It can be found in the opening pages of a book published in 2014: one of the most influential ideas in modern British politics, given its first airing in the days when Ukip was on a roll, and the forces that would propel Britain towards Brexit were decisively coming into view. “Over recent decades,” goes the text, “deep social and economic changes have hit particular groups within British society particularly hard: older, less skilled and less educated working-class voters. These are the groups we describe as the ‘left behind’ in modern Britain, who could once rely on the strength of their numbers to ensure a voice in each of the mainstream parties.”
Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain was written by the academics Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford; its thesis was that the two main parties had ignored these people for decades, and their resulting resentment was now exploding into the open. In this sense, the term “left behind” was initially focused on neglect by politics and politicians – but it also implicitly referred to matters of culture and economics, and as the national media became newly interested in people and places way beyond the M25, the concept was quickly stretched.
Soon enough, the formulation “left behind” took on a deeply condescending aspect, as if people in more affluent cities and suburbs were happily gliding into the future, while many towns were clinging to a sepia-tinted vision of a mislaid Albion and hoping to somehow get back there. The notion that all support for Brexit was reducible to a hopeless nostalgia, tinged with outright racism; a yearning, as the venerable Vince Cable later put it, for “a world where passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink”.
Since May, I have been putting together a new series of Anywhere But Westminster videos for the Guardian, with my colleague John Domokos. We have been regularly visiting Walsall, a post-industrial town 10 miles north of Birmingham. Eight years of cuts have hacked back some of its most basic public services, and its pinched shopping district is now dominated by a closed branch of Marks & Spencer. Much of the town is multicultural and loyal to the Labour party, but, particularly in whiter neighbourhoods to the north of the centre, Walsall’s 68% vote to leave the EU superficially confirms the “left behind” stereotype; the future is something happening elsewhere.
In fact, as with so many other towns, what Walsall represents is the social and economic cutting edge, albeit in a very different way from more affluent parts of the country. The future it is entering is not manifested in the gleam of luxury flats, or the promise of lives rendered blissfully easy by technology: the town is troubled, and clearly in need of help, but that does not make it any less modern. Walsall’s economic past revolved around leather and metalwork; now, one of its most notable features is a giant TK Maxx distribution centre next to the M6. There is employment to be had in and around the town, but it is increasingly insecure, and vulnerable to automation, a fact brought into sharp focus by my conversation with a man whose work in the logistics division of Iceland is built on only 20 hours of guaranteed work a week. “Nothing’s solid,” he told me: a pretty pithy encapsulation of the 21st-century condition.
Two weeks ago I spent the afternoon at the gates of the vast Amazon distribution centre in the former coal town of Rugeley in Staffordshire, where people from Walsall are brought to work in buses, the blacked-out windows of which give off a strange sense of secrecy and paranoia. The centre sits in the shadow of a disused power station and next to a new Premier Inn and a branch of McDonald’s. It is one of the most surreal corners of England I’ve set foot in: a parade of auguries of the future in which we may all soon find ourselves.
Walsall confounds one more stereotype: the idea that Britain is now full of communities devoid of what some call social capital, and unable to organise anything for themselves. I spent a day following the work of an amazing organisation called the Old Hall People’s Partnership, whose activities run from benefits advice through libraries and counselling services, to gardening and household maintenance for people who cannot afford market rates. Its sheer energy and collective refusal to be confined within traditional categories of public service point to two very modern truths: that people have long since pushed beyond the idea that they have to wait for the beneficent big state to help them out; and that if austerity is eventually avenged and the public realm is rebuilt, we will have a great deal to learn from what such people have been doing in these supposedly “left behind” places in the interim.
If towns such as Walsall are not really “left behind” in the economic and cultural sense, their place in politics has also changed. The idea that elections are always decided in affluent, often suburban marginals has receded. Two years after the referendum, in the corners of politics not consumed by the mechanics of Brexit, a conversation about towns and their predicament is never far away.
Labour lost the seat of Walsall North to the Conservatives in last year’s election – one of the five seats the party lost among the 126 in which there was a swing from Labour to the Tories. The loss of Walsall North is evidence of why Jeremy Corbyn’s party is said to have a “towns problem”. Of the 64 seats Labour needs to win a parliamentary majority of one, 31 are essentially town constituencies; among its top 100 targets, the figure is 49. This is why, over the summer, Corbyn visited not only Walsall, but Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire, Corby, Telford, Stoke-on-Trent South and Mansfield. It also partially explains shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s focus on rising insecurity at work, and how best to deal with it.
For sure, in the midst of the insecurity and uncertainty such places often embody, a small minority of people have taken refuge in bigotry and sounding off about immigration. But each time I have gone back to Walsall, what I have heard people express with the greatest regularity is a yearning for things that ought to be beyond argument: community, stability, an assurance that they will be able to plan for next year, and the year after that.
These are modern demands voiced in truly modern places – what stands in their way is an enduring disconnect between progressive politicians and the social grassroots. This problem is encapsulated by the fact that the only political offer to have truly cut through in recent years was the chimera of Brexit. Moreover, many people in Walsall are unimpressed by Labour’s transformation, and still see it as a collection of metropolitan people indifferent both to their communitarian values and the nitty-gritty of their lives.
This is arguably the biggest challenge Labour faces, and tackling it has to start with a realisation some might see as counterintuitive to the point of logical impossibility: that all of sudden, it is the “left behind” who hold the key to the country’s future.
