The north has changed. To win it back, Labour must recognise that
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Version 0 of 1. Grassroots activism alone won’t address the party’s problems. It needs to commit to devolving power to the region, says Newcastle University lecturer Alex Niven There is no getting away from the fact that Labour suffered a northern rout last Thursday. Big urban centres such as Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle remain Labour strongholds – as, more precariously, do smaller cities such as Sunderland, Hull and Bradford. But they are now isolated islands in a sea of Tory blue. For the campaigners who door-knocked, leafleted and phone-banked in the now almost nonexistent northern heartlands, there is now an understandable sense of despair. Not only did Labour lose marginals such as Bishop Auckland, Darlington and Stockton South, it also relinquished supposedly safe bets such as North West Durham and Blyth Valley. The large and inspiring grassroots mobilisation we saw in recent weeks would have been unthinkable in the pre-2015 Labour party. But it mostly failed to have any substantial impact on a final, disastrous outcome. Now all the talk turns to what must be done. Most analysis agrees that Labour has to win back its former heartlands. But a major problem is that these heartlands no longer exist in any concrete demographic sense. The northern industrial communities that gave birth to the Labour party more than a century ago are now neither industrial nor especially coherent as communities. Faced with this hard socioeconomic reality, it is very difficult to see what the modern party can plausibly do to win back its vanished northern empire. This crisis is not merely a quirk of the latest election – it is long-running and structural. Prior to the deindustrialisation of the northern economy in the late 20th century, entire villages and towns in areas such as County Durham would share the same workplace, worship at the same church or chapel, drink at the same club and attend the same trade union meetings. When it came to election time, almost everyone would vote instinctively for the Labour party, because it was visibly an extension of their community’s interests. It is the evaporation of this cultural backbone, far more than anything else, that has led to Labour’s collapse in its northern territories. Over the past four decades, industrial communities have been thoroughly desocialised and depoliticised – first by the surgical removal of heavy industry and the crushing of the unions, then by the deliberate unwillingness of neoliberal governments from Thatcher to Blair and Cameron to meaningfully regenerate northern areas. The question now is what to do about this hollowing-out of the heartlands. For some, the answer lies in providing a modern version of the grassroots culture that guided the development of the Labour movement in its early years. In the immediate aftermath of the election many have argued, reasonably, that Labour must renew its contract with its base. Just as the trade unionism and community organisation of the industrial past acted as a foundation for the original growth of the Labour party, they suggest, Labour now has to find a way to create a new communitarianism, by providing advice to those who face punitive benefit cuts, legal support to tenants facing eviction and grassroots political education programmes. It goes without saying that all of these things should form a part of any longterm democratic socialist strategy worth its salt. But expecting Labour to win back voters by becoming a sort of substitute ministry of education or legal advice bureau is unrealistic – even with some miraculous reallocation of union funding. It is also broadly in keeping with the logic of neoliberalism, which suggests that forms of welfare should be provided by dedicated individuals giving up their time and labour to do things previously taken care of by the state. This, if you like, is the politics of the food bank. What Labour is facing, then, is an infernal paradox. Only a government can provide the economic, social and political conditions necessary for a renewal of the party’s working-class base, by pouring money and resources into a comprehensive revival of local infrastructure, of the kind that will empower and resocialise post-industrial communities. If this election has one lesson, it is that winning means everything in our archaic, binary voting system. Community-level organisation will always be essential to any political struggle. But if we continue to have governments in power who are intent on depleting community resources and institutions, a wholesale revival of Labour’s grassroots culture will remain a distant and unrealisable dream. Instead of asking Labour’s activists to do more with less, we should think about more macrocosmic ways of reawakening the party’s support in its former northern heartlands. Demanding the installation of an “authentic” northern leader is clearly absurd. But a leader with a deep understanding of the long-running socioeconomic processes that led to Brexit and the collapse of the “red wall” last week is essential if Labour is to win back the necessary number of voters in Stockton or Blyth. Alongside this, Labour’s ability to fight a large-scale “hearts and minds” campaign in the north will be hugely helped by the cultivation of a new regionalism, based on campaigns for the relocation of major institutions and devolution of power outside of London. While developing a radical northern populist offer, Labour must also demonstrate the hollowness of Tory claims to be the new party of the north, underlining the fact that the Conservative powerbase is still overwhelmingly a south-eastern one. The north was changed for ever by the political system ushered in by Thatcher and her heirs. The tragedy right now is that significant numbers of northern voters have just lent their support to a political party and leader who enthusiastically supported the Thatcherite project and its wholesale destruction of northern areas. The cause is not lost, but the Labour party needs to think ambitiously and on a grand scale about a radical political strategy for delegating power to the north and winning back these voters en masse. It can’t simply expect one to emerge through the heroic efforts of an exhausted grassroots. • Alex Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and the author of New Model Island |