‘Swallow the lot and swallow it now.’
CON O’NEILL, BRITISH DIPLOMAT, ON HIS
ORDERS FROM TED HEATH TO JOIN THE
EUROPEAN ECONOMIC COMMUNITY
The mist lay so heavily over the Port of Grimsby that the road was invisible. As the sun rose on a still spring morning, a blanket of faint heat and sunshine covered the remote seaside town on England’s east coast, which was once home to the world’s largest fishing fleet. The docks, which have welcomed cargo since the Danes conquered the region, are dotted with signs of its illustrious past. Many of the sloping warehouses and decaying offices from the fishing era are listed and cannot be put out of their misery. For the first-time visitor, these abandoned structures cast an inexorable shadow of decline over the town.
The days where a visitor could walk across the whole harbour boat to boat, without touching the water, are gone. The 900 trawlers from the fleet’s 1930s peak have dwindled to just twenty, with the same rate of decline befalling the workforce, which once numbered tens of thousands.1 The fishing industry is still at the core of Grimsby’s identity: ‘We sing when we’re fishing’ is the chant at Grimsby Town Football Club, nicknamed the Mariners. The town’s decline can be attributed to a series of events: the 1970s Cod Wars between the UK and Iceland, the industry-wide push to end overfishing, and the UK’s accession to the European Communities. The town’s perception of the EU Common Fisheries Policy explains why 71 per cent backed Brexit.
Grimsby Fish Market, found at the far end of dock number one, opened in 1996 to primarily process catches from elsewhere. As soon as I stepped into the car park, the aroma of fish was overwhelming. A little too much for such an early start. Four refrigerated lorries were backed into the market and slowly being filled with boxes – the market processes 20,000 tons of fish a year – with smaller vans taking deliveries to the town’s shops. Martin Boyers, its chief executive, occupied a glass-walled second-floor office overlooking the sea. He expressed disappointment that the fog curtailed the vista: only two boats were visible from his desk and only the occasional sounds of forklift trucks hinted at the industry below us.
Boyers comes from a fishing family: his father and grandfather were fish merchants. ‘I’ve always been on the docks since I was a boy,’ he said, in a forthright manner shared by all of Great Grimsby’s residents. He noted that although catching has declined, the town’s reputation for processing was strong. ‘This is the major base in the UK, by a mile, for processing – therefore the largest distributor of fish, therefore the largest by volume of fish by an absolute mile.’ The processing industry, too, has undergone changes, as the nation’s tastes have become more refined. ‘Consumers don’t want skin and bones. When people go and buy haddock and chips, it’ll be a piece of haddock without bone in it.’ Having enjoyed Grimsby’s fish and chips the night before, including an unwanted stray bone, I accepted he was right.
For Boyers, the decline in Grimsby was all down to the Cod Wars. ‘Not Brexit, not Europe, not the Common Fisheries Policy . . . Iceland was a very small, expanding country. The first thing was when they expanded their territorial limit to twenty-five miles. That was a ripple. Then the next Cod War was when they expanded it to fifty miles. That was a bigger ripple. But when it got serious was in the late 1970s, when they extended to a hundred miles, then two hundred miles.’ For the ports of Grimsby, Hull, Fleetwood and north-eastern Scotland, the new territorial boundaries – accepted by the UK in the face of Iceland’s threat at the height of the Cold War to walk out of NATO – proved disastrous for the trawlers.2 ‘It was the ultimate demise of the deep-water fleet, because they couldn’t go anywhere.’
Boyers admitted that nostalgia for the days of heavy fishing is heady: ‘People think it was a marvellous time, they go on about the good old days. But nobody says anything about the amount of fish that was wasted, the amount of fish that went to fish meal.’ It was also a perilous job: one common maxim at the time was that for every man killed in mining, eight died at sea. ‘I wouldn’t do it. It’s a tough job, it’s a dangerous job. And people still get killed and die every year going out fishing because of the nature of it. If you applied health and safety rules to a fishing boat, you wouldn’t go on it.’
Still, the EU prompted anger among the fisherman of Grimsby, much of it targeted towards the Prime Minister Edward Heath, who was seen to have ‘sold out’ the fisherman when the UK joined the European Communities in 1973. ‘They still blame Ted Heath for throwing away the fisheries. So it [Brexit] was seen as an opportunity to get it back.’ During the 2016 referendum, Boyers thought there was ‘a lot of delusion’ that leaving the bloc would lead to a fundamental shift away from the Common Fisheries Policy that is widely seen to have disadvantaged Grimsby. Indeed, the fishing deal signed by Boris Johnson as part of the UK–EU’s trade deal has failed to make much difference.
Over the last five years, Boyers said there has been a ‘marked decline’ in Grimsby’s fishing. ‘Quite a number of fishermen have thought that they should get out of it, take the money. The quotas have become a tradable commodity, the value of quota has outstripped the value of the actual vessel.’ When the new fish market opened in 1996, it processed 20,000 boxes a week. Twenty-five years on, it is down to 4,000. The wider industry, however, remains one of Grimsby’s biggest employers. ‘The biggest seafood company in the UK, Young’s, they’re based in Grimsby. The second biggest seafood company in the UK is Flatfish, they’re based in Grimsby. The third biggest is Seachill, they’re based in Grimsby. The only supermarket that has a processing operation is Morrisons, based in Grimsby.’
Boyers took over the market in 2001 and soon saw the need to diversify. ‘We were getting less vessels, we then thought, looking at the longer-term, that we needed to diversify, we needed to look at other opportunities.’ Grimsby is now predominantly a renewables port. ‘For the older generation, Grimsby is synonymous with fish. But the younger generation have been brought up where Grimsby is a renewable hub. It’s a wind-farm base and that’s a completely different perception.’
Grimsby’s image as a deprived fishing town will take time to adapt. ‘It’s been assumed to be something that it probably isn’t, because of its history connected to fish.’ Boyers said it was ‘quite a nice place’, especially the surrounding countryside. Driving along the A180 from Doncaster, I was struck by the unyielding landscape and the isolation of Grimsby. There are no major settlements en route. Or, as Boyers put it, ‘It has to be a destination, you cannot pass through it.’ This remoteness has forged a particular identity. It has also made the sense of decline more harshly felt in some parts of the town. ‘People do think it’s just a bloody shit old fish place. No, it’s not. If you went round, we’ve got a shipyard, we’ve got quays, we’ve got the renewable centre. It’s absolutely spanking clean and tidy.’
With a fifteen-point swing from Labour, Great Grimsby elected its first Conservative MP since the war in 2019. The Tories have plugged away at the seat for several election cycles, coming within 710 votes of taking it in 2010. Boyers had a ringside seat for the town being won over by the Tories. Boris Johnson visited the Grimsby Fish Market in December 2019, posing for the customary early morning photo with a big snapper. ‘Boris was very jovial, very impressive. We had a good one-to-one chat,’ Boyers recalled. ‘He was just sociable, talking to as many people as he could. And I was flabbergasted that he got this support. I thought people were going to have a go at him – that’s what’s happened in the past. A Conservative MP trying to get a seat – no chance! But Lia Nici stood alongside Boris, and they were treated like king and queen.’ From that moment on, Boyers realized ‘it was going to be a landslide’.
Not everyone is as accepting as Martin Boyers of the change in the fishing industry – and the disappointment over the new quotas in the UK–EU trade deal. One of the angriest is June Mummery, a fifty-seven-year-old fish auctioneer based in Lowestoft, Suffolk. Mummery was part of the Fishing for Leave campaign, which campaigned for Brexit in 2016 to ‘ensure the restoration of the sovereignty of our Parliament and people, and, with that, the restoration of our waters to national control’.3 Mummery later stood for the Brexit Party in the 2019 European Parliament elections and took a seat in Brussels until the UK formally left the bloc in January 2020.
There is no sole adjective that can capture Mummery’s anger at the government and the fishing deal. After the Brexit trade deal was signed at the end of 2020, she turned down all media appearances. ‘I couldn’t speak for three weeks. I couldn’t do any interviews. The BBC and ITV, I just couldn’t because I was crying,’ she said. ‘They sold us out. This government just took away aspirations and our opportunities. By handing over our industry straight back to the EU when our prime minister said that he would take back full control and the 200 miles.’ What did she make of Boris Johnson’s pledge during the 2019 election to ‘take back control’ of the fishing waters?4
‘He’s useless. He didn’t even secure our territorial waters. I mean, how the hell in your wildest dream could you ever get a deal like that? We have failed the boys and girls at school who want to go into an industry where you don’t need a degree.’ Given how Brexit has turned out, does Mummery have any regrets about supporting Leave? ‘No, no, no.’
Mummery accepted there would be some trade-offs, and that the UK’s twelve nautical-mile territorial waters might not be fully secured. But she thinks the UK’s situation is now worse than the one Ted Heath negotiated in 1973. ‘A hundred and eighty-six MPs representing coastal seats voted for that deal. They all voted for that awful deal. It’s worse than what Edward Heath did.’ During the referendum, she had a one-to-one meeting with Johnson and feels the betrayal personally. ‘This was a golden opportunity to get full control. I don’t go around lying for a living. I sat in an office with Boris Johnson. He told me “we will take full control” and I made damn sure I asked that about twenty times . . . I’ve got all his speeches written somewhere. The bloke is a bloody liar.’
During her brief time as an MEP, Mummery visited Grimsby and professed to being full of sadness after her visit. ‘We went to see the processing side, that is great.’ She went drinking with the fishermen in one of the town’s many pubs and found herself at home but melancholic, and the fact that Grimsby has not seen the renewal promised by Brexit campaigners has made her pessimistic about its future and that of similar towns. ‘There were so many jobs in places like Lowestoft, Grimsby, Hull and Hartlepool. They said that the GDP of the industry is not worth enough. Well, it’s not worth a lot because we’ve given away the crown, we’ve given the emeralds and the diamonds to the EU.’ She wanted Grimsby to be self-reliant. ‘I want to see Grimsby with boats rather than relying on fish from overland coming. How sad is that! How weak that we have to rely on fish from Iceland. I want to see fishing boats back in that town. I want to see that town vibrant.’
Mummery, who counted herself as a Conservative supporter, is disillusioned with the party and argued the people of Grimsby will be too. ‘They’ve [Tories] used fishing. Well, they’ve used it for the last time because they can’t come back and knock on Mr Smith’s door in Grimsby and say, “Oh, Mr Smith, if you vote for us, we’ll bring back fish to Grimsby.” We’ve done that and you’ve made us look like idiots.’ She has even joined the RMT trade union, paying monthly £9 subs to further her cause. She has not, however, developed an affinity for the Labour Party, who, in her words, ‘couldn’t give a damn’ about the industry. Mummery is mulling over starting her own political party to focus on the needs of these towns. ‘I think that we need a party that concentrates on our coastal communities. I really do, because they’re precious.’
Putting aside her own disillusionment with the Tories, does she think the Conservatives can hold onto Great Grimsby, given how the fishing pledges have frittered away? Before stating she never wishes to be rude, she argued that Lia Nici, the Tories’ first representative for Grimsby, has ‘done nothing’ and she will debate her anytime. After a short drive from the docks to Grimsby’s town centre, Nici was conveniently the next person I met.
The town hall is one of Grimsby’s grandest buildings, a testament to its past wealth. Lia Nici greeted me outside for a wander through the town she was elected to represent in 2019. Fifty-one, with short blonde hair, Nici was cheerful and engaging, as you would expect from a former teacher. Aside from a couple of years studying in Newcastle, she has lived in Grimsby her whole life. ‘Grimsby has a pull and a feel to it that I’ve never felt anywhere else,’ she said as we crossed the road toward Freshney Place, the mid-twentieth-century shopping precinct. The open town square around the shopping area was filled with construction works for another redevelopment.
Before entering politics, Nici taught at the further education college, the Grimsby Institute, while concurrently working in the local media (she helped set up the town’s own television station). She served as a parish councillor for several years and entered party politics in 2017. It was Nici’s love of the area that took her into the Tory Party: ‘Working in the local area, I started thinking about wanting to do something for the town I’m passionate about. I think Grimsby is a great place, great history, good-hearted people, and I didn’t feel that we’d been particularly well represented.’ She stood in the constituency of Hull North in 2017, across the River Humber, and decided she enjoyed political life enough to do it again.
As with Martin Boyers, Nici cited the biggest misconception about the town was that it was all about fish, but acknowledged the significant social challenges. ‘We’ve been fishing for over a thousand years, the coast is very important to us. But with the loss of the fishing industry we have become very down at heel.’ The end of the catching industry was ‘catastrophic’ because the town ‘didn’t have anything else to hang our hats on’. So her drive, and why she is a Conservative, is to reshape those perceptions. ‘Grimsby needs people to speak for it in a positive way. If we were writing a brochure for Grimsby, you wouldn’t put on there, “It used to be great but now we’ve got no fishing here”, you would say we have everything we need. We have coastline, great spaces to live, countryside, we have great engineering skills, pharmaceutical skills.’
The town’s name has long been a subject of perceived negativity. Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2016 film Grimsby is an example of how the town can be held up as the archetypical left-behind community. ‘People think, Grimsby, grim, grim up north.’ The name, to my surprise, comes from an ancient legend. A Danish fisherman, Grimm, was awarded the area for allegedly saving the life of Havelock, the Prince of Denmark. ‘Maybe Grimm doesn’t exist – I’m sure it’s a piece of propaganda,’ she smiled. ‘But the fact that Grimsby has that legend shows how powerful and well known it was across continental Europe.’
When asked to rank the factors that swung Great Grimsby for the Conservatives in 2019, she listed them in order: ‘Brexit, Boris Johnson, and the dislike of Jeremy Corbyn.’ Nici did not vote to leave the EU over fears about the economy, but her Remain stance did not hinder her campaign. On the doorstep, the support for Leave was due to a sense of abandonment. ‘When there was a New Labour government, people felt there would be a change and there wasn’t.’ How does she feel about the fresh anger from the likes of June Mummery and the fishermen who backed Brexit and bought into promises of change? As we paused outside the permanently closed House of Fraser department store, Nici spoke carefully. ‘There are things we still need to settle, obviously, because coming out of the EU and becoming an independent coastal state, we’ve got negotiations now ongoing and those negotiations are taking time. I think it’ll probably take over a year to properly settle down.’ She admitted exports had been ‘challenging’ due to ‘having virtually no market in Europe at the moment’.
As we continued through the indoor market – also soon set for redevelopment – Nici said the most significant campaign factor was Johnson’s boosterism. ‘He’s infectious. When you meet him, you get a feeling that he’s got a good heart and wants to do good and make changes.’ On the stump, she found his reputation was strong even in the poorest parts of the town. ‘People were coming up to me and saying, “When’s Boris coming? He’s going to get us what we need. He’s going to get us Brexit, a breath of fresh air.”’ Despite his privileged background, he passed the Nigel Farage test of someone voters would like to share a pint with. ‘People didn’t feel that Jeremy Corbyn was going to do anything for them other than give them a state-owned country where they would have to pay many more taxes, and lose their freedoms.’
Given her background in the sector, Nici’s focus is on skills and education, particularly education after secondary school. Nici is a further education ambassador for the Johnson government and hopes to improve non-university education provision across the country. ‘We’ve got to get people to understand that there are lots of very good jobs out there. Businesses are telling me they’ve got skilled jobs . . . I’m working with colleges and businesses now to talk about what we can do to have some joined-up thinking – talking to young people about how they can change things rather than thinking that somebody else will change things for them.’
As we walked past the 1960s library, with four tasteful naked concrete sculptures amid the pebbledash, Nici lambasted New Labour’s education policies and how they changed perceptions in her old college. When Tony Blair set out his aspiration in 1999 to send 50 per cent of the population to university, the excitement was not shared in Grimsby:5
‘It killed what we were doing locally. When I was working for the [Grimsby] Institute in the media department, we had a very good reputation. We were teaching university courses from Hull, Lincoln and Lancaster. As soon as the fifty per cent to go to university policy decision was made, all of that stopped. The entry level for getting into university dropped . . . we had people saying, “Well, I can go to university now with two Es, and your HND [a technical qualification] course is asking for two Cs.” So a degree became a commodity, to go and study and have a lifestyle in a city university, rather than thinking about what would have been a more technical higher-education qualification.’ Instead of people coming to Grimsby to study at its college, the focus on universities created a brain drain. ‘They can’t get what they want here in Grimsby, so they go elsewhere and then we maybe never see them again. Or they may come back when they’re in their forties, when they want to have an affordable house that gives them half an acre of garden.’
Nici’s 7,331 majority is one of the largest in the first-time Tory seats, yet she is aware Labour will be targeting her aggressively at the next election. ‘They’ve had every opportunity in the last seventy-four years to actually do something and they haven’t.’ The coronavirus lockdowns have challenged Nici’s ability to establish herself in the community. As we circled back to the town hall and Grimsby’s ornate buildings, she accepted the pandemic had hindered her chances. ‘I am quite aware that I have a very short window of time to try and make some change, to prove my worth to people, because I know that a lot of people voted Conservative for the first time ever and were incredibly nervous about doing that, so I have that weight of responsibility on me, and I will do my darndest.’
Could she envisage herself being a one-term MP, if the town turns on the Tories over fishing? Or if the people decide she has not done much better than her Labour predecessors? ‘I will rise or fall at the next election depending on what people think of me, that’s the beauty of democracy. But I will do everything in my power over the next three and a half years to stand at a hustings and say, “This is what I’ve been able to do, and this is what I’ve started to do.”’
Before I met with the Labour candidate who lost Grimsby in 2019, I wanted to explore the fabric of Great Grimsby’s community. The town centre is not as dilapidated as some of the other red wall seats I visited. Venture a couple of streets away from the shopping precinct, however, and the vast council-housing estates begin – not all of them well-kept and many showing signs of deprivation. North of the docks was my next step, West Marsh, one of Grimsby’s core working-class communities, where the average house price is £65,150, according to Rightmove, compared to £327,797 for the rest of the UK.6 At the centre is the West Marsh Community Centre, based out of an old primary school overlooking caged-in football fields. For two decades, the centre has provided activities for all ages in West Marsh. Chiefly staffed by sixty volunteers, it has recently hired its first, and only, paid member of staff. Alan Burley organizes activities and runs the centre. His aim is to link the needs of the residents with the centre’s offering.
As with many of Grimsby’s residents, he has lived in the town all his life and, at sixty-four, has witnessed the end of fishing and the struggle for jobs that followed. He has trouble with his leg and, with a black walking stick in hand, he moved stiffly to greet me. Outside of the main hall, beside a Coca-Cola vending machine and a noticeboard promoting the activities of the local police, he explained the centre’s main focus was aiding the oldest and youngest. ‘We’ve always done things like older people’s groups, arts and crafts groups, and whole community bingo sessions. Since I came on board, we do tea dancing, we’ve introduced cricket for young people, and we’ve focused on the history of the West Marsh because people want to hear the stories. We’re trying to start a book club.’
West Marsh’s residents are mostly families and single parents. ‘It’s a solid, traditional community, a lot of older people who have lived in the community all their lives.’ Most of the residents are white working-class men and women retired from the fishing community, although Burley said there was a growing Eastern European community in the last five years. The centre has started producing its literature in Polish and Russian to forge links. ‘As you come in the centre,’ he said, pointing at the creaking door, ‘you’ll see “welcome”, but it will be in all different languages. We do get Eastern European people coming in and, ultimately, we want to engage with them.’
Burley reckoned many of the challenges the community centre encounters are down to the consequences of industrial decline. ‘[Grimsby’s] on a par with Yorkshire when the pits closed, all those Yorkshire towns had to reinvent themselves. Jobs have been scarce – it’s not unusual to see two jobs advertised and four or five hundred people going for them. But the community has a habit of just looking after itself.’ He praised the togetherness in West Marsh. ‘They’ll stand by each other and when people are in times of difficulty, they’re there for each other. The bad thing about the community is, like everywhere, we do suffer from antisocial behaviour.’
His main concern is that the area still suffers from unstable families and food poverty. ‘If somebody said to me when I first started a year ago, “Do you think that there’s a big issue with single-parent families in West Marsh?” The answer at that time would have been, “No more than anywhere else.” But now from talking to people, we know there is.’ He cited a case of giving £50 from the centre’s funds to pay for shopping for a family where the main earner was on a zero-hours contract and lost their work during the pandemic. ‘We found people crying, saying, “You just don’t realize what good you’re doing here.”’
After discovering the number of families struggling with food poverty, Burley started a weekly larder at the centre. Ninety people in the community are registered to use it, half adults and half children. ‘We give them enough food that will actually support them and their children so they can eat better for that week.’ He lambasted the lack of attention to poverty as disgraceful. ‘It’s absolutely criminal that probably the biggest growing businesses in the country are food banks. In this day and age there shouldn’t be need for food banks.’
While the centre caters daily for the retirees, who often visit for their only daily or weekly activity, it is the younger residents and those who are engaged in gangs that cause Burley more concern. Sometimes teenagers get involved because they are bored. ‘That’s not an excuse for it, but it’s a reason,’ he hastily said. ‘That’s why, in terms of centres like this, it’s important that we look at how we run youth activities.’ Centres like West Marsh are also important for dealing with problems that might otherwise be unnoticed. ‘It’s simple things, like if somebody is down . . . they haven’t got the confidence to talk to somebody about an issue. Whereas in a place like this, it may well be that we’re having a cup of tea and people come and talk to us.’
I asked Burley whether the town suffers from a ‘poverty of aspiration’, a phrase often used by Conservative MPs, and whether its residents struggle to see a world of steady work. ‘Yeah, without a doubt,’ he said. ‘I think if you look at somebody who lost his job in the fishing industry and reinvented himself and found work in the food industry, but then lost his job, he hasn’t got the relevant training or skills to move into renewable energy.’ The problem can ripple through the generations as well as through an individual working life. ‘You’ve got the grandfather who’s a fishermen, you’ve got the father who’s worked in the factories, and then you’ve got the young person who hasn’t got the skills.’
And about outside perceptions of the town? Has Burley witnessed much change throughout his life? ‘It’s as happy today as I remember it. It was a different time. I never wanted to work with the fishing industry. Grimsby, everybody says it’s a dark place, it’s always raining and some portray it that way.’ But he is convinced the town’s location on the eastern coast has created extra resilience, echoing Martin Boyers almost word for word: ‘You don’t pass through here, you come here. And when you are here, you make the most of what it is. Yes, life’s shit, too much crap at times. But you get by and think, Life’s not going to drag me down.’
Tucked away behind Grimsby Town train station, which will have direct services again to London from May 2022, is Abbys Bistro – a smart restaurant down a little alleyway of boutiques and small shops. Waiting at a table was Melanie Onn, Grimsby’s Labour MP from 2015 to 2019 (also its first female MP). The forty-one-year-old grew up in the town’s housing estates and had a reputation in Westminster as one of Labour’s more cheerful personalities, greeting me with socially distanced elbows.7 As we tucked into fish – what else? – and wine, she began with how her upbringing took her into politics.
‘There’s lots of things that I’m interested in: animal rights, women’s rights, and I think I had quite a strong sense of morally what was right and wrong.’ Her teenage years were dominated by instability and poverty. ‘There had been a breakdown in the family. I was a stroppy teenager, so I ended up living alone at quite a young age, seventeen. Then you get a sharp shock of the real world. I was living in a shared house with other similar-aged girls, who also weren’t living at home, on benefits and still going to college.’ After university, she worked at Labour Party HQ in London as a compliance officer before returning home to become a trade unionist. ‘When I went to work for Unison and moved back up to Grimsby, it was great. I really loved doing that. I was regional organizer, batting for people to save their jobs, trying to organize bigger campaigns.’
Standing in the 2015 election, she boosted Labour’s majority by eleven points before it slumped again in the post-Brexit election of 2017. The Tories surged in that campaign as the UKIP votes slid away. Two years on and the Tory vote rose again. Onn’s share dropped by seventeen percentage points. The memories of that election campaign were raw. ‘It was awful. From start to finish it was really soul destroying. The places that you would go and think, This street is always absolutely supportive, suddenly people would not answer the door, they couldn’t look you in the eye, they’d be angry.’ Grimsby’s coastal climate did not lift spirits either: she recalled it was ‘absolutely freezing and soaking’, requiring a steady stream of hot food and drinks for sodden campaigners. ‘All the volunteers were heartbroken on the night. And I knew it was coming.’
She places the blame on a long-standing trust breakdown between Labour and its traditional supporters. ‘I know there are lots of people who don’t like that, they don’t want to say that Brexit was a massive factor, but it was. We can blame the party’s position on it, which was ultimately a leadership issue, but there was an awful lot of deep-rooted cultural response where people just didn’t trust the brand.’ No matter how much Onn spoke on housing and leadership, the audience had tuned out. ‘People felt everything we were talking about wasn’t reflective of their lives. Ultimately, they wanted somebody who was upbeat, they felt Boris was so sure of himself, he obviously knew what was right for the country. Labour’s message in 2019 did not present its own version of that optimism.’ The anger of Grimsby’s voters about Labour was especially potent. ‘We were suddenly all communists, Marxists. People hurling these labels, perhaps not even thinking about what that really meant . . . it was a bolt out of the blue.’
Like Lia Nici, Onn was a Remainer standing in a Leave seat. Although she ultimately voted for Boris Johnson’s revised withdrawal agreement in October 2019, she did not back Theresa May’s softer withdrawal deal earlier that year – something she now deeply regrets. ‘Hindsight is marvellous,’ she said. ‘I should have voted for Theresa’s deal, and I didn’t. I was convinced by the party at the time not to and I stuck with my party. I look at everything it’s led to now and I think if Labour had supported that, or even not opposed it, things would have been very different.’ Even if she had backed May’s deal, however, she was sceptical about whether it would have improved her electoral prospects – citing the example of Caroline Flint in Don Valley, who took a much more pro-deal stance in Parliament and was still wiped out in 2019. ‘People felt it was self-serving and didn’t believe it, because there was already such a lack of trust in the party. They were like, “Actually, you’re doing this to save your own skin”, whereas the fact was I spent many nights not sleeping.’ The pain of that period was palpable. ‘I found myself incredibly stressed and upset about these series of votes and trying to really go against my own conscience to deliver for a constituency that was so opposed to my own personal views. That was really difficult. I was in a real sense of turmoil.’
Labour has an illustrious heritage in Grimsby. From 1950 to 1977, the town was represented by Anthony Crosland, the great theoretician of post-war social democracy, who served as foreign secretary (Crossland’s time at the Foreign Office was dominated by the Cod Wars, he joked that ‘fish’ would be engraved on his heart). Reflecting on her four years as Grimsby’s MP, and the ninety-five years since the town last returned a Conservative, she felt Labour’s priorities were out of kilter. ‘In 2015, I was talking about a sense of fairness for people. If people wanted to talk about immigration as a concern, we could have good conversations.’ Labour’s stance on unfair energy bills and the cost of living during the Ed Miliband era did connect, she felt, but she said there was a disconnect under Corbyn. ‘In the intervening five years, there has definitely been a drift from those things people feel are important.’
Onn has moved on from politics, for now, working as deputy chief executive of RenewableUK – a lobbying group for the renewable energy sector. From this perch, she is innately involved in Grimsby’s efforts to regenerate into a green hub. The sector, she argued, is crucial for improving the quality of jobs. Fish-processing, for example, does not offer an easy life. ‘It tends to be long hours on minimum wage. I don’t know how people do twelve hours on a factory processing line, it’s absolutely backbreaking, and it’s cold.’ The public sector, pharmaceutical and petrochemical employers provide jobs for the town, but she remained worried that prosperity is not widely spread. ‘For some reason, there is still a sense that wealth hasn’t fed through to the town, which I think is about the fact that not enough people who work in those places actually live in the town, spend in the town, invest in the town.’
As in my other encounters, Onn emphasized the uniqueness of Grimsby. ‘It is misrepresented as having very little going for it. Sometimes even locally people will talk it down, but in actual fact, it’s got a huge heart, and communities you don’t find anywhere else.’ Due to its geographical remoteness, the strong feel of neighbourhoods, which has been lost elsewhere in England’s towns, remains here. ‘Even when things are tough, people have still got the comfort of neighbours and family living close by. Bringing up your family here, it’s brilliant, it’s not ridiculously expensive, people can live a nice life on a modest salary.’ She agreed there was deprivation, but it mostly has an upbeat outlook. ‘People work hard and then want to have a lot of fun, that’s an uplifting side of it. People with practically nothing, compared to the fortunate position I’ve found myself in, would give me bags of crisps and bottles of pop for my kids and dig in their pockets to give them pocket money.’
Onn maintains her passion for Grimsby. ‘We probably don’t talk about it enough, don’t celebrate it enough, and there’s a lot of desire to make things better for more people, so there’s a lot of people who are really committed to that notion of community, and trying to make things better for more people.’ But does she think Great Grimsby will go back to Labour at some point? ‘Yeah, I don’t know when, but yes.’ The numbers are tough for the party. The challenge of overturning a 7,331-vote majority will be ‘significant and shouldn’t be underestimated’, in her view – especially if the Conservatives continue to ride high nationally. Onn had not yet made up her mind as to whether she would try to win the seat back. Her love for Grimsby is great, but the bruising experience of losing her seat has not been easy to overcome.
Every person I encountered in Grimsby referenced the uniqueness of its community, which weathered the collapse of its fishing industry. Whether it was mining in Northumberland, steel in County Durham or fishing in Lincolnshire, there was a collectivized lifestyle in the red wall that bound people together. In seats closer to urban centres, with better connectivity to the rest of England, this community ethos has more rapidly withered away, but has continued to thrive in more isolated places. Much of the decline in this collectivization occurred during the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher shed the UK’s economy of its less productive sectors. Opposing her at the House of Commons Dispatch Box for seven of her eleven years in Downing Street was Neil Kinnock. A son of the Welsh mining valleys, he took over the party following its disastrous 1983 general election result (only worsened in modern times by its result in 2019). Through two general elections, he eased Labour away from its more left-wing elements, ejected radical entryists and paved the way for the New Labour modernization project. Lord Kinnock, still an active member of the House of Lords at seventy-nine, sees many parallels between the party’s challenges in the early 1980s and those it faces in 2021.
Speaking from North London, Kinnock expressed surprise that Labour did not do even worse in 2019. ‘You only had to knock on any ten doors, especially in Labour seats, to know the breadth and depth of the antagonism towards what people thought Labour had become.’ He placed much blame on the leadership, seeing the election outcome more as ‘an active rejection of Corbyn’s Labour’ than any active support for Johnson’s Tories. He harked back to the February 1974 election in his old constituency of Islwyn in South Wales to explain why the red wall collapsed so dramatically:
‘My theorist comrade and friend Barry Moore and I, together with a couple of other mates, canvassed the one Tory street in my constituency. It had been Tory since 1930 . . . we usually went there just so the bastards couldn’t say, “We never see you.” We were walking away after getting the usual redneck rubbish and going up to the pub. And I said to Barry and my agent, “What a bunch of bastards.” And Barry said, “Yep, but you better hope that those bastards never get organized.” And I’ve remembered that to this day. He should have added, “and financed, assembled and regimented.” The working-class Tories are not an isolated crop who are separated from the communities in which they live. They have relatives, they have friends, they have workmates, they have drinking buddies. When an area switches, it switches rapidly and suddenly.’
I put to Kinnock the view that the red wall’s collectivized constituencies have become richer in the years since his time in frontline politics, which has in turn made them more economically and culturally Conservative-leaning. He shot back that they may have become ‘more capable of consuming’ but the richness has been harmed in other ways. ‘I’m not being misty-eyed when I say I am not sure they are richer, because a lot of the dependable social fabric of enrichment is not monetary,’ he said. ‘It isn’t that they were collectivized, but that they were securitized in the world. Going way back, there was widespread poverty. The universality of poverty was in itself cohering. Solidarity flourished as a great defence mechanism, but also as a platform for advancement. What’s gone is that commonality.’ Shared poverty, however, is still poverty, but Kinnock continued to decry how British society has changed. ‘The individualism that’s fostered is a source of choice, but it’s also a source of weakness and insecurity. You’re on your own. In the previous decades, the one thing you weren’t, in richness and then poverty, was on your own.’
Kinnock did not serve in the New Labour governments – he was a European Commissioner from 1995 to 2004 before rising to the House of Lords – but acted as a mentor and (sometimes critical) friend to the Blair government. Does he think the voters of Grimsby were taken for granted? ‘The important thing is people felt they were being taken for granted,’ he replied. He blamed the attitude of New Labour, with its electoral sights focused on the wealthier marginal seats in the south of England, for creating such an impression – and for not speaking up about socialist ideals. ‘People did vote to reject the Tories, but they also voted to have a new start. Labour had a real mandate, but they never convinced themselves that, to use that horrible phrase, they were the natural party of government.’ Kinnock strongly felt that the failure to speak of Labour’s universal ideals, and show the fruits of its reforms to the public sector, meant there was no national sense of renewal. ‘Tony didn’t fully comprehend the idea that the source of individual liberty is collective provision, never got hold of that really. It just wasn’t part of him. Gordon fully comprehended it but didn’t speak about it.’
The feelings that Labour did not care – nor the Conservatives – fostered the Brexit vote. ‘What do we do when nobody cares about us? We kick them up the arse,’ Kinnock laughed, deeply and despairingly. ‘That’s why it was fifty-two per cent for Brexit and not fifty-two per cent for Remain. That isn’t the only reason, but it certainly crystallized and reinforced that idea of nobody gives a damn, we’re abandoned. We’re ignored. We’re left behind.’ The collapse of civic pride in the nation’s towns fed into that notion. After fire stations and libraries were closed during the austerity years, replaced with charity outlets and vape shops, many places felt ignored by Westminster. Kinnock agreed: ‘All of that sense of abandonment, which I understand and bloody hell I share it, is massively reinforced. Public institutions give meaning to a community. When you take those things out, nobody’s saying where or who you are.’
One critique of Kinnock’s years leading Labour was that he was too backward-looking. While Margaret Thatcher presented a buccaneering free market vision for the UK’s future, he appeared to represent its declining industrial past. Nostalgia is rife in the red wall communities and he thought it has had a distorting effect on how these voters see the world. ‘Coal mining is a bloody horrific industry – just in the act of getting in there. The absence on any coal seam in the country of a toilet, just something as bloody basic as that, apart from the danger, just the sheer bloody, vile unpleasantness.’ As a young man, he worked part-time in the Welsh blast furnaces and recalled the working environment. ‘Sometimes you literally could not breathe because of the dust. Even as a rugby-playing, fit seventeen-year-old, I couldn’t breathe. And yet people yearn for the days!’
Kinnock is hopeful that the turn of the red wall from Labour to Conservative is temporary. But he thinks to win the seats back will require ‘the politics of reassurance’, although the task facing Keir Starmer is ‘very, very, very difficult.’ Echoing the language of Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s chief policy advisor and author of The New Working Class, he set out why Labour has to build a narrative around security. ‘If Labour can manifest itself as the “security party” in terms of personal security, employment, education, enterprise, national security, all of the many facets of security, then it’s capable of getting over the identity demarcations that produced the referendum result.’ It is a thesis he has promoted for several decades and tried to sell to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. ‘I wish I’d thought of it when I was leader! Because it would have been a really solid basis to build all the dimensions of policy.’ Ironically, the leader who spent almost a decade trying to offer an alternative to Thatcherism has touched upon what might be the response to its long-tail effects. It was the first convincing thought I’d heard about how Labour can reconnect to its lost voters.
Kinnock echoed the warnings of Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband about the growth of the ‘shadow economy of zero-hours contracts’ and said Labour’s pitch should be for ‘a common need for high-quality, easily accessible, dependable services in communities.’ By making itself the party of security, Labour has the opportunity to ‘pierce those invisible walls in people’s consciousness’. Kinnock agreed with me that the 2016 referendum created a new Remain–Leave identity divide that smashed Labour’s old voting coalition: ‘For lots of Labour voters, it was the first time they rebelled against their historic family view. You know, “I voted Labour, my granddad voted Labour, he would be turning in his grave.” But come the referendum more people went against Labour. Once they’ve done that once, it’s easier to do it again – that’s what we saw in 2017 and 2019.’ Convincing those people to look at the party again will require something new. ‘You can’t go back to those old bonds, because Brexit broke them.’
Kinnock’s ideological successor was Ed Miliband, who he enthusiastically supported for the leadership in 2010. ‘He had a degree of natural humanity, as well as high intelligence, that marked him out from [his brother] David. Ed has an ease and natural politeness and concern that could communicate itself much better.’ But after he won the leadership in 2010, those qualities ‘reduced and reduced, almost as if they’d been shaved off the block.’ Kinnock remained mournful that this ‘man of great capability’ lost his way. Keir Starmer’s politics are still somewhat unfathomable, and he is often described as the Kinnock of his generation: a connecting figure who can bring the party back from electoral oblivion, but may lack the star power to win. What does Kinnock make of the comparison? ‘I think it is more Attlee than Kinnock,’ he said, again with a hearty laugh. ‘The big difference is that Attlee had three or four years in which to demonstrate his trustworthiness as a leader in government. Keir is going to have to do it without getting that.’ But he does think Starmer passes the taste test of being prime minister, ‘which I didn’t’.
As well as securitization, Kinnock was ebullient about the possibilities of green energy to revitalize places like Grimsby. ‘The potential there for the restoration of very forward-looking, cutting-edge engineering, design, manufacturing, as well as the actual operation of the energy-generating facilities, is bloody gigantic.’ The windy and wet climate of the UK is, on this occasion, a natural benefit. ‘You’ve got a much better load factor [capacity to generate electricity] from offshore wind, which can be made invisible with modern techniques of construction. You can ensure there’s hardly a bloody wind farm that anybody can see.’ He is, however, surprised that the Conservatives have so readily embraced this technology. ‘Getting from that mentality, ideology, philosophy, practice, to one in which a Tory government is willing to spend judiciously, with enough foresight to generate a sustainable recovery? It’s a bloody big leap for them.’
Opposite Grimsby’s fish market, where my visit started, a low orange building connected to a series of warehouses symbolizes its future. Ørsted, a Danish energy company and the world’s largest wind-farm operator, was one of the first to set up shop in Grimsby. The company has four farms off the coast of Grimsby: 375 turbines providing energy to power three million homes. Hornsea One, which alone provides enough power for a million homes, is the world’s largest wind farm and Ørsted is plotting to beat its own record with two additions to the Hornsea project in the coming decade that will plant another 400 turbines offshore.
At its operations centre in Port of Grimsby, I met Emma Toulson, who oversees Ørsted’s engagement with British stakeholders. As well as activities in the Humber, the company has twelve wind farms around the British Isles – including in the Irish Sea, off Birkenhead and Barrow-in-Furness – producing electricity for four million homes. Across the country it employs 2,800 people. Grimsby was selected as its east-coast hub due to its location: it is always windy, as any visitor attests, has a deep-water estuary and strong support from central and local government. It also benefited from the Siemens blade factory across in Hull, kickstarted by Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson at the very end of Labour’s time in office.
As we circled the warehouses and buildings, built on an old timber yard, Toulson enthusiastically made the case for how her industry is giving Grimsby a new lease of life. ‘I’m quite excited and passionate about the growth that it can bring, particularly in places that have had a history of declining traditional industries.’ Ørsted arrived in 2014 with a few Portakabins, before constructing its operations centre. Four hundred people work at this hub on the quay, of whom 45 per cent come from Grimsby. ‘We are really pleased that we’ve got a very good local workforce. And we’ve got an apprenticeship programme to feed in new talent.’
Further along from the main centre, two types of boats are docked that provide many of the new jobs. The smaller vessels are used to zip out to the wind farm to carry out daily maintenance on turbines closer to shore. The dock also houses two large tomato-red service operational vessels. Handily, one of them was docking as we arrived (Toulson admitted it was not put on especially for my visit). Crews on these ships go out to sea for two-week shifts to maintain the hundreds of turbines further away from the land. To my unknowledgeable eye, the docking vehicle appeared sophisticated: a helipad on top, a steel gangway curled up like biceps. The accommodation on board is ‘posh student accommodation’, Toulson joked. The crew coming into dock, waving at their colleagues on shore, appeared pleased to be returning to terra firma.
The Johnson government has set very ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions and increasing renewable energy, which is likely to benefit Grimsby (along with Blyth, Hull and many other eastern red wall coastal towns that were once fishing hubs). The UK presently has ten gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, yet the government wants that to quadruple by 2030. Combined with legally binding targets for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 – and a 78 per cent cut in emissions by 2035 – Toulson is confident there are many more opportunities ahead for Grimsby.8 ‘There’ll be a requirement for even more offshore wind in the future. The Committee on Climate Change talked about seventy-five gigawatts, but possibly even more. We are still on the journey.’
The jobs at Ørsted may not be as plentiful as in the fishing days, but they are skilled and stable. ‘When the turbines go in, they need to be serviced to keep them running smoothly. The life cycle of the turbine is twenty-five years or more. You’ve got longevity for those good-quality jobs.’ RenewableUK has predicted there will be 69,000 jobs in offshore wind by 2026, up from around 20,000 in 2020.9 As we looped back towards the main building, with the crew changing over, Toulson spoke of her delight at the collaboration with local colleges to improve skills and jobs. ‘Seeing young people from the area, they’re super passionate. It’s not just that they want a good job but to do something with a purpose. You think, This is a really exciting opportunity for young people or older people wanting to transition. I think there’s momentum now.’
Much of Toulson’s job has been working with the community. Ørsted has donated £460,000 to community projects, sponsored the town’s 10k run, cleaned up the beach and tried to integrate itself into Grimsby life A sense of renaissance with a ‘green future’ is there, she thought, along with a renewed reason for putting the town on the map. Toulson is pleased that the message of the town’s renewal is spreading. ‘If you asked somebody outside of the area, “What do you know about Grimsby?”, they would probably still say fish. In Grimsby, we’ve had visitors from Taiwan, Japan, North America and South Korea. Someone has got on a plane in Japan to come to Grimsby to see what offshore wind is.’ What was possibly once the world’s largest fishing port is forging a new identity. ‘That recognition, in that global sense, of our industry is there. We’re on a journey to grow.’
Prior to my visits to Grimsby, my knowledge of the town was limited to the stereotypes its residents decry. The people I met were hardy but welcoming. Few were consumed with nostalgia or pessimistic about the future. On my last night in the town, I spent an evening at the Barge pub, a local institution in the centre of town. The temperature was bitterly cold, yet every picnic table beside the old boat was packed with drinkers supping pint after pint, bottle after bottle of Prosecco. It is not the party town – Cleethorpes, just down the coast, takes that mantle for Lincolnshire – but Melanie Onn was right; once you dig beneath the grit, there is a warm atmosphere, a proudness and deep loyalty to Grimsby. Those intense feelings make the travails it has suffered during the twentieth century all the sadder.
The green renewal is what the town has been yearning for, but it should not be Panglossian about it. The UK’s journey towards net-zero carbon will be painful, far more so than Boris Johnson admitted when he confidently set out some of the most ambitious climate-change targets in the world. There will be difficult economic choices ahead that will clash with the political priorities for towns like Grimsby. The decision to kibosh the West Cumbria Coal Mine project highlighted how the green agenda and Johnson’s pledge to ‘Build Back Better’ after the coronavirus pandemic will not always fit with levelling-up.10 The mine would have created 3,500 jobs in a remote corner of north-west England. The overarching desire to hit net zero, however, along with the timing of the UK hosting the COP26 climate conference, meant the scheme was doomed.
I left Grimsby with a sense of optimism about its future and its people. The frustration among the residents about their fishing and Brexit has not abated and the Tories should be careful not to underestimate that sentiment. Bold promises were made on fishing that could never be fulfilled and some political backlash may emerge. But improving the town’s education and skills offerings can chime with the renewables sector. It is no coincidence that Johnson emphasized his ‘vote blue, go green’ credentials when the country was casting around for an explanation of what ‘levelling-up’ means.
Whether you abhor Britain’s decision to leave the EU or not, one benefit of the upheaval is the focus on places like Grimsby. Politically and economically, they were overlooked as successive governments took easier routes to create wealth in the south-east and big cities. During a long chat I had with Austin Mitchell, an avowed Eurosceptic who served as Grimsby MP from 1977 to 2015, he referenced how Brexit and the political disruption of the last five years had made Westminster focus on towns like his: ‘Attention has shifted back to the small towns like Grimsby and especially the north. After we’ve been badly treated, change moves very slowly. It’s like a glacial process. You don’t get overnight changes. Things do improve and gradually, people see sense. It just takes a long time.’
Mitchell, who once changed his surname to Haddock to promote fish, described his old constituency as ‘tough’ and ‘difficult to love’.11 His own brusque manner reflected the character of the town. At eighty-six, he still had ‘great faith in Labour’ and thinks his party is best placed to make the changes Grimsby needs, although he did not think he would be around to ‘see the end of it’. For Lia Nici, there is little time to do what successive generations of Labour politicians failed to: make Grimsby feel loved and prosperous once again. Having gone as far eastward as the journey took me, the next stop was just over an hour westwards through Lincolnshire and into the natural beauty spot of the Derbyshire Dales.