‘If this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state . . . it means the end of a thousand years of history’
LABOUR LEADER HUGH GAITSKELL REJECTING THE COMMON MARKET IN 1962
The Great Yorkshire Way sweeps in and out of Doncaster like an erratic Picasso brush stroke. The road has the mundane title of the A6182 dual carriageway, with the formal purpose of connecting the large South Yorkshire town to the M18 motorway and the new-ish Doncaster Sheffield Airport (voted the UK’s best airport three years in a row, apparently).1 The Great Yorkshire Way helps make sense of the Don Valley constituency: the seat wraps around Doncaster like a smile, consisting of several smaller market towns and former mining villages. Travelling from the market town of Hatfield on the north-east edge to Conisbrough on the south-west was a chore before the Great Yorkshire Way.
Through connecting several of the nearby motorways, this road was responsible for a major new development that has brought thousands of jobs to the Doncaster area. Bordered by the slag heaps from Rossington pit, the last mine in the area to close in 2005, is the iPort: the ‘i’ represents international, interconnected or, more accurately, intermodal. Unlike many of the UK’s logistics parks, the iPort can take haulage from road and railway. From the front entrance, the park consumes your line of sight: six million feet of warehousing and logistics, the equivalent of fifteen football pitches. iPort was built in partnership with the local council in the early 2010s to capitalize on the area’s transport links to the rest of Britain. Donny may be firmly in the north, but thanks to the phalanx of motorways and railways, in terms of infrastructure, it is essentially the middle of the UK.
After looping around the Great Yorkshire Way several times while avoiding the HGVs dwarfing the Mini, I found the off-ramp to the marketing suite – a stack of white cabins. I met Steve Freeman, who oversees the railway terminal, and Michael Hughes, a real-estate investor and chief executive of Verdion, who founded the iPort. Freeman stepped out of his maroon Mercedes convertible in a sharp suit – not exuding the demeanour of a former British Rail executive. Hughes enticed him to build the iPort in order to boost the project’s green credentials. For long distances, ‘one train can take up to seventy lorries off the road.’
Hughes, in a black turtleneck with professional grey glasses, first visited South Yorkshire in 1990 when he worked for a logistics company on the River Humber. He arrived at a time when heavy manufacturing and mining were dominant but in decline; he concluded the area urgently needed something new. ‘Doncaster had a clear sense from the early nineties that it wanted to go to a different place. It wanted to be successful, and do good things,’ he recalled. ‘And just really good people. A really nice town.’
The project was the fruition of Hughes’s long-held passion to integrate road and rail to ‘move goods more efficiently’. Doncaster was the perfect canvas. ‘You have [River] Humber ports, you have the East Coast Mainline, you have long-standing great working communities,’ he said as we drove slowly around the gigantic warehouses. The conversion of the former RAF Finningley base into the new regional airport and ‘poor quality farming land’ made this swampy motorway verge perfect. ‘iPort as an idea was a hub that would appeal to modern industry and logistics businesses as part of a network, and where we could create a very high quality – in fact one of the first and best – intermodal facilities built in the last ten years.’ Freeman said the project began almost entirely speculatively: ‘I don’t think they’d actually finished building it before Amazon signed up,’ he said, in reference to the site’s biggest employer.
When iPort opened in 2017, it aimed to bring 5,000 jobs to an area of England that has suffered from higher than average unemployment rates. Amazon employs over a thousand workers on the vast site.2 Freeman said that from the beginning of 2021, warehouses rapidly filled up: ‘We just can’t cope. We can’t build enough warehouses at the moment.’ Hughes added, ‘There’s not only the number of jobs within the park, it’s important to remember that it’s a piece of a jigsaw that drives jobs by bringing other companies to the region.’
The drawback of iPort – and hundreds of similar sites dotted up and down Britain’s motorways – is the nature of the work. Employment is often based on zero-hours contracts, long shifts and strict conditions. Out here, with the only visual stimulation being the traffic zipping up and down the road, you can sense the loss of the camaraderie from the old industries. As we continued to go around the site – the third phase is under construction – and past the freight containers being unloaded from the railway tracks, the stream of lorries arriving and leaving, it is hard to conjure up an ethos for the place.
Freeman shared some of these concerns: ‘Despite the perception that some people may have, the jobs being created at iPort are real jobs. They’re not just zero-hours contract types.’ Logistics work is easy to attack, but Hughes staunchly argued these attacks are wrong: ‘The community spirit is simply shifting into different industries. There’s a patronizing tendency to somehow think that logistics is an empty warehouse with a light switch and empty boxes. It’s not. We’re talking about temperature-controlled buildings, we’re talking about medicines, we’re talking about Big Pharma and not just e-commerce. All of that complexity demands a lot of people and creates great career opportunities.’
Yet the vision of iPort is reminiscent of a different era for Britain, a pre-Brexit time when reducing wait times for goods and trading barriers was the chief aim of policymakers. Whatever one thinks of the decision to leave the EU, there is no question that barriers have been raised in the short term. Speaking a couple of months after the UK fully exited the EU’s single market and customs union, Hughes said the picture was still positive. ‘From the point of view of trade, I think we’re all reading there are some regulatory hurdles,’ he carefully noted, adding that more goods are moving through the hub than pre-Brexit. ‘From the point of view of volumes that are being generated for iPort, they’re on the rise. And I think it’s pretty common parlance now that the freight industry is actually seeing strength and growth. It’s not because of Brexit, it’s just not been interrupted by Brexit. Trade continues with the world.’
Hughes acknowledged there were ‘clearly negatives’ from a trading viewpoint but said they were mostly short-term or ‘at worst, medium-term’. He argued the UK’s freight industry is ‘very, very good’ and the UK is fantastic at managing complex supply chains – confirmed during the Brexit period and coronavirus pandemic, when supply chains remained mostly intact and fears of mass shortages proved unfounded. ‘We can walk into a garage and pick up a sandwich but to get the product there it has involved tens of thousands of people. The industry is very sophisticated.’
In the run-up to Brexit, Freeman said there was a ‘big rush of people bringing stuff into the UK’, which iPort managed to cope with. While the site’s volumes collapsed in 2020 due to Covid, it has now mostly recovered. There have been some opportunities too: iPort has been granted customs clearing status. ‘We can now accept a train from wherever it might be from in Europe, through the Channel Tunnel, right the way up to Doncaster iPort. And we will clear it for customs so it doesn’t have to be done at Dover or anywhere like that. And similarly for export it can be loaded here.’ Based on conversations he’s had with workers in the rail terminal, he said they mostly backed Leave due to being ‘so disgruntled and so disillusioned with politics, generally; with the way the country was apparently going.’
Brexit was why I went to Don Valley: 68 per cent of the constituency voted to leave the EU – well above the national average – putting it in the top fifty of the most Brexit-supporting parts of the UK. For Labour, which officially had a Remain stance in 2016, the problem was clear. According to number-cruncher Chris Hanretty, 70 per cent of Labour constituencies voted for Brexit yet just 5 per cent of Labour MPs supported leaving at the time of the referendum.3 The cracks emerged in 2016 but did not fully break open until three years later.
The story of why this corner of South Yorkshire so heavily decided to quit the bloc is essential for understanding what happened to Labour, given that the Tories never came close to taking the seat until 2019. After bidding farewell to Hughes and Freeman, I braved the M18 again for a twenty-minute drive to Hatfield.
The Brexit chaos between 2016 and 2019 was not only painful for all political parties, but the whole country too. David Cameron’s abrupt departure from Number 10, the arrival of Theresa May, her botched effort to gain an electoral mandate to deliver Brexit, the gradual collapse of her government and the ultimate failure of Parliament to pass her withdrawal agreement, were all symptomatic of how the referendum came close to breaking parliamentary democracy. When Westminster collapsed into its own nervous breakdown in early 2019, even the Church tried to intervene. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called for five days of prayer and urged MPs to avoid a no-deal Brexit.
With those higher thoughts in mind, and keen to learn more about the communities of Don Valley, my next stop was the pleasant town of Hatfield and the St Lawrence Church. The grade-one listed building was known to the Venerable Bede and has its origins in Norman times.4 I met two of its church wardens in their parish office, which was consumed by bulky photocopiers for newsletters. Vivian Stubbs and Vera Owen became involved with St Lawrence six years ago, elected when the last church warden was disgruntled with the arrival of a female vicar (see The Vicar of Dibley for more details).
The pair had baked banana bread and small cupcakes, incredibly welcome after time spent on the South Yorkshire motorways. They both agreed with the impression I gained from walking around the village that Hatfield was mostly comfortable and middle-class – tidy shops, a mixture of housing, well-kept countryside. The opposite of what most people will think of as Labour’s heartlands. Stubbs felt ‘blessed to be living here’. Owen agreed: ‘I don’t think we do as badly as lots of other places do.’
The community spirit centred on their church came to the fore during the coronavirus lockdowns. The volunteers of St Lawrence made over a million phone calls to stave off loneliness. ‘We’ve got some people who’ve gone into isolation and are terrified of coming out, which is not good,’ Stubbs said. The pair have also worked at the food bank – a partnership between the church and the local council. The typical food bank users in 2020 were those who had lost their jobs.
Owen said those in poverty in this western corner of Don Valley are overwhelmingly unskilled labourers reliant on zero-hours contracts. When the pandemic hit, much of their employment disappeared. ‘I think it’s a big problem here.’ Stubbs noted that the £20-a-week uplift to benefits through the universal credit system had made an ‘enormous difference’ to the poorest. ‘If you’re poor you learn how to manage. Then somebody gives you an extra twenty pounds a week, that makes you rich. It has made the difference between us no longer having people coming in saying “I have no money because I’ve been feeding the gas meter as it got so cold.”’ Owen agreed with her that the pandemic, for many in the area, was ‘incredibly difficult’.
The ladies felt the biggest challenge for South Yorkshire is aspiration. Stubbs’s main grievance was ‘trying to convince people that they’re worth more than they think they are and that the way out of poverty is through education.’ Owen said, ‘I was brought up with education, education, education – you must be educated. That was your way out. But they don’t seem to have that message in the same way.’ Both said the biggest improvement that could be made locally – alongside maintaining that universal credit uptick – would be youth clubs and activities to help teenagers.
Did the pair feel there is nostalgia for the days of heavy industry? Stubbs thinks there was some pining for steady work, but not the kind of jobs. Owen added that the feelings were potent about ‘the stable line of work, but I don’t think people miss working down pits.’ Although neither confessed to being political, they appreciated that Hatfield was a ‘very Brexit area’. Neither backed leaving the EU, yet both voted Tory in 2019 – Vivian Stubbs for the first time, for reasons she could not quite articulate. Could the pair imagine going back to Labour in the future? Stubbs felt guilty about rejecting politicians they personally knew. ‘In local elections, I might be inclined to vote Labour.’ But for the next general, both demurred.
With the banana bread gobbled up, I headed westward out of the upper corner of Don Valley’s smile to meet the Labour MP who was popular in the community – Owen and Stubbs praised Caroline Flint several times, as did Michael Hughes and Steve Freeman at iPort – but found herself at the heart of this schism between Labour’s long-time supporters and Brexit.
Conisbrough may look like any other small town on the suburbs of a bigger conurbation, but it has an illustrious history. The romantic keep of Conisbrough Castle feels a little out of kilter in such an ordinary suburb. English Heritage reports it dates back to the 1170s, when William the Conqueror made it home to a Norman lordship.5 During the eighteenth century it inspired Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, set in England’s Middle Ages and charting one of the last remaining Anglo-Saxon nobilities. In the twenty-first century, Scott’s work has inspired all manner of buildings in Conisbrough, including a deserted pub overlooking Sprotbrough Cricket Club.
Sam Smith pubs are one of the delights of travelling in England. Inspired by George Orwell’s definition of a perfect pub in ‘The Moon Under Water’, they serve cheap drinks brewed in Yorkshire – never ask for a pint of Coke or Carling – in dark wooden surroundings, with open fires most of the year.6 Dripping in nostalgia, they are patronized by those who moan about the decline of old boozers. And students, who imbibe their cheap drink. Mobile phones are supposedly banned, along with music and TVs showing sports. Most of Samuel Smith’s 200-odd pubs are in England’s former industrial heartlands, and the brewery has done a fine job in rescuing buildings and providing a comforting destination for those who live in these towns. The Ivanhoe is a typical Sam Smith’s establishment – and was deserted on the Thursday afternoon I arrived to meet Caroline Flint. It was just the two of us and an elderly waitress, just days before all entertainment venues were closed again for another round of lockdown.
Flint was one of the best-known MPs of the New Labour era and also one of the most idiosyncratic. She arrived in Westminster in 1997 as part of the 101 female MPs disparagingly known as ‘Blair’s Babes’.7 Although she never rose to be a full Cabinet member, she was a prominent junior minister at the Home Office, the departments of Health and Housing, and the Foreign Office. A household name, if your household was in north London. Her final public perch was serving in the shadow cabinet, where she looked after energy and climate change under Ed Miliband. Now fifty-nine, with dark glasses and a bob of grey hair, she explained why her family settled in the area. ‘I’ve always been a hands-on practical person who felt that you need to keep close to the people you represent, which is why I made the decision that if I was going to be selected in somewhere like Don Valley, it would be my home.’
The Don Valley constituency had returned Labour MPs stretching back to 1922, mostly with large five-figure majorities. Her back story shone through to activists. ‘I come from a very ordinary working-class background myself. Not coal, but I’m the first in my family to go to university. I’ve been through quite a lot in my own life. My family lived on benefits, we never owned our own home. My sister and brother both left school at sixteen and went to work. I can understand that working-class culture, but also not being someone who had all the best chances in life.’ She felt that the Don Valley Labour Party wanted an MP who could ‘talk about something more than coal mining.’
After she was selected and elected for the first time in 1997, Flint said there were a ‘huge stack of problems’ that tempered New Labour’s ambitions. In Don Valley, schools still had outside toilets. Half of the hospitals in the area pre-dated the foundation of the NHS in 1948. Much of the council-housing stock was in need of refurbishment. But the first Blair term helped her patch. ‘The unemployment rate was twice the national average in Doncaster back in 1997. We had to put money into retraining, the New Deal programme for jobs . . . you can look back and there’ll always be somewhere to say “Well, we should have done this.”’ Does she think more should have been done? ‘Of course! Look at what happened here compared to what other countries like France and Germany did to support their industrial base, and still do.’
Given that she was an MP for two decades and Labour was in power for thirteen years, the obvious question I put to her was, why did her party not do more? She retorted that if the 2019 result was about economic decline, then how did Labour win in 2005, which came soon after Don Valley’s last pit in Rossington closed? It was a good challenge. ‘In 2010, with expenses and the financial crash – and this is before people knew about what was going to happen under the coalition government – we didn’t win the election, sure, but we held on . . . why we lost Labour voters to both Tories, UKIP and the Brexit Party comes back to the straw that broke the camel’s back: Brexit. And it is about immigration.’ Such was the latent feeling about the issue that Labour voters gradually fled the party. ‘We failed to understand people’s concerns about Europe and about immigration,’ she bluntly said. ‘They voiced their concerns in the 2014 European elections, where UKIP won. They voiced it again in the 2016 referendum. They actually voiced it again in 2017. And then, when they still weren’t being heard, they made it loud and clear in 2019.’
Immigration and jobs dominated our empty-pub conversation through a second round of coffee. When Flint was first elected, Don Valley was ‘ninety-nine per cent white British’, which has fallen to approximately 90 per cent – not a massive change, but enough to create feelings of dislocation. ‘You can suddenly find in a village, overnight, the workforce is 50 per cent from Eastern Europe. Now, it’s not that people have got a thing against Polish people. But they’re saying, “Hang on, what’s going on?”’ Flint said those out of work in Don Valley found themselves applying to employers who could find EU nationals willing to work for rates locals could not compete with.
Flint was scathing about her Labour colleagues who were unwilling to debate the impact of immigration on England’s towns. ‘There was a London-centric point of view about this. They didn’t understand what was going on in these areas and almost didn’t want to hear it, it’s too uncomfortable. It’s almost like, “Let’s just talk about the benefits of migration, the net benefits of migration”. And yes, if you put all the pounds and pence together, it makes sense, they’re paying tax, but that doesn’t deal with community dislocation.’ When she raised those concerns with fellow MPs, accusations of xenophobia flew. ‘Whenever they started a speech about immigration, it would always start with, “Let me tell you about how great it is”. I thought, Well, that’s fine for Camden, but sometimes, you should just say change is difficult sometimes and start with, “Actually, we’ve got to make sure that immigration is fair.”’
In the Brexit referendum, she dutifully campaigned for Remain but became one of the party’s most ardent voices for delivering on the result. Unlike many of her colleagues who told the media and constituents they would back a Brexit agreement, Flint actually did. Flint recalled one strain of thought among Labour MPs that ‘actually maybe losing seats in Doncaster and Grimsby was a price worth paying [to stay in the EU].’ Flint backed Boris Johnson’s revised withdrawal agreement in the autumn of 2019, stating at the time that ‘the voices in our mining villages remain unheard, despite their support for Labour over many decades’.8 But the eight-point national swing at the 2019 election from Labour to the Tories is proof that no matter how good a local candidate is, nor how in tune with their local electorate, their party’s national standing matters. Between 2017 and 2019, the Labour vote in Don Valley dropped by eighteen points.
Despite regrets about the past, Flint holds some optimism for the future. She thought Keir Starmer had done well to neutralize Brexit as a subject, but warned the Conservatives’ leftward policy shift poses a challenge. ‘The Tory Party is not the same Tory Party that faced me when we were in government, the economics of the Tory Party has changed, it’s a massive change. They’re doing the sort of things you’d expect from Labour.’ As we exited through the empty car park, Flint agreed that the red wall seats did not suddenly go in one heave in 2019, and pointed to two older examples of Labour’s decline – Ed Balls’ old constituency in West Yorkshire going Tory in 2015, and Mansfield in Derbyshire flipping in 2017. She also noted the ‘astounding’ majorities that Conservatives returned in 2019. Once again, she sighed at the attitude of her Labour colleagues: ‘If you think it’s going to be a flip back, then you are being as complacent as you ever were.’
Flint’s successor, ironically, held the same position on Brexit. After a quick journey down the M18 to Bawtry – one of Don Valley’s more affluent market towns – I met Nick Fletcher outside the Town House, overlooking the market place. The pub was not allowing punters inside, so we huddled beneath tall gas heaters. The sun had disappeared, it was utterly freezing. Fletcher was wrapped up with a bulky woollen scarf, I was shivering over yet another cup of coffee. Unlike his parliamentary predecessor, his demeanour was low-key. He has lived in the Doncaster area all his life, leaving school at sixteen and moving straight into an electrical apprenticeship at Doncaster’s railway works. One of his first tasks was rewiring London Underground trains after the King’s Cross fire in 1987. But as work declined, he was made redundant with sixty other electricians in 1994. ‘I couldn’t get a job, it was a tough time, I had no real experience,’ he said. His story from there is a classic Conservative tale of entrepreneurship: on top of the weekly dole money, he was given additional funding attend a course to form a business plan. After beginning with a £40 a week grant for the first year of his business, his electrical company has celebrated twenty-six years of business.
At the age of forty-eight, he employs thirty-eight staff. During his eighteen years in Don Valley, Fletcher could see the area needed investment. ‘When you get into Westminster and you start hearing about the formulas that they use for infrastructure projects, you start realizing how badly we’ve been treated over the years.’ His first year of commuting between London and Don Valley has further highlighted the gap with the capital. ‘You realize the opportunities that have just not been up here, and there’s jobs down there that people don’t know existed.’ His interest in politics is recent. He joined the Conservative Party when his youngest child reached the age of sixteen, when his business and family life were settled. Whereas Flint’s politics came from the trade union movement, Fletcher’s came from enterprise – similar to Mark Brown in Gateshead.
‘When you’re in business, especially when it starts getting bigger, you start realizing how much you actually contribute as a business in tax, but also in people’s lives. The more people you employ, the more issues you find out about in people’s lives and you realize how complicated it can be, and how the government has such a massive effect on them.’ His philosophy is for the state to ‘interfere as little as we can’, but to encourage aspiration. Fletcher added, ‘I never had any dreams of being self-employed, but there was a need. I thought I could do it, and once you start, it gets a hold of you.’ In a nutshell, as Fletcher put it, that is his story. He did not spend two decades on the stump, wearing down Labour’s majority.
His five weeks on the campaign trail chimed with Flint’s view that, for the people of Don Valley, it was all about one topic. ‘For the people that wanted Brexit, we were the only party that was going to do that.’ His background informed his Remain vote in the 2016 referendum. ‘I did it from a business point of view more than anything else. We’d come out of a massive recession, and my business had pretty much done well up until 2008.’ His enterprises turned a corner in 2014 but he was aware that Brexit would ‘rock the boat’.
By the time he reached the doorsteps of Don Valley in 2019, he was strongly against a second referendum. Even though both candidates held the same positions on Brexit, he said there was a realization that ‘the ones that did like her, of which there were many, realized that a vote for her was a vote for more of the same with Brexit, and also, a vote for Jeremy Corbyn, so they couldn’t bring themselves to do it.’ Voters he encountered were disillusioned with all politicians. ‘People were just saying, “We’ve had enough, you’re not listening to us.”’ He also concurred that immigration was a key issue. ‘There was an awful lot of the Brexit vote based on immigration,’ he said. He does not think those with concerns wanted all migration to cease, but that it needs more control. ‘That’s what’s so significant about the illegal boat crossings that we’re seeing [in the English Channel] – that’s not controlled. We just need it cooling off a bit, bring it down . . . and until that happens, it’s always going to be one of the top items on the agenda.’ Fletcher said he took no pleasure at Flint’s predicament and agreed he would be ‘very upset, devastated’ if he had lost the seat in similar circumstances.
His plan for holding onto Don Valley ties closely to the Johnson government’s levelling-up agenda, starting with a new hospital. The Doncaster Royal Infirmary is in urgent need of replacement: the Doncaster Free Press reported it has a backlog of £11 million worth of maintenance and is landlocked by housing on all sides, so can’t be further extended.9 Fletcher’s hope is for a new hospital on an out-of-town campus. He also hopes to gain freeport status for Doncaster Sheffield Airport and the iPort to incentivize further investment. But his efforts, at the time of writing, have yet to bear fruit. Doncaster was not included in Boris Johnson’s first batch of forty new hospitals, unlike the new Shotley Bridge project in North West Durham. In March 2021, the prime minister told Fletcher in Parliament that his NHS trust was ‘very much in the running’ for the next eight buildings to be commissioned. South Yorkshire was also not included in the first eight freeports announced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak.
Fletcher was also eager to inspire confidence for jobs. ‘I’ll go into schools and give assemblies. I’m going to fill all these kids with aspiration, to try and cheer them, I’ll do a lot of work on it, we need something at the end of it for them.’ He thought the Tories have a ‘very good chance’ of turning around Doncaster’s fortunes and making it a ‘wonderful’ place to live. He did, however, acknowledge that Keir Starmer is a ‘completely different’ opposition leader and poses a different challenge for his re-election efforts, even if Boris Johnson remains personally popular on the doorstep. ‘They do like the prime minister round here. He’s just got something about him, he’s obviously a very intelligent person, but I mean, the people in Don Valley voting for somebody that went to Eton? It’s just . . .’ Fletcher trailed off. ‘They just love him . . . I think if we can get through Covid, they’ll vote for him again.’
Fletcher was preoccupied with thoughts of how the coronavirus lockdowns would impact his patch. Again reflecting on his time as a businessman, he concluded that ensuring businesses survive the pandemic is key to re-election. He predicted the Tories will win Don Valley again ‘if we keep to the manifesto and come out of Covid as well as what can be expected’, and could take more seats. ‘You’ve got an awful lot of hardworking MPs. Everybody I know that won one of these [red wall] type of seats works really hard, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t [win again].’
The journey of traditional Labour voters to the Conservatives cannot be explained without looking at the role of the UK Independence Party. The Liberal Democrats had been the natural protest against Labour in northern England, but UKIP usurped them. In 2014, the peak year of its influence, two Conservative MPs – Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless – defected to the party from the Tories and won by-elections in Essex and Kent. It was the direct influence of UKIP that forced David Cameron to write a referendum into his party’s 2015 manifesto. The 2014 European election campaign was the first time formerly staunch Labour voters of Don Valley found an affinity with UKIP. In the general election the following year, the party came third here with 24 per cent of the vote.
UKIP’s campaigning success was almost entirely down to Nigel Farage, probably the most influential British politician in recent history aside from Tony Blair. As an MEP from 1999 to 2020 and leader of the party on and off for a decade, he did more than any other person to take Britain out of the EU and prompt Labour’s electoral headaches. His litany of provocative statements on culture and immigration made him a bête noire for Labour and metropolitan-minded people. Yet over and over in my travels around England, he is praised in working-class communities. His cultivated image of the ordinary bloke in the pub – adorned with a pint of bitter and cigarette – put him instantly at home in Labour’s former heartlands.
Speaking from his home on Kent’s North Downs, the fifty-seven-year-old said the foundations of UKIP in 1993 were ideologically diverse. When he became chairman in 1997, Farage shifted the party towards people like himself: disgruntled Tories. ‘I used to joke in the mid- to late-nineties that I knew it was a UKIP meeting by the number of Bomber Command ties in the front row. These blokes who were about seventy, seventy-five, would have their RAF blazers on and their wives would put their best dresses on. The voter base was very much the World War Two generation in those days, very much conservative. They saw Maastricht [the treaty, which formed the EU institutions as they are today] and all that had come since as a total betrayal.’
In 1999, Farage was elected along with two other UKIP candidates to the European Parliament, which he called his ‘greatest day in politics’ – the first time he kicked Britain’s political establishment in the teeth. That first election was focused on courts, cost and sovereignty – ‘all the things that Tony Benn and Enoch Powell were talking about twenty to twenty-five years earlier’ – but the word immigration did not appear once. However, Farage soon realized that the EU’s impending expansion eastwards presented an opportunity. ‘It was going to bring in a whole load of former communist countries, some of which were quite poor . . . that was likely to be a very, very big watershed moment in British politics.’ In the 2004 vote in the European Parliament on expanding the bloc, Farage and the other two UKIP MEPs were the only three from Britain to vote against. ‘That was when I began the big crusade about opening the doors to uncontrolled immigration, that huge numbers will come.’
The party’s brief flirtation with TV presenter and former Labour MP Robert Kilroy-Silk in 2004 – described by Patrick Maguire in the New Statesman as ‘the godfather of Brexit’ – expanded its profile.10 ‘He did a lot of good. He got the UKIP name out there,’ Farage said. Prior to Kilroy-Silk, the party was strongest in the West Country, East Anglia and the south-east. In the 2004 European elections, UKIP won ten extra seats in the European Parliament, with the gains coming from the Midlands and north. Farage also thought Blair’s devolution agenda in Scotland and Wales stoked resentment in England: ‘The difference it made to the psyche of the English working-class voter was remarkable. Suddenly, when England were playing football, on the housing estates of Newcastle, the crosses of St George were hanging out of bedroom windows.’ With devolution, Farage argued Blair had fostered a sense that ‘we should almost be ashamed to be English’.
Farage has made seven attempts in six seats to be elected to the House of Commons and failed in all of them – the last, in South Thanet in Kent, was the closest he came. On his fifth effort in Bromley and Chislehurst, he came in third place and pushed Labour into fourth. His campaigning highlighted an opening for UKIP. ‘I was being treated like a bloody hero. Walking up the streets, people coming out of their doors and wanting to come out and talk. They felt a deep sense of injustice. They felt the Labour Party just wasn’t for them anymore. The Labour Party was actually for the rich people, central London people now.’ In 2014, UKIP won the European elections thanks to ‘turnout in the Labour areas’. And by the 2015 general election, Farage said he was being vilified by the media and political establishment. He said, ‘Nigel Farage has been made this national monster. I mean, far worse than [fascist] Oswald Mosley ever was . . . how I stayed sane I don’t know.’
Farage reckoned the four million votes UKIP won in 2015 were very different to the four million in the European elections before. In the European elections, Farage said he attracted disaffected Tories, but it was traditional Labour supporters defecting to UKIP that helped the Conservatives return their slender parliamentary majority of thirteen. ‘I could say this on the television till I was blue in the face. Nobody understood it. Nobody got it. The London-based press corps didn’t understand it. And remarkably, the Labour Party didn’t understand it . . . we were actually hurting Labour far more than we were hurting Cameron.’
The relationship between Farage and Johnson is frosty, but there is mutual respect. In his Daily Telegraph column in 2013, Johnson described the then UKIP leader as ‘a rather engaging geezer’ who shares many of the same attributes as Tories.11 Johnson wrote: ‘We Tories look at him . . . and we instinctively recognise someone who is fundamentally indistinguishable from us. He’s a blooming Conservative, for heaven’s sake; and yet he’s in our constituencies, wooing our audiences, nicking our votes.’ The pair may be too similar to truly get along.
Farage readily argued he was ‘the gateway drug’ for the red wall flipping Conservative, especially by standing UKIP candidates on a local level in places such as Doncaster. ‘We really weaned people away from the Labour Party. And the more they saw the Labour Party write us off as being racist and extreme, the more they said, “But that’s me they’re talking about!” Until the tribe abuses you, it’s difficult to recognize that it’s not your tribe.’ Had Labour not written off UKIP, Farage argued, these voters would never have made the full journey to voting Tory through him. ‘The real problem for the Labour Party now is how do you get these people back?’ Does he hold the answer? ‘No,’ was the firm reply.
Farage recalled an incident in South Yorkshire that demonstrates why he thinks the current crop of Labour figures won’t win these places back. ‘They just don’t speak their language. I went into a working men’s club in Doncaster in 2015. I was invited. I walked in and there were a lot of ex-miners: some pleased to see me, some not at all pleased to see me. I had a couple of beers, sat down and Channel 4 racing was on. We had a bit of fun. Ed Miliband’s office was four hundred yards down the road, so I said to the governor, “How often does Ed Miliband come in?” Do you know what he said? “He’s never been!” Because what would Ed say to a group of miners?’ Despite being a privately educated stockbroker, Farage’s everyman image found the same appeal as Johnson’s.
Now that these disillusioned Labour voters have made the journey from Labour to the Tories, Farage does not see them returning. ‘Once you’ve crossed the Rubicon, it’s quite tough to go back. If Boris is sensible, if there is some belief that the levelling-up agenda is really happening – whether it is or not, it’s a separate issue – whether people believe it is is what matters.’ Unsurprisingly, he was scathing of Starmer for his cultural views, which reminded me of an encounter I had one night in a pub in Hatfield outside of Doncaster. Chatting to a couple of local men, I asked them about the new Labour leader. One bloke whipped out his smartphone and opened up a Facebook group of his mates and showed me a picture of Starmer and Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, down on one knee – the symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement. ‘There’s no way I’m voting for him. Starmer, he hates white people,’ the guy said. No matter how much I explained this was not what the BLM protests were about, they would not listen. ‘If I was a Conservative candidate, standing in any election in the Midlands and the north, that’s the picture of Starmer that would go on every one of my leaflets,’ Farage said. ‘Starmer’s done with that picture. I don’t see a way back for them, barring a catastrophic economic downturn.’
His final thought was on class and why it will be hard, if not impossible, for Labour to win its supporters back. ‘There is a realignment going on in British politics and in American politics. We’re seeing politics of the centre-right attracting working-class votes, but in danger of losing suburban middle-class votes. And it’s the same in America, those Washington DC suburbs can’t vote for Trump. But there are bits of the Midwest that voted for Trump that had never voted Republican in their lives. There is a big class change in politics. That, for me, is overwhelming. The middle-class/working-class divide that I grew up with in the 1960s and 70s has gone.’
Before returning to the people of Don Valley, I put these accusations about Labour’s disconnect over Brexit to someone at the heart of the debate. Peter Mandelson has been in Labour politics for four decades: first as Neil Kinnock’s communications director in the 1980s, then as a key force behind the creation of New Labour. Although his positions in the Cabinet as Northern Ireland and Business Secretary ended with controversy, his sustained reputation as the ‘prince of darkness’ speaks to his backroom role as the most important strategist and fixer of his generation. Mandelson has unashamedly kept the New Labour flame alive and spoken highly critically of Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party. He is also one of Labour’s most diehard Europeans, serving as the bloc’s trade commissioner from 2004 to 2008, and crucially for the question of Labour and Brexit, as a director of the unsuccessful People’s Vote campaign for a second referendum.
Speaking over Zoom from his rented farm, with a newly planted lockdown garden in the background, he sighed that for him Brexit was a ‘difficult and raw subject’. During the first year after Theresa May failed to win a majority in the 2017 election, he explained that Tony Blair gathered a group of like-minded Labour figures to convince them that the British people could be persuaded to think again about leaving the bloc. According to Mandelson, Blair’s argument at that time was: ‘When people see the facts and what sort of deal is available; when they see through all the lies of the Leave campaign, we have a real opportunity.’
Mandelson said the pitch was ‘very persuasive’. Even if the campaign was unsuccessful, he thought it could galvanize the pro-EU section of the UK electorate that could in turn exert pressure on the Brexiters in Parliament. But after a long tough year of campaigning, Mandelson realized the campaign was failing. ‘As time went on, we managed to mobilize the Remain side very well but we were not gaining traction amongst Leave voters. We weren’t converting people. We weren’t winning the argument in favour of a second look.’ He recalled, ‘I said to Tony, “We’re not gaining traction here”, and he was put out by this. I said it again to him towards the end of this and he said, “I just don’t agree with you.” You have to understand that Tony never doubts his ability to persuade people, he is a great communicator and he wanted to offer national leadership at a time of crisis for the country.’
Mandelson was unhappy at People’s Vote’s inability to frame the question: ‘All the way through, I kept trying to focus people on what would be on the ballot paper of a second referendum, but it was insoluble. And they just wanted a referendum. Basically, they wanted a re-run, come what may, of David Cameron and George Osborne’s original disastrous campaign.’ The greatest ‘what if’ of this period is what Brexit would have looked like if the likes of Mandelson, Blair and the People’s Vote campaign had focused on a softer exit instead of trying to overturn the result entirely. Mandelson explained that ideological purity took ahold for him and the former prime minister:
‘Tony always had doubts about a soft Brexit because he believed Britain cannot become a regulatory satellite of the European Union and you have to see his point. I didn’t want to become a regulatory satellite of the EU either, that’s why I wanted to stay in the EU with full voting rights, because I know that you can’t enjoy or exercise the sovereignty outside the European Union that the Brexiters were promising. The “satellite” argument led some to the conclusion that it was better to sever ourselves completely than settle for May’s deal, which I accept now was an error. We should have supported May’s deal as the least harmful option.’
One target of the People’s Vote campaign was Keir Starmer, who was then Labour’s chief Brexit spokesperson. Starmer is still targeted by Conservatives and hardcore Corbynistas alike for his backroom advocacy for another referendum – culminating in the party’s 2018 conference in Liverpool when he told agitated activists that ‘nobody is ruling out remain as an option’.12 I was in the room for that speech and it was rapturously received. Few of the party’s grassroots realized at that moment it would turn off millions of voters in the party’s heartlands. Mandelson said Starmer was being ‘kicked around like a political football’ over the second referendum debate. ‘Keir had massive pressure exerted on him by the People’s Vote campaign but he was able to see that the campaign was not prevailing and achieving the traction it wanted.’ Left to his own devices, Mandelson reckoned Starmer would have gone for a softer Brexit. ‘He would have said, “No, we can’t reverse this, we have got to go for a version of Norway.”’ Instead, the now opposition leader was ‘caught very painfully in the middle of a pincer movement between People’s Vote on one side and Corbyn on the other and that’s why when it came to Johnson’s final deal he decided he was going to follow his own judgement. He decided to trust his own instincts and put Brexit behind us once and for all.’
The Sunday Times reported in February 2021 that Starmer had called in Mandelson for advice on regaining New Labour’s winning spirit.13 So how did he think the leader is doing, one year in to the plan to win back seats like Don Valley? Mandelson carefully said, ‘He’s doing everything correctly, but not strongly enough and not fast enough.’ His main advice was to find a forward-looking narrative. ‘Keir has got a fascinating and empathetic family backstory but he needs to offer an account of the country’s future as much as his own past.’
Mandelson was still sore at how the legacy of New Labour was trashed by subsequent leaders after Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. ‘The Labour Party has just seemed unable, since we left government in 2010, to come to terms with the world – to understand it and interpret it for others, to respond to the global and technological changes underway with a set of coherent ideas and policies that seem relevant to people. As a result, we have been swept up in the anti-politics backlash that has kicked in across many parts of country. Quite honestly, if you are angry and disappointed because austerity has hit you and your local authority and community disproportionately, you are going to lash out at everyone, including those in charge who are nearest to you. At a time of austerity, where you do not have a vibrant private sector and secure incomes to turn to and you are very dependent on government spending, you are going to feel the pain of austerity a lot more than others.’ He lamented that the resentment that was stoked up in the red wall during the austerity years was, in his eyes, mainly down to the collapse in the public sector, which Labour had relied on to regenerate those areas.
It was therefore no surprise people in those areas became angry. ‘If you are also a minority not doing fantastically well financially as incomes diverge and a yawning gap grows between the very rich and everyone else, you are bound to become very angry. And frankly, you are likely to turn to anti-elite populists, nationalists, however simple their analysis and ideas. These are not policies, they’re essentially ways of sowing division, exploiting people’s anger, whipping them up into an anti-elite, anti-London, anti-establishment, anti-this, anti-that temper.’ Labour, in his view, was not politically alert enough to see the tide of resentment that spilled over in 2016, 2017 and 2019. ‘The centre left and centre right were clobbered by a tidal wave of anger and disappointment and resentment, which was much more skilfully exploited by the divisive tactics of populists than we were able to handle ourselves.’
Mandelson summed up the party’s plight over the last decade: ‘We just had too little to say, too little strength and skill with which to say it, too few people of any charisma or strength of personality to articulate it. After thirteen years of government, the party passed into the hands of people who were not able to rethink and remake Labour’s appeal, and instead, devoted their energies to fighting internal ideological battles and attacking the record of the very Labour government of which many of them had been a part! Why on earth would people vote Labour if what they hear from a new Labour leadership is endless negativism and criticism of what their own party had achieved in government?’
To gauge if Mandelson was right, I went back to Conisbrough to find a group of such disaffiliated people.
The Ivanhoe Community Centre, named after Walter Scott’s novel, is located between housing estates and luscious playing fields. On a sunny spring morning, I was invited to a coffee morning with the volunteers who run the centre. Most of the Ivanhoe’s activities were paused during the pandemic, as the main function room morphed into a Covid testing centre (I was ushered into a complimentary test on arrival, thankfully negative). The function room upstairs was a hodgepodge of antique cabinets and armchairs, as well as having a small kitchen. Anyone growing up in northern England who has attended a christening or child’s birthday party would feel at home. Four formidable characters waited and ushered me into the sole empty red-velvet chair, before handing me a mug of strong tea and gesturing towards a tin of McVitie’s biscuits.
Carol Fleming introduced herself as the dominant figure who oversees the Ivanhoe. A retired pharmacy technician, she was the only one of the group not born in the town. Before the Ivanhoe opened in the mid-1990s, she recalled the community coalesced around a wooden shack on the football field that ran bingo nights, baby weigh-ins and dance evenings and hosted weddings. After the Yorkshire Main Colliery in nearby Edlington closed while still profitable and employing 1,400 people, the playing fields were donated to the people of Conisbrough and fundraising began for a more substantial community centre.14
Fleming became involved with the Ivanhoe seven years ago, after retiring and taking up keep-fit classes hosted there. When she took over the centre, her priority was to ensure the Ivanhoe was welcoming to all parts of Conisbrough’s community. ‘A lot of people thought when they were going past on buses that it was an old people’s home because of the decor we had at the time. It was chintzy drapes and blue high-back chairs.’ Barbara Moore, clutching a mug that revealed her age – ‘Chuffin’ell! Tha’s Seventy!’ – jumped in to reel off all the activities the Ivanhoe hopes to restart when lockdown is over: Slimming World, fitness classes, the Mucky Paws and Dogs Trust groups, Pilates, Zumba, cinema nights, boxing clubs, and ‘two Vikings who come in on a Wednesday evening’. To do what, exactly, was not made clear. John Jeffcote, a retired bricklayer who helped build the centre, is eager to restart his dancing classes ‘whenever’. Carol Fleming is keen for the cafe to reopen soon and for the toddlers’ group to start again.
I asked the group why they did all this? What motivated them to devote their retirement years to the centre and the community? ‘Because we’re daft,’ joked Barbara Moore. But she also had a serious reason for her involvement. ‘I do suffer with anxiety. And I find that coming here, and being with these people, has made me a different person. I like meeting people and I like being with people. I retired from my job at the racecourse [serving at the bar] and I would have just been sat at home.’ Carol McNichol chimed in for the first time to explain her involvement was to stave off loneliness. ‘My husband died six years ago and I came here for company.’
Although there was admirable camaraderie among those who run the Ivanhoe, I was curious as to how far it extended into the community. Carol McNichol spoke of the ‘brilliant’ spirit at the bingo nights and lunches, but added that there ‘had been trouble with youths in the village’. The other Carol thought that family ties in Conisbrough were as strong as ever. ‘Conisbrough and Denaby [another nearby village] are ex-mining areas, that binds us together. The men in particular, lots of them are miners. And I suppose it’s like ex-soldiers – they’ve kind of relied on each other to keep each other safe.’ But Fleming agreed with the others that it was not as friendly as in the past.
Carol McNichol was born in Conisbrough in 1950 and has lived there all her life. She adores the place and would ‘never ever move’, despite her husband professing an eagerness to emigrate to Canada. A lot has changed, but she said several times that it was the same for all the villages and towns in the area. ‘It’s not just Conisbrough, it’s everywhere,’ Carol Fleming agreed. Both Carols thought people in each of the towns tend to stick together. McNichol joked, ‘I would say we’re more friendly here. Where’ve you come from? Well, we’ve accepted you this morning. From London.’
With the mugs of tea drained and the table covered in crumbs, we moved onto politics. Both Carols, Barbara and John are engaged with politics – they always vote, but despite their similar backgrounds, their allegiances differ. Carol Fleming comes from a Labour family, but is a long-time Conservative voter. ‘I didn’t feel Labour represented me . . . and then we got Jeremy Corbyn. I thought, Well, I’m definitely glad that I never did before.’ Her politics were driven by life aspirations. ‘I wanted a good job. And a nice house. And to have money to do what I want with it. Go on holiday, buy a car, and so I thought, well, probably they’re [the Tories] going to help me more than the others.’
The other Carol was surprised at this. ‘I wanted the same things, the house, but I never looked at it like that.’ McNichol also came from a family of staunch Labour supporters. ‘I voted Labour because I live in Conisbrough and it was the done thing. I’ve never ever questioned it.’ McNichol admitted that she was still scared to vote Tory. ‘You know, I’ve never put it into words before. I think I was frightened for voting Conservative, for going against it, like a religion. But with Jeremy Corbyn, I do think the same as Carol.’ Barbara Moore concurred: ‘It’s always been a Labour area. So like my mum and dad, I voted Labour automatically.’
Throughout his fifty years as a bricky, John Jeffcote was a trade unionist. But his disillusionment dawned with New Labour. Blair turned him off the party. ‘I just couldn’t take it. I mean, look what he did with Iraq and Afghanistan, I don’t think he should have gone into there at all. And ever since then I’ve thought, Labour? No. Then when Jeremy Corbyn came in that really put me off.’ For only the second time in his life, Jeffcote voted Conservative in 2019.
Casting their thoughts to the next election, two of the Ivanhoe gang said they would ‘vote for Boris’ – person first, not party – one said the Tories and only Carol McNichol said she might go back to Labour. And what about Brexit? Four resounding votes for leaving the EU. Any regrets? Four more resounding nos.
Before my road trip, it was obvious that Brexit was a key issue that knocked down the red wall. But until speaking to the people of Don Valley, I had not appreciated the depth of the breach of trust between Labour and its traditional voters. The bond between them had been waning for some time, but Brexit has acted like a bleach for voters’ past prejudices against the Conservatives. Voters who might have otherwise backed the Tories, but harboured a grudge for the party’s role in deindustrialization, were given a license to support them. It is remarkable that in these former mining areas, those who loathed Margaret Thatcher now love Boris Johnson.
The breach is not a one-off either: in the 2017 election, UKIP’s coalition of left- and right-wing working-class voters abandoned the party in large numbers. They overwhelmingly backed the Tories, although some went back to Labour. And again in 2019, the traditional Labour voters went against their tribe. There may be arguments and characters who can win them back, but there should be no illusions it will happen automatically.
When the dust settles and the debate moves on from the 2016 plebiscite, Brexit will prove more problematic for Labour than the Conservatives. The latter initially appeared to publicly suffer the most – as seen when twenty-one of the party’s most prominent MPs were kicked out by Boris Johnson. But the party has not lost an election over it. The Tories did what the party does every couple of decades: it shed its past ideology and reinvented itself. The Corn Laws in the mid-nineteenth century saw it turn into the party of free trade. After the Second World War, it accepted the welfare state. In the 1980s, it became the party of free markets. And in 2019, it is now the Brexit Party. The make-up of its MPs, membership and voting base is now pro-Leave. For Labour and others, it is frustrating to fathom how the party can shift its beliefs so rapidly.
Yet the alternative is what has befallen Labour. The party is still attempting to straddle its old Remain and Leave coalition, that Hampstead-to-Humberside alliance that came into being when the party was formed. The specific issues around Brexit and the EU will fade away, but the identity question will not and it will take generations for voters to forget what happened in 2016. Nor is the divide in Labour’s coalition new. Herbert Morrison, Labour’s deputy prime minister in the early 1950s and Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, remarked ‘the Durham miners will never wear it’ when France invited the UK to join the nascent European Coal and Steel Community, which morphed into the EU. Labour eventually embraced the European project, but it did not sign up all of its voters for the journey.
Now it faces the challenge of making those Leave voters feel as if the party is on its side. Gisela Stuart, chair of the Vote Leave campaign, former minister and probably the sole Blairite Brexiter, recalled telling Boris Johnson during a campaign event in Sunderland, ‘Remember, they just want someone to show them respect.’ She correctly deduced that Brexit was about ‘identity and belonging’ and ‘recognizing some of the legitimate concerns’ about how society had changed. Labour’s failure to do that, before, during and after the referendum, cost it seats like Don Valley. It may find a new formula to meet that challenge, but repairing that trust will take quite some effort.
Ian Austin, an apparatchik to Gordon Brown and later the Labour MP for Dudley North – another red wall seat that went Tory for the first time in 2019 – believed that Brexit ‘turbocharged’ the party’s disconnect. He told me, ‘It’s a bit like a wife who’s been telling her husband for years you’re not listening to me. We didn’t listen in 2010, we didn’t listen in 2015. We lectured them in 2017 and 2019. So after years and years of being ignored, being lectured by this husband who’s not remotely interested in what their wife thinks, the wife gradually is worn down. And in 2019 decides to divorce their husband. You can’t just turn up with a bunch of flowers and a box of chocolates and say I’m really sorry.’
The UK’s forty-year ties with the European project provided the nation with economic and trading benefits. But even its supporters know it created dislocation for certain industries. That is particularly true for coastal communities, dependent on fishing, which saw their livelihoods fritter away. My next stop was closer to the east coast, once home to Europe’s biggest fishing port and felt the pain more than anywhere else. No one passes through Great Grimsby – it is at the end of the eastward road from Doncaster. Geography is too often underestimated in politics. Don Valley is closely tied to Doncaster, whereas Grimsby only has itself.