The party of elsewhere, not here; Labour’s lack of a sense of place
It’s slightly confusing to see Blyth Valley on tv, or in the papers.For the two decades I’ve lived here I’ve always had to explain to strangers where the Blyth Valley is. Since the election I’ve seen the same picture of a shuttered shop with the word No spray painted on the shutters in several publications as if that’s all that Blyth Valley is.
Suddenly, everyone on the left, right and centre is an expert on the politics of Blyth Valley and why it has a new MP. Suddenly, everyone can fit the residents of Blyth Valley into categories that suit their own ideological explanations for Labour’s latest failure and a lamentably predictable Conervative victory.
I’m baffled by the certainty with which some of those writers are pronouncing on the political changes in Blyth Valley. I’ve lived here for two decades, have been a local councillor and a trade union activist, and I don’t have that degree of certainty.
A good starting point though is the reality of Blyth Valley. Blyth may be a mining and shipbuilding town of the kind beloved of nostalgic documentaries about the end of the working class, but the constituency (Blyth Valley) includes Cramlington. For those who don’t know Cramlington is a private sector new town that has grown from a pit village to a thriving dormitory for Tyneside with a retail centre that acts as a sub regional destination. North Cramlington, a council ward of predominantly private housing in the town, is one of the least deprived places in England, with a life expectancy nearly thirty years higher than Cowpen, in Blyth.
If someone starts drawing political conclusions about Labours future based on Blyth Valley, and doesn’t mention Cramlington, don’t trust their conclusions. If they don’t know that Labour held the Cramlington North ward until 2008, despite or maybe because of its prosperity and aspirations, don’t trust their conclusions. The politics of Blyth Valley today may have as much to do with the collapse of Blairism into mistrust and disillusionment as it has to do with anything that has happened since Jeremy Corbyn became party leader.
That’s not the whole story though. Far from it. As someone who has observed and been part of Blyth Valley’s politics for the last two decades (I was, for four years, a councillor for Cramlington Village) I see what happened on December 12th as being part of trends that are almost outside of Westminster politics as it was practiced during the election, and rooted in the idea of place.
It’s been a feature of the Brexit debate that places that have been ‘left behind’ were seen as a focus for leave sentiment, for something characterized as regressive, nationalistic and intimately connected to a racist version of English nationalism. I think it’s time to reverse that prism, and suggest that the reason why right wing politicians have been able to capture the support of those left behind places is because Labour has lacked a sense of place, and lacked an understanding of the emotional attachment to place that many people have.
I first got a whiff of this in the run up to the 2017 local elections in Northumberland. Facebook groups like Morpeth Matters or Make A Noise for Bedlington provided an outlet for the emotional attachment to a sense of place, and completely shut out Labour voices that tended to have a broader sense of place than the purely local. In a range of towns with active place based Facebook groups Labour struggled to gain any traction at all, and it was wiped out in former mining towns like Bedlington and Prudhoe where grievances were well articulated and adopted by locally based candidates. The 2019 general election amplified for me that sense that in many ‘left behind’ places Labour was perceived as the party of elsewhere, not here.
There is nothing intrinsic to Labour politics that means it cannot have a sense of place, and community. Quite the opposite. I remember sitting in the council leader’s office in the noughties, with Ronnie Campbell, Dave Stephens and Gordon Webb, explaining our vision for Blyth as a place, and how reopening the Ashington Blyth and Tyne line fitted into that vision. Tom Harris sat there and praised our vision, our grasp of the issues, then left, and we heard no more. Privately we were told the re-opening didn’t fit government priorities, and that was that. Amongst the election material I received this year was the Conservative promise that they will deliver rail services to Blyth in the next few years. The fact that they’re building on nearly two decades of work by local Labour activists like Gordon Webb and myself is immaterial, because when we spoke to our government our requests fell on deaf ears. Labour in power demonstrated that investment in rail was possible; the problem in places like Blyth was that the investment only seemed possible elsewhere, in large cities and conurbations, not in places like Blyth or Ashington.
Bevan argued that the language of priorities is the religion of socialism. In the same speech he also said “The argument is about power … because only by the possession of power can you get the priorities correct.” It was a topic he regularly returned to. He also said, in 1952, “Discontent arises from a knowledge of the possible, as contrasted with the actual.” I would argue, strongly, that as power has leached away from local government and local Labour parties we have consistently got our priorities wrong, with devastating consequences in places like Blyth Valley.
Opposite my house is a former fire station; it closed when fire engines got too big for its doors. No-one is going to argue with that. On Cowpen Road is what was Blyth’s last fire station, closed by a Labour council because the Treasury’s priorities, to reduce local government spending and to direct spending to where the Treasury thinks it will be most effectively spent decreed massive reductions in Northumberland’s fire and rescue service. Keeping a fire station in Blyth was possible, if only there had been a sense from government that public services and facilities actually enable a sense of place and pride in place that is essential if communities are to feel valued.
Just a healthy dog walk from my house are our police station, closed by a Labour police and crime commissioner in the name of rationalization and efficiency, and our civic centre, abandoned since local government reorganization was imposed by a Labour government in the name of efficiency. Let me leave that there for a moment, as evidence for a thesis that discontent with Labour in Blyth Valley may be more deep seated than Brexit, to the extent that Brexit might be a symptom, not a cause of Labour’s defeat.
If you want to understand the degree of discontent in places like Blyth, local government reorganization is a good place to start. The possible was clearly popular; the disastrous referendum on devolution in 2004 had endorsed a two council solution for Northumberland, and the district councils had worked hard on a model to deliver an urban council for south east Northumberland, Even the junior minister, Phil Woolas, seemed well disposed to the plans produced by Labour councillors in Wansbeck and Blyth Valley. Then as if by magic, Woolas was gone, and the new minister, John Healey, decided all that mattered was the alleged efficiency of a one council solution, and the local voices were ignored.
The 2004 devolution referendum was as perfect a demonstration of how cloth eared Labour in government could be on issues of place as you could wish for. I remember well sitting in a technical college in Darlington on a Saturday afternoon, listening to councillors from all over the north east tell Labour officials and elected politicians that shoehorning Teesside and Cleveland into a new polity called the northeast would never work. No-one listened and no-one managed to articulate a single benefit of devolution, as proposed, that could persuade the north east to vote in favour of it. The referendum’s failure to endorse devolution was predictable, and set in train, arguably, a sense that a proposal to give the north east, under devolution, less powers than Scotland, Wales or London was a measure of how little government thought of the north east. The proposed assembly might have been efficient, and good at delivering government’s regeneration priorities, but the outcome of the referendum illustrates perfectly how little those arguments engaged the electorate.
The idea that Labour in government must ignore the voices of communities in favour of efficiencies that are rarely as straightforward as they are claimed to be is not intrinsic to Labour politics. It’s a fetish of politicians who seek the comfort of doing what they believe to be right as a panacea for their lack of empathy for people and places they neither understand nor value. Localism under Labour in government became code for bypassing councils and creating entirely artificial structures in the communities that articulated discontent but which lacked the power to deliver except within the very narrow constraints of their ring fenced funding. All too often that funding been diverted from the general pot of money previously available to local government. Suddenly the local government landscape was populated with all manner of partnerships and coalitions designed to coax civil servants to provide funding to their preferred clients from the third sector, leaving elected councillors feeling frustrated by their reduction to being a supporters club for a new magistracy of unaccountable partners and charities.
The Treasury’s preferred ways of disbursing funds to places like Blyth and Ashington only exacerbated the problem of a declining sense of place as a thing that was valued. Recurrent spending was to be pressed down upon, endlessly salami sliced in the name of efficiency while time limited grants for ring fenced programmes were handed out to those who had the best bid writers, able to produce endless reams of paper that conformed to treasury guidelines. Sometimes it worked; Blyth beach was regenerated in a way that helped shape the town’s sense of itself. Sometimes they failed; providing millions of pounds to transform the town centre is an utter waste if there isn’t the funding to pay the maintenance costs of the water feature, or to occupy the events space with, umm, events…. Blyth market place was designed as a multi purpose space; I remember standing there with Ronnie Campbell on the night it re-opened, revelling in its potential as we watched a band play on the temporary stage. The reality today is that without sufficient funding to populate it with events it’s experienced as an elegantly paved tundra, barren, windswept and abandoned, surrounded by underused shops that have been the first casualties in the transition from the high street to out of town and now screen based retail.
This isn’t just a Labour problem. It’s a treasury problem, rooted in the treasury’s refusal to make recurring commitments, and government’s refusal to abandon the practice of using local government as a safety valve in the public finances, with cuts to local government easier to deliver and to avoid responsibility for when circumstances demand that spending must be reduced. Paradoxically, one of the ways of addressing Labour’s problem with places lies at the centre, with the treasury, and with making a fair and rational long term settlement on the problem of local government finance. The decades of kicking the council tax can down the road need to end, and Labour needs to articulate once again the idea of using investment to direct growth, not to reward existing success.
At heart it’s also a vision problem. For every voter who sees Europe as the place they belong to, who is comfortable with picking and choosing where they shop, how they receive public services, when and where they engage with the state, there are the residents in places like Blyth Valley, who see abandoned civic spaces as synonymous with empty shops, as evidence that government’s priorities are elsewhere, not here. Labour needs a vision for the civic components of a place, the things that make people feel their place is cared for, as a priority if it is to return to government in the future.
At the top of this piece I mentioned an abandoned shop, the word ‘no’ spray painted on its shutters. It’s an imposing building that used to be part of an arcade that connected two shopping streets. It’s been empty for more years than I can remember and was under-used before that The word ‘no’ was spray painted on the shutters when an out of town developer proposed converting it into 17 tiny bedsits that would act as an informal bail hostel on Blyth’s main shopping street.
I felt a particular, personal anguish about that because three years previously I’d suggested to some of the town’s councillors that the parish council should move from its anonymous offices in a camera controlled office block on the dockside to that distinctive town centre building, and should take the opportunity to build a civic space that said ‘ we care about this town centre’. The idea was never taken up, I think in part because Labour lacks a vocabulary of place and a sense of the civic as an essential component of that vocabulary. I include myself in that criticism; I couldn’t explain why it mattered, and I was unable to persuade my friends and colleagues.
The idea that there is a struggle within Labour politics between those who would engage with emotional concepts like place, and those who view government as a practice for politicians with the souls of dessicated calculating machines (in Bevan’s words) is hardly new. The idea of emotion in politics is hardly new, and has been given a huge push by the work of neuro-scientists like Drew Westen. I prefer to refer back to the work of people like Erich Fromm on social consciousness, rooted in the material realities of people’s lives, but the lesson is the same. If the people of Blyth Valley feel as if Labour has abandoned them, is there evidence that they might be right, that there might have been choices made which fed that feeling? Making our way towards a sense of place, towards a feeling that the towns we feel an attachment to, that we belong to, matter, is going to be a central part of Labour’s task if it is not to shrink inwards to being a party of the conurbations and cities
