The England That Lies Beneath the Surface
Last year’s Brexit vote exposed the depth of the divide between our towns and cities. We have long understood the differences between North and South but the chasm exposed by Brexit was remarkable. Across England, and across the UK, look North, South, East or West and the picture is the same. London, Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Norwich, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. Despite their many differences, cities across Britain voted resoundingly to Remain. But outside of those metropolitan centres, the picture is very different.
In one sense, it always has been. Diverse, liberal, fast-changing cities have often been at odds with the stability, (small c) conservativism and communitarian values that are much more prevalent in towns.
And too seldom have we heard those latter voices. In 1971, the author Jeremy Seabrook bucked the trend, travelling to Blackburn - not to tell a story about the lives of the men, women and children who powered the Lancashire mills but to allow them to speak for themselves. Their fascinating accounts were set against a backdrop of a declining textile industry, recent immigration from India and Pakistan and huge social change that was both liberating and unsettling for the people living through it.
The stories they tell – about immigration, stagnant wages and families and communities in transition – are as resonant now as they were almost half a century ago. And Seabrook’s conclusions are equally relevant. Blackburn, he said, is “not a town full of racists, any more than it is a stronghold of liberal humanitarian values”.
This is the communitarian as opposed to the liberal England found in towns and cities across the country, each with their own very real problems but with strengths in equal measure.
I was born in one of those great cities, Manchester, that gave us the first free library, the free trade hall and the Battle of Waterloo. Like many cities it has since become – not least thanks to the last Labour Government - an area of strong economic growth, where jobs and opportunities are available to many and society is largely multicultural, tolerant and diverse.
I have made my home in Wigan, a town with a strong history of solidarity. It gave the world Gerrard Winstanley, stood shoulder to shoulder with Indian cotton pickers and came together in the 1980s to support striking miners. It symbolises the importance of towns in Britain, each with their own character, shared history and experience, where the sense of community is palpable and people are strongly invested in the local area, intrinsic to their own future and their families’.
Perhaps because of this I am acutely aware that towns and cities have always had clear differences. But increasingly it feels that these are two countries. Two groups with different experiences, priorities and conflicting political outlooks, united on the surface by very little at all.
And much of this is recent. Over the last two decades, the attitudes of those living in towns have shifted significantly, widening the gulf with cities. On LGBT rights, immigration and a whole host of areas the differences are stark. But nowhere was this more apparent than in the changing attitudes to the EU. Between 1997 and 2015 support for leaving the EU more than doubled amongst those living outside cities. It took less than 20 years for Britain’s towns to transition from seeing the EU as part of the solution to part of the problem.
This is not unique to Britain. In America, the Democrats have long been aware of the party’s “rural problem” but few predicted that 100,000 voters, predominantly in the rural parts of crucial swing states, would gift Donald Trump the presidency. Across America, “populous urban centres” voted for Hillary Clinton by a factor of almost 2:1. The same ratio that voters here in Britain, living in similar urban centres, voted to Remain. Two countries – each facing very different but equally symbolic and ideological choices – facing growing division.
In France, they call this the “halo effect”. In the United States the ‘big sort’. Here, the philosopher Julian Baggini calls it ‘hefting’ – a farming term, actually about cows, the process by which populations naturally sort ourselves into territories and communities we feel comfortable in. For some of us it’s the liberal and ever-changing cities; for others, the community and stability of the towns.
These are increasingly, as the academic Will Jennings puts it, Two Englands, each with their own distinct set of attitudes and outlooks. One that believes the future will be better than the past, the other that the past was better than the future.
It has become fashionable to call the latter of these groups the “left behind”. So many politicians and commentators, including me, have lapsed into this politically convenient shorthand. But in truth it simply doesn’t resonate with the millions who live in towns.
Because towns aren't wastelands where people have nothing left to lose and dream of escaping to the cities. Even the ten most deprived towns in the country have better access to public services, housing and a decent environment than some of the most affluent areas. These are often precisely the reasons we choose to live there; because we value the sense of community, stability and quality of life it affords.
To label those who make this choice “left behind” is as blinkered as it is patronising. What’s more it implies they have been left behind by the progress of affluent cities, which airbrushes the reality of city life for so many people - a daily battle against poverty and hardship, with a front row seat to wealth and opportunity but no share in its advantages.
And it is misleading because it tells us falsely that Brexit was a last throw of the dice for people who have nothing. But on doorsteps across the country, it wasn’t in areas of complete social breakdown that people shook with anger during the referendum, but precisely in those communities where people still have much left to lose. This vote, the last line of defence, for the things that matter.
What is striking about these two distinct groups is how much they share an overwhelming distrust with the political and economic system in this country. The crisis in politics is far more widespread than those who have nothing. It is felt just as strongly by those who benefit from growth and opportunities as it is those who have fallen victim to it.
But for those who prioritise rootedness, stability and continuity, there has been a growing sense that not only has mainstream politics failed to comprehend, speak for or respond to the changes in recent decades, but it is deeply disrespectful towards their lives and choices.
We see it in the contempt for patriotism, attachment to place and desire for continuity. Too often life in towns characterised as a dull, stifling, provincial life, inferior to the alternative. And so too often when we talk about “listening” we mean listening so we can explain to people what is best for them. Do we understand the damage that does? It doesn’t simply reflect the gulf but actually helps to widen it.
And this has left a political vacuum in towns that populists have willingly filled.
It is built on a political system in which too many of us are simply not represented. Cities have dominated political thinking for decades, denying voice to the lived experience in towns. Too often, as with Brexit, cities are wrongly treated as proxies for national opinion. And while city leaders have rightly gained a national voice, there is no comparable platform for civic leaders in towns.
For Labour, with five times as many members in Islington as Wigan, is it any wonder that the issues that matter to millions of us are almost entirely absent from the national political debate?
This is amplified by a media that (with some rare and important exceptions) is overwhelmingly London centric, with opportunities for talented young journalists to break through from the regions becoming increasingly scarce and much likely to get worse as local newspapers disappear.
It’s fuelled by an economic model that treats cities as engines of growth which, at best, drag surrounding towns along in the wake of metropolitan prosperity. It has meant life has got harder, less secure and less hopeful for too many people in towns. The cause is economic but the impact is social and political.
This deeper sense of loss is encapsulated for me in the demise of Upper Morris Street Working Man’s Club in my constituency, the headquarters for my first election campaign. Once a thriving hub in the community, the collapse of the mining industry and the replacement of the nearby rugby league stadium with a Tesco led to its decline, and eventually it was demolished. Today, that site is a McDonalds, employing young people on minimum wage, zero hours contracts. It tells a story of what has been lost. Those shared institutions as Jesse Norman said, that “shape us as we help to shape them”.
It’s impossible to ignore the destructive impact global capital has had on our sense of belonging, sweeping away the familiar and with it, as Paul Kingsnorth puts it, our “mooring in space and time”.
But this wasn’t just an accident, it was a clear political choice, summed up for me in these words:
“I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer…
“The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition.
“Unforgiving of frailty.
“No respecter of past reputations.
“It has no custom and practice.
“It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.”
This is the vision the Tony Blair set out in 2005 enabling a consensus that outlasted New Labour through Osborne’s Tories. To concentrate investment in the cities and embrace that culture of change, and in doing so stake out a future for the country that is alien to the values of millions.
As a result, cities have dominated political and economic thinking for decades. And while that focus and investment in Labour years led to huge improvements in many lives in the inner cities, it is economically, socially and politically unsustainable.
New times require a convincing alternative that rejects both a rose-tinted nostalgia for the past and the false inevitability of a future that millions of us don’t want.
This will demand political leadership. For Labour the task is not only to reject populism, but to learn how to defeat it. This false and damaging distinction between a single, uniform sovereign people and an illegitimate, unresponsive political elite denies the growing rift between two groups of people; the messy, often contradictory reality that demands the very political leadership that is being currently being delegitimised.
This leadership must be both political and emotional. Anxiety is now the overwhelming political problem that progressive politicians must solve. How to offer security, hope and solidarity in the face of the loneliness and isolation, an economy based on flexible labour markets that undermines our jobs and wages and treats us as disposable good. When our favoured tool - the state - is too often seen as “other” to people and their efforts. It manifests itself in low pay, job insecurity, youth unemployment, older people growing old without dignity and warmth - anger, division and alienation.
In truth it is about power - who has it and who doesn't. It’s why we need:
Local devolution that is real and meaningful, so decisions about the things that matter to us are made much closer to us, with our involvement. Not just the transfer of power from one group of men in Whitehall to another in the Town Hall, but a politics based on consent, built from the ground up.
The current devolution model is built on the same tired trickle-down model from cities to towns that has proven so destructive. The plan for the first and most radical devolution city region in Greater Manchester is to invest in infrastructure projects that carry people into Manchester to access decent jobs, while building a ring of warehouses around the outskirts, offering minimum wage, zero hours, zero opportunity jobs to the rest. This must change. It has been enabled by the current settlement that allows for no scrutiny, no accountability and no voice for the people. In short – no power, replicating the national dilemma.
It needs a national response too. As IPPR’s Britain in the 2020s project has shown new technologies – artificial intelligence, automation, the Internet of Things –have the potential to create an era of widespread abundance, or a second machine age that radically concentrates economic power.
This means holding power to account wherever it is found.
In the market where capital is increasingly unaccountable. A handful of companies who own our data and control vital public goods. Some, like Walmart, larger and more powerful than nation states.
It sounds futuristic but it is a major contribution to the frustration and powerlessness in towns across the country. I saw it for myself a few weeks ago in one of my local community pharmacies. Labour are currently, rightly calling on the government not to cut grants to community pharmacies. But a central problem is not the state, but the market - the control that a small handful of companies have over the distribution of drugs. If the same company that distributes our drugs also owns Boots, what hope do community pharmacies have of competing for them? The result is that when drugs are scarce, my elderly constituent cannot walk to his local chemist and get the flu drugs he needs.