Laborism isn’t working The North needs more than nostalgia

Two miners’ halls once dominated the politics of England’s coalfields. The first, Redhills in Durham, is one of the most beautiful buildings in a city blessed with many. Its domed roof and oak-paneled committee rooms are a monument to working-class pride and self-organization. The Miners’ Hall was once home to the Durham Miners Association and the so-called Pitmen’s Parliament. About 100 miles south, meanwhile, stands the Edwardian Miners’ Hall in Barnsley. Later the headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers, the Barnsley hall is stunning too, with its stonework, turrets and gables, all built by a movement that asserted its presence in stone.

Indeed, the grandeur of both buildings stands as a testament to the political weight these communities once carried — reaching the highest levels of national decision-making. As Herbert Morrison famously declared when rejecting the European Coal and Steel Community, “the Durham miners won’t wear it”.

Durham and Barnsley symbolize what the academic and parliamentarian David Marquand described as “labourism”, a class-based politics rooted in the institutions of the organized working class. It was a politics embedded in place, still visible in traditions like pit banners, or the Miners’ Gala — or the 297 numbered seats of Redhills’ debating chamber, each corresponding to a Durham colliery. All the while, labourism was focused on the material improvement of local communities: patriotic, often culturally conservative, and practical rather than abstract, so unlike the bourgeois socialism of the Webbs and others.

Labourism is now dead, and the Labour Party has lost its grip on its former industrial heartlands. In Barnsley this month, Labour were reduced from 48 seats to 11, while Reform rose from zero to 42 and took control of the council. This follows similar gains in Durham a year earlier, where Reform surged and Labour was reduced to only four seats. This same pattern is being repeated across the English coalfields, from Sunderland to Durham to Barnsley, and together is starting to look like a more durable realignment of working-class England. The push for Andy Burnham to succeed Keir Starmer is also symbolic of a romantic desire within Labour to revive labourism.

This is understandable. At its peak, after all, labourism was not merely a political identity but a complete social world. The pit or the steelworks provided the work, but the union, the cooperative and the chapel provided so much more. Miners’ institutes housed libraries stocked with improving literature. Choral societies and cricket clubs gave leisure its shape. The workplace was not just where you earned your living — but the hub around which an entire network of community institutions revolved. To be working class in Durham or Barnsley was not simply an economic condition, but an identity, a set of loyalties. Together, it encompassed, in David Marquand’s memorable phrase, a civilization as much as a politics.

Labourism suffered a gradual decay, followed by a more sudden collapse. The decline of the industries on which it depended made that erosion almost inevitable. When the pits closed, the institutional network and the communal loyalties that had sustained labourism began to unravel with them. Without the workplace as its organizing core, the dense web of community life began to thin. The Labour Party remained, of course, but as a weakening electoral habit rather than an expression of a living culture.

The cultural transformation of the Labour Party accelerated this decline. As the Party became more closely associated with metropolitan, progressive values, it lost touch with its voters. Labour’s approach to immigration distanced it from supporters who saw it as undercutting working-class wages. Its emphasis on welfare created further distance from those who felt the system was being misused. Its approach to Net Zero compounded a deindustrialization that had already hollowed out these communities. The energy costs that accompanied the transition fell disproportionately on the kind of energy-intensive manufacturing that remained in these areas.

Whereas labourism emerged from and represented the industrial working class, modern Labour does neither. Rather, Labour has come to resemble what Thomas Piketty describes as the “Brahmin Left”, a party of “high-status city dwellers”.

As memories of deindustrialization and the Miners’ Strike faded, meanwhile, the cultural ties between Labour and post-industrial towns weakened. Labourism became, at first, nostalgic and then moribund. Old tropes were repeated, but without the cultural rhythms that defined labourism at its peak. The Miners’ Gala continued, but what had once been a living demonstration of collective identity has become, for many Labour activists, something closer to heritage tourism.

Nor have these economic wounds truly been healed. I grew up in Consett, where the steelworks closed overnight in 1980, and what it left behind was still visible a generation later. Brexit crystallized the frustration of working-class voters, but the economic model that had failed these places remained intact, and the political class that had ignored them continued to do so.

Much of the Red Wall voted for Brexit in 2016, then Conservative in 2019 on the promise of Leveling Up. But the Tories proved too tied to economic orthodoxy, and too weakly embedded in their new constituencies to deliver it. Too many treated these places as a temporary electoral asset to be managed, rather than a new heartland to be rebuilt.

Meanwhile, net migration reached record levels, a fact that sat particularly badly in communities where the relationship between immigration and wages had long been a source of grievance. Studies by the Bank of England and the City of London Corporation confirmed what many in these communities felt directly: that mass immigration placed significant downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the labor market. The communities that felt that most acutely were precisely those that had already lost the most to deindustrialization.

The 2024 election appeared to mark a revival of the old alignment, with Labour recapturing much of its former industrial heartland. Yet as the local-election results so vividly showed, that realignment has proved hollow. All this provides an opportunity to fill the void left by the collapse of labourism: for a doctrine that is both distinctive and rooted in the communities it now represents.

Call it reformism. Labourism endured because it was embedded in the institutions and daily life of the communities it represented, and because it offered a coherent account of those communities’ place in the national story. A modern equivalent would need to do the same, starting from the question of how to rebuild economic life in the towns and regions where it has drained away.

Just as Durham and Barnsley were once the emotional heartlands of labourism, giving the movement its identity, its imagery, its sense of moral purpose, these same towns could perform the same function for a new politics of place. But that cannot be conjured through rhetoric alone. Instead, it requires the patient rebuilding of local economies that generate rooted, dignified work, and the institutions that give people a genuine stake in the places where they live. The emotional heartland has to be built, not proclaimed.

In the first place, this is true aesthetically. The Miners’ Halls of Durham and Barnsley were not merely functional buildings: but beautifully deliberate statements of permanence, soaring visions of dignity in stone. The labourist movement understood instinctively that elegant buildings generate civic pride, and that the quality of the built environment tells a community something about how much it is valued. Most of what has been built in these towns since says something very different. The default architecture of post-industrial regeneration — the retail parks, the bland civic centers — has compounded rather than reversed the demoralization of deindustrialization. A new politics of place would need to take beauty seriously, understanding that handsome architecture is not an aesthetic indulgence but an act of civic respect.

All this naturally requires thoroughgoing economic transformation. Without that, Reform risks becoming another chapter in the long quest of post-industrial England for a coherent political identity. In practice, that means seeing places like Durham and Barnsley as vigorous economies for the future of Britain. These would be places defined not by what they used to be, but what they do now.

At its core, then, reformism would need to shift the economic focus from redistribution to production. For much of the past generation, policy has been concerned with how to allocate the proceeds of growth rather than where that growth takes place, even as growth itself has weakened since the financial crisis. A durable alternative would emphasize reindustrialization and a stronger private sector in the parts of the country where both have declined. That means rebuilding productive capacity, supporting firms that sustain local employment, and encouraging risk-bearing capital to invest in the places it has historically avoided, rather than relying on centralized redistribution to fill the gap.

In practice, this is already visible in varying forms. In South Yorkshire, for instance, advanced manufacturing has grown out of surviving metalworking skills. In Sunderland, the Nissan plant has anchored a wider supply chain. In Preston, procurement and cooperative business have kept value circulating locally. And, further afield, in Germany’s Ruhr valley, a former industrial heartland has been reshaped through sustained investment in skills and infrastructure. These examples could provide the outline of a serious place-based economic doctrine, one that starts from the assets of particular towns rather than assuming national growth will eventually reach the places it has bypassed for generations.

The case for reindustrialization is reinforced by strategic necessity. The pandemic exposed what it means to hollow out a productive base, while the war in Ukraine underlined the risks of dependence on fragile supply chains. The need to increase defense spending offers one potential demand anchor for domestic manufacturing, though only if procurement is designed to build industrial capacity at home. Either way, rebuilding productive capacity is not just an economic argument for left-behind towns. It is a national security argument too.

All this would also require a more demanding approach to the labor market, placing greater emphasis on domestic skills, training and productivity rather than imported lower-cost labor. Power would also need to shift away from the center, giving local economies greater control over skills, investment and planning. That points toward genuine experimentation with the conditions for growth in specific places, including the kind of lower tax, lower regulation zones that have driven renewal elsewhere. Poland rebuilt industrial employment through targeted economic zones, while South Korea anchored entire industrial ecosystems around specific sectors in specific places. The freedom for post-industrial towns to set their own conditions for growth, rather than waiting for solutions designed in Whitehall, may be the most radical and necessary element of a genuinely place-based economic doctrine.

There is a deeper question lurking beneath all of this. Herbert Morrison’s anxiety about what the Durham miners might wear was not just a colorful anecdote. It reflected a real sense of power located outside London. Thriving post-industrial communities with strong local institutions and tight labor markets would not be passive recipients of central government policy. They would be politically potent in ways Westminster has not had to confront for decades.

The economic case for reindustrialization, then, is clear —  but whether the political class actually wants the world it would create is another question. Yet the communities of post-industrial England can’t wait for the political class to overcome its ambivalence. The need for a new doctrine of place, rooted in economic renewal and genuine civic power, is too urgent and too important to be left to those who may fear its consequences.

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