The Trent Barton threes bus crosses some hard country. Hard and troubled pit towns long into
decline. Hard political battles of recent times. Hard days ahead.
It takes you through the conjoined towns of Sutton and Kirkby, in Ashfield. Lee Anderson turf. It
takes you to Mansfield, snatched by the Tories seven years ago with the proud Ben Bradley
taking the seat.
Conservative coups in the hard-Brexit seats of Mansfield in 2017, and then Ashfield in 2019,
were major moments in post-referendum politics, and bitter losses for Labour.
This is mining country. Or it was. These are the ‘red wall’ seats we used to talk about, which for
a century sent an almost unbroken line of Labour MPs to Westminster.
To lose these was to confirm what so many in the party had long feared: the once carbon-strong
bonds between the former pit towns and Labour had finally been broken. The towns had
changed. Or Labour had changed. Or both.
I arrived in Mansfield early in the afternoon. The election was in two days. The political battle
had been a rough one but the town itself didn’t seem at all moved, either by the prospect of
change or for more of the same.
It took half an hour of walking around the town before I saw anyone doing any campaigning:
three elderly men manning a foldout table for Reform in the corner of the Market Place. There
were more posters still fixed to lamp posts from Mansfield Armed Forces Day the previous
Sunday, and the military parade through the town, than signs that an election was underway.
There was Ben Bradley’s constituency office of course, closed down, he and his team hoped, only
temporarily. A few doors down, hanging from a first-floor window of the Linx Hair Studio, a
homemade banner read: “BEN BRADLEY. The best thing to happen to MANSFIELD in a lifetime.
DO NOT LOSE HIM.”
As I stood there noting down the words, I picked up the sound of a game of Sticky 13s – bingo,
but with cards – going on in Ye Olde Ramme pub. Clearly the pub was busy; very busy for 3
o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. Inside a man was picking out cards and calling them over the
microphone, ‘Seven of diamonds.. three of clubs…’, met with the occasional boozy whoop when
someone’s luck came in.
There are a lot of pubs in Mansfield. There used to be even more, but a lot have gone bust, as
have so many of the cafes and shops. There are a lot of Permanently Closed – Redirect Mail signs
in boarded-up windows in Mansfield.
Stopping into the Bridge Tavern for a cold drink out of the sun, I had a brief chat with the
barmaid about the election two days away, and asked her what she thought about Ben Bradley.
Neither seemed to be of much interest, but the question had hit a far more pressing worry –
about the state of the town.
There used to be a lot more shops, and the market used to be a lot busier, she made it a point to
say. The Four Seasons shopping centre used to be much better. Things had “got a lot worse since
Covid”.
There’s no doubt that the pandemic hit these towns hard, harder than the cities. But Mansfield’s
troubles, like those of towns all over north Notts, began much further back than that.
The familiar story of the strikes and closures that devastated mining country shouldn’t need
repeating. But the consequences of that fatal end certainly do. Because now, four decades later,
towns like Mansfield, and Sutton, and Kirkby – and thousands like them around Britain, far
beyond coalfield country – are in big trouble.
No doubt the many Labour activists out on the doors that day were telling voters that it was all
down to 14 years of Tory government. And again, there is no doubt that reckless austerity and
years of unforgivable underinvestment in public services, infrastructure, jobs and transport
have all taken their toll.
But the dead and dying towns of England did not suffer some sudden arrest in 2010, having
otherwise been in good health. When Britain’s economic power started to fade in the long, tired,
post-war slump, so these towns began their own painful slide.
People fought hard to hang on. In Mansfield thousands came out in 1984 for a mass rally against
pit closures, as did hundreds of thousands in demos all over the country, because they knew
that once the industry and jobs were gone, the towns would follow. The colliery closed four
years later.
Progress has no sympathy for places. With globalism, the coal could be bought in from overseas;
the ships and cars and trains and computers and clothes and gadgets not yet conceived of could
and would be built cheaper in plants thousands of miles away.
If the industry had to go, then those who stood over it all had a moral duty to stay and see that
something would replace it. They didn’t. They just shuffled quietly away and hoped the towns
would rebound somehow and something else would come along for the hundreds of thousands
of jobless workers and it would all end happily.
–
Walking down the tired, faintly menacing streets of Mansfield, even the hot July sun could not
brighten the sad, familiar story.
The dull red brick-paved pedestrian strips mark the invariable formula of the struggling town
with its shabby charity shops, money shops, and vape shops; cheap nail bars, slots arcades,
bookies and clearance clothes stores; grim, uninviting pubs festooned with St George’s flags and
Sky Sports banners; down-to-earth cafs beside European food markets and Turkish barbers.
The towns are tired and old. This is the phenomenon identified by Centre for Towns back in
2018 and articulated by Wigan MP Lisa Nandy, that in places where “industry has been replaced
by minimum wage, zero hope jobs”, populations of towns “once younger than nearby cities, are
now significantly older”.
There were people of working age, and clearly working, out on the streets of Mansfield that
afternoon. But there seemed to be just as many elderly people on mobility scooters, passing red
faced daydrinkers and sallow, grizzled rough-sleepers pacing wild-eyed from person to person
asking for change.
This is not to sneer or single out. Quite the opposite. The same sad malaise is repeated
throughout England, in the hundreds, thousands of once-proud places now in a fatal spiral. This
was a proud town. I remember it growing up down the road in Nottingham, in the 80s and 90s.
There were a lot more shops, and the market was much busier.
Over the years there have been efforts to turn it around. There are things going on right now. On
the very sorry-looking Stockwell Gate, where my walk took me, Mansfield District Council is
developing the abandoned building that was the Beales department store into a multi-agency
hub and community centre. A board on the outside of the empty building reads ‘Mansfield: A
flourishing place where people are happy and healthy’.
The project is being paid for by a chunk of the £20 million of Levelling Up money that has gone
to the town. Levelling Up had its political critics, but few, I suspect, among the people who
regularly walk along the terribly deprived Stockwell Gate in Mansfield, nor the residents of the
nearby Bellamy and Oak Tree estates, which are in line for £7.4 million of funding.
In the 2019 English Indices of Deprivation ranking, the Oak Tree estate was ranked 154th lowest
nationally out of 32,844 neighbourhoods. Ravensdale just down the road was the 36th lowest.
Far away in the cities the liberal middle classes, still blind with anger over Brexit and all who
voted for it, sneered at Levelling Up. Because they could afford to. Less loudly, they sneered at
the dismal Leave-voting towns that needed the money too.
Under Jeremy Corbyn Labour moved closer to the same urban bourgeoisie, and let the troubled
working-class towns slip away completely. So that in the election of 2017, nationally Labour
recorded its highest vote among wealthy ABC1 voters since 1979, while the Conservatives had
their highest level of support from working class C2DE voters since 1979.
With all hope of Teresa May calling a second referendum totally dead, Tory and Lib Dem
remainers were forced to vote Labour as a last gasp attempt to stop Brexit. The result was an
artificial inflation of Labour’s 2017 vote, thanks largely, once again, to the urban middle classes.
As Ipsos put it, “The middle classes swung to Labour, while working classes swung to the
Conservatives”. Labour lost Mansfield but gained Kensington.
Drifting away from Stockwell Gate in no particular direction, I passed the spot where during the
2017 election campaign I watched John McDonnell address a small rally pledging to fight against
the bad polls and keep the seat. Carry on down that road out of the town and you reach the field
where a few months later Jeremy Corbyn addressed a Jeremy Corbyn rally, pledging to do all he
could to win it back. At the ballots two years later the Conservative majority went up by 17%. –
Feeling a little weary, I decided to leave Mansfield. One route out of the town centre takes you
on foot under the grand Mansfield Viaduct – a looming, arched monument to past optimism –
and up to the bus station. From there it’s a short ride on the threes along potholed roads to
Sutton-in-Ashfield.
It’s sad to say, but Sutton has a bleakness, made more painful and more obvious by its relatively
smaller size. Maybe it’s because I got there later in the day and a lot of the shops had closed, but
the streets were half-deserted. The biggest group of people I saw was a cluster of smokers
outside The Picture House – the local Wetherspoons.
Before he became a national figure of sorts, Lee Anderson was known around here as the
Labour councillor who once hired a digger to plonk a huge boulder in the entrance to a field
outside the town, to block a group of travellers trying to get in.
That incident, and the rebuke from his own party, directly led to Anderson’s defection to the
Tories in 2018 and, ultimately, to the Reform Party infamy he enjoys today. In that journey lies
the rough political metamorphosis of these troubled towns.
All the good the EU did for Britain was not divided equally. Our entry into the EEC and the
European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) timed painfully closely with the beginning of the
end of coal mining, heavy industry, and manufacturing, and the start of a period of to-this-day
rapidly accelerating social and demographic change.
More than 50 years later, towns where the plants and pits were based lag well behind the rest of
the country on metrics of health and wealth, and bear the biggest grudge against Europe.
These are constituencies that recorded some of the highest Leave votes anywhere in the country – 70.9% in Mansfield, 69.8% in Ashfield. They are also the places of some of the lowest opportunity and most declining wealth; potent fuel for anger seeking something to blame.
In the eight years running up to the EU referendum, Resolution Foundation analysis of the ONS
Wealth and Assets Survey 2018 revealed, the wealth of the poorest households in the East
Midlands declined by a sickening 42% – the biggest drop of any region. Outside London, the East
Midlands has the biggest divide between wealthy and poor households anywhere in the
country.
These are not isolated statistics. These are just a few of the numbers charting and explaining the
sadness and anger that has built up in the left-behind towns over decades of economic decline.
The causal link between deprivation, despair, and susceptibility to hateful right-wing radicalism
should need no explaining. As Hope Not Hate expressed it, in its 2018 Fear, Hope and Loss
report, “where opportunities are greater, and where people feel more in control of their own
lives, and optimistic about their successes, these communities become more resilient to hateful
narratives and to political manifestations of this hatred”.
Whether it’s in the towns or the cities, allow a total void of opportunity, control and optimism go
on too long and you risk what finally happened in early August: the eruption all over England of
violent mobs marauding the streets, trashing their own libraries, attacking cops, and setting fire
to hotels housing asylum seekers. Stating so is not to justify any of that vile behaviour; it is to
attempt to explain it.
If respectable Britain really wants to deal with this ugly problem, it could start in the troubled, hopeless
towns; treat the prime causes, and not merely sit in judgement on the symptoms.
It will take some rethinking. Some bad and long-held middle-class habits will have to change. At
the far-right protest and left counter-protest I attended in Nottingham there were more
complex divisions on display than the facile fascist vs anti-fascist narrative would suggest. There
was the gaping class divide, weaponised scornfully by the better-off side.
“Go back to Wetherspoons! Go back to Wetherspoons!” was chanted by the ‘anti-fascist’ side at
one point, with some braying laughter thrown in. A little while later they all screamed “Fascist
scum off our streets! Racist scum off our streets!” because one of the scum had begun playing
God Save the King on a little trumpet.
Snobbishly jeering at the lives some people live and raging at the sound of God Save the King under the guise of anti-fascist resistance is not solving the problem, it is adding to it. To detach the rage from its context; to dismiss the decades of sadness and anger from which it grows, is a convenient get-out taken readily by some at the risk of everyone.
It is more comforting, of course. Decontextualisation licences superiority. Because if not, if being drawn to “hateful narratives and to political manifestations of this hatred” is simply a grim consequence of living amid decline, then the righteousness of the liberal ‘anti-fascist’ is nothing more than an unearned virtue of being born in a better place.
–
Retaking Mansfield this time around caused a huge sigh of relief in Labour circles. The shame of 2017 and 2019 was cleansed and Labour was back where it belonged. But if the party now in government thinks that’s the end of the story, it’s in for a big shock. As Lisa Nandy put it in 2018, “For decades… towns have been trying to tell us there’s a problem”. For years we have all been ignoring them, or simply sneering and judging. And finally that problem has grown too huge to ignore.
Beating back the thugs and locking up the worse of them might suppress the mob for a while. But it is hardly a victory.
Far more serious, yet intrinsically linked, is the state of the dead towns of England. There are hundreds of them, thousands, in the harsh hinterlands between the cities, huddled unhappily below the bypass roads and flyovers.
Without serious, enlightened development and careful economic planning, the sadness of these places is only going to grow, and that will keep feeding the rage.
That heavy task is now Labour’s, and there will be no easy solutions. This is hard country. It has been through hard battles. And unless the system that has neglected it for so long is willing to change, many more hard years lie ahead.