that when they come to the UK, it’s not just about London and the south-east. Yorkshire is not just about the Dales, or the Moors. You can come and have an extremely fruitful cultural time.’
Cultural regeneration projects such as with the Hepworth are a much disputed topic in England’s towns. Their detractors argue they create elite institutions that are out of touch, irrelevant to the daily grind, and create further alienation between different communities. Advocates argue they bring in money, tourism, jobs and help forge a new identity. As I mentioned in the Gateshead chapter, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art opened there in 2002, in a deserted flour mill on the banks of the River Tyne.3 I adore the Baltic building and its aspirations, especially after a teenage summer studying photography, yet my opinion veered towards scepticism given the lamentable state of Gateshead town centre. Why spend millions on an art gallery when there are no decent shops? Why have a beautiful rooftop restaurant when almost every cafe in the town centre is deserted and struggling for survival?
While listening to Simon Wallis’s explanation of how the Hepworth had helped Wakefield, however, my scepticism fell away. ‘It changes the spirit of a place. You can start to feel civic pride growing. The palpable difference when I came nearly thirteen years ago and now, it’s night and day,’ he argued. ‘It is about making people proud of having a world-class institution that is accessible to everybody on the doorstep. It’s not an elitist organization, it’s one that definitely really does make an effort to ground itself in the lived reality of the communities that surround us.’ According to the local council, the gallery has contributed £23 million to the city’s economy since it first opened, laudable but still less than the original investment.4 After our chat, I toured the deserted gallery – it was a weekday during the pandemic – taking in the Henry Moore sculptures, Bill Brandt’s photography and the permanent exhibition of Barbara Hepworth’s work. To have this space filled with such works of art lifted my spirits; I fully appreciated how it could do the same for those who live nearby.
Wallis does not, however, think the UK has perfected the cultural formula for regenerating post-industrial towns and cities. ‘Too many politicians are not sophisticated enough to actually understand how to exploit culture-led regeneration properly, they don’t involve themselves. They rarely come along to see what happens at openings. They still treat them as either elitist or irrelevant and they’re neither of those things. I think a better understanding needs to develop, so we exploit the true potential of the institutions that we’ve created.’
Wakefield is both lucky and unfortunate in its proximity to the great Yorkshire city of Leeds. The larger conurbation has a stronger jobs base, better shops, more restaurants, so Wakefield has had to find something else. ‘We more than match it for what’s happened in the visual culture here, there’s no question about it.’ Wallis, ironically, lives in Leeds and commutes into Wakefield. ‘I will be honest, when we first came up here, and we looked at Wakefield, we just thought we couldn’t do it. We moved up from London and it was a shock seeing the level of challenge here.’ Simon and his wife were initially taken aback by the cultural and ethnic homogeneity that was ‘too alienated’ from their past lives.
Since moving to West Yorkshire, Wallis has appreciated the need to better distribute opportunities across the UK. ‘The centralization of power in this country is obviously preposterous. Centring everything in Westminster no longer works.’ He agreed with my take that much of the 2016 Brexit vote was a revolt against that sense of dislocation. ‘The push towards such a large Brexit vote in somewhere like Wakefield was that people were fed up to the back teeth of being dictated to by people that have no idea of the reality of what it’s like to live here – no idea what the true needs of communities are. I think it was a cry of desperation.’ He was harshly critical of recent governments for failing to present an alternative to heavy industry. ‘We’ve not had a strategy for how these former industrial areas are meant to fully reinvent themselves . . . look at the stubborn levels of unemployment in some areas of Wakefield. It is industrious and successful in other areas too. So it’s not a sob story of a place that doesn’t know how to make anything happen.’
Throughout our conversation, Wallis gushed about the nearby Yorkshire Sculpture Park. ‘It’s no accident that Hepworth and Moore came from here, they come from engineering and mining backgrounds in their families.’ Before delving into politics again, I went back to the car to head into the Yorkshire countryside to continue this mini cultural odyssey. In the heavy morning mist, the Mini’s fog lights struggled to cut through, but the roads were glorious to drive along.
In William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, the 500 acres of greenery to the west of the M1 motorway was labelled merely as ‘waste’. Over several centuries it developed into the Bretton Hall estate, occupied by the Wentworth family, who built an ornate bed in case Henry VIII decided to drop by – he never did – and hosted bacchanal celebrations with mock naval battles.5 The family sold Bretton Hall and the estate to the local council after the Second World War, with the imposing manor becoming the Bretton Hall College of Education, training art teachers. In 1977, one lecturer, Peter Murray, had an idea to use the former parkland for sculptures, to inspire both students and those who lived nearby. The Yorkshire Sculpture Park was born. Bretton Hall College was closed in 2007, subsumed into Leeds University, and the hall is being renovated into a luxury hotel, but the YSP remains.6
Half a million visitors visit the YSP each year, including 45,000 school children. One of the children who came in its early days was Helen Pheby. She admitted there was ‘very little appetite’ for contemporary art during her childhood, when the West Yorkshire coalfields were in decline. But that visit ‘triggered’ something in her. ‘Coming here as a child showed there was another life, there was a window into something else.’ After moving to Liverpool for under- and postgraduate studies in art, she returned to the sculpture park, first as a volunteer, and is now head of its curatorial programme, working with local schools. In her cramped but cosy office, packed with paperwork, posters and art history tomes, she explained the park’s mission: ‘What we want to do is improve quality of life for people here and create opportunities.’
A decade ago, Wakefield Council’s research concluded the biggest barrier for locals visiting was ‘not knowing what to wear, not knowing how to behave, not having anyone to come with. But the biggest one was not being able to imagine a life where you enjoy art, so if it’s not something you do as a child it’s not something you do through school. It’s not on your radar.’ Pheby explained some locals are put off by the idea that sculptures and contemporary art are the property of ‘an urban elite’, but her answer is to first enjoy the open space. ‘People will come for a walk. And then they gradually get a bit more interested in Henry Moore, and then they might come into the gallery – it’s definitely a place where people come as families, a place that people want to show off when their friends come and visit.’ The park has grown from a hut and six tables to a long wooden and glass visitor centre, contributing £10 million a year to the local economy and employing 180 staff.7 Along with the YSP and the Hepworth Wakefield, the area boasts the Henry Moore Institute and the Leeds Art Gallery. A whole culture scene appears to have arrived. ‘It’s a tourism-driven economic agenda around establishing this particular region as the cradle of contemporary sculpture.’
Having lived most of her life in Wakefield, Pheby is aware of the city’s awkward standing with its nearest neighbour. ‘We used to have a saying at school,’ she said. ‘“Don’t talk to me about sophistication – I’ve been to Leeds.”’ Tongue in cheek, but it spoke to deeper feelings about aspiration. ‘I remember, growing up, Leeds being seen as a very dirty, down-at-heel city, and it’s pulled itself up in a way that Bradford hasn’t. Parts of Wakefield town centre are grim. Where I live is very nice but to judge Wakefield’s identity just by its city centre would be a mistake. Leeds city centre is really thriving, and you can tell it’s palpable – like when [department store] Harvey Nichols opened fifteen years ago, that was a really big moment.’
Further back in its history, Wakefield was known for being the ‘merry city’: Westgate, the main shopping and leisure thoroughfare, has a reputation for debauchery dating back to the sixteenth century. ‘Wakefield used to be known as a really good night out – that was a big part of its identity – people come from the north-east and wherever. But that night-time economy is really diminished. It was always a bit rough but it was always fun, and there was an energy.’ During the 1990s, Pheby said the culture shifted from partying locally to going out in Leeds. And much like Simon Wallis, she believes that one of the north’s biggest problems is being too backward looking. ‘We need to let go of a lot of nostalgia. We also need to be much more forward-thinking about what future could be possible for everybody.’
Pheby’s view on Wakefield’s 62 per cent vote to leave the EU was less about Europe, and more about ‘an invisible demographic being given a voice’. Having spent much of her life in Wakefield, her perception is that for many of the city’s residents, ‘it couldn’t get worse, really’, and that there was ‘a general lack of opportunity and aspiration that has become generationally ingrained. It was being given a voice, it was wanting change, not necessarily leaving Europe, it was just about wanting something different.’
After enjoying the countryside it was time to explore Wakefield’s maligned town centre. One problem was obvious immediately: parking was impossible. One-way systems and tight streets are unhelpful for an area where motoring is the main transport. Thankfully the Holiday Inn Express I was based in – overlooking a down-at-heel council estate – had one snug space left. The city centre has undergone several regeneration efforts: the Ridings shopping mall was one of the first in England to open in 1983. Other areas contrast each other: the Edwardian civic quarter has maintained some of the grandeur from the days it was West Yorkshire’s administrative centre, while around the mainline train station a new complex of restaurants opened to coincide with the modernization of the station itself – I heartily recommend the generous steaks at Estábulo grill – but most of the centre is tired mid-twentieth-century shops. Near the bus station, every other shop is empty. One building imposes itself over the whole city. The first Wakefield Cathedral was built during the Norman age and the structure has been rebuilt and enlarged several times over the centuries. The current edifice is the work of famed architect George Gilbert Scott, who oversaw a restoration in the late nineteenth century. Wakefield’s identity as a city is thanks to this magnificent building.
Simon Cowling was ordained as a priest thirty years ago and has served as the cathedral’s dean for the last two. He met me outside the refectory dressed in black suit, shirt and jumper, only broken by his white clerical collar. Over fruit scones, he discussed Wakefield’s identity. ‘It’s a former county town, which is why you’ve got this array of civic buildings.’ But those functions have drained away, due to abolition of metropolitan councils in the 1970s. The typical residents today, he said, are more likely to travel to work around Leeds while those living in the five council estates around the city lament ‘a lot of what’s lost’, particularly in the city centre. ‘It’s also about an awareness that Wakefield once had lots of independent shops that people took pride in. If you go out onto Westgate [the main shopping street], there are probably twenty empty retail units. They were no longer able to be supported because of the state of the economy.’ After our meeting, I duly went up and down Westgate; his calculation was sadly correct.
Cowling has devoted much of his time as dean to visiting communities across the Wakefield district to examine social issues. Speaking softly but forcefully, he outlined his concerns about the lack of aspiration. ‘A question mark about whether things are going to get better, and that leads to a kind of corrosive loss of pride in the place, and self-esteem. Part of my role here is to help people feel a sense of pride in the place, and understand that things can only get better, to coin a phrase, if we all work at it.’ He praised the ‘world class’ cultural assets and lively arts scene emerging in the city, adding the area was ‘less parochial’ than some might assume. ‘Wakefield has a lot of interesting folk who have come in from outside, who offer that kind of texture and colour to the local scene . . . it is by no means as inward-looking a place as it might be assumed from outside.’ He said there is a sense among some that the city is ‘a place either for people who are older and retired or a place from which people commute into Leeds, and where they therefore do most of their shopping, and where they know where the entertainment spots are.’ A better range of employment opportunities would help that. He praised the Johnson government’s towns fund, which offers small pots of money to towns that are struggling.
It is not hard to sense from our conversation that the dean veers leftward in his world view, although he is eager to work with all politicians and did not make any overly partisan statements. Reflecting on the New Labour years, he said that Tony Blair did not speak up enough about the party’s achievements in places such as Wakefield. ‘They were desperate not to appear too left wing, frankly, not wanting to frighten the horses, they actually hid quite a lot of the redistribution that they were able to do, a lot of the initiatives they were able to begin, the family centres and so on, many of which have now closed, and which places like Wakefield benefited from.’
With our tea pots drained, the last crumbs scoffed and the sounds of the afternoon service beginning, Cowling concluded he expects the district to continue electing Labour councillors but remained uncertain about whether the party could take the seat back at the next election. ‘People probably distinguish between local culture and national culture, and I think that shows a level of sophistication among the electorate which I find quite heartening,’ he smiled.
Wakefield has all the key attributes of a red wall constituency: a solid set of Labour MPs since 1931, including Walter Harrison, the party’s legendary whip who featured in James Graham’s play This House with his noble efforts to keep the Callaghan government in office. In 1997, its then MP David Hinchliffe was elected on a secure 14,604 majority. The Conservatives came within 360 votes of taking it in 1983, thanks to the emergence of the SDP. But the city and the seat are palpably different to the first four stops on the road trip. While Blyth Valley, North West Durham and Sedgefield consist of smaller towns, Wakefield is one major settlement which forms part of a larger urban area. The city has a population of just under 100,000, but the district population, including the towns of Castleford and Pontefract, is three times that. Before Leeds became the dominant city of West Yorkshire, Wakefield was the administrative centre of the county, thanks to its prosperous industry. The inner city was once filled with mills and glassworks. Few of them are left today: I was only able to track down one still going, Castlebank Mill, on the river just south of the Hepworth Gallery, which employs 177 people producing ‘non-woven industrial textiles’, otherwise known as materials for items such as rugs.8 The list of closed mills that once dominated the area’s employment base is long. Since the 1980s, 45 per cent of local mills have become derelict or unused.9 David Hinchliffe, who served as Wakefield’s Labour MP from 1987 to 2005, pinned the blame on the policies of Margaret Thatcher. He told the House of Commons in 1990 that since she had come to power in 1979 his ‘backbone industry’ had lost 5,000 jobs.10
Textiles were a major part of Wakefield’s identity, but as in Blyth Valley, mining was also a dominant part of its twentieth-century employment base. Hinchliffe told Parliament there were 4,395 mining jobs at eight pits in his constituency in 1979. By 1988, it was down to 565 jobs in one pit. In the wider Wakefield district, he stated that 17,000 jobs had been whittled down to just 5,000. When the Wakefield pits of Lofthouse, Manor, Newmarket, Newmillerdam, Parkhill and Walton all went under during the eighties – as much to do with exhausted coal seams as government policy – many miners were lucky enough to have the opportunity to transfer to the new Selby Coalfield that opened in 1983.11 Several new ‘superpits’ were built, with large car parks to facilitate commuting. After the interruption of the 1984–85 miners’ strike, Selby hit peak production in 1994, with 12 million tons of coal produced that year. But these new mines became unprofitable after the loss of government subsidies and concerns about the stability of the geography. All were closed in 2004, with the loss of 5,000 jobs.12
More poignantly, it was Kellingley Colliery, also in Selby, that brought an end to deep coal mining in the UK. In 2015, the last major pit in the land closed, with 450 jobs gone, down from 2,000 at its peak.13 Kellingley marked the final end of centuries of deep mining. Today, Wakefield’s biggest employers are wholesale and retail trade, but manufacturing in other sectors continues – particularly beverages. Coca-Cola employs 450 people at a major factory beside the motorway. Ossett Brewery, home to the delicious Yorkshire Blonde pale ale, has a similar-sized workforce in its brewing and warehouse facilities on the outskirts of town. Microbreweries such as Five Towns and Tiger Tops have emerged in recent years.
Wakefield’s population is also more diverse than other Labour heartland seats, due to its urban nature. In the 1950s, large-scale migration from Pakistan began to buttress those British industries struggling to fill positions after the war, and Wakefield was in dire need of workers.14 Men, typically from Mirpuri and Kashmir, settled in the Agbrigg area of the city, according to a local history project that charted their story. Arshad Mahmood told the project about his father Fazal, who left his family in Pakistan to live in a shared house with sixteen others.15 Najeeda Asghar recalled the hard work of these early settlers:
There was a lot of them in one property and they had to share everything . . . they worked long shifts, fifteen-, sixteen-hour shifts. Some would do days, some would do nights, so while some were on nights at Rawson’s Mill, those at home would have their sleep and do their cooking. I think they found it very hard, being away from their families. That was the thing that kept them going. They had family in Pakistan, they knew why they were here, it was to support their families financially.
The migrants who came to Wakefield had little intention of staying permanently: they intended to work five or six years to earn money and return home. In 1968, immigration rules were changed so children could no longer travel alone to visit, which marked the start of more families moving to Wakefield. Abdul Aziz, whose father was one of those earlier settlers, said, ‘When mothers arrived with their children it tipped settlement more to here. The idea of going back lessened once the family was here.’ In the Wakefield district, the ethnic minority community is now is now 5 to 7 per cent of the 345,000 strong population. The political picture emerging from white working-class communities in red wall areas is clear, but I am eager to know whether ethnic minorities have undergone much of a change, particularly on the issue of Brexit. To find out, I crossed the marketplace from the cathedral to the shopping precinct to meet one of the local Pakistani community’s most prominent members.
Forty-something Nadeem Ahmed is leader of the Conservative group on the Labour-dominated Wakefield Council. He has a background in education and now works as a freelance public relations consultant alongside part-time politics. Over an outdoor coffee and flapjack at Costa in the town centre – it was raining heavily and the awnings were near to collapse, buffeted by wind and groaning under the weight of water – he told me his family history. He explained how his father came to Wakefield from the Punjab in the 1950s to work in the mills. The majority of the ethnic minority community was and is based around the inner city, and prides itself on close family values, he explained.
‘We believe the family unit has got a responsibility to look after its elderly, vulnerable family members. That stems from the Punjab, where we came from, and the Kashmiri, the idea that we have a responsibility for our family members whether they’re elderly, ill, sick, and we hope our children will carry that responsibility out as well. It’s old, traditional working values: if I go to Barnsley, people believe that as well, they will always look after their grandma, or their aunts and uncles, when they got older as well.’ He said there is some jealousy between generations about Wakefield’s post-industrial fortunes. ‘Leeds has a market, we don’t have a proper indoor market, and they feel that we’ve lost out because of Leeds.’ He exclaimed, ‘We wish we were Leeds! The prosperity, the shops, the business. But it’s tough for us in that sense. The city itself had a considerable amount of money from mines, textile mills, and it’s declining.’
Ahmed studied at the University of Huddersfield, also in West Yorkshire, and remembered his time there fondly. He would like to see a similar institution in Wakefield, and hopes it would encourage Wakefield’s younger residents to stay instead of moving away for studies and not returning. ‘Our youth are often getting jobs outside of Wakefield and moving out.’ Some of his fellow councillors have argued that the town should be focused on apprenticeships to improve the city’s jobs prospects, but Ahmed thinks higher education and small-scale manufacturing are both crucial. ‘I feel the problem Wakefield has is creating jobs. There are a few big employers here, but it’s trying to get more in because we’ve got Leeds on our doorstep and they’ll favour Leeds over us.’
Wakefield’s changing economic make-up has influenced the changing political ties of predominantly white communities, but Ahmed said the same is true across the whole city. His father was a strong Labour supporter, a loyalty founded on his time in the textile industry. ‘It was automatic that they joined a union, the foreman would often be a unionist and encourage others to become union members. And from there, they affiliated with Labour. They weren’t thinking Labour voters, if I can say that!’ But now, he says, the older generation are mostly Conservative supporters, while the younger generation are Labour supporters.
Given the economic impact of the Thatcher years on Wakefield, it is still remarkable it voted Conservative in 2019. ‘There was an anti-Thatcher element in there that Boris was able to detach himself from,’ he said. The closure of the mills and Thatcher’s racial attitudes may have made her unpopular in Wakefield’s ethnic-minority communities, but Ahmed said the passing of time has dimmed those memories. Plus, the Tory party itself has changed, with several prominent non-white ministers acting as trailblazers. ‘Sayeeda Warsi, Sajid Javid and other prominent Pakistani-origin MPs were able to forge and show that you can vote Conservative, you can be a Conservative and be a Pakistani and a Muslim as well. Sajid Javid was quite a force . . . People started rethinking their allegiance.’ This shift is perhaps personified by someone I spoke to on a mercifully drier day – Wakefield’s first ever Conservative MP.
The Robatary restaurant is in the undistinguished Bullring House building. Above is an employment agency, opposite is an empty shop that once sold mobility scooters. During this particular phase of the pandemic, restaurants were open for outdoor dining, so Robatary had installed outdoor heaters. Even with my suit, overcoat and wool scarf, it was utterly freezing. Imran Ahmad Khan, forty-seven, could see I was struggling with the temperature, so we launched straight into ordering and chat. He arrived with his parliamentary aide, and was dressed in a turquoise velvet suit and yellow knitted tie. Within minutes, I concluded I’d never encountered a newly elected MP so enthusiastic and eager to impart their life story.
Khan grew up in Wakefield. His father was a consultant doctor from Pakistan and his mother an English nurse, and he said he never felt fully at home within one community. ‘I’ve always been slightly othered – growing up in Yorkshire in the seventies and eighties being half. Half the family being Methodists and me being a Muslim,’ he said as our Diet Cokes arrived, thankfully without ice. His political memories were potent from a young age: first of the industrial action in 1979, when he was five years old. ‘The whole way down Wentworth Street there were rubbish bags, because the rubbish wasn’t being collected. All the noise! People were heating dustbins, and the dustbins were full of flames and so on. I was in the back of my father’s Rover, and I remember being rather concerned. I asked him “Well, what is all of this?”, and he said, “Oh, it’s unions, they’re worried about pay and fees.”’
With hindsight, he said the city was a theatre for the political debates of the Thatcher era. ‘In 1982, three or four of our pits in Wakefield were being closed. You’re in the crucible of those whole arguments about contracting out, efficiency, state, individual labour.’ Khan joined the Conservative party as a boy, and his first campaign was helping Elizabeth Peacock in her successful 1983 bid to become the MP for the West Yorkshire Batley and Spen seat. ‘I remember she took me, hand in hand, when I was about ten – that was my first political outing.’ Five years later, he became vice chair of the Batley and Spen Conservative association and continued his political activism when studying at King’s College London. His career before Parliament is impressively packed with colourful globetrotting: studies at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow, a consultant for M&C Saatchi in London, UN assistant in Mogadishu, advisor on counterterrorism in Somalia and Afghanistan. When I asked what drives his politics, he launched into a mini soliloquy about how all of his experience feeds into a single word:
‘If I were a stick of Blackpool rock, what would be written throughout the middle of me is freedom. The freedom to live, work, and worship as one wishes. There is no movement, no political party that champions the rights of the individual like the Conservative Party. That’s at our core. If you look at the world – and I spent most of my career overseas in distant places – there is nowhere where you can live, work, and worship freely, that is not also an admirable, free society where business is safe, where corruption is low, where aspiration is built, and achievements are created. Pluralism, tolerance, and the freedom to live, work and worship are fundamental, and we take them for granted a little too often. But when you have lived and you’ve seen what happens when there’s poverty of them, they become central to one’s beliefs, as do free markets, free trade, and the invisible hand.
‘I have seen such great poverty, whether it’s in eastern Africa or Afghanistan or in war zones like Somalia. Nothing has lifted greater numbers out of the pernicious state of poverty than free trade, and for free trade we also require free markets, and also for free markets to really operate, for the invisible hand to roam freely, you need to have an educated population, people often forget that bit. This is why I have no time for those who are anti-capitalist, who beat upon capitalists, their mistakes. Capitalism is all about choice. It’s all about freedom. And they mistake capitalism for mercantilism, which is about compulsion, which is about a lack of choice. Or, worse still, socialism and Marxism, which is about taking away control and allowing the state to choose for you. So, if, like me, the most important thing in life is freedom, the freedom to live, work and worship, the freedom to conduct your own business and make your own choices, not to have the state telling you what to do, but only for the state to be there to ensure that you can live life without threat or fear, let or hindrance, then the Conservative Party is your answer.’
It was probably the most passionately I have ever heard a Conservative speak about their political beliefs or party. His enthusiastic spirit for public service is strong across his whole family: Imran’s brother Karim is one of the world’s most renowned lawyers, elected to be the chief prosecutor on the International Criminal Court in February 2021 after serving as the UN’s assistant secretary general.16 Imran had spoken to his brother, who was in Baghdad, the night before our lunch and the conversation returned as usual to Wakefield. ‘Whenever he thinks of home he thinks of here, we were talking about his favourite fish and chip shop, Barracuda, over in my constituency. This is home. What draws you home? That sense of belonging.’
With a first-time Tory majority of 3,358 votes, Khan’s is one of the more comfortable red wall seats – benefiting from a ten-point drop in the Labour vote in the 2019 election. His vision for re-election is based on Wakefield as ‘the crossroads of the kingdom’, pointing out that its transport links are superb. Manchester is forty minutes away, Leeds ten. It has the M1, the M62 and the A1 and London is only two hours away on the train. He is full of praise for the cultural sector. At the time of our lunch, he was producing a manifesto for the city that would achieve the sort of joined-up thinking the Hepworth Wakefield has been promoting. The relatively small size of the city is something he’s hopeful of capitalizing on. ‘Wakefield, of course, it’s a real city, but it’s the most perfect size because it’s got all the problems of a big, big city, but it’s a wonderful place to test concepts, because you can really measure effect, and show that things are working and so on, and what isn’t. Then it can be an exemplar we use for other cities and towns, not only across the north, but similar countries too.’
As well as being one of the most ebullient Tories I have come across, Khan is also one of the most enthusiastic Brexit supporters. Much of his victory in 2019 was down to his predecessor Mary Creagh, who took the opposite stance on the EU question and who he disparages as one of the ‘Labour politicians from Islington’ in the vein of Keir Starmer. Khan said Creagh reneged on her promise to deliver on the referendum vote. ‘In that cathedral there, we’re still in the shadow of the sacred spire, she swore in the debate, in the hustings with the Conservative candidate at the time, in 2017 she said she would respect fully the results of the referendum, and would not do anything to frustrate Brexit.’ Coming to his climax, Khan concluded, ‘I think it is questionable because if you can’t keep your promise to the people, I don’t think one has a place in public life, frankly. Disagree, lose the argument, and still continue, because we’re representatives, not delegates, quite right. But, don’t say you’re going to do something and not deliver and then do the opposite.’ It is quite an accusation, so following our lunch, I sought out Creagh to see if she agreed that Brexit cost her seat.
While I was in Wakefield, Mary Creagh was in London. After losing her seat in 2019, she has moved back to the capital full time. We spoke during one of the full-lockdown phases, when she was out for her daily constitutional. My encounters with her prior to this were mainly during the 2015 Labour leadership contest, when she came in a distant fourth behind the other candidates. Her performances then and serving in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet as shadow transport and shadow international development secretary were polished, the sort of spokesperson Labour was happy to put on Newsnight. We began with her early career, a curious reflection of Imran Ahmad Khan’s. She too has looked beyond the British Isles, but Europe runs in her blood. The fifty-three-year-old was born in Coventry in the Midlands and spent four years working in Brussels. She took a European Studies degree at the London School of Economics before entering local Labour politics in north London. She was elected as a councillor for Islington in 1998, working closely with a certain Jeremy Corbyn.
Her marriage and first child delayed her ambitions for a few years – something men in politics do not have to juggle to the same extent – but she continued to harbour ambitions to go into Parliament. When David Hinchliffe retired as Wakefield’s MP in the run-up to the 2005 election, she jumped at the chance to be selected – taking the train northwards from King’s Cross every Friday, while continuing her day job – working on Islington council and looking after a two-year-old. After she beat off a left-wing challenger, she recalled life was hectic. ‘We rented a house, it was a kind of home family project. My mum and dad came up on the train from Coventry at the weekend and looked after my son so that my husband and I could go out campaigning.’ Those first few years were ‘an absolute whirlwind’, but she has fond memories of working with her neighbouring MPs: Ed Balls, who went on to become shadow chancellor, future leadership contender Yvette Cooper and shadow cabinet minister Jon Trickett.
‘I had some really interesting times and some very positive experiences. People loved David Hinchliffe and there was a bit of “oh she’s not from round here”. But, you know, Ed [Balls] wasn’t either and nor was Yvette [Cooper] and those kinds of mutterings disappeared fairly quickly.’ Her first years as an MP were focused on campaigning: legislation to get Turkey Twizzlers off school lunch menus; justice for two small children who died of carbon monoxide poisoning on Corfu. In 2007, she was pregnant again and had to balance an prospective election – Gordon Brown’s honeymoon ‘election that never was’ – with her pregnancy. She recalled her first trip back to Wakefield with her new daughter and son, and how she felt a deeper connection with her adopted home.
Wakefield, according to Creagh, mixes a lot of public-sector employment – which leans towards the Labour Party – with a ‘very rich set of small businesses’ and respected private schools. ‘It’s always had a kind of cultural life, a sense of its own self and a small, but very committed group of middle-class people and people with conservative values.’ During her time as the MP, her successes included a multi-million pound redevelopment of the main Kirkgate train station, a new performing arts sixth form college that was at risk of moving to Leeds, a brand new hospital and, of course, the Hepworth gallery. She worked with Arts Council England to bring £8 million of funding for the arts to Wakefield to create jobs in the city. Boundary changes in 2010 made the seat more marginal, but it was Brexit that caused Creagh the biggest headache, which is not a surprise given her studies and career.
‘I was always clear, as a daughter of an immigrant, that Brexit was a nationalist project. I think in the twenty-first century that nation states that go it alone are weaker, more isolated,’ she argued. ‘Having been in Brussels and having literally got a master’s degree in government, law and policy, I kind of knew what the treaties meant because I studied them.’ She vigorously campaigned for Remain in the 2016 referendum and, unlike many Labour MPs, did not vote to trigger the Article 50 exit proceedings in 2017. ‘I didn’t vote to trigger the referendum right the way through. I just thought I’m not doing this, I’m not being part of this.’ A strong majority of her constituency felt the other way, although Creagh said, ‘People respected me for it’. In Theresa May’s snap election in 2017, she was re-elected with a 2,176 majority thanks to a nine-point surge in the Labour vote, but there was also a ten-point boost for the Conservatives.
The following two years of Brexit warfare only increased her scepticism about Brexit and the government’s ability to deliver it. ‘Those of us who were following the process very closely, it was like the government doesn’t really know what it’s doing.’ She felt May’s withdrawal agreement was ‘obviously bad’ for jobs, livelihoods and incomes in Wakefield. Yet in her home patch, hostility grew as the parliamentary stalemate continued. ‘It became nastier and nastier . . . there was one moment in the city centre, I think around the May elections in 2019, where we have ten sergeants, a riot van and six officers around us. That’s not normal, it’s not right you can’t have conversations with people.’ When the 2019 election arrived, when Creagh had fully embraced a second referendum and remaining in the EU, the mood in traditional Labour areas had turned against her and Jeremy Corbyn. ‘One bloke just opened the door, saw my Labour rosette and just shouted “fuck off” in our faces. It was like, wow, you know, this is really bad . . . a feeling that the Labour Party was a middle-class elite that was out of touch. We weren’t focusing relentlessly on the economy and working people’s lives, on making things better for them. And that we didn’t have the answers for what was going on.’
The election result was decisive, with a six-point swing away from Labour. Yet Creagh does not harbour regrets over how she acted. ‘I approach that with a degree of humility. I approached it as a matter of conscience, because for me I can’t bring myself to do something that I know will cause further hardship to people who are already struggling. I can’t pretend that something bad is somehow going to be good.’ In one of her Brexit speeches to Parliament, she told MPs, ‘It’ll be like voting against my DNA.’ She puts the strong Leave support in Wakefield down to a proxy vote over economic hardship following the financial crash: ‘A huge amount of unemployment and recession that carried on for seven or eight years, gradually tearing away public services. And because they [her former constituents] are so dependent on the public sector for employment, these cuts to the police, to the NHS. A lot of people, you know, Tory voters in 2010, came over to me in 2015. It’s a very sort of fluid picture.’
Creagh also blamed much of what happened in 2019 and Brexit on her former Islington comrade Jeremy Corbyn. The day after the election, she confronted Corbyn in Portcullis House in the Palace of Westminster, enraged to see him taking selfies with young supporters after she and dozens of other Labour MPs had lost their seats. ‘I don’t think Jeremy did the cause any favours, he went to EU rallies without mentioning the European Union. He was lost in his own self-righteousness. The whole kind of movement and the momentum around his own personal political project, which I think, in retrospect, is probably not the same political project of the Labour Party’s historic mission, which is to get people elected to Parliament. I think Jeremy kind of lost sight of that.’
Creagh has left party politics for good: after the election, she has pursued a career as a communications consultant and is a visiting professor at Cranfield School of Management. Her lifelong passion for Labour and European politics, however, has not waned, and she is impressed so far with Keir Starmer’s leadership but warned there is no quick fix for seats like Wakefield: ‘The task of putting it back together is very laborious, very time consuming, and hugely emotionally draining. There have been some big wins, he has detoxified our party, he is clearly a person of the very highest integrity, with a complete and utter commitment to public service. But I’d say that Labour has yet to develop a compelling narrative on the economy, and, in particular, the post-Brexit economy and a narrative on Britain’s place in the world. And both are very, very deep, enormous tasks and it will require a huge amount of skill and political savvy to do those redefinitions.’
For some of my explorations of Wakefield, I was joined by an SW1 special guest. Matthew Elliott may not be well known outside of the Westminster bubble, but he is one of the country’s most influential right-leaning campaigners. Through the low-tax campaigning outfit the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the civil liberties pressure group Big Brother Watch, his influence on political debate over the last two decades is unquestionably high. But his most consequential legacy is in laying the groundwork for and delivering Brexit. In 2013, he founded Business for Britain, a Eurosceptic pressure group that made the case for reforming the UK’s relationship with the EU. In 2015, Elliott launched Vote Leave, which was eventually designated the official Brexit campaign. He served as its chief executive, along with his long-time friend Dominic Cummings.
Elliott grew up in Leeds and was keen to hear more for himself about what happened in the 2019 election and how much Brexit played into it. The bespectacled forty-three-year-old arrived at the train station in Barbour jacket and flat cap and quietly observed my conversations with Simon Wallis, Helen Pheby and Simon Cowling (who it turned out he knew from his childhood days as a budding organist). His childhood memories of Wakefield were of a place with a more ‘conservative tradition’ than the ‘emerging metropolis’ of his home city. The cultural renewal at the Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park impressed him and he was especially taken with the idea of how devolution can empower these places. The plight of towns was ‘definitely a conscious part’ of Vote Leave’s pitch to the electorate, he said, pointing out that their infamous slogan of ‘take back control’ was as much about Westminster and the UK’s political elite as Brussels.
Returning to his childhood, he recalled the debates of the Maastricht Treaty and the ‘crucial turning point’ when the EU morphed into the institutions of today. ‘I actually remember choir practices around the early 1990s people talking about this. They were pretty outraged about political power shifting from the UK to the EU. So I could see from that, that there were a set of attitudes in the country, especially in West Yorkshire, and a certain pride in the UK that we could stand on our own two feet.’
As Elliott returned to visit his family and friends over the years, he said those feelings of disconnection festered and grew. ‘Politicians who weren’t actually standing up for their local people, who were more comfortable with being on the international global circuit, and were increasingly detached. The whole idea of taking back control and bringing back power to Westminster, into the UK, it was fairly obvious that would play well. It was done on the basis of lots of message testing and polling and focus groups – largely done, actually, around the time of the 2014 European elections when I got Dom [Cummings] to come and do a big project for Business of Britain. It was clear at that point that there was that constituency of people removed from the metropolitan area who felt left behind, let down and wanted to regain control.’
Although Brexit was primarily, for him, about sovereignty, he agreed with the common view that there was a strong anti-establishment feeling that grew from 2008 to 2010. ‘I feel really strongly that the roots were forged in the period around the financial crisis and the aftermath. You had the country bailing out the banks at great expense to taxpayers and the injustice that people felt at that but going along with it to stabilize the economy. Then, of course, in the aftermath, you have the years of austerity when the country is paying the price and at the same time you had the MPs’ expenses scandal. So it was the idea of not only the bankers, but also the politicians.’
On top of these grievances, Elliott believed there was a feeling among voters in places like Wakefield that they were ‘being lied to about the effects of the expansion of the EU’, which stirred passions. ‘By time you’ve got to the referendum, people hadn’t really seen their living standards rise. So not only had their wages not gone up in real terms since the financial crisis but with the austerity in the aftermath, people hadn’t really seen public services improve at all, so people were feeling very let down by the government. And I think this was sort of a wake-up call to the government to remember us, we’re here, and stop being diverted to the international stage when things go wrong.’
The folks I have met in Wakefield all cited confidence in their local image as the key challenge to overcome. As with the previous red wall stops on the road trip, Wakefield’s existence is defined by its industrial past. Its local culture and community was once strong; now it feels uncertain. Is the city destined to be part of Leeds’s commuter belt? Can the whole area be structured as a vibrant cultural destination? Or does it face further gradual decline, as the coronavirus-induced turmoil further destroys its town centre? The area has a Russian-doll structure of resentment: in the shadow of Leeds, Leeds in the shadow of London, and England in the shadow of Brussels. All that creates a sense of being far away from power and self-determination, which was spoken to in Vote Leave’s all-purpose referendum slogan of ‘Take Back Control’.
Local identity should not be underestimated. When Tory chancellor George Osborne began promoting the concept of the Northern Powerhouse in 2014 – linking together the great cities of Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds to take on the might of London – he argued cities were the future. We’ll hear more from Osborne later, but one of his comments about this place struck me: ‘the Boltons, the Rochdales of this world, the Wakefields of this world, they’re not going to succeed if Manchester isn’t doing well, if Leeds isn’t doing well. But you’ve got to create two-way traffic between those towns and those cities.’ The feeling I got is that the traffic is too much in one direction.
West Yorkshire’s regional identity will be boosted by the instalment of its first directly elected mayor. The conurbation of Leeds, Wakefield, Bradford, Calderdale and Kirklees will cover 2.5 million residents, the largest economic area outside of London and the largest economic area in Europe without an urban transport system. Tracy Brabin, the former Labour MP for Batley and Spen who won the mayoralty in May 2021, says she quit Westminster out of a desire for palpable change. ‘We’ve seen around the country what being a mayor can actually achieve and how you can change people’s lives in a really profound, tangible way.’ These so-called ‘metro mayors’, championed by Osborne, have sharpened the identity of some parts of the north, such as Manchester and Liverpool, but sometimes at the cost of subsuming the smaller towns around them. The local Tories in Wakefield are concerned that their new mayoralty will put Leeds first, and leave the other parts of the conurbation stuck in its orbit.
Wakefield’s cultural institutions are undeniably positive and help the city stand apart from its neighbours. Their contribution to the local economy is clear, the tourism they encourage is welcome, their addition to the physical environment is a relief from the urban sprawl. I was sceptical of their power, citing my home-town experience, but as a visitor to Wakefield I have changed my mind. The cultural identity is something fresh that does not rely on nostalgia for a bygone era. When pondering how to level up the economies in the red wall, Wakefield offers valuable lessons of success. But these new identities develop gradually and do not offer all the solutions: the sculpture park has been around for forty years, the Hepworth for a decade, and the dominant talk in the town was still all about jobs, skills and infrastructure.
Wakefield’s resentment about its standing in Yorkshire and the UK was heightened by the Brexit wars of 2016 to 2019. The trauma of the parliamentary stalemate following the 2017 election goes beyond one MP: even those who voted the opposite way to Mary Creagh – by backing Article 50 and a withdrawal deal – were wiped out by the Johnson and Brexit tide. Her personal situation was emblematic of Labour’s emotional connection issues: her north-London political background, rooted in a European mindset, was so out of kilter with her constituents. Despite her best intentions, reconciling her personal convictions with those of the majority of her constituents may have always been impossible. In South Yorkshire, the story of one constituency and one MP in particular underlines how disastrous Labour’s miscalculation on the Leave question was, and raises the question about whether the fissure can be repaired. It was time to drive another forty miles south, veering around the city of Sheffield, to Don Valley. Four seats into the journey, having skimmed around the big question, the next stop was the moment to tackle the main red wall issue head on: Brexit.