‘Around 80 per cent of British families would like to own their own homes. Only 56 per cent actually do so. Barratt are doing more than any other company in the country to meet [that demand].’1
BARRATT HOMES IN 1980, THEN LED
BY SIR LAWRIE BARRATT, THATCHER’S
FAVOURITE HOUSEBUILDER
Sixty-six miles inland from Great Grimsby, the village of Killamarsh is wedged between the suburbs of Sheffield and the green expanses of the Derbyshire countryside. The village has an agrarian and industrial history harking back to the Middle Ages and, until the 1980s, the main source of employment was Westthorpe Colliery. Most of the residents lived in small houses and bungalows built for the miners. On the corner of Upperthorpe and Manor Road, high up overlooking the old pit, now consumed by an industrial estate, I met Pat Bone, who runs the Killamarsh Heritage Society. On her extensive website, she has collated hundreds of photos and memories from the area.2 Many feature steam trains puffing into the town’s three train stations (the last, Killamarsh Central, closed during the 1960s Beeching cuts).
As we set off for a stroll to look at the variety of housing, she explained how the village has changed during her lifetime. Bone’s father worked in the pit, doling out wages each week in little brown-paper envelopes. As with young men like Ronnie Campbell in Blyth Valley, going down the mine was the obvious, and sometimes only, route when they left the village school. Since Westthorpe closed in 1984, the local jobs market has become more diverse but opportunities remain scarce. ‘There’s not a lot of employment. There’s a variety of things on the industrial estate [built on the site of the old colliery]. One of the bigger ones is Macdonald Joinery, they do shopfitting all over the country.’ Bone has never felt Killamarsh was a poor village, either during its industrial prime or more recent dislocation. ‘There were four of us, one sister and two brothers. I never felt like we didn’t have any money. We never went without things.’
As we walked past the tiny village school and the Nag’s Head pub – typically closed due to the pandemic – she recalled the village’s most troubling episodes in recent history: the ‘horrendous’ miners’ strike. Some families struggled to eat. ‘At the time, these families had young children,’ she said, gesturing at the small terraced houses. ‘It was so bad that during the miners’ strike, it got to the point where some of them had to sell their cars or TVs. They hadn’t got any money.’ Distrust still flows between those who took to the picket lines and those who continued to work during the strike. ‘They’ve pretty much got over it, but most will never forget what they went through,’ she added.
The Heritage Society, to which Bone has devoted much of her retirement, encourages nostalgia. She thinks it is especially strong in this village. ‘They love it. We’ve got a charity site, a Facebook page and I put photographs on of the pits but also old ones of the village. Views of the village, and they love that.’ She’s posted pictures of Killamarsh’s demolished buildings, forgotten social venues and lost green spaces. What drew her to find all this material and share it? ‘It’s really good to keep a record. We go to exhibitions, any local events. We put up our stall and our photo boards, it really attracts attention.’
We next reached a housing development Bone called ‘White City’: street upon street of thousands of prefabricated houses built in the 1940s and 1950s to accommodate the booming post-war population. The properties did not appear to be in good shape. Damp was rising up many of the walls, the white paint stained by years of neglect, pavements littered with empty cider cans and used NOS canisters (nitrous oxide, inhaled through balloons to give a quick sensation of euphoria). Most of the houses have cars, but these streets are the grittiest I’ve visited. Roughly half of Killamarsh’s stock is council houses, the other half privately owned. Bone was brought up in one of the small miners’ cottages once owned by the Coal Board. And as with millions of England’s working class, she took advantage of the Thatcher government’s Right to Buy scheme to purchase the council house she had lived in for fifteen years at a discounted rate. She then sold it on and purchased a larger home for her family.
Many of the children Bone went to school with still live in Killamarsh, but they have been joined by thousands who have moved into the village to make the brisk twenty-minute commute into Sheffield. Commuters were initially drawn to Killamarsh by the sprawling Wimpey housing estate; built in the 1970s it occupies a third of the village. As far as the eye could see from Delves Road, where we had stopped, the streets of council houses morphed into semi-detached suburbia – triangular roofs, sloping driveways with space for two cars, well-kept lawns. Houses that were built for the aspirational middle-class lifestyle Mike Leigh satirized in 1977 with Abigail’s Party. Initially, Bone said the appeal of such housing was its affordability. ‘Would you believe you could buy a new three-bed semi for £2,500? That was cheaper than buying in Sheffield, so people came out here. At the time, they all sold like hotcakes,’ she said. ‘That was basically the start of people coming in from Sheffield and it’s continued.’
As Killamarsh’s private housing expanded, its bus services declined. Bone guided me back towards the council estates and a small row of shops; she noted one of the few bus stops. ‘A village of this size, just over 11,000 people including children, we get just one bus an hour. It’s a really big issue because everyone wants to go to Sheffield for shopping and work.’ Her sister, who has worked in the Royal Hallamshire Hospital for forty years, spends hours waiting for buses to head to and from her job. Bone has started an action group to improve the services that have been gradually cut as buses were privatized, again by Margaret Thatcher, in 1986. ‘I formed a group because people wanted to come together to solve this,’ she added. Killamarsh’s older residents, especially those ex-miners who did not need cars, have increasingly found themselves stranded. ‘People didn’t have cars. All my dad did every day was walk across the field. All the miners on our estate walked to work. It must have been very pleasant,’ she smiled, thinking of the past.
Today thirty-eight per cent of the North East Derbyshire constituency is classified as green belt, which makes planning permission and construction extremely difficult. Much of the northern parts of the seat, especially touching on Sheffield, are restricted to avoid further urban sprawl. Yet in Killamarsh, plans are afoot to build 400–500 homes on parts of the old Westthorpe pit. Bone wants to keep the green belt, despite the ever-rising demand for houses.
As we hiked back to the top of Killamarsh, I asked Bone how the gradual influx of commuters had changed the character of the village and whether the new commuting arrivals were as keen on her historical work. ‘I find that if you talk to people, they’re friendly and do want to chat to you,’ she said. ‘But you have got that small element of people who come here, buy a house, go to work in Sheffield and don’t really mingle very well.’
In every red wall seat I visited, new housing estates have emerged outside the traditional town centres. Most were from the 1980s and 1990s, judging by the styles of brickwork, while others were still under construction. On the outskirts of Sedgefield, Wakefield and Consett, new detached houses were appearing in every spare corner. The psephological term used to describe the voters who reside in these developments was ‘Motorway Man’. As the Financial Times reported in the run-up to the 2010 election, this person was a ‘materialistic and car-dependent middle manager’ who lived on newish housing estate along the M6 or M1 motorways.3 Nearly all of the constituencies which are the natural habitat of this voter turned blue in 2010 and 2015 – notably Morley and Outwood, near Leeds, where shadow chancellor Ed Balls dramatically lost his seat. Some of them have become the safest Tory seats in the country: Nuneaton in Warwickshire now holds a 13,144 Tory majority.
Motorway Man was markedly different from Mondeo Man, the stereotypical voter Labour aimed to win over in the 1990s. Addressing the party’s 1996 conference, Tony Blair recalled campaigning in the Midlands and meeting an electrician who had abandoned the party: ‘He used to vote Labour. But he’d bought his own house now. He’d set up his own business. He was doing very nicely. “So I’ve become a Tory,” he said.’ Mondeo Man was, himself, a continuation of Essex Man: the traditional Labour voter who switched to supporting Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and formed the bedrock of the party’s eighteen years in office. In 2019, the latest incarnation was Workington Man, representing the white middle-aged Brexit supporters residing in post-industrial towns.4 These pollster labels are not necessarily helpful for understanding the country, as they tend to throw voters of different persuasions into the same bucket without examining the places and circumstances in which they live. They do, however, give an indication of who each party is attempting to win over. What they all have in common is home ownership and aspiration: as voters purchase their own properties and become wealthier, they are more inclined towards the Tories. The only deviation was the New Labour years, when its aspirational message spoke to Mondeo Man.
In the red wall, the voters who live in new out-of-town estates, dependent on their cars for transport, were identified by The Economist in 2021 as ‘Barratt Britain’ (in North East Derbyshire, ‘Wimpey World’ was more apt).5 These people do not feel hard up or left behind. According to the magazine, the towns that voted Tory for the first time are ‘often surrounded by gleaming new suburbs: a British counterpart to the American dream, where a couple on a modest income can own a home and two cars and raise a family.’ The Conservatives returned to power in 2010 thanks to voters living in comfortable circumstances and to understand the red wall is to appreciate that many parts of it are wealthier than ever.
The prominence of these new estates has been growing for decades. The end of building controls in 1954 allowed builders such as Wimpey to enter the private market. By 1972, Wimpey was building 12,500 houses annually – three times as many as its competitors. Barratt, the builder which symbolized the Thatcher era, sold 100,000 new homes in the 1980s. Although inner-city redevelopment became the later focus for the UK’s major builders, their initial focus was on new private estates built on cheap land in the old Labour heartlands.
Neal Hudson, an analyst of the UK’s housing market, said the shift away from city living began in the 1930s – the ‘metro lands’ around London championed by poet laureate Sir John Betjeman. The trend continued after the war, as much to do with the nation’s health as its prosperity. ‘Getting people out of urban areas into suburban markets and knocking down city-centre tenements was about getting them into better-quality housing,’ Hudson said. ‘For a long time, housing was under the remit of the Department of Health, which shows you where the priorities were. It was very much viewed as the need to have a healthy population, it was up there along with healthcare and nutrition.’
When the Labour Party emerged as a national force at the turn of the last century, the majority of the country did not own their own property. In 1918, when the first reliable stats became available, around two thirds rented. Conservative governments since the war have consistently championed home ownership, as seen in Harold Macmillan’s achievement of building 300,000 a year in the 1950s.6 The party believed homes played a significant role in keeping Labour out of office – and it did so for thirteen years until 1964. As the Conservative Party’s 1951 manifesto declared, ‘Housing is the first of the social services. It is also one of the keys to increased productivity. Work, family life, health and education are all undermined by crowded houses. Therefore, a Conservative and Unionist Government will give housing a priority second only to national defence.’ Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme went further, shifting a significant portion of the nation from social renting into ownership, including my paternal grandmother and much of her family.
The UK is said to be in the throes of a housing crisis; a lack of supply has pushed up prices and made it nigh impossible for younger people to clamber on the housing ladder. In London and the south-east, this is certainly true: the average 2020 house price was £674,668, compared to £327,797 for the whole UK. According to Rightmove, the average price in Derbyshire was £184,849. But Hudson said that the biggest problem in housing across most of the country is quality, not supply. ‘What comes up as actually a far bigger problem in that market is distribution of housing – that’s going to be a combination of both the quality but also lots of older people living in bigger housing.’ He also cited a weak demand for new housing in some post-industrial towns due to underperformance in the local economy. Killamarsh comes to mind. ‘It’s the lack of long-term, secure, high-quality, high-wage-paying employment and that’s the barrier to people being able to afford housing rather than it being an outright lack of supply.’
Labour continues to do well in parts of England where renting is rife, and the Conservatives do better where home ownership has increased. This divide has created headaches for both parties. For Boris Johnson, his government faces a desperate need to build more homes and forge the same grateful class of voters that worshipped Thatcher in the 1980s. He will encounter a clash between the party’s old and new voting base: the Home Counties Tories adhere to nimbyism – not in my back yard – and their passions for protecting a green and pleasant land. All of the red wall Tory MPs I have encountered are eager to wheel out the bulldozers and cannot pour out concrete fast enough.
Labour has to find a way of appealing to the aspirational voters who have purchased their own home, or at least aspire to. During the 2019 campaign, Jeremy Corbyn devoted much of his energies to policies tackling exploitative landlords with a ‘property MOT’ and a charter of renters’ rights. He also made a commitment to building 100,000 council homes each year.7 The Conservatives, on the other hand, pledged to reform the planning laws to make it easier to build. Corbyn’s sentiments were worthy in their goals, with the poorest in society at the front of his mind, but they spoke primarily to Labour’s core base. There was little that he or the party said that would appeal to the middle classes who live near motorways, possibly in Workington in a Barratt home, and would have driven a Ford Mondeo. As the results of 2019 confirmed, these voters are increasingly dominating the seats Labour once called its heartlands.
The housing of North East Derbyshire may be similar to other parts of the red wall, but it has one standout political characteristic: it flipped Tory two years earlier. The 2017 snap election was called by Theresa May to gain a mandate to deliver Brexit, after the party was riding high in opinion polls and David Cameron’s majority of thirteen was proving problematic. She led an appalling campaign, notably due to a series of ill-considered policies, a dense manifesto and flaws in the manner she came across to voters. The party made a net loss of twenty seats and clung onto power with the assistance of the Democratic Unionist Party. The Tories did win 42 per cent of the national vote, its highest since 1983, which heralded the return of two-party politics after the prominence of the Liberal Democrats and UKIP.
Crucially for what was to come next, the party gained four seats it had never won before: Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland in the north-east, Walsall North in the West Midlands, and Mansfield and North East Derbyshire in the East Midlands. During that election, I toured the country in a maroon Morris Minor to produce a series of videos on whether Labour was really in trouble. The conventional wisdom that Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity would sink the party was proved badly wrong, as Labour edged closer to power and a wave of youthful optimism surrounded his leadership. But along with the seat of Copeland in Cumbria, this quartet was the first batch of bricks to be chipped out of the red wall.
Lee Rowley was the first Tory MP in North East Derbyshire since 1931 and is rooted in his constituency. We met outside Staveley Hall, built in 1604 and now home to Staveley’s town council. The settlement is typical of North Derbyshire: a former mining village, now dominated by housing and a giant Morrisons supermarket. With no cafes or pubs open, most of the shoppers kept to themselves, heads down, shuffling to their cars. In the afternoon sunshine of the car park, overlooking a surprisingly lush green field, Rowley spoke of his family roots. His father was a milkman, his mother an adult education teacher. He came from a Labour family, who were horrified with his decision to go into politics against the family tradition. ‘Because I just didn’t like what was happening in my part of the world and my part of the world was run by one group of people,’ he said in his homely manner.
After studying at Oxford, he moved to London and entered local politics as a Conservative councillor in the extremely affluent Maida Vale. When his father experienced health issues, he felt a pull to return home. His first attempt at Parliament was in 2010 in nearby Bolsover, held by Dennis Skinner, where he gained 8,000 votes (the socialist firebrand lost his seat in 2019 after forty-nine years in the House of Commons). That campaign was ‘strange and brilliant’ because the party was out on such a limb. ‘It was like a curiosity show, because they didn’t know what to do with a Conservative turning up on their doorstep delivering leaflets.’ Judging by the number of passers-by that Rowley said hello to, the curiosity has turned into familiarity. In the 2010 election, Huw Merriman – now a Conservative MP in East Sussex – pushed the Tory vote up by seven per cent in North East Derbyshire and laid the foundations for future success.
Brexit, in Rowley’s view, convinced North East Derbyshire to look at electoral alternatives. ‘People were attracted to the party, but they needed a pathway to get there. And so you had to build it yourself. That took literally a decade or so to build up.’ Unlike many of the new Tories in the red wall, he is a true Brexit believer who chimed fully with his constituency. In the 2015 election, his first campaign in North East Derbyshire, he recalled from the doorstep: ‘My area had their baseball bats ready for Europe. If they got a referendum they were coming after Europe – primarily for reasons that they didn’t like the EU, but secondarily, because they just didn’t like where politics was and they wanted to change the establishment.’ UKIP was initially the outlet for those feelings, gaining ten points in that election, but their vote soon transferred to the Tories.
What changed between 2015 and 2017 was the working-class vote. In his first campaign, Rowley built up the Conservative vote in suburbs and rural areas but struggled in the mining areas. Two years on, after the referendum, those pit villages swapped their affiliations. ‘They’ve become comfortable with the Conservatives in a way that they weren’t ten or fifteen years ago. And they’ve had enough of the Labour Party,’ he said. The shift is wholesale: most of North East Derbyshire’s district councillors are Tories and many of the parish councils have left Labour. ‘We’d done the whole process of people finding out the Conservative Party didn’t eat their babies and all the rest of it.’ Plus, he reported an ‘immense dislike’ of Jeremy Corbyn. By 2019, the seat’s Tory majority had risen to near 13,000.
The sprawling landscape of North East Derbyshire raises pertinent questions about what the levelling-up agenda will look like here. Rowley represents forty-one villages and towns, all of which have economic and geographic challenges. He admitted there are structural challenges in reinvigorating parts of the seat. ‘Most of the kids I went to school with, about a third to a half have come back, or stayed here, regardless of their economic interest. They come back because they want to raise a family near their parents.’ Does he see the future of his seat as a suburb to Sheffield? He cited the town of Dronfield, population 22,000, which has the benefits of being close to the city. ‘It’s pretty close to Sheffield, it’s got a railway station, which is a positive.’ But wandering around its town centre, there appeared to be too much commercial property – one of those 1960s civic centres that struggles today to sustain a big butcher and baker. Rowley is optimistic for reviving the parts of his constituency that are well-connected, but acknowledged others will be more challenging. Their best hope may be the connectivity to the M1 and the continued rise of logistics and warehousing.
Despite having won two general elections and now sitting on a healthy majority, Rowley believes he needs to oversee tangible change by the next election to secure his position as its MP. As deputy chairman of the Tory Party, his fortunes are tied to Boris Johnson’s. Many parts of his seat will benefit from the government’s numerous funds to improve town centres and infrastructure, but he admitted there are deeper problems too. ‘You can make a very strong case in 2024 on roads and railways, but you probably can’t build them before 2029.’ The red wall Tories actually need to show some progress, as well as promising more. As we stretched our legs with a wander around Staveley Hall’s gardens, Rowley showed me a print-out of a table of policy topics where North East Derbyshire is struggling, improving, and succeeding compared to the national picture. Unlike the UK’s electoral map, it is a sea of maroon. ‘A lot of these red marks on this table need to go green, in order for them to feel like it’s easier to get on.’
As we bid farewell, Lee Rowley mentioned he had a soft spot for his predecessor and told me the pair had become friends despite his victory and her defeat – a rare thing in politics. Natascha Engel, North East Derbyshire’s Labour MP from 2005 to 2017, was a prominent Westminster figure and her defeat was a shock. As deputy speaker over her last two years in Parliament, she commanded the chamber in some of its most difficult Brexit moments. Unlike Rowley, her connections to North East Derbyshire were looser. Before entering Parliament, Engel was the party’s trade-union liaison officer, but was exasperated by the lack of women in Parliament and decided to stand herself. Deciding to stand for the seat a few weeks after her first baby, she was surprised the constituency Labour Party did not select a local candidate. Engel was born in Berlin and educated privately in Kent. Speaking from her home in London, where she has moved on from political life, she said of her selection, ‘There was no bloody way that I could say that I was local,’ adding that people were not much interested in what she had to say. ‘It was about me listening to them and hearing why it was they were so concerned about it. They weren’t bothered about what I thought about it.’
Her memories of her old seat, and the hodgepodge of towns and villages thrown together by electoral planners, were warm. ‘When you go from Killamarsh to Dronfield to Clay Cross, there are three different accents,’ she said (my ears were ill-tuned to the East Midlands dialect, so I confessed that everyone sounded the same to me). The name ‘North East Derbyshire’ is not a destination, but a geographical locale. If asked on holiday, Engel said residents would say they’d travelled from Chesterfield, Sheffield or the village where they live, not ‘north-east Derbyshire’. Despite this ambiguous sense of place, she reported a ‘very strong sense of civic pride’, even in the more run-down towns. ‘Most people haven’t moved very far away – I’m talking working-class voters, the kind who used to vote Labour and have recently voted Conservative in very large numbers.’
She felt much of the constituency has a ‘real feeling of isolation’, not least as the lack of a redevelopment plan turned closed pits into dumping grounds. ‘The pits left voids and those voids were perfect for landfills. The villages were built quite close to the pits. There was a permanent problem.’ Similarly to Pat Bone, she decried the transport links that had stoked the sense of isolation in smaller parts of the seat. ‘All these villages aren’t that far away from each other as the crow flies. But as there were no bus services, people would walk for miles from one village to another.’
During her dozen years as an MP, Engel saw North East Derbyshire change ‘quite dramatically’ due to the number of new homes. ‘They were everywhere on the edges, it was prime territory for all the pit villages. They were all brownfield, so they just built onto them. These little towns became joined up. If you go outside Grassmoor [village], for example, all the areas started to be linked together because they were being filled with new housing.
In her first election campaign, Engel was returned to Westminster with a 10,065 majority, with the Tories a distant second place. Her majority dropped sharply in 2010 and again in 2015 before she lost in 2017. During the 2015 campaign, she concluded the seat was gone. Engel ran a highly personal campaign, with few Labour markings on the literature, and worked the doorsteps hard for five years. With the snap 2017 election, she realized ‘we just didn’t have the time’ to canvass in the same way. What went wrong? Was it Engel, Labour or the seat? Top of her blame list is Jeremy Corbyn, who found little support in the old pit villages; his messages had ‘no relevance to the lives’ of people who were focused on finding enough petrol to fill the car.
Engel, who supported Remain in the 2016 referendum, said the referendum motivated the non-voters in North East Derbyshire back into politics, but she denied that the vote was driven by xenophobia. ‘I still get really upset with people saying that the reason why places like North East Derbyshire voted Brexit was because they were all obsessed with immigration and they were racist . . . it was labelling this type of person without trying to understand what it was that they really valued about their culture and their lives.’ Corbyn’s leadership symbolized a wider disconnect. ‘It was cultural, in that the Labour Party didn’t seem to represent their kind of people anymore.’ During her time as a trade union officer, she travelled frequently around the traditional heartlands and saw the cultural disconnect grow during the years Labour was in government. ‘We were very much a middle-class party with working-class voters. The assumption was there was nowhere for this group of voters to go.’
Yet Engel insisted these were not voters who were ‘left behind’. Instead, they felt the government had not given them adequate support. ‘They thought, Leave us alone, give us the tools to help ourselves. “Left behind” implies they were not capable, or there was some way in which people were not properly equipped.’ Part of this is the collapse of the monolithic industries that dominated North East Derbyshire. In their place were distribution centres, dotted across the seat, which do not offer a resilient or stable base.
She was very pessimistic about winning these voters back due to the great cultural gulf. Even the way Labour talks about the red wall rankles her. ‘There’s a slightly operative tone when Labour talks about the red wall, as having to win back those votes if they want to get into government, rather than say these are our people and we love them, we want to represent them.’ Although she thought Keir Starmer had done an ‘absolutely amazing job in a short space of time’, Engel was downbeat over whether the divide between Labour’s left and right could be healed to speak to both sides of the Hampstead–Humberside alliance. ‘I don’t think there is accommodation to be had between the left and the right of the party.’
She concluded that Starmer may have to decide which part of the electorate to address. ‘Do you face towards the Remain-voting middle class? Or do you face towards the more Brexit-voting working class, who are culturally very different from one another? How do you combine the two?’ On a local level it can be done, as she saw in the 2015 election. But nationally she is sceptical. ‘You’ve got to have a much stronger political narrative to do that.’
The divide between the left and the right within the Labour Party was most acutely seen in the 2017 election. For supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, the party was a mere 2,227 votes and seven seats away from the opportunity to form a rainbow coalition.8 For the Labour right, particularly embittered Blairites, the party was barely ahead of its total from 2010 and hopelessly far away from winning a parliamentary majority and governing as a stable majority force. The indisputable trend, which both sides agree on, is the coalescing of votes: UKIP collapsed, with its voters flocking mostly to the Tories, and the Liberal Democrats shed votes to Labour in the big cities. The rise in vote share for the two main parties makes assessing the merits of that election very difficult.
David Blunkett was the Labour right’s most prominent figure for several decades, who has little time for the narrative that the 2017 election laid the path towards a socialist government. Born into one of the most deprived neighbourhoods of Sheffield, he rose to become the most senior minister in the New Labour era: serving as Education, Work and Pensions and Home Secretary. Now Lord Blunkett, he spoke of a sense that Labour’s support in seats like North East Derbyshire was ‘seeping away’ based on his doorstep activities. ‘I tried to explain to colleagues and friends that 2017 was an aberration – not just because of the poor campaign which Theresa May ran, but because of the local elections four years ago [2016], were dire for the Labour Party. Absolutely dire. We also mopped up virtually all the Green and a great deal of the Lib Dem vote, so the anti-Tory vote coalesced.’ Corbyn’s manifesto commitments were also more tempered in 2017, although not by New Labour or Ed Miliband’s standards, which Blunkett felt helped on the doorstep.
In the 2017 campaign, many Labour MPs I have spoken to stated their primary message to voters was, ‘We’re not going to win and Jeremy Corbyn won’t be prime minister’. In Sedgefield, Labour’s Phil Wilson went as far as to write on his leaflets, ‘I am not for Corbyn’, which others followed.9 Blunkett said the primary message in his area was, ‘Please vote Labour, don’t let it be a landslide for Theresa May’, which was a credible offer for those who did not have much love for the Tories. In the following two years, opinions in the red wall hardened against Jeremy Corbyn. Blunkett put the party’s collapse down to ‘people just wanting to get back to some sort of stability, to get Brexit over and done with.’ Plus he found a ‘complete alienation of the Corbyn Labour leadership’ in seats like North East Derbyshire, due to ‘the Labour Party having ditched its normal commitments on security, on issues of safety that are really close to the heart of those areas.’
Blunkett agreed with my emerging conclusion that Labour’s collapse in the red wall was in part due to structural changes, not purely the immediate consequences of Brexit and Corbyn’s leadership. The collapse of heavy industry, followed by the financial crisis and the austerity cuts to public services, resulted in a ‘complete change’ in people’s lived experiences. The old world of apprenticeships that were ‘relatively well paid’ in shipbuilding, engineering and steel gave people ‘dignity in work and the community’, he said. ‘When that disintegrated, as it did in the eighties and early nineties, it wasn’t replaced. It was a mistake we made. It wasn’t that we neglected the so called “red wall” seats, we did a fantastic job on transforming the lives and the prospects and the opportunities. It was that we didn’t understand that there needed to be a model, a very different prospectus in terms of that security, that feeling of community.’
This change emerged gradually across the East Midlands, Blunkett explained. ‘You could see the same type of areas, it creeps in gradually. With North East Derbyshire going in 2017, it was almost inevitable Rother Valley would go in 2019.’ The neighbouring seat did indeed go Tory for the first time. ‘It’s a reflection of the whole change in the social and economic experience people were having.’ There was also a crucial age differential: just 17 per cent of over sixty-fives voted Labour in 2019, which reflected how its traditional voting base had gone. ‘That reflects very heavily on the way in which, since the collapse of heavy industry, older people who had pensions, who had built up some capital, perhaps able to buy their own house, are now of an age where they don’t feel like the younger generation.’
The question of whether these voters were taken for granted is one Blunkett thought had roots going further back. ‘It’s a myth that the working classes were overwhelmingly Labour. In the industrial areas, the heavily unionized in large plants and mining communities, where political education and solidarity were instilled into people, the Labour Party was very strong.’ But he noted that there were voters in the same class and income brackets in other parts of England who voted Conservative. ‘That’s why the Tories were in from 1951 to 1964, from 1979 to 1997.’ His party also tends to be focused on the past rather than the future. ‘The Labour Party has been brilliant at fighting the previous election rather than the current one. We’ve done it historically – you only need to look at the debates in the Labour Party conference in the late fifties, particularly 1959, when we lost that third election then, and the astonishing nostalgia.’
Blunkett was especially angry throughout our chat about the narrative that Labour governments did not do enough for working-class voters – particularly espoused by Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters. He recalled an exchange with a voter during the 2005 campaign in his old Sheffield Brightside constituency:
‘A man said to me “You’ve done nothing for us.” And I said, “Have you got any children?” He had, and I pointed out the Sure Start centre, the nursery classes around him, the market renewal of his house, and then I said, “You’ve got a daughter, you said, of sixteen. Where is she going?” and he said, “Oh, she’s going to that Longley Park College.” I said, “Tony Blair and I opened that £30 million college. Where do you think it came from?” He said, “I don’t know.” I said, “It came from us. This is our government. This is us, actually repaying you for voting Labour by being able to put that in place.” “Well, I didn’t think of it like that,” he said. When you don’t have a clear narrative of what you’ve done, and you don’t sing about it in a way that relates to people’s lives, and when you then find your own side trashing the things you’ve done, it’s not surprising that people get the exact opposite message.’
In Blunkett’s book, the ‘fantastic achievements’ of New Labour’s time in government were not praised enough by Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn, which created dissatisfaction in its traditional heartlands. ‘You’ve got this consistent, repetitious message that the Labour government failed, and failed the working class – despite the national minimum wage, despite a transformation in the education system that led their children to go to university, despite the refurbishment of many of the older housing estates, despite reducing waiting times from eighteen months to eighteen weeks, and then to six weeks.’ Without a proper narrative since the party left office in 2010 to build on these transformations, Blunkett said the ‘umbilical cord’ between the party and its voters was cut.
Agreeing with Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, Blunkett feels the party needs to find a new message for these voters that reflects the impending economic upheaval due to the rise in automation and the ageing population. The opportunity will be presented by ‘automation and the whole issue of AI and robotics, the nature of big social care issues and the way people are treated in jobs which are not traditional working-class, often insecure, part-time and lowly paid.’ This is not reinventing the working class or speaking to nostalgia, he added.
Although optimistic about forging a new economic message, Blunkett was concerned about the cultural disconnect between Labour and places such as North East Derbyshire as political affiliations have reshaped around issues of identity. He said, ‘They detest the idea of identity politics. Everybody I speak to in my own constituency – I still visit it because I used to go to football matches – they don’t know what on earth the liberal intelligentsia are talking about. They just don’t relate. They’re not on the same wavelength. So what appeals to under forties is anathema to many of the over sixty-fives.’ Nor does he think the cultural divides will wholly benefit the Conservatives, particularly with an eye to other parts of the country with more diverse populations. ‘The Tories are putting all their eggs in the basket of being able to play off people’s fears about the rapid way communities are changing culturally and socially.’ What he described as the ‘different offer’ to win these places back does not rest on memories of old-fashioned work or ‘waving of the flag’, instead it needs to be rooted in place. ‘An understanding of where those people are coming from, and why in 1997 similar people voted Labour for the first time in the south of England and the Midlands.’
Although he sees a route back for Labour in the red wall, he remained concerned that the Rubicon has been crossed and some convincing will be needed. ‘Once you start voting Conservative, even through gritted teeth, it’s not as hard the next time. That was true in reverse of Tories who voted Labour in 1997 and 2001. In 1992, once people had started to get used to voting Labour, they were very happy to do so in 1997 and stuck with it in 2001. And against all the odds, because of Iraq, they pretty well stuck with it in 2005,’ he said. The offer has to be for what he calls the ‘reasonably affluent’, the asset-rich but sometimes income-poor older people. ‘We can’t win a general election with the disparity between the eighteen- to thirty-year-olds and over sixty-fives upwards, not least because the older generation vote and young people don’t.’
Blunkett was scathing of the Johnson government’s levelling-up agenda, which he thought would only make superficial changes to red wall communities and not tackle the underlying issues. ‘They’re going to do a bit with the cosmetic physical environment. And people will say, “Well, you can see it’s a bit better in the town centre.” It won’t have changed their lives at all,’ he said.
Blunkett’s vision for Labour’s future is of a communitarian party, built from the grassroots upwards and rooted in the communities it lost in 2019. He is concerned that it appears too paternalistic. He advocated a new social contract of ‘mutuality and reciprocity’ that links the state with personal responsibility. ‘If we do this for you, you will do this for yourself, you will play your part and we will play ours.’ But above all else, he said his party needs to be relentlessly optimistic about the future. ‘The only times we’ve been able to succeed as a Labour Party as a force for social democracy, is when we’ve actually reached for the future.’
If the 2017 election was deemed a disaster by the Labour right, it was hopeful for the Labour left. For the long marchers, disciples of the radical socialist Tony Benn who led the fight against Tony Blair’s efforts to reshape the party, the gain of thirty seats was proof socialism could find an audience in modern Britain. John McDonnell was central to Jeremy Corbyn’s five-year reign. As shadow chancellor and the intellectual ballast behind ‘the project’, he was by far the most thoughtful and determined mind in the leadership. The resounding defeat in 2019 sent Corbyn and McDonnell to the backbenches and semi-retirement. While the former has been marked in his criticism of Keir Starmer, McDonnell has been careful with his interventions. Speaking from his West London office, he reflected that Labour did not want the 2019 election. I have clear recollections of Labour arguing for another election almost every day after the 2017 poll, when the opportunity of gaining power was obvious. That appetite drained away, funnily enough, when Boris Johnson became prime minister and the Conservatives moved ahead in the opinion polls.
The mistakes of 2019 were twofold, according to McDonnell. One was the lack of time, due to the abrupt manner in which the election was called (given the lack of a stable parliamentary majority, Labour might really have given the prospect some thought in, say, the intervening two years). He said, ‘From 2017 to 2019, we never had a clear enough narrative of how all the individual policies welded together to create a new vision. When it came to December 2019, the individual policies might have been popular in themselves but because they weren’t part of an overall narrative, they lacked credibility.’ Labour’s other major error was in communication, which McDonnell admitted ‘wasn’t good enough’. He was right that the ‘incredibly creative’ team that emerged from Corbyn’s leadership campaigns led the political pack, with creative and punchy messaging, but the Tories caught up.
Reflecting on 2017, he pinned the project’s success on policies designed to ‘give a bit of zest’ to politics. He felt that after six years of a Conservative government, voters were fed up with austerity. ‘By the time you have been through the first five years of austerity, people just didn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.’ Oddly, however, the political reaction to that anger was not immediate – the Tories won a majority in 2015 – but McDonnell felt the anger was bubbling. ‘People get angry and react, not necessarily when you’re in the depths of a recession or when it’s the hardest. It’s when politicians or governments or others are telling you things are improving, and you don’t feel you’re sharing in the benefits of the improvement.’
McDonnell admitted that the party was expecting ‘a bit of a drubbing’ in 2019, but pinned its issues on the EU question. ‘Brexit was absolutely dominating everything. Even where we were trying to shift the agenda onto other issues like anti-austerity, like jobs, like the NHS in particular, people reach those subjects via Brexit. When you raise the NHS, they’d say, “Oh, yeah, that’s great, because we’ll get so much more money for the NHS when we leave the European Union”, as dictated on the famous bus advert.’ On economics, where McDonnell said his leftward anti-austerity push had ‘won’ the debate on public services, everything came back to the EU issue. ‘Here’s the irony: where we were convincing people on every policy, we were also reinforcing their antipathy to us because of Brexit.’
When Theresa May’s momentum stalled after the 2017 election, he was part of the negotiating team that attempted to piece together a cross-party withdrawal agreement that most, if not all, of the Tory and Labour MPs could support. Whereas senior Labour figures such as Alan Johnson have argued this was the party’s great missed opportunity to shore up the red wall, McDonnell said there was no plausible opportunity for a deal. ‘We couldn’t get a deal that Theresa and our party could both deliver on. But in those negotiations, the Tories were falling out literally in front of us.’ He did not think May was acting disingenuously, but the internecine warfare within the Tory Party made a deal impossible. McDonnell was also concerned that a soft deal to satisfy the middle ground of Labour would ‘march our people to the top of the hill’ by whipping them to back the deal, yet still lose a significant chunk of MPs, particularly those who were ‘hooked on having a People’s Vote’. He believed there was a real risk that those talks would have produced a deal that would have seen Labour ‘falling flat on our face’ in Parliament.
The Brexit knot, in McDonnell’s view, was impossible. Referencing a maxim of Tony Benn – ‘walk down the middle of the road and you get run over’ – he felt Labour could not keep both sides of its coalition happy. ‘We couldn’t offer a better Brexit position than the Brexit Party or the Tories. If we leaned towards the Remain vote we then alienated our Brexit supporters in our own constituencies.’ A historical contingency, a nightmare, that McDonnell felt was out of the party’s hands.
As one of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest political allies for decades, he must have detected the concerns among red wall voters about his leadership. No, it transpired. He felt it was all whipped up by the media. ‘Every time when it came down to it, there wasn’t “I hate Jeremy Corbyn”, it was more about the Brexit issue in particular constituencies. We can overcome any issues around Jeremy and criticisms of him. But people weren’t listening to any other message other than the Brexit one.’ Corbyn and McDonnell had a testy relationship with the media, which in turn took a hostile stance towards his leadership. As a political journalist through that period, I can confirm they did almost nothing of substance to engage with the Financial Times, and almost all newspapers were ignored by the leadership. McDonnell insisted that ‘from 2015 to 2019, we had a four-year campaign in the mainstream media – and increasingly on social media – that was character assassination. It was quite appalling. I don’t think we’ve ever really seen anything like it in British politics.’ His response to the Salisbury poisoning, for example, which proved so toxic to traditional Labour voters, was not filtered through any media lens. Giving Russia the benefit of the doubt over the terror attack was done through his words at the dispatch box in the House of Commons.
The Labour left has been vocal in its criticisms of Keir Starmer’s leadership, judging him too meek in his scrutiny of the government during the coronavirus crisis. Treading carefully, McDonnell stated Starmer had done the right thing in working with the Johnson government. ‘When you’re in a national crisis, what you want to do is work together, you don’t play petty politics.’ But he reflected a criticism of many colleagues in urging Starmer to be bolder. ‘We’re at that stage now where there needs to be a bit more passion, both in terms of how you critique the government, but also then how you recreate the image of the sort of society that you want to create.’
Reflecting on the Corbyn project, which failed to get Labour elected but shifted the party, McDonnell thought the greatest achievement was forming ‘a mass social movement’ and expanding the party’s grassroots activist base. He was very satisfied at the shift in the political debate, which has seen the Tories and Labour shift leftwards on economic issues. In many ways, the Corbyn project lost the election but won the argument. ‘The whole flow of the debate is towards our ideas about how you create a more equal society, how you use the state to do that, and how you look at the fairer distribution of wealth and power.’ He was right: prior to the Corbyn project, the economic debate was focused on fiscal prudence. He did not, however, buy the argument that the Tories were doing things in power that would fulfil even his wildest fantasies, such as spending £300 billion during the pandemic.
‘I keep getting this: “Sunak is implementing your budget or your policies.” That’s absolute bollocks,’ he laughed. ‘They’ve taken our rhetoric, but not the substance. And so therefore it’s the same as a Boris Johnson-type approach that doesn’t really tell them whatever they need to be told.’ He was also dismissive of the levelling-up agenda and the government’s pledges to renew infrastructure in the red wall. ‘The Tories will never be able to match Labour and its ambition around how you want to transform people’s lives because they don’t want to shift the balance of power or wealth.’ For the second time, he quoted Tony Benn. ‘“Labour’s role is an irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in this country in favour of working people.” That will never happen under the Tories.’
His deepest regret is that he never made it into government to use the levers of power to reconfigure how the British state works. ‘The state is a set of institutions, but also relationships . . . our role was to go into the state and be against that [status quo]. You go into these institutions, but you change the relationship as you distribute power outwards and empower people to control their own lives.’ Despite the failings of the project, McDonnell thought that a radical Labour government can be elected. ‘Oh, of course. I think we’ll see when objective reality intervenes as well. How people are being dealt with and how they’re feeling within society, what their lives are like, and the desires that they have as well as the frustrations that they feel. The issue there is how those feelings are mobilized, and how those emotions are channelled so that they affect the political chain.’ Although he sounded increasingly Marxist, implying that the contradictions in capitalism make its collapse inevitable, McDonnell insisted he was not a historical determinist.
Given how Labour’s voting coalition fractured due to Brexit, I was curious to hear his take on a commonly held view among Labour MPs that their 2019 manifesto was targeted at an electoral coalition that did not exist, and whether the economic and demographic shifts in the red wall were detrimental to Labour. In response, he quoted another left-wing thinker, Antonio Gramsci, and his concept of hegemony. ‘Your ideas can dominate, you can shift the whole paradigm if your ideas resonate with people’s lives,’ he said. ‘If you look at a lot of what we were trying to do, it wasn’t that they were quite broad-ranging dramatic changes to people’s lives – of course they were – but they had a broad-ranging effect across the classes, in many respects.’ He insisted that Labour’s policies on wages and public services had a ‘majoritarian appeal’.
His biggest instruction for the left was professionalism. ‘It comes down to the levels of dedication, commitment, professionalism, lessons learned through past failures and I’m hoping that’s the period that we now go into.’ McDonnell also thought ground campaigning should not be underestimated. ‘We generally reinvented word of mouth as a form of physical communication. People derided all these big rallies. But actually, they’re incredibly successful. We have a huge movement, which developed as a result of those rallies all around the country.’
McDonnell concluded by admitting the left made mistakes but they were not always a bad thing. ‘It was experience to learn those lessons and move on and also, to a certain extent, don’t be ashamed of errors or mistakes as well. Sometimes you just have to fly a few kites. Sometimes they take and sometimes they don’t catch the wind. But the worst thing to do is to almost be frightened of taking the next step because you’re worried the ice will break.’ The issue for Labour, however, is that the left’s mistakes resulted in five further years of Conservative government, scores of seats abandoning Labour, and Brexit delivered on terms few on the political left, or even in the centre, are happy with.
Having visited two of North East Derbyshire’s working-class suburbs, I finished up by visiting Dronfield, mentioned by Lee Rowley and Natascha Engel as one of the most affluent parts of the area. The centre of the market town has a gritstone tribute to Robert Peel, the Tory prime minister who repealed the Corn Laws and paved the way for the Victorian age of free trade. Opposite the monument was the Peel Community Centre and a small 1960s shopping centre. After visiting on three occasions at different times of the day to find it almost empty, I felt Rowley had a point: this is the particular form of market town that struggles with having a major shopping destination, Sheffield, just twenty minutes’ drive away.
Yet below the surface, Dronfield – named after the River Drone – has one of the most tight-knit community spirits I have seen. Several residents told me to seek out Jill and Tony Bethell as examples of pillars of the community. Venturing back into the countryside, after several wrong turns through sleet that rapidly turned into sunshine, I found their grand manor and was ushered in for coffee and cake. Their residence was built on an old mine, which closed in 1890, and has vast grounds for garden parties that they hold to raise money for the community.
Amongst the pots, plants and mustard sofas, they told me their story. Jill, a general practitioner for forty years, and Tony, who turned to medicine later in life, were married in 1970 and moved to the area soon after. She described Dronfield as ‘wonderful’ precisely because it is a ‘dormitory area’. The residents, she cheerily said, were ‘middle class and middle aged’. The town rapidly grew in the 1950s and 1960s, chiefly for teachers and doctors who preferred countryside living. Tony recalled that Dronfield had a manufacturing past, which was present but waning when they first arrived. ‘A lot of places in north-east Derbyshire have changed dramatically as they lost the heavy manufacturing.’ Beyond the old miners’ cottages, council houses are few. The Gosforth Valley housing estate in Dronfield, built in the 1970s, was once Europe’s largest private housing estate and its creation sped up change in the town. It is another example of how the collectivized communities have morphed into individualistic lifestyles – as seen in other parts of the red wall. ‘That made a change to the demographics and the sort of things that people were looking for, rather than just the local pub,’ Tony said.
For such community-spirited people, this change was not wholly welcome. Jill said the arrival of the vast private estate meant that ‘neighbours didn’t neighbour’. Yet since their retirement, Tony and Jill have done their bit to rebuild that spirit. Starting with their involvement with the church – both are practising Christians – they launched a cardio club for those struggling with chest pain. Tony founded the Dronfield Heritage Trust to celebrate the town’s legacy. Jill has worked with a small magazine, the Dronfield Eye, to celebrate events and stories of the area. Both were involved in a (successful) campaign group to return better train services into Sheffield. They set up a local day-care centre for the disabled. Both are governors at local schools and involved with St John’s Ambulance. Their aim has been to ‘turn Dronfield into a community where everybody feels they have a certain degree of ownership along with a certain degree of responsibility. It’s that balance of the two that I think makes Dronfield distinctive as a community.’ Politically, neither are party-minded but were close friends with Engel and supportive of Rowley. They counted the town lucky to have dedicated local advocates.
Housing has undoubtedly played a key part in the changing character of the red wall. When North East Derbyshire was filled with mines, its ties to the Labour Party were natural. Now that it is filled with private housing estates, like those in Killamarsh and Dronfield, commuting is its main purpose. The inherent lifestyles of those living in these estates are aspirational, even if not in an overt sense. When I asked Jill and Tony about the problems facing Dronfield, they both struggled to name any substantial issues. Many of the places that voted Conservative for the first time are content and the dystopian vision of society painted by Labour in 2019 was sharply out of kilter with the world they know. This suburban lifestyle is where future elections will be fought.
North East Derbyshire also added credence to the notion that the collapse of the red wall in 2019 was not a one-off event. Lee Rowley’s increased majority, and Labour’s struggle to bounce back – it dropped ten points between 2017 and 2019 – is an indication of the structural change that has taken place. I asked three other Conservatives who won red wall seats in 2017 why their seats had not switched back.
Simon Clarke, representing Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland in the north-east, thought Labour was too negative. ‘They’re just seen as having offered nothing positive, and this actually is where it runs deeper, once the dam broke it swept the whole thing away, I don’t think it was a short-term thing, there was no alternative to Labour for a long time and now there is – that’s not going to reverse quickly.’
Eddie Hughes, in Walsall North across in the West Midlands, said the Conservatives had grasped the use of language that connected with those who are not fully engaged in politics. ‘The ordinary voters, they only tune in for a limited time every day, so you need to be able to link this kind of theory or concept to something that matters to them on the ground and they’ve got to be able to see it.’
And Ben Bradley, in nearby Mansfield, thinks that the cultural divide is chiefly to blame. ‘We said we were going to do things Labour was fundamentally opposed to. They are wedge issues because Labour will find it very difficult on subjects like immigration and free speech, equality and human rights. When those discussions come around, they find that really challenging because what they’re going to say is fundamentally at odds with what the vast majority of my constituents think.’
Combining all those issues together, which Boris Johnson did in 2019, is a potent mix. Some of Labour’s challenges lie in policy, but far more of them are about personality and style. Until Labour rediscover that mix, Barratt Britain will continue to stick to its new voting pattern. The next stop, across in the West Midlands, almost went with the other red wall seats. The demographics of much of the red wall are favouring the Tories, but there are plenty of others where Johnson’s party are facing their own cultural challenges.