And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Amongst these dark satanic mills?
WILLIAM BLAKE
The first thing that struck me on my arrival in Burnley, forty minutes north of Manchester, were the chimneys. Dozens of them, sprouting from abandoned mills in the town that was the heart of Lancashire’s cotton industry. In its Victorian prime, Burnley had 100,000 looms powered by vast engines belching out steam and smoke. Along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal – carried through the town on the magnificent Burnley Embankment – the warehouses and sheds are now deserted. The cotton industry is long gone and the remnants have become the area’s foremost tourist attraction. The Weavers’ Triangle commemorates the times when Burnley was the cotton-weaving capital of the world, before the influx of foreign imports made it uncompetitive. During the 1960s and 1970s, mills were closed across Lancashire at a rate of almost one a week.1
From the train station, the Manchester Road slopes into the town centre and over the canal. The Weavers’ Triangle Visitors Centre is a small building overlooking the canal that commemorates the cotton industry. Brian Hall, a retired teacher, runs the trust. At eighty-three, he spoke in soft, delicate tones with a broad Lancastrian accent about his memories of the ‘last days’ of the coal mining and cotton industries. ‘I had several members of my family who worked in the cotton industry. Over the years, that has completely disappeared, practically completely. When I was young, it was already on its last legs. It’s been taken over by a number of other industries such as aerospace engineering. But engineering was always very important to Burnley, some of the largest mill steam engines ever made were made in Burnley.’ The only remaining engine is the Queen Street Mill, the world’s last surviving steam-driven weaving shed, that was converted into a museum in 1986.2
He likened these vast engines to cathedrals and recalled visiting the mill his family worked in. ‘I do remember how dreadfully noisy it was. I’m sure lots of people did go deaf just because of it. The weavers had to learn to lip read.’ Reflecting on the industry, Hall said there was a ‘great camaraderie’ among the weavers despite the conditions William Blake wrote about. ‘We look back and think, Oh, it must have been dreadful, they had long hours. It was noisy. Quite a lot of the people now talk fondly of their times in the mills, including my relatives, who actually quite enjoyed it.’
When Burnley’s weaving moved from an active industry to a historical artefact, Hall recalled there was resistance from residents, who believed the remains of the town’s mills should be destroyed. ‘When we started the Weavers’ Triangle area – it was given that name in the 1980s – there were quite a lot of people who wanted to get rid of the chimneys and the mill.’ He argued ‘you can’t get rid of history’ and the chimneys remained vital to Burnley’s identity.
After the collapse of its main industry, Burnley’s town centre declined. The mid-century shopping centre is located awkwardly alongside the Victorian buildings. Hall cited the disappearance of two kinds of useful shop as problematic for older residents such as himself: ‘When Burtons went, how many gent’s outfitters were there in the town centre? I was just thinking if I want a new pair of trousers, where would I go in the town centre? There’s only Marks and Spencer.’ He also misses local produce. ‘The market hall used to have three or four greengrocers and three or four butchers. Within the last twelve months, the last greengrocer closed down and there’s one butcher.’ He also said the local library had ‘deteriorated immensely’ and its once voluminous local history collection has shrunk.
Hall is proud of Burnley’s history, and the place. ‘Burnley dates back to the Middle Ages. We celebrated the eight hundredth anniversary of the market in 1994. The first mention of Burnley was a parish church in 1122, so we’ll be celebrating its nine hundredth anniversary next year.’ He acknowledged that the town has a slightly downtrodden image but felt it was misguided. ‘I’ve always enjoyed living here. I’ve wanted to bring people here to show Burnley’s best side. A large number of visitors say how surprised they are and how nice it is. I remember a visitor a few years ago, someone who wasn’t from this area, who thought it was way better than Wigan.’ The main draw for Burnley is its football club, based at Turf Moor stadium on the outskirts of the town, welcoming supporters from across Europe for matches.
Although not especially political, Hall recalled the town’s history was with the Liberals ‘for much of the nineteenth century. It eventually became Labour, but not always.’ His impression is that the town places particular pride on having a local candidate. Julie Cooper, the Labour MP who represented the seat from 2015 to 2019, was Burnley born and bred. Her successor, Antony Higginbotham, was born in Haslingden, a town twenty minutes away. Hall noted he was not seen as local.
My walking tour of Burnley town centre started outside the visitors centre with Higginbotham. The thirty-one-year-old may not be a pure Burnley resident, but he exemplified the new breed of Tories. Born into a northern working-class home, he moved to London for work and, similarly to Lee Rowley in North East Derbyshire, returned home to Lancashire for family visits. He was selected to fight Burnley days after the 2019 election was called. Although he felt from the start his party had a ‘genuine chance’ of taking the seat, some of his colleagues thought otherwise and assumed it was a no-hope battle. On his first day of campaigning in the town centre, he donned a blue rosette and found a warm reception; even children wanted selfies. Higginbotham’s bid was aided by the fact he was a passionate Brexiter – his anti-EU stance was well received on the doorstep.
As we entered the shopping streets of the town centre, Higginbotham pointed at the range of Union Jacks and St George’s flags on houses and offices. ‘Don’t underestimate how patriotic many northern towns are. Burnley is a prime example – not only because we have a really strong connection to the armed forces, as many northern towns do, but it is your typical British identity.’ It was one of the reasons Boris Johnson connected with Burnley’s voters. ‘Boris is from the south, but he still has appeal because he’s got the same patriotism, he’s not sneering at people who want to fly the flag.’ As we came to his constituency office, housed in a smart old yellow-stoned building, a large Union Jack was hanging on the corner. The handmade bracket was shaped as the portcullis of Parliament.
Thanks to Burnley’s location, slightly isolated from Manchester in the Lancashire countryside, a particular community spirit has developed (similar to Great Grimsby). ‘Probably because of the football club,’ he said. ‘It’s almost unique in that it is so small. The population of Burnley could fit in some football stadiums, and yet it’s still a huge Premier League football club.’ Burnley FC is one of the best-supported sides in English football per capita, with average attendances of 20,000 in a town of approximately 73,000 inhabitants.
As we walked away from the shops toward a series of small warehouses and workshops, Higginbotham explained Burnley is still an ‘archetypal manufacturing northern town’, despite the closure of its mills and mines. ‘If you look at aerospace in the UK, it’s hugely clustered around places like Burnley because of the ingenuity.’ Safran Nacelles, a large French engine company, is one of the town’s largest private sector employers.3 Rolls-Royce has a factory nearby. Velocity Composites, another grandly titled aerospace company, employs 130 people.4 In 2013, the town was named Britain’s most enterprising place, thanks to its commitment to small- and medium-sized businesses.5 The Burnley Bondholders scheme has brought together a hundred local firms to raise £10 million for improving the town and promoting local enterprise. The empty mills may be eerie, but looking beyond the decay of the past, in the new small and smart industrial parks, you can spot an economic revival similar to Consett in County Durham.
The health service is also a major employer: the second-largest hospital in East Lancashire is here. In turn, the University of Central Lancashire, known as UCLan, has a sizeable and expanding modern campus near the Weavers’ Triangle. As we gazed admiringly at the buildings, yet to be occupied, Higginbotham explained there were mock wards for training midwives, producing a medical ecosystem he hoped will encourage more students to the town after the pandemic. ‘That’s already been accelerated by Covid and will no doubt continue.’ Higginbotham, however, was eager to ensure that any new jobs are split between the private and public sector. Many of the red wall seats were improved during Labour’s time in office thanks to an expanding public sector, which was later pruned back during the financial crisis and the Tory governments. ‘My focus has to be on making sure that’s balanced with equal private-sector growth so we don’t become imbalanced and end up with a huge public sector and a very small private sector. If that happens, you become very reliant on the economic cycle of government investment.’
The town centre is in better shape than many others in the red wall, with few empty outlets and plenty of midday shoppers milling around. Burnley does not have a Debenhams or John Lewis department store, which may explain why the smaller shops on the high street continue to thrive. Higginbotham expressed surprise that so many of the bars and businesses have survived throughout the coronavirus pandemic. ‘We’ve been through the most difficult period, but everybody’s actually quite optimistic that when we get through it, it’ll be fine.’ The shopping centre was mostly dominated by older shoppers; it was obvious that not many people live or walk to the town centre.
The inclement weather that dogged me through the trip became too much, again, so I darted into a coffee shop for warming beverages. When I returned, Higginbotham introduced me to a local character. Charles Briggs was the former leader of the council, a disaffected Labour and Liberal Democrat councillor who broke away to form the Burnley and Padiham Independent Party. Informed that I was writing about Labour’s troubles, Briggs explained he left the party because of the Iraq war, in which his son served for two years. ‘On my bucket list, I want to get Tony Blair in a room and I’ll kick seven bells out of him. What he did was to send lads and got them killed in Iraq so the Americans could get oil. That’s how I took it. But I think he’s a war criminal.’ Briggs thought such feelings were likely shared with others in the town. ‘The British Army is built on the north,’ he claimed. ‘It’s northern men and women that make up all the infantry regiments and stuff like that. There is an incredibly proud connection.’
Higginbotham and I continued on our walk with our coffees, towards the bus station and the shabbier side of town. He admitted that Burnley suffered from a reputation problem – highlighted nationally in 2001 when riots caused £1 million of damages.6 ‘Burnley has not been without its problems over the last twenty or thirty years . . . it’s consistently felt in the doldrums and feels like the poor relation to Manchester or Leeds,’ he said. One of the biggest challenges is social drug use. ‘It’s not your well-off middle classes as it is in the cities, it’s now a normal part of going to the pub,’ he said. Police regularly discover greenhouses used for giant cannabis farms, which encourages gangs. ‘You can buy a house in Burnley for £40,000 – there’s no better place to put it.’
Warily, he added, ‘we had someone shot the other week, it’s few and far between. But anti-social behaviour is the biggest actual crime.’ There are also racial overtones to some of the civic unrest. Higginbotham had to deal with a ‘White Lives Matter Burnley’ banner being flown over the Etihad Stadium in Manchester during a Burnley away game. ‘Are there tensions? Yes. Do they bubble over? Rarely.’ Tackling these issues is crucial for Higginbotham’s re-election hopes. ‘We’re still in the top ten for deprivation across the country, which is a challenge.’ He was typically critical of Labour for failing to address these problems. ‘They’ve had decades of a Labour approach of putting more money into welfare. It’s not worked for the unemployment rate, which has still been higher than the national average.’ His message during the 2019 election was ‘turbocharging businesses’.
Higginbotham was eager to show me Padiham, a smaller market town in his constituency. After a short ride in his Mercedes coupé, we arrived at a giant Tesco supermarket in the centre of town. ‘This is the most Brexity part, there’s a uniqueness to Padiham.’ He hoped to reinvent it as a market town, encouraging shops and restaurants to have more outdoor seating. One of his most immediate levelling-up projects is to deal with flooding. The River Calder flooded in 2015 and 2020, with hundreds of homes and livelihoods destroyed.7 Around £9 million is required for flood defences and improving bridges with £2 million coming from the government since the election. On the former gasworks and a disused coal mine, Homes England is preparing the groundwork for a vast new housing estate. Padiham was certainly less urban than Burnley.
At the end of our walk, I asked him about his vision for the future of jobs. One of Burnley’s biggest employers is Boohoo, the online clothing retailer, which has a distribution site on the outskirts. By 2021, 3,500 people were employed in their warehouse with further expansion planned. But the company has stoked controversy: the warehouse was reported to be a ‘breeding ground for coronavirus’, which caused consternation among residents.8 Higginbotham admitted ‘they employ a big chunk of people, but it’s a bone of contention’. He did not feel they had done enough to integrate with Burnley’s people. ‘Normally if you’ve got a company that size, they’re part of the community, they do things. They sponsor events, they pay for nice things. Boohoo has never done that. It is just this giant grey box that employs thousands of people who read about it in the news. It’s terrible.’ He has urged them publicly and privately to improve their image in the town, to little avail.
Burnley’s job market is stronger in some aspects than other red wall seats, but still has issues with skills. Before coronavirus, unemployment was 5.6 per cent – significantly above the national average.9 The number of people with no qualifications is double the national average. It also suffered particularly during the austerity years: Burnley council saw 9 per cent knocked off its budget; charges were introduced to visit the town hall and a 3 per cent tax rise was introduced. Despite Higginbotham’s cheerfulness – and that of several residents we met during the walk – funding is at the forefront of questions of how to provide a better, more secure social contract for red wall voters.
The issue of where Labour fits into the new jobs market – praised by the Tories for its flexibility, criticized by Labour for its lack of security – first came to the fore in the 2015 election, when Ed Miliband pledged to ban zero-hours contracts, claiming they were ‘undermining family life’.10 When he took over the party in 2010, his efforts to reconnect Labour with towns like Burnley were made through economic arguments, not emotional. In his first and only general election, the party’s vote share declined in the red wall areas.
Miliband’s leadership of the Labour Party is not widely remembered as a success. He had the unenviable job of forging a new path after the New Labour years in government and following the memories of the financial crisis. He never recovered from its inception: Miliband’s older brother David was widely seen as the heir apparent and Ed’s decision to enter the contest, and emerge victorious, was a spectre over the 2015 election. But the relevance of his economic pitch is stronger as time passes. Miliband’s focus on inequality pushed it to the fore of political debate, although his nerdy, policy-wonk demeanour failed to connect with middle England and their vision of what a prime minister should sound like.
Miliband retreated to the backbenches after losing the 2015 election and devoted his energies to podcasting and book writing throughout Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. He has spoken infrequently about his time leading the party but with his return to the shadow cabinet as Keir Starmer’s shadow business secretary, Miliband opened up about what went wrong for the party. We conducted a virtual interview, me in my cosy room in Burnley’s Premier Inn, him in his North London home. He was enthusiastic about the ‘big and interesting questions’ about the changing jobs market with the example of Burnley and Boohoo, and how it affected Labour’s standing.
‘It’s not simply about saying, “we’re going to change every job people have”, because it’s not like warehouse jobs will suddenly disappear or that we should want that,’ he said. ‘We have to improve terms and conditions in these jobs and it’s about new jobs we can create. The obvious area is around the whole Green New Deal. There are masses of jobs, some in manufacturing and some not, to be done as part of this revolution.’ Unlike the Tories, Miliband thinks trade unions still have a significant role to play in this new flexible environment. ‘We operate with very deregulated labour markets, people’s work is incredibly insecure. What rights do they have? Do they have the ability to be part of a trade union? What engagement are those trade unions doing? Those questions are really important because we are dealing with an insecurity–power deficit.’
That insecurity fed into the ‘take back control’ message during the 2016 referendum. He concluded that too much risk has been put on individuals, away from the state. When I referenced the deep funding cuts made to Burnley Council and whether this had affected the services, Miliband thought, ‘the welfare state, as we’ve seen in the crisis, is incredibly full of holes. It’s not enough to live on. Fundamentally, you’ve got to act on the working conditions people have, and the rights and power they have at work. You’ve got to act on the risk question: what the welfare state is and where business responsibility lies.’ He felt that the post-war social contract is too often dismissed as ‘nostalgia’, as it ultimately offered housing, job security and pensions. ‘It’s not that people want to go back. People in Doncaster North don’t just say “let’s have lots more coal mines”. But it does mean recovering something that has been lost. It goes back to my overall belief: if you think about Trump, if you think about Brexit, if you think about some of the things that Jeremy was talking about, in very different ways they were all talking to the same deep economic discontent, in a way the mainstream right and left had not been doing.’
Miliband drew much ire inside his party for criticizing the New Labour project. He continues to believe ‘there was too much complacency that people in the red wall seats weren’t going to vote for anyone else’. He insisted that New Labour’s investment in public services, the Sure Start programme and tax credits were all ‘excellent’ but noted ‘good things doesn’t necessarily mean it was a) enough or b) it is not right to say “this economic settlement question is really important”.’ Particularly on the issue of the labour market, he felt ‘exploitation persisted in the Labour government’, and deeper questions should have been asked about how the economy is run and how the growth gains were distributed.
Much of the economic reassessment mooted during his five years was later adopted by the Conservatives, yet the electorate rejected Miliband’s world view by handing the Tories their first parliamentary majority in twenty-three years. Miliband theorized that he lost the election because his pitch was ‘not primary-coloured enough’ compared to Jeremy Corbyn’s offer to the electorate two years on:
‘What 2017 had over 2015 was that it was painted in bolder, more vivid strokes and I do think that had an impact. I was too reassuring for the people who want radicalism, and too radical for the people who wanted reassurance,’ he said, in a soundbite worthy of Tony Blair in his prime. ‘Plus, we had also had a shorter period of austerity. And in the end, people wanted David Cameron and not me. I’m sure there were better ways that I could have put across what we were proposing.’ At the time, Miliband said that observers thought he ‘overestimated people’s desire for change’. But on reflection from Brexit and the Corbyn years, he believed that he underestimated it. ‘The Brexit referendum, a year later, was based on a lot of the things that I campaigned on, like stagnant wages, loss of good jobs and so on.’
He agreed that the Tory campaign was ‘very rubbish’ in 2017 but he thought it is ‘too easy’ for those who were critical of Jeremy Corbyn to pin all of the blame on the opposition. ‘There is a danger that people want to write their version of history which is most convenient. For some, 2017 was a rather inconvenient election.’ He saw the Brexit vote in 2016 as a vote for ‘big economic change’, as many others, including myself, do. ‘You have got to think Corbyn’s unexpectedly good performance was due to a desire, including in constituencies like mine, for big economic change. People were coming over to us because of the primary colours offer. There’s no explanation about 2017 which does not incorporate that thesis.’ In Burnley, Labour added nine percentage points to its vote in 2017, only for it to collapse by ten points in 2019.
Miliband felt vindicated that he was right in speaking about a need to ‘reshape the condition of Britain’. But he felt he failed in his lack of boldness – something where he suggested Jeremy Corbyn bettered him with his policy solutions. ‘They weren’t equal to the scale of the crisis. And that isn’t necessarily why I lost the election but it didn’t help. Hence why I didn’t get whatever enthusiasm that Corbyn got in 2017 in winning people back.’
Miliband insisted he took full responsibility for his failure to win in 2015, but argued that the disaffection with Labour went deeper. ‘If you look from 1997 onwards, where the [voting] gap starts to close actually, what people say to me in my constituency is that they got disaffected with Labour in government. Not because Labour in government didn’t do good things, but I don’t think it fundamentally changed some parts of the economic settlement.’ Although reforms such as the minimum wage and tax credits to help working families helped the poorest in society, he felt New Labour ‘didn’t fundamentally change the deep question’ about insecurity and wages. He also struggled with moving on from the New Labour era. ‘Coming out of thirteen years of government was always tricky. But I am not making excuses, I take full responsibility for all the decisions I took. I lost, it’s my responsibility for having done so.’
But he felt there had been too much focus on the growth of the whole economy and not enough on the actual experience of people’s lives. ‘It’s hard to remember now, but it was controversial to be saying at the Labour Party conference “the rising tide just seems to lift the yachts.” The notion that we were deeply unequal; that there was a cost of living crisis; that more of the next generation would be worse off than the last.’
Reflecting on 2019, Miliband’s analysis of what went wrong for Labour followed mainstream thinking of the left. He argued industrial change was significant in breaking the ties with the party. ‘I don’t think anyone can underestimate the extent to which, in a constituency like Doncaster North or Burnley, the combination of industrial jobs, unions and the sense of community was so significantly tied to Labour.’ He also felt that the policy changes made by the coalition and Conservative governments had failed to shape the new job markets. ‘I am struck by the insecure jobs, temporary agency work, zero-hours contracts and warehouse jobs which all have issues versus the old mining jobs. Those mining jobs, not to romanticize, had a very different social contract. The current economic settlement is quite repudiated in the minds of a lot of people, especially after the 2010 election.’ The final issue, of course, was Brexit, which became a ‘lightning conductor for those deep issues’. In his constituency, voters told Miliband they were voting Leave out of a desire for a fresh start. ‘There was a deep aching desire for something better. Of course, for some people it was about immigration and discontent with the EU, but it went much deeper.’
The campaign itself was ‘really hard’ for Miliband, who saw his majority in Doncaster North drop from 14,024 to 2,370. Had it not been for the Brexit Party, he would have almost certainly lost his seat. ‘It was really hard watching lots of people who were really angry.’ He put ‘quite a lot’ of the outcome on Brexit, but also confirmed, ‘Jeremy wasn’t popular. For a lot of people, it was very painful to think they were not going to vote Labour.’ Yet despite Corbyn’s unpopularity as leader, Miliband still felt he was ‘on to something’ with his slogan ‘for the many, not the few’ – its origins in Shelley’s poetry following the Peterloo Massacre. Miliband said, ‘I remember this conversation in my local miners’ welfare with somebody who was not voting for us. “Well, I initially thought Corbyn was quite good actually.” But then they went onto Brexit. I’m not saying that Brexit was Jeremy’s only problem, because I know that it was also about defence and other things.’
Ideologically, however, he believed the Tories will struggle with their new voting base. He does not think the Johnsonite Tories are reborn interventionists, ‘that is not their fundamental belief’, and that will harm them in delivering on the levelling-up agenda. ‘If you take someone like Kwasi Kwarteng or Rishi Sunak, that is fundamentally not their belief. Johnson is more of a shapeshifter. They’re not doing a green stimulus at anything like the level of Biden or even the French or the Germans. They’re good at talking the talk on this stuff, but they’re not really good at walking the walk.’ On the issue of zero-hours contracts and workers’ rights, he does not think the Conservatives have fundamentally changed. ‘Are they really going to say “we do think deregulated labour markets have gone too far”. I don’t think they’re going to be able to solve these big problems that people face.’
Miliband still doesn’t think seats like Burnley will ‘automatically’ come back. He felt Labour needs a compelling offer – although, like many others in the party, he did not define what it was – but felt that voters are impressed by Keir Starmer. ‘People are more positive towards him than they were towards Jeremy. He’s started to build the foundations. Some people went to the Brexit Party, not the Tories – you can overestimate the extent to which people in the red wall just went to the Tories. Quite a lot splintered from Labour or abstained. But they’ve got to be won back, because it’s not just “well they’ve voted Labour before and they’ll carry on voting Labour.”’ Labour must think big to tackle these issues. ‘The challenge for Labour in the red wall is: can we make a sufficiently compelling offer of change for these deep-rooted issues? It’s what Biden is trying to do. That is the way you unite the Labour coalition, because both metropolitan and red wall voters want economic change.’
Miliband’s criticisms of the Tony Blair era deserved a response from one of its leading lights. And it is hard to think of a more assuredly New-Labour politician than Alan Milburn. Always cogently and clearly spoken, with only a soft hint of his County Durham background, the former Darlington MP was at the top of the New Labour project: first as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, later as Health Secretary and Cabinet Office Minister. After leaving Parliament, he served as the head of the government’s Social Mobility Commission – based out of the Department for Education – which looked at the structural issues that limit aspiration. He resigned in 2017, blaming Theresa May’s government for failing to commit enough support to tackling unfairness.11 Whereas many key figures from that era remain prominent in British political life, Milburn has taken a much lower profile; he is not often seen in newspaper columns or on Sunday talk programmes. He feels almost a lost figure from the New Labour era, despite embodying all of its professionalism, pragmatism and ideological flexibility.
Milburn splits his time between London and Northumberland. Speaking on FaceTime while he walked through the countryside with his dog, he did agree with Ed Miliband’s critique that New Labour had not been bold enough when it first entered government. ‘I think in the early phase of New Labour that’s a very fair criticism,’ he said, breaking off to dodge a tractor. ‘We were probably more frightened of Labour’s gulf than necessarily we should have been. We probably didn’t quite realize, post 1997, how much permission publicly there was for change.’ Arriving in Parliament in 1992, he was closely tied to Tony Blair’s rise to the leadership and concluded that the desire for change may have gone too far. ‘We obviously chose to accentuate the “New” and not so much the “Labour”. I do think that changed over time and I think it was a learning journey.’ He pointed out that he had never been a minister prior to the 1997 victory; Blair and most of his Cabinet were novices in running a country. ‘But as time went on, the argument about Blair and New Labour changed . . . at the end it was too much boldness – whether that was on public service reform or in Iraq.’
New Labour was about slaying ghosts that were deemed to be part of party’s ineluctability; whether that be tax and spend, softness on crime, not being patriotic, weak on defence. Milburn believed that created an atmosphere that meant ‘New Labour were defined more by our past’. Those policies may have been right for the period of 1994 to 1997, when the party was preparing for power, but failed to adapt in office ‘The old bastions of support over time have crumbled. It’s no longer – and it was no longer true then – that if you own a council house, you automatically voted Labour, any more than if you own your own home, you necessarily voted Tory. The trick in political strategy was about how you could straddle these constituencies, north and south, middle class and working class, in order to have a decent chance of winning.’ New Labour, in his view, did a ‘pretty awesome job’ at that straddling, evidenced by the three large parliamentary majorities.
Milburn laughed it was ‘objectively bollocks’ to say that New Labour did not deliver enough in office for the red wall constituencies for towns like Burnley. But he was aware, through his experience in the trade unions, that bigger economic forces were at play. Before entering Parliament, one of Milburn’s first major campaigns was to save the Sunderland shipyards. He recalled it as ‘the epitome of the fight against deindustrialization under Mrs Thatcher’, with 1,000 jobs on the line and more in the attendant industries. It was ‘the finale’ of what had been happening across the north of England over many decades. ‘Purpose disappeared from these places, and particularly for young men, because all of the anchor points of their lives – whether it was an apprenticeship, or membership of a trade union, disappeared. At the same time you had these sweeping forces of globalization that were disrupting and disrespecting the veneer of these places.’ The collapse of high streets was just as damaging to the local psyche as the end of the factory, he argued. ‘It was very acute in towns, because something profound was happening in the labour market. Skills were being punished in crude terms and, as a consequence, [there was] wage stagnation.’
Whereas the cities of the north reinvented themselves, the towns did not have the scale to do so. New Labour, in its inherent eagerness to push forward, left the party’s traditional supporters behind in such places. ‘What people were hearing was “the Labour Party are talking about this stuff in the future and meanwhile my present doesn’t seem to have a place in the world anymore. And maybe there isn’t an understanding about my past.”’ He did not think this was a policy failure the party could have dealt with: ‘Was there a way of saving the shipyards or the steelworks? Was this something clever that we missed in policy terms? I think the answer to that is probably not. I don’t think there probably was a way, in a globalized world, short of a “fortress Britain” approach to saving those industries.’ But the failure, Milburn posited, was one of empathy to those who had suffered through deindustrialization. ‘What they heard was that we were not fully respecting that past and we didn’t understand the pain of the present. And that all we were focused on was a future that was out of reach.’ That created a perfect storm for the likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who put empathy and emotion at the centre of their message. Labour too often offered rational analysis without an emotional answer.
With the thoughts about jobs and skills in my mind from Burnley, I asked Milburn about his views on the trade union movement that brought him into politics. Throughout his eight years as a minister, his view remained that the UK needed ‘strong and sensible’ unions. ‘The problem is that they’re neither strong nor sensible. What you had was this dreadful structural need for trade unions to act as a counterweight to what was happening in the labour market – an increasing proportion of national wealth in developed economies going to capital, rather than going to labour – and at the same time you had trade unions who hadn’t come to terms with that. And who frankly decided that they were going to be a complete pain in the arse to a Labour government.’ That created a stand-off between the Labour government and union leaders. Again, he wondered if the party had got that aspect of its time in government wrong. He put the problem down to a ‘failure of storytelling’ needed to convince voters that the party cared about the market.
Did he feel that New Labour did not change enough while in power? He recalled a saying of Blair’s – ‘you can’t keep selling the same product five or six times over’ – and pointed to the challenges social democracy is facing in other countries. ‘The crisis is fundamentally a crisis about what is the project for social democracy in a globalized world. Tony had an answer to that, but the way that was heard did not necessarily translate.’ He was critical of both Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband for exacerbating the disconnect between the party and its traditional base. ‘It’s no longer good enough just to have the smarts, you’ve got to have the connection. You’ve got to be emotionally able to relate.’ He recalled that Blair used to constantly tell Milburn he should move his family to London, but he insisted on staying in Darlington. ‘I used to say to him, “No, we won’t, because this is our place.” And it’s still my place. Here I am’ – he turned his iPhone around to show me the countryside he was walking through – ‘I’m literally twenty miles from where I grew up. We have a house in London, my work is in London, but we’re grounded in this place. What people felt with Ed [Miliband] is that he may be the smartest guy in the world, but he certainly doesn’t get my life.’
The combination of being a rational public policymaker, while having the necessary emotional skills, is essential for a politician but one that Milburn thought the generation of Labour politicians after his have struggled with. ‘People underestimated Boris Johnson, because he’s mercurial, to put it politely. Somehow or other, he has a point of connection. It doesn’t matter he’s from Eton. He is able to translate belief into emotional connection and that, in today’s world – as Trump so amply demonstrated – is an extremely potent force, particularly if you have these structural changes, making the landscape ripe for [someone offering] an answer.’ For politicians that deemed themselves as ‘hyper-rationalist and highly technocratic’, the struggle to form an emotional connection is their greatest challenge.
You will not be surprised to hear that Milburn was no fan of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, but he felt that the schism with working-class voters began with the Brexit referendum. ‘2016 was the moment where people got to the edge of the cliff and decided they were going to jump. Once that happens, it’s quite hard to claw your way back.’ The main problem of the Corbyn leadership in the red wall was highlighted in Burnley and beyond: a sense of patriotism. ‘The critical thing that Jeremy and his contingent can never understand is what I call the innate patriotism of working-class voters. If you want to single out a factor that wasn’t Brexit, it was the fact that you had a guy who was soft on defence, who was soft on international terror.’ Corbyn’s reaction to the Salisbury poison attack, where the opposition leader was seen to give Russia the benefit of the doubt, was toxic in northern towns. ‘The poisoning in Salisbury is seared in people’s minds. One thing that people can remember is the sense he had no respect for our armed forces, flirted with the idea of separating from NATO. All of these things are part and parcel of the complex emotional map that people have, which they construct to make meaning in their lives.’
Milburn had arrived back at his countryside home by this point and settled into an armchair in his conservatory, the dog barking in the garden. As well as the problems with emotional connection, he felt the greatest challenge for Labour to overcome today is language. ‘It is no coincidence, in my view, that the two most successful electoral prime ministers in twentieth-century history, Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair, have one thing in common: an absolute understanding that the language of aspiration is a language that unites voters, whether they’re north or south, middle or working class, because that’s effectively what people are looking for in their lives.’ Milburn, who grew up in the shadow of the Consett steelworks and could see the red embers burning over the County Durham sky from his bedroom window, feels this is what is missing the most from political discussion. ‘This is the thing that so pisses me off about a lot of the debate around social mobility. It isn’t about the low aspirations of working-class kids or working-class parents. You’ve got to be kidding! If you’re of that class, of course you have aspirations.’
As with many of the other interviewees, he concluded Keir Starmer still had to find a vision to define both his leadership and the purpose of the Labour Party. ‘Churchill’s project was to see Britain through the war. Attlee’s project was to rejuvenate Britain after the war. Thatcher’s project was to liberalize the economy and society. Blair’s project was to modernize Britain. They had lots of policies, and they had values that informed their policies.’ Boris Johnson was successful in his first project, Brexit, but Milburn was less sure about whether levelling up, his second, would be as successful. ‘Keir has to define what his project is. Without a project, you simply don’t cut through and you don’t get the golden thread that allows the emotional conversation. He needs a story to connect with the public.’
The economic story of what has happened in Burnley and other places in the red wall has best been told by Diane Coyle, economics professor at the University of Cambridge. In her public and academic writing, she has long argued that the UK requires a new economic model. She put forward that the issues began with deindustrialization in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘when in those formerly strong industrial areas, a lot of economic and social problems got embedded because of long-term unemployment, poor housing and underinvestment.’ This cycle became vicious for towns such as Burnley, but also for economies around the world, as work based on knowledge came to the fore. ‘Intangible assets have become more important, so that people who have a high level of education who are working in advanced engineering or software or the other professions have gathered together increasingly in London.’ This shift, as I have seen throughout my travels, has created resentment – below and above the surface – and a belief that some people are becoming better off all the time, while others are not.
Coyle has repeatedly argued that long-standing economic policies of successive governments have made the situation worse, by encouraging investment in particular parts of the country that are ‘already productive and already have high land values’. For prospective investors, London and the south-east is always the natural draw, as these areas are the most productive. ‘That too has contributed to these vicious and virtuous cycles that have exacerbated the divergences between fortunes in different parts of the UK.’ She has campaigned for reforms to the Green Book – the guidance used by the Treasury in assessing value for money in infrastructure projects. She found that the current system meant that the unevenness in the amount of public money put into different parts of the country has increased over time. Chancellor Rishi Sunak listened to Coyle, and has replaced the Green Book with a greater focus on place. ‘As well as looking at the hard numbers about where productivity is the highest, they will be looking at how investments align with the ambition to level places up . . . raw economic efficiency is not the only criterion for making an investment decision in future.’
The other campaign Coyle has waged is against the metropolitan mindset of decision-making in the UK – namely that policymakers in all of the major government ministries are based in ornate palaces off the same road in central London. The dominance of Whitehall as a place and as a mindset has been ‘incredibly damaging’ to policymaking because ‘decisions have been made among a not very diverse group of people living in the same part of the country.’ She cited transport infrastructure as the classic example: the per capita investment is often the same in parts of the north of England as the south, but the infrastructure base was so low that the lived experience was vastly different. ‘These were people who had never had to take the train from Liverpool to Manchester and didn’t know how overcrowded and unreliable it was. Or the fact that many of the trains were buses on tracks, literally [the maligned Pacer trains, finally discontinued in May 2020].’12 She argued that policymakers need to better understand the fabric of life of people who are not professional civil servants and live in different places.
The UK economy is one of the most unbalanced and unequal of advanced countries. Coyle described it as ‘flying on one engine’, in this case London. And when there is overreliance on one engine, as has been witnessed in recent decades, problems emerge. ‘You’re limiting your capacity to grow as a nation if you’re only doing it in one place. That’s the hard economic reason for it [rebalancing the economy] but it matters for political reasons, too. We’ve seen those very clearly in voting patterns and discontent in recent years.’ Until the Brexit vote in 2016, she believed Tory and Labour governments were not paying enough attention to regional variations, which in turn played into the Leave argument. ‘It’s a combination of places around England – and around the rest of the United Kingdom – not having any control over their own destiny or political accountability for decisions. The consequences of that fed through to a weaker economic performance, and a lower increase in living standards over time compared to London and the south-east.’
Coyle agreed that skills, along with infrastructure, are vital. ‘People need to develop skills that will suit them for higher wages and more productive jobs. And you’ve got to align that with bringing in the kind of employers who want those kinds of workers.’ Britain’s economy suffers from what is called a ‘long tail’ on productivity: the top end is very efficient, but it trails off quite rapidly and large parts are lagging behind. Coyle noted that all advanced economies have seen this tail grow but it’s a particular issue in Britain, because the whole range of smaller productive firms have struggled. Better access to finance is one example she cited of how to improve this. And again, skills and training are crucial.
On the debate between cities or towns as the economic focus of the future, Coyle is firmly on the side of cities. ‘I’m in the cities camp, because of the way that advanced economies have become much more dependent on knowledge . . . people have been congregating in cities because of the way you can exchange and build supply chains.’ She agreed with Lisa Nandy that working from home post-pandemic may ‘change it a bit’, but differed in thinking it would not be in a significant way. The successive lockdowns during 2020 and 2021 have acted as an ‘X-ray on society’, highlighting the existing problems and making them worse. ‘Because of all the disadvantages that certain places have accumulated over the past thirty years, it’s places with poor housing or crowded housing or poor air quality where the impact of the pandemic has been worse in terms of health. And it’s the vulnerable economies where the shutdowns have made things even worse.’
What does success in levelling up look like in Coyle’s view? Although investments in physical infrastructure are important, she believes it is still about the whole package of jobs, economic resilience and a palpable sense that life is improving. ‘I think of it in a broader way as people’s lives are getting better wherever they are. Some of that will be high-skill jobs, high pay and the productivity growth that shows up in the statistics.’ The country is never going to be completely and wholly equal, nor does she think these challenges can be rapidly resolved. ‘We have a big gap, a big challenge . . . we ought to be thinking about a minimum offer for everybody around the country, no matter where they live, in terms of public services, transport, access to nature and a sense that things are getting better, because that’s what we’ve lost.’
And does she think that Boris Johnson is serious and can deliver, despite the reservations of some Labour politicians? ‘From all the conversations I’ve had with Treasury officials and ministers, I think they do take very seriously the need to deliver on levelling up. But expectations have been raised now, it’s a big challenge. And I’m not sure anybody has really got their minds around the scale of the challenge that we face and also the interaction between the economics and the politics of it.’ Crucially, Coyle agreed with Andy Burnham, George Osborne, Michael Heseltine and almost every other political figure that more devolution is needed in decision-making. We concurred that levelling up cannot be done from Whitehall.
My visit concluded near the train station at Burnley College, whose origins were as a mechanics institute 150 years ago; it now has over 7,500 students on a gleaming new campus that speaks to the importance the town puts on further education.13 Karen Buchanan has worked at the college for twenty-seven years and has been principal for the last three. In her spacious office, she defined the mission for upgrading the town, trying to improve its skills offering and taking some on to university level education. ‘Our students, a lot of them come from families where no one had been to university before, they are the first generation to go to university.’ Her push has seen some Burnley students go to Oxford and Cambridge, but there are also 2,000 apprentices studying at the college, many going into the town’s manufacturing sector.
More than half of the college’s students are aged sixteen to eighteen, recent secondary-school leavers. For those who have left school with inadequate maths or English qualifications, the aim is to make the subjects ‘fun and enjoyable’ to achieve a basic level of proficiency. Buchanan is also closely involved with the college’s programmes to help adults reskill after they have been made redundant, so they ‘fit into other companies whose order books are thriving’, whether that be in aerospace or solar panels. She likened her role to a recruitment agency, ensuring there are local skills to match local jobs. Employers are even involved in the college’s curriculum.
Her aim is to ensure that every adult who enrols in the college has a guarantee of a job at the end. ‘The whole premise of that is reskilling local adults, so that they can stay living where they are but bring in an income for their family.’ One macabre example of this adaptability came during the coronavirus pandemic, when there was a greater need for black rubberized body bags due to the huge number of deaths. One company that works closely with Burnley College, specializing in composite materials, had to diversify rapidly. ‘They’ve been able to use some of our kit and trial prototypes before they change their equipment to make sure they’re producing the right things.’
Although the college had 3,500 sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds – its core demographic – the town’s birth rate has recently declined. They have attempted to make up the gap by encouraging students from elsewhere: Manchester, the Lake District, Yorkshire and elsewhere in Lancashire. The college is on track for another major building expansion and is hopeful of expanding its adult education facilities. Buchanan said that the future will be based on expanding its higher education offering that provides university degrees. ‘We’ve got a clear vision and plans for how we want to grow university offers, as well as, obviously, everything else.’ She is hopeful that they will encourage more students to Burnley, which in turn will boost the shopping centre and the town’s wider economy.
Jayne Wynee, who oversees marketing for the college, also joined our discussion, and I asked her about her feeling of the place. Before I arrived in Burnley, I was expecting to find somewhere a little tetchy, yet everyone I met was warm and welcoming. ‘There’s a real pride in Burnley. For us as an organization, with the campus being so close to the town centre, it feels like it’s an extension of the college. There’s been a huge focus with the council on it becoming a university town,’ she said. Having spent most of my time in the town on foot, it feels compact and united. Wynee agreed, ‘Everybody is kind of connected and they’re proud and really wanting to share in the successes of Burnley. That absolutely comes from the football club.’ The college also hosts lots of free events to encourage people from the town to visit its campus, and holds an annual science festival to encourage interest in STEM subjects and promote the town’s engineering prowess. ‘We wanted to support our local schools in terms of getting kids excited about science, engaging parents with science.’
Both Buchanan and Wynee praised Antony Higginbotham for his eagerness to improve the college. ‘Since becoming an MP, he’s been brilliant for the college and for the town. He’s brought a youthful vitality and energy that we’ve not seen before and he’s been here to talk to the students about politics,’ Buchanan said. Several government ministers have virtually visited the town and she was hopeful that Boris Johnson would come soon. She added, ‘We did a presentation to the whole of the Department for Education – not the politicians, but the civil servants who are there all the time. There were 180 of them online. I’ve worked here for eighteen years and have never had such a good day as I had virtually touring Burnley College.’
The last stop on my road trip prompted the greatest surprise. Burnley, in many respects, is a model of how former industrial towns can be revived. Small pieces of infrastructure investment can go a long way to boosting their connectivity – like the reinstatement of the Todmorden Curve. The 500 metres of railway track directly link Burnley to Manchester for the first time since the 1960s Beeching cuts, and cut half an hour from journey times when it reopened in 2015.14 The Johnson government’s pledge to ‘reverse’ the closure of rural railways is unlikely to see swathes of new stations and lines opened, but small strategic improvements like this can be made. Burnley College is an example of how employers, the community and businesses can integrate better. A new £18 million shopping complex will provide the town centre with a new cinema and restaurants, which residents hoped would appeal to the student population.15 I left feeling a great sense of optimism for Burnley’s future.
But I was also aware of the biggest challenge in levelling up is going to be structurally improving jobs and skills. Burnley needs to give its young people a reason to stay, if they want, to do the kind of work that is also available elsewhere. Rob Halfon, the Tory MP who chairs Parliament’s Education Select Committee, has plenty of ideas about how this could be done. Inspired by the work of the college in Burnley, he believes every town should have an Adult Community Learning Centre, to encourage people of all ages who lack the confidence to enrol in a further education college. He also believes the government should offer a ‘lifelong learning account’, where every eighteen-year-old is given an account with credit they can spend on adult learning of their choice. The Johnson government announced this policy in May 2021, to his delight. Halfon also believes that companies should be given skills credits from the government to improve workers.
The stigma that further education is inferior to university education also needs to be addressed. Halfon set out to me what he calls the ‘dinner party test’. When this is cracked, then he believes the long-lasting struggle with skills will be addressed: ‘Let’s say you invited me to dinner and there was a young person there. That young person says, “I’m going to Oxbridge.” Everyone will go, “Wow, how amazing!” If someone next to them said, “I’m doing an apprenticeship in engineering at Jaguar”, I’d bet you hardly bat an eyelid about it. That is what’s wrong with our system. What it should be is when someone who is doing an apprenticeship at a dinner everyone starts to ask them, “Oh, that’s incredible! What do you have to do? How did you get that?” We have a complete contrast, but I’ve seen myself how German and Swiss businesses train their workers because they believe it’s their duty to do so. They believe vocational education is prestigious and important.’ The emphasis New Labour put on university education was key to Blair’s grand vision for renewing the country, but it also had the impact of pushing anyone to apply – regardless of grades – with little thought given to whether academic study was the right path for them.
There is no doubt that life is still a struggle for too many in Burnley, but the town has many of the qualities needed to improve its future: a high-skilled engineering base; a positive collective attitude in its community. Nearly all of the red wall seats have distribution warehouses, like Boohoo, and they do provide valuable employment. But such jobs are unlikely to deliver on the hopes of the levelling-up agenda. There is a danger that, without intervention from government, these places will drift into an economic base that does not provide stable employment and a resilient local economy.
After hearing the complaints about Boohoo, I spoke to two policy experts who have pondered how to balance the benefits of a flexible labour market with the blight of insecure work. James Bloodworth, author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, spent time working in an Amazon distribution warehouse and discovered a similar dislocation among their new employees. Bloodworth found that the enthusiasm for an alternative to life on benefits soon disappeared with the reality of working for a big multinational, without trade unions and without security.
When Amazon built a new warehouse in Rugeley, north of Birmingham, the local authority constructed the building and built special roads with a certain type of tarmac to cope with the weight of the lorries. The same was true in Swansea, with millions invested to encourage the company to locate there. With some longer-term thinking, Bloodworth argued that the same investment could eventually reap improvements for other sectors. ‘Do we want twenty-first century employment in Britain in these communities to be all Amazon warehouses? This is not really a short-term solution but if we build up the skills base, it’s going to be more likely that we attract those companies.’
Much of Bloodworth’s research has focused on the isolated new communities among migrants that have emerged in these towns, which do not imprint themselves on political debate. ‘They often can’t vote, they don’t appreciate the job protections.’ He found that many of the new jobs in these towns had limited career progression. ‘The problem with some of the jobs like Amazon is that there is no real advancement unless you can go directly into management.’ Bloodworth believes trade unions need to be strengthened to tackle the individualistic economies that are found in towns such as Burnley.
Matthew Taylor, head of the Number 10 policy unit under Tony Blair, was commissioned by Theresa May to review the nature of work with a particular focus on the gig economy. He praised the benefits of a flexible labour market – something the economy will ‘always need’ – but similarly to Bloodworth, he believes that workers need to be empowered. ‘Trade unionism is actually an aid to effective staff engagement and even assists productivity because you hear your workers’ voices complaining about things which adversely affect them.’ He argued in his Good Work report that workers’ rights should be strengthened and the thresholds for giving more rights to casual workers be lowered.
Taylor was enthusiastic for expanding the higher education sector, and growing the UK’s ‘export-focused, high tech, high investment sectors’. During his research for the report, he found the biggest distinction between England’s towns was whether they had a student economy or academies. ‘If they haven’t, then unless they’ve got another significant employer of skilled labour, you’re talking about a mixture of public sector work, relatively poorly paid service economy work including gig work, casual work, zero-hours work. And then you have obviously a smattering of the professionals that you have in any town such as estate agents and dentists.’ For those who stay in those places, the state of work has deteriorated. ‘The sense of the paternalistic employers, the notion of job for life, that has obviously declined, and it does feel for people more insecure. And for many people, it’s very difficult to support a comfortable lifestyle on the basis of their employment.’
But Halfon also believed that central government action needs to be taken on further education. ‘I would create individual learning accounts, for example, so I would give everybody a lump sum of money which they can only spend on education, that they can spend at any point in their lives, so it’s not just graduates who keep on learning.’
Taylor also believed that devolution and local power is crucial. ‘All the evidence in the world is that you don’t achieve levelling up unless you devolve serious power.’
Having clocked up 6,000 miles on the Mini – desperately in need of a wash and a service – my six-month long, U-shaped tour of the red wall was complete. I was ready for the four-hour drive south, back to Westminster, to meet Michael Gove and Kier Starmer, who will be among those to define the future of the red wall. But an unexpected by-election in a part of northern England that had many traits of Labour’s former heartlands necessitated a detour eastwards, to meet another two key players in the future of the red wall. So instead of heading south, I took a two-hour drive across the Yorkshire Dales and back to the north-east, to Hartlepool, a remote northern port town in the Tees Valley, for the beginning of the end of this road trip.
The extra miles were worth it: 6 May 2021 produced a seismic result that challenged even Boris Johnson’s election victory of 2019 for its significance and shock.