Just over a century later, Labour — as it is still quaintly known — has begun to rediscover the concept of social class that was once the foremost reason for its existence. Earlier this week, Bridget Phillipson, Minister for Women and Equalities, announced the creation of a new “class unit” within the Office for Equality and Opportunity. “We have been squeamish about class for too long,” said Phillipson. Reporters were quick to identify the unit’s purpose as “improving outcomes for white working-class people”. The government clarified, bashfully, that the class unit would examine disparities across all ethnic groups.

Things do seem to be changing from the era when identity, rather than class, seemed to rule the Left’s moral calculus. In August, the American Democratic politician Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez admitted on ABC’s This Week that perhaps some of the new socially radical politicking that had overtaken the institutions of the Left for a generation hadn’t landed quite as intended. “Woke One was crazy!”, she said.

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In truth, it was never really clear what so-called wokeness had to offer a majority of working-class people in Britain. As Woke 1.0 spread from the USA to our shores, it brought with it a moral diagnosis that resonated in America, where some states had struggled to move on from the Reconstruction era, but bore a smaller relevance to the malaise in much of the post-industrial Britain of the modern era. Prosperity and opportunity had begun to centralize in cities and vanish from Britain’s much less diverse towns and coastal regions. Social attitudes had seen huge progress. Race wasn’t the immovable roadblock in life that it once was.

My generation came to political maturity riding a wave that crested alongside Woke 1.0. We began walking into institutions equipped with a politics shaped by the 2008 banking crisis, the expansion of the EU’s migration covenant and the introduction of the Equality Act in 2010. It was an era where the moral leadership of the Left, once the de facto voice of working-class people, became dominated by people for whom “the white working class” were a distant species.

The former industrial communities of Britain’s regions were something modern politicians left behind en-route to a career in London after Oxbridge — and why wouldn’t the aspirational leave? Margaret Thatcher’s decade long war on local council democracy had left millions with little power at the ballot box. Everything meaningful was now decided in the capital.

Otherwise, the white working class were a group many of the Left had never actually met. They were to be spoken on behalf of in student meetings — the way a primatologist might talk about what was best for the gorillas in their charge at a zoo. Rather than considering the diminishing life chances and outcomes of millions of people on lower incomes as a central part of their politics, my generation were encouraged to adopt a series of niche causes under the doctrine of “intersectionality”. It was as though working-class life was a solved problem and not something collapsing around us.

For this more bourgeois iteration of the Left, the emotional pull of Woke 1.0, and maybe, dare I say it, a bit of traditional liberal guilt atonement, held an appeal that was easy to ratify just by looking out of the front door. We lived in big cities and in Britain’s most metropolitan boroughs, there really are still notable gaps between people’s prosperity that can be predicted based on their skin color. Those who might object to making these concerns the most prominent pillar of our politics could easily be presumed to only do so because of prejudice. In reality, the gaps on the doorstep weren’t nearly as wide as those between metropolitan Britain and everywhere else.

The country we maligned for its supposed backward social attitudes was quietly becoming the most regionally unequal major economy in the developed world. Large swaths of Britain had been torn to shreds by austerity not with a bang but a whimper. Traditional Labour politicians like Ellen Wilkinson or even Ramsay MacDonald would have marched the breadth of the country to do battle on issues like unemployment and closing factories. By the mid-2010s, this was an unsexy, even faintly embarrassing cause — largely forgotten, maybe a bit nostalgic. The odd episode of Benefits Street would present the collapse of working-class communities as something with a cosmic justice to it: they were always lazy, weren’t they? John Harris would conduct a Guardian-sponsored safari around the shuttered high streets of provincial England, furrowing his brow in befuddlement as people told him they were planning to vote to leave the EU, but couldn’t say exactly why.

Working-class institutions, like trade unions, had been collapsing for years. Deindustrialization, something the Left had largely given up trying to stop, had robbed unions of anyone to represent and deprived millions of working-class people of a decent job to go to after school. Culturally, the white working class were becoming unmentionable. They had been absorbed into the wider and varied “white” group by the Equality Act, their life outcomes masked by this sleight of hand.

Those who did mention the white working class — the last few political figures that had lived similar lives, like Angela Rayner, who left school, pregnant, aged 16 to become a care worker — were shushed. As education secretary Rayner spoke about the needs of white working-class boys being “pushed down the food chain” due to the focus on ethnic minorities and women, but was pilloried for her trespass. Even to mention the group seemed to risk resurrecting the ghost of Enoch Powell, like a monster from an Eighties horror movie coming back to life. It was a faux pas to mention the white working class. It could only be assumed that the speaker didn’t realize that working-class people now came in all colors.

None of this handwringing stopped the least well off white working class kids’ educational attainment utterly collapsing. White British kids on free school meals have the lowest higher education participation rate in Britain. They are less likely to spend age 19 in further education than Roma Gypsies.

As rolling the dice on higher education has become the only accepted way of creating social mobility in Britain, it isn’t hard to understand why people in these communities feel a profound loss of hope. The Social Mobility Commission — which will apparently become surplus to requirements following the creation of the Class Unit — places the least diverse former industrial and mining areas, such as the North East of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the West Midlands as the places least likely to allow someone to make generational progress. The Sutton Trust’s Opportunity Index shows a yawning gap in educational attainment between London and places like the North East and Cornwall.

Swaths of Britain being completely left behind has been a quietly accepted part of our national story for more than a decade. The story briefly came to a head during Brexit, only to be quickly dismissed by the political Left. The fact that the old Labour heartlands voted for Brexit in spite of what sensible people in London were telling them to do was seen simply as an inconvenience that their betters would need to muddle through. It was the spasm of a palliative patient whose bedside vigil often gave them cause to yawn and glance at their watch — a victory for the far-Right that any right-thinking person would reject.

Nevertheless, the broader political re-alignment that Brexit represented refuses to go away. In the recent Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany, the Alternative Für Deutschland [AfD] party dominated the votes of a community that looks like a facsimile of left-behind Britain: shuttered industries, a low rate of higher education, too disillusioned to bother much with politics. The AfD’s platform hoovered up and sent to the polls exactly the kind of working-class voters that have fallen off Britain’s electoral rolls over a generation of hopeless disengagement. Saxony-Anhalt was an election infused with a sense of the injustice of regional inequality too: 73% of voters there believed that East Germans are second-class citizens. The result is that Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, ex-Stasi officers and Putin apologists are now more trusted to run a swath of Germany than the old parties of the working class.

Labour’s answer to the British version of this disengagement suggests that some within the party are at last waking up to the anger present in swathes of working-class Britain. However, the tools it has unveiled look much like those that have already produced unremarkable results.

For many years the moral component of modern social justice has amounted to a kind of human flower arranging. How many protected characteristics can you gather and display in your vase to prove that Britain is a caring society?

The creed of modern social justice was that Britain’s growing prosperity would be accompanied by the assurance that more of the beneficiaries would have a certain color skin, or a certain preference for other’s genitalia, or a certain bodily or mental difficulty. Now the working class will be included in this bouquet of virtue.

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It isn’t yet clear exactly how big a change this could be. Perhaps new positive discrimination access schemes of the kind that have become common (and commonly gamed by middle-class climbers) will be developed. Now Britain’s social justice engineers will be encouraged to say: “Look, we have a black person, a disabled person, a gay person AND a poor person.” Where previously an applicant being white and poor only gained one virtue point, now perhaps it could gain two.

The expanding prosperity that undergirded the politics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is evaporating. It hasn’t existed in parts of Britain for a long, long time. DEI politics has shown that it can take the ever-more centralized wealth of Britain and divvy it up among a more diverse fortunate few. It hasn’t shown any ability to provide for the parts of Britain clinging on by their fingertips.

In 2024, the Institute for Public Policy Research published its report, “State of the North”, detailing for the umpteenth time how the Britain that was remade by industry closure during the neoliberal turn was full of sicker people with shorter lives. It showed that wealth inequality was set to grow in spite of a Labour government: there will be an average gap of £228,800 per head between the wealth of those in the South-East and the North by 2030. The authors proposed  “Germany-style levels” of investment — nearly £8 billion a year for 15 years — to start closing the gap, referencing Germany’s history of “solidarity taxes” between West and East since reunification. IPPR proposed that this would be achieved by wealth taxes that mostly land on the South. But then, even that level of investment hasn’t worked to keep faith in the political system of Germany, as downward mobility leaves people hyper-vigilant, hoarding, worried about losing or being forced to share what little is theirs.

Andy Burnham came into No. 10 promising to be a prime minister for “The North”. But his previous economic advisor and Goldman Sachs chief economist Lord Jim O’Neill has already come out strongly against taxing the wealthy regions. His argument: London will need even more investment if any growth is to reach the rest of Britain. The money markets seem to agree that borrowing to restore prosperity to the once proud working-class areas of Britain should come at a punishing cost. A cost it isn’t clear anyone is willing to pay.

Will working-class voters buy into the idea that “social class” can be solved by being granted a protected diversity status? It’s not hard to wonder what someone like Ramsay MacDonald might think of such a measure; “class” was once the entire reason a Labour politician got out of bed in the morning.

But it speaks also to the mindset of the modern political class: that more unity can be created if more people can be given permission to be recognized as “in need” by their betters. The Labour of old knew that working-class people didn’t want this politics of pity: they wanted a politics of dignity. They built institutions, friendly societies, social insurance schemes, working men’s clubs and trade unions as a living demonstration of their ability to stand on their own feet, not reliant on other people to decide whether they can be given a leg up for the sake of meeting a quota.

Clearly, the working class of deindustrialized Britain will need to wait for anything that would mimic the gigantic leaps of change that Labour once provided: homes where there were once slums, work where there was once unemployment, an NHS where there was once sickness, a welfare state where there was once desperation. A New Jerusalem. In the meantime, the white working class can celebrate their induction into the world of DEI. One more flower in the bouquet.

It’s one of a number of lines that makes its way from Stephen Beresford’s 2014 film Pride into the fabulous new stage adaptation at the National Theatre. Beresford and his co-writer, Matthew Warchus, have transformed the classic Brit-flick portraying the then-unlikely union between working-class communities and metropolitan progressives during the miners’ strike into a piece of bombastic and campy musical theater. It lands in a political milieu markedly different from the 2014 film — and certainly from LGSM’s Eighties heyday. In recent years, the story recounted quite faithfully in Pride has become a political fable of the kind beloved on the Left. Like the Jarrow Crusade, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo Massacre, the Paris Commune, and the Spanish Civil War before it, it is a somewhat melancholic story of a social movement that is said to have succeeded in history’s long vista — in spite of near-term defeat.

But where Pride’s story differs from the parables of the Left canon is in the split fortunes of the LGSM coalition. Britain now is a far-cry from the widespread homophobia of the Eighties, whose officials responded so shamefully to the HIV epidemic. When the young today are told of how Manchester’s chief constable James Anderton — “God’s copper” — described gay men affected by HIV as “swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making”, they are rightly disgusted. Thatcherism failed to suppress gay rights. Within a generation, her Conservative successors would go on to denounce Section 28 and legalize gay marriage, David Cameron declaring this — in an admittedly small pool — to be “one of the things of which I’m proudest”.

But Thatcher and her heirs did succeed in shuttering British heavy industry and neutering the political weight of organized labor. Britain’s breakneck deindustrialization process was faster than any other nation; even the collapsing Soviet Union wasn’t so extreme. It is now a country where skilled manual work has become a niche career choice. Outside London are countless communities that have never recovered from the offshoring of their local industry.

It’s hard not to wonder how LGSM’s visionary founding member Mark Ashton would feel about how things turned out. Mischievous as well as driven, as a young man he spent a six-month stint in the King’s Cross Conservative Club undercover in drag. Played by Jhon Lumsden in Pride, he radiates a manic confrontational energy, simultaneously pithy, erudite, roguish and possessed of a rare moral clarity. When asked why a group of gay people should come to the aid of people who persecuted them growing up, he phlegmatically retorts: “Because miners dig for coal, which produces power, which allows gay people like you to dance to Bananarama till three o’clock in the morning.”

Ashton instinctively connected social liberty and class struggle. Millions of Brits were gay and millions worked in industry, and it was clear how contributions to the economy and social life of Britain linked the two. It would be difficult to draw the same threads together today. How does one link a piebald economy of casualized work, AI data centers, Deliveroo riders, vape shops and photovoltaic cell installers with the remaining contested battlegrounds of social liberty? It isn’t quite so clear how each of us contributes to the life of the other anymore.

Still, it is worth challenging the narrative that has emerged, particularly since the Brexit referendum, that these two core components of the old Labour vote — the urban progressives and the traditional working class — are somehow fundamentally opposed. The commonplace bigotry that I encountered at comprehensive school in a former pit community in the Nineties is dying. Indeed, polling by the likes of YouGov consistently disproves the stereotype of the bigoted, provincial “gammon” who has bewitched progressives since Brexit. People living in Britain’s social mobility cold-spots, characterized by the ghosts of production lines and shipyards, are no more likely to feel animosity towards the non-straight population than people anywhere else. Where homophobia is more prevalent is within religious communities, which leaves the modern progressive with difficult scales to balance, as those people often don’t resemble the middle-aged men of post-industrial England who have become their Ur-baddie.

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I saw the heartbreaking effects of this homophobia first-hand in 2014 — the year the movie Pride was first released. I was a key-worker in various homeless hostels in London. One was for young people in Sydenham where roughly half of my young charges were the disowned teenage children of homophobic parents — all of whom had been taught by their religious leaders that their children’s sexuality made them evil. Each case file would come with a letter from a parent containing words to the effect of: “I do not support my child’s lifestyle. They are no longer my child.” This social and familial ostracization used to be a common part of the gay experience in Britain; activists like Ashton fought so hard to overcome it.

The continuation of such attitudes within highly religious communities is a reality that most modern progressives mostly prefer to ignore. When, in 2019, a school in Birmingham was subject to a months-long campaign of picketing by Muslim parents outraged at a curriculum encouraging acceptance of LGBT+ relationships, most progressives seemed keen to shuffle the episode under the carpet. False claims that mimicked the worst of post-war-era bigotry whirled around social media: the school had a “paedophile agenda”, staff were “teaching children to masturbate”, and children were “being indoctrinated” into homosexuality. The campaigner Amir Ahmed said that children were being “conditioned to accept (gay relationships) as a normal way of life”, while the Imam Mullah Bahm pronounced the school’s headteacher was a “shatani” (a devil) who “needed to be broken”.

There is little sign at present that Left progressives are prepared to challenge such bigotry today; those who did turn up, tying messages of solidarity to the school gates, later went to the police after being pelted with eggs by the protestors. If Zack Polanski, whose Green Party is buoyed by a defecting Muslim vote after Labour’s Gaza failings, is following LGSM’s lead of building solidarity partly as means to a cultural end, he’s doing so very quietly. Meanwhile, Tribune, the magazine built by pioneering feminists like Labour MPs Ellen Wilkinson and Barbara Castle, is now owned by the same religious-conservative businessman whose Islam Channel has been fined by Ofcom for, among other things, advocating acquiescing to marital rape as a religious duty.

In this light, the ethical ethos that Ashton and his comrades held themselves to seems almost alien. LGSM were willing to put in hard yards to convince others they were on their side. Today, according to the pollsters More In Common (and anyone else who has spent any time in progressive circles), the group denoted as “Progressive Activists” are now the most insular citizens in Britain. They almost exclusively socialize with people who agree with them — and they are also the ones most likely to think those who don’t agree with them are morally deficient.

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Rather than drive hundreds of miles with donations for the skeptical but depressed villages of Britain, contemporary progressives stick to their own. They are the type to respond to national news of racial tensions in the depressed estates of Teesside by organizing a night-time vigil on the other side of the country in Walthamstow. They write, read and display dense, self-flagellating books about the difficult and intellectually taxing work of “not being a racist”. They swap Labour councillors for Green councillors in cities already full of Low-Traffic Neighborhoods and car-use penalties, reacting with shock when the small council budget allocations that aren’t already taken by elderly care don’t allow much in the way of revolutionary change.

In many ways, this is a politics of resigned indignation. One that has given up on Britain’s potential and instead built a members-only club inside of her major cities. The Mark Ashton of 1983 would surely feel a sense of disappointment. Progressivism may hold the kind of cultural dominance that previous generations could only have dreamed of — but it has also become an insular subculture. Outsiders are, if not the enemy, irrelevant.

Pride’s relevance today is in the contrast it sets out between LGSM and the modern activist. Rather than cultivating the necessary humility to find common purpose between groups of people, a culture of social media-incentivized extremism and righteous indignation has turned many on the Left into sniffy inquisitors, not entirely convinced that the poor are good enough people to be worth helping.

The National Theatre is Pride’s second stop after a stint in Cardiff. It isn’t clear whether the play will then go on tour, but it’s worth noting that if it does, it’s unlikely to visit the parts of Britain permanently broken by the end of the miners’ strike. Though it is a play that would be ideal for neglected England, it might be almost exclusively applauded by an audience of comfortable Londoners. I wonder whether that is what Ashton would have wanted.

***

Pride is at the National Theatre until 12 September. Friday Rush tickets are available.

With his ponytail and bushy grey and brown beard resembling a Regency-era portrait, McMahon looks like he belongs to another century — until, that is, you see the metal band t-shirt tucked into his jeans. It reads: “Therapy?” Stanley certainly needs some, its old signage crumbling, its Edwardian town hall abandoned for so long it’s begun to sprout trees. The particular stretch we’re walking down is, technically, the 41st most deprived of England’s 34,000 “super-output areas”: these “SOAs” are how Westminster census-takers parcel up the nation’s small communities.

At last, this despair is being registered back in London. Stanley is one of around 250 communities that will receive funding as part of the Government’s new £5 billion “Pride in Place” scheme. McMahon is precisely the sort of figure you’d hope such a scheme would empower — part of England’s informal social militia, battling against a decline so severe that The Guardian now suggests the most deprived parts of the country could be even poorer by the next election.

When I arrive in Stanley, McMahon is on his lunch break. He runs Pact House, a kind of all-purpose social fishing net, helping people here to do everything from IT training to learn how to care for their newborns. McMahon is particularly proud of the fact that people who come here initially to seek help often then stay on as volunteers. “We see people who’ve gone through domestic abuse, addiction, and mental health trouble,” he says. “They come out the other side and then help.” It’s a model of social triage that shows people at their best in the most challenging circumstances.

Expansive, all-purpose social hubs like a Pact House are now a common feature across post-industrial Britain. A substitute social infrastructure where the state has frayed. Stanley is reflective of County Durham’s history in other ways too. Once synonymous with organized labor, heavy industry and the industrial revolution, Durham mineworkers pioneered the Friendly Societies that were prototypes of National Insurance and the NHS. The Durham Miner’s Gala has been held almost every year 1871. I grew up nearby in Sunderland in the Nineties and 2000s and I’m a regular Miners Gala attendee. As teenagers, my friends and I frequently visited Durham to watch hardcore punk gigs at a venue called The Fishtank.

By then, Durham was already a shadow of its former self. There were around 230 collieries operating in England in 1944, making Durham the country’s industrial heartland. As the war ended, the nation’s keenness to move on saw Durham condemned. In 1951, Durham County Council designated around a third of its villages as “Category D” settlements — meaning they had “outlived their usefulness.” Support was cut; development discouraged; residents advised to move on.

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That was 75 years ago now, a full lifetime, but the effects of this managed decline echo to this day. Child poverty rates in the region remain extremely high: 38.7% of children in County Durham are in poverty compared to 27% nationally. This long history of adversity also helped forge the area’s distinctive political culture. Chopwell, one of Durham’s Category D villages, was nicknamed “Little Moscow” for its radicalism. Touring the North East in the Thirties, the Labour intellectual Harold Laski found an impoverished miner’s home containing only William Morris books. The tenant had sold all his furniture before them.

But ancient loyalties shifted markedly in the “Red Wall” election of 2019, when two Durham constituencies elected their first ever Conservative MPs. Keir Starmer’s Labour reclaimed the seats in 2024, but last year’s council elections highlighted how tenuous his hold was. Durham became one of the country’s first Reform-majority councils. The party’s celebrity Northerner, Darren Grimes, is now a councillor in the ward just across from Stanley. His campaign platform, centered around which flags to wave on buildings and on cutting Durham council’s largely nonexistent DEI jobs, had little to say about the business end of poverty in an area that has been neglected for decades.

In her 1939 book, The Town That Was Murdered, the Jarrow MP Ellen Wilkinson wrote about the ups and downs of life in an interbellum industrial Britain that regularly shed its workers and rehired them broken and impoverished. Even in the glory days of coal, Durham miners were in and out of employment as surely as the tide. Wilkinson was keen to honor them in a way largely absent from politics today, writing that “the history of a town is not that of its famous men only, but the story of the tenacity of its unknown fighters in the struggle for existence”.

Darren McMahon is one of those unknown fighters. Another is  Linda Kirk, who runs Just for Women, a wellbeing and advice center on Stanley high street, from an office decorated with artificial pink flowers and a cabinet containing several of the “Heart of the Community” awards she has won over the years.

Kirk is clear that a lack of jobs has crippled Stanley. “In the Sixties and Seventies, we had a lot of businesses that came in,” she says. “Big businesses. Through the Eighties and the Nineties we saw that decline.” Stanley once had its own department store, Doggart’s, a family-owned retail chain that closed in the Eighties. “It was the John Lewis of Stanley,” Kirk adds, the pride in her voice palpable. “You used to be able to go and buy all your lovely clothes and housewares. The street was vibrant.”

Kirk runs a mother’s group, and hears every day how the disappearance of social infrastructure is affecting the younger generation. “They call their children as you would a cat that didn’t go outside,” she explains. “They’re ‘house’ children. They come from school and they’ve got nowhere to go. They’re just hemmed in. Literally hemmed in. Where can our children go? Where can they go?”

Strong social ties were once the real wealth of working-class life, but these are vanishing. According to the Government’s Community Life survey, the North East is now the loneliest part of Britain. Especially deprived areas, like Stanley, have double the rate of loneliness and isolation of the wealthiest. An ONS study published last October said that 33% of 16-29 year olds feel lonely “often, always or some of the time”. The loss of jobs has been compounded by a loss of social spaces: no pubs, no youth centers, no well-kept parks to hang out in.

When I ask Kirk what a rejuvenated Stanley might look like, her ambitions are modest. “We’ve got another town center that’s not too far away from us: in Consett.” Consett is another County Durham town, characterized by steep hills lined with miner’s terraces and Persimmon new builds. It’s bisected by the River Derwent and sits on the edge of the North Pennines National Landscape. Boasting better transport links than Stanley, Consett also attracts commuters from Sunderland and Newcastle. “You can see that it is just absolutely thriving,” Kirk says of the town. “We’re hoping this is what’s going to happen in Stanley. That’s what we’re looking forward to.”

What’s striking about my conversations in Stanley is that when I raise the idea of local pride, people talk about things that those in other places take for granted. The opportunity to have a pint with some friends; to buy a knickknack from a local shop; to push their kid on a swing with some other parents. “We look at Consett,” Kirk says, “and think ‘Why can’t we have the same?’”

It’s a question decades of trickle-down dogma has never really solved — and yet it’s one that could transform our political life far beyond the North East. Luke Akehurst, the Labour MP for North Durham, watched Reform win a landslide at the local council elections in 2025.  For him, the results are less a protest against Durham Labour and more about anger at national decline. People “felt their town was suffering from a failure of government,” Akehurst says. “Whether that’s on the issue of failure to control borders — which there’s no point pretending that my constituents don’t care about — or a failure to provide the basics.”

To that extent, Pride in Place can hopefully move decision-making away from Westminster — to let local people decide how to spend their millions, whether on crumbling village halls or dormant youth clubs. Akehurst sees this particular pot as the last chance to evade the slow death of local traditions. “Craghead Colliery Band practice in a band room at the Craghead Victory Club.” he says by way of example. “The ceiling there is cracked. It’s leaking and dangerous. They have a cadet band, bringing kids in to play instruments. They can’t run sessions for young people because it’s not a safe environment. Pride in Place could literally give them a new ceiling.”

It would seem an easy decision to make. Yet since Johnson won his landslide, Whitehall has offered a stream of overly complex, heavily centralized, and impossibly bureaucratic redistribution policies: The Towns Fund, Levelling Up, Build Back Better. All have spectacularly failed to deliver on what voters in places like Stanley were promised. In early 2024, Durham County Council even took it upon itself to sue the Government for rejecting five bids for Levelling Up money on which it had spent £1.2 million. They abandoned the legal case the same year, citing a lack of money.

Pride in Place may yet avoid these pitfalls. But Labour is meanwhile keen to avoid the charge of being “as bad as the Tories” — who, predictably, siphoned their own Towns Fund into Tory constituencies. As is often the case with Starmer’s Labour party, the logic here seems self-defeating.

Labour’s army of special advisors in Westminster appear to have convinced themselves that such “pork-barrel politics” is at the heart of political distrust. The Tories, by contrast, understood the more basic political rewards of giving the people what they voted for, the kind of political patronage Ronald Reagan once referred to as “dancing with who brung ya”. Labour, by contrast, arrive at the dance floor nervous that to cut some rug on behalf of their voters is somehow unfair.

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Pride in Place’s architects do seem sincere in their desire to empower places like Stanley. Ben Glover of the Independent Commission on Neighborhoods (ICON), which helped develop the scheme, sees it as a successor to Big Local — the Lottery-funded program giving 150 neighborhoods across England £1 million each to make improvements with minimal bureaucracy.

Glover argues that the cash would be better spent on interpersonal initiatives like knitting clubs more than high streets. In the least well-off neighborhoods, a trip to the high street is far less important than the social connections that were once sponsored by employers and trade unions.

When I spoke to Linda Kirk, however, the technicalities of Westminster funding formulas seem far from her mind. “We’re trying to hold on to dignity and respect and all of that,” she says. “My take on it is about leaders. I’ve got a thing about leaders and we really do need strong leaders that we can believe in.”

Walking around Stanley, I can’t avoid the sense that all Whitehall’s handwringing arguments about the best way to deliver levelling up-type projects are missing the point. Labour will invest £36 billion over a plethora of schemes while in office — three times what was pledged under Boris Johnson. Yet it still might not make a difference large enough to win these  communities back, with one recent report suggesting Labour risks an electoral wipeout if it fails.

In 2021, the Center For Cities released a study that claimed that closing the North-South divide would cost £2 trillion and take decades. To make real progress would take a nationwide effort similar to the post-Cold War reunification of Germany, where a solidarity tax on the West was levied to rejuvenate the East. Labour hasn’t promised anything like this. Indeed, it isn’t clear that the money markets, whose permission the Government needs to rebuild these parts of Britain, would even allow such an effort.

After so many failed projects to address regional inequality, then, Pride in Place feels like a step in the right direction — but a small step. Large swathes of the country are aging and have been in decline for decades, propped up by transfers from London’s economic surplus. There has been no serious attempt by any Western government to change the economic paradigm of the last two generations, a paradigm that has swept Britain clean of the kind of industrial jobs that once made County Durham so prosperous.

Where once there were mines, shipyards, factories and refineries, Britain made a desert of call centers, betting shops and Deliveroo bikes and called it peace. Millions of us live in “Category D” Britain — just as those old condemned mining villagers did, where residents feel their best days are long behind them. By the time the next election comes round, people like Darren McMahon are likely to still find themselves battling tirelessly at the frontline of British malaise, providing hope where others have given up years ago.

Those words come from George Orwell, who was writing during World War Two about the difficulty of truth-telling. In today’s era of disappointing political leaders, it is easy to forget that it is nothing new for uncomfortable truths, as Orwell put it, to be silenced in the interest of the supposed greater good.

In modern British history, there have been few truths more uncomfortable than that of the grooming gangs. Last week, the organization Open Justice UK released a long fought-for selection of court transcripts. They include sentencing decisions that are both utterly horrific in their graphic detail of sexual abuse, and utterly despair-inducing as to our legal system. The judges presiding over these cases appeared, on multiple occasions, to give offenders much more lenient sentencing than they could have and should have.

Yet the crimes mentioned in the judges’ sentencing remarks are depraved enough to shake anyone’s faith in our species. They are so beyond the pale of normal morality that they make a mockery of the political and social priorities that have taken hold in Britain. Today we live in a censorious culture that has spent more than a decade obsessing over “problematic” issues of media representation; the ever-unrealized dangers of “incels”; and the necessity, or otherwise, of cancellation and social ostracism over “violent” language.

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Blue Labour has come too late

By David Littlefair

This set of social rules and norms has become the established table manners of media and political life, but it lacks the capacity to respond to a world that contains systematic child grooming. But if the country ignores the transcripts, there will be no prospect of Britain learning the lessons of these awful crimes. Labour’s shaky record on the subject doesn’t inspire confidence.

So far, the Government has given the impression of acute squeamishness on the issue of grooming gangs. This reaction is disappointing but not unpredictable. After months of pressure, No. 10 opened an inquiry into the grooming gangs, even as it worried that that very inquiry would “play into the hands of” the worst of Britain’s racist forces, cheered on by Elon Musk.

But the truth is that important facts have been kept from public view. As Louise Casey’s report into grooming gangs demonstrated in June, two thirds of cases of group-based child exploitation have been processed without ethnicity being recorded. Casey also noted instances where the ethnicity of the offender had been Tippexed out of case files. There’s no telling what crucial evidence might no longer exist. Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Conservative MP Robbie Moore discovered that the Government is yet to legally instruct councils to protect key records. Even now, council office shredding machines might be destroying any chance of real justice.

In a politically schismatic world, Labour must keep its nerve if it is to deliver any kind of justice for the vulnerable working-class women who were systematically exploited. These are women whose lives were ruined as the state looked away.

I have been a member of Labour for two decades, and my faith that the party is up to the job has been rattled. Talking to other members about the grooming gangs has too often produced a patellar reflex-like invocation of the far-Right. And this is a tendency that goes right to the top. In the spring, the then-Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, appeared on Radio 4’s Any Questions?, where she was asked by Reform’s Tim Montgomerie whether she had watched a Channel 4 documentary on the gangs. She replied: “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, OK, let’s get that dog whistle out.”

Powell later explained, by way of apology, that she had meant to object to political point-scoring over the issue. Whether her account was true or not, her “dog whistle” accusation had already indicted our political culture. Labour’s leaders, and indeed the party members beneath them, have been confronted by the evil of organized rape and abuse of children, but they cannot see it as being independent of its political convenience or inconvenience to team Left or team Right. The reality, though, is that to blame this catastrophic failure of the state on a single political party cheapens the discussion: a discussion that deserves dignity.

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Why is London ignoring its grooming gangs?

By Julie Bindel

Kemi Badenoch was seemingly bounced into caring about the cause by her Conservative leadership rival in early 2025. Since then, she has shown a remarkably opportunistic confidence to instrumentalize the issue to make political hay. Yesterday, she spoke of the need for the inquiry to leave “no stone unturned”, notwithstanding her own party leaving plenty of stones unturned when in power. Badenoch is a politician who has spent most of her career on the safer ground of complaining about liberal identity politics. Now she has suddenly found themselves in the company of something truly dark. Her first thought: “This will hurt Labour.”

If Labour’s enemies have shown political cynicism, that does not excuse No. 10’s reticence in opening the inquiry. Nor does it excuse the general impression they give of trepidation in tackling this issue, something Baroness Falkner, the outgoing head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, called out this week.

Despite her “little trumpet” jibe, Lucy Powell was subsequently elected Labour’s deputy leader. Her gaffe was never mentioned on the campaign trail. Evidently, it didn’t bother Labour members enough for them to look for a different candidate.

In September, too, we were reminded of the party’s frayed relationship with the working class communities it was originally founded to represent. A leaked text message referring to gang victims as “poor white trash from Rotherham” forced the resignation of Peterborough’s council leader. Prior to this, Labour attempted to choose one of Rotherham’s councillors to be a candidate for parliament in 2024, before thinking better of it.

Sadiq Khan, likewise, has failed to distinguish himself. In January of this year, Susan Hall, the leader of City Hall’s Conservative contingent, pressed the Mayor on the subject. In a bizarre exchange, full of implied political point-scoring, Khan put on a virtuoso display of pettifogging, asking repeatedly what was meant by a “grooming gang”. He implied that the character of exploitation in London held a complexity that only few could understand.

In reality, the Metropolitan police re-assessed nearly 10,000 cases, of which an expected 3,000 thousand will require further investigation. An undisclosed number will relate to family and institutional abuse: i.e. they did not involve a gang of men preying on young women. Despite his obfuscation, Khan was right in one sense: as The Times reported in October, the grooming gangs inquiry does not yet have an internal definition of what a grooming gang actually is.

For this, and other reasons, the inquiry’s key contributors are also leaving in despair. Four survivors have resigned from its victim liaison panel and two intended chairs have stepped away, with the search for a viable chair now expected to take “months”. Accusations have been made that the scope of the inquiry is being massaged and widened, no doubt because of who it may “play into the hands of” should its focus remain as originally intended. It’s easy to imagine how the lack of a definition of a “grooming gang” might be a means of using constructive ambiguity to reduce clarity.

Would things be different if the victims were different? It is hard to ignore the feeling that, had they not been poor, the sexually exploited women and girls would never have been ignored, mishandled or denied justice for so long. The majority of Labour’s membership consists of well-educated and often well-paid members of the middle class. They must realize that, in the eyes of working-class voters, the legitimacy of the law and the state is now in question. As those working-class voters might ask: does the law give us fair treatment, too?

Anyone reading Open Justice UK’s publication — something that should be forced, A Clockwork Orange-style, on all those who see the inquiry as “Right-wing” — would be led to think the answer is a clear no. In a particularly horrific sentencing transcript, a judge decides to charge an abuser for having groomed a 13-year-old. Her abuse had actually occurred between the ages of 12 and 14, but the judge openly uses the logic that to “average” the age of the victim to 13, rather than to zero in on her abuse as a 12-year-old, would enable the court to avoid the severest possible sentence. In another transcript, a sex trafficker was told that his record of good character was a mitigating factor in sentencing — as though showing a good face to one’s community in the daytime somehow lightens the evil of what he had done in the night.

For generations, the labour movement battled for laws that working class people could trust. Now the working class is represented by a Labour Party that is seriously talking about the abolition of trial by jury. Labour’s political opponents, meanwhile, are keen to present grooming gangs as the crowning sin of multiculturalism. They won’t be making their argument with Queensberry Rules in mind, or with an emphasis on protecting the dignity of victims of this scandal. Labour must remember that this is, at heart, a gigantic state failure to protect the very people the party was founded to represent.

And if the Government makes a mess of this inquiry, why should those people continue to trust in the rule of law? Should Labour continue to silence uncomfortable truths, Britain might have to add our legal system to the list of things and people these gangs have destroyed.

Later that year, Mahmood stood on a podium at the Labour Party conference and excoriated “pale, male and stale” politicians. As an opposition MP, she was often seen holding “Free Palestine” placards. But now, as Home Secretary, Mahmood is the politician who must grasp the nettle of Britain’s asylum reforms. She is the minister Keir Starmer has chosen to implement the “Denmark-style” reforms he hopes will restore public faith in the collapsing system: making it harder for refugees to settle, and foregrounding the expectation that receiving asylum is a temporary measure.

At first, this seems an odd mix of task and person. Mahmood’s detractors, especially those on the Left, might call her a hypocrite. Her cheerleaders, especially those on the Right, have hailed her as a realist and a strident moral decision-maker.

But it is clear that Labour sees her as the only politician capable of delivering these changes and averting a post-budget electoral collapse next May. In this respect, she is really the consummate “Blue Labour” politician — a perfect example of the strange, shadowy and seemingly contradictory impulses on her wing of the party: namely the “Politics of Paradox”.

The paradox here is that to save the overall moral legitimacy of the asylum system, the Government must implement a series of changes that make it seem less compassionate. Changes that are by turns symbolic, well-intentioned, unrealistic or inhumane will hopefully restore trust in the system with the public: and allow things to carry on more or less as they were. This is what the Danish center-left have achieved, so why wouldn’t it work in Britain?

The “Politics of Paradox” was coined back in 2011, when Blue Labour founders Maurice Glasman and Jonathan Rutherford collected together a series of seminars under the title The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox. It was part of a spirited attempt to give the party an intellectual framework that could help it understand Gordon Brown’s defeat in 2010 — an attempt to return Labour to the history of class politics from which it had come unmoored.

Even then, years before Brexit, Labour was becoming a political party run by and for globalization’s winners — progressive activists and the aspirational social elite. This was the paradox: Labour presented itself as the party of affluent urbanites and the information economy, when it was really a party of ex-mineworkers with broken lungs.

The Labour leadership of the time were alive to these apparent contradictions. The foreword to The Labour Tradition, written by then-leader Ed Miliband, emphasized the “need to rediscover the tradition of Labour as a grassroots community movement”. The essays demonstrated that close social ties and bonds, family, and a concept of place were central to working-class identity and key parts of the Labour tradition. The authors evoked proud traditions of ground-up politics that could stretch back through the artist and socialist William Morris, through the 19th-century founders of the Labour Representation Committee, to the democratic activists murdered at the Peterloo Massacre and beyond — all the way to the proto-socialist Levellers and Diggers from the English Civil War. These traditions disdained elitism, metropolitanism and hierarchy. Instead, they celebrated ordinary family life. That was what Labour should pin to its mast. That, so the theory went, was its real identity.

But here was another paradox. To proclaim this turn against elite metropolitanism, lifelong professional politician Ed invited his brother and fellow Oxford University graduate David Miliband to donate an essay. Editors Marc Stears (Oxford University) and Stuart White (Oxford University) invited extra contributors, adding to content taken from the seminars held at Oxford University. These included the privately educated think-tank director Philip Collins (Cambridge), and the now former minister James Purnell (who had at this point returned to the think-tank career he had held between his spell at Oxford and his period as a Labour minister). These were the people — all members of the intellectual elite — who became the scions of Labour’s working-class voice and identity, warning against the gentrification of the party. But remember, this wasn’t hypocrisy. It was paradox.

It didn’t immediately change the party. The General Election of 2015 found Ed Miliband’s Labour embracing the paradoxical politics of radical timidity and slumping to defeat. Under Momentum’s influence, Labour offered a radically outstretched middle finger to the working class and lost twice, in 2017 and 2019. But the pendulum has now swung back again. The paradox-handling technicians are back behind the steering wheel.

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Blokeism won’t save Starmer

By Josiah Gogarty

For this, they have Morgan McSweeney to thank — the Labour fixer who cut his political teeth battling the BNP in Barking and Dagenham, and said to be a long-term Blue Labour acolyte. McSweeney reached the top of Labour democracy through the think-tank-cum-organizing-project, Labour Together. The initiative was set up to try and tie Labour’s dysfunctional factions together through the difficult Jeremy Corbyn era and its aftermath.

But what started as a grassroots project later became a sink for big donor funds. The organization jettisoned any staff who bought into its original mission of unity — and instead became oriented around breaking up the Labour family rather than keeping it together.

Paradoxically, however, this was the only realistic way to get a class politics that didn’t completely neglect non-metropolitan England back into the Labour Party. Polling showed Labour members far from the general public on almost every issue. Any Labour member on the ground understood that the party had become utterly dominated by graduates in large cities, particularly London. These were people whose politics were representative of their insular social milieu. People from places that applaud themselves for processing asylum seekers, before shipping them off to post-industrial England’s poverty hotspots.

So a platform of pledges was developed to present the Starmer leadership as “Corbyn in a suit” — and therefore amenable to the arty member selectorate. It included a pledge for “Full voting rights for EU nationals”, as well as promises to “Defend free movement” and to “End indefinite detention and call for the closure of centers such as Yarl’s Wood”.

The platform was then quietly discarded in its entirety. Keir Starmer took over Labour and nobody got what they voted for. Selections for Labour’s parliamentary candidates in 2024 produced a party more packed with professional politicians, lobbyists, Spads and elite professionals than any Labour government in history. You might think this cohort would have the decency to be the quiet foot soldiers they were selected to be, chosen over binmen and bus drivers and nurses with more “challenging” affiliations to trade unions — but they aren’t playing ball. They seem angry. They were never told this was going to happen.

What would the Chartists referenced in The Labour Tradition think of this strategy? Maybe they’d shrug: “It’s a paradox”.

As for McSweeney, he no doubt understands, in light of these asylum reforms, that the Danish Social Democrats are the only Left-affiliated party in Europe to have won back working-class voters from the populist Right. However, it’s not clear if he has read the details of Mette Fredericksen’s party’s success. Fredericksen led the change from the front, and did so for years. Her changes were not carried out behind closed doors — but were done with conviction and consent.

After the working class abandoned the Danish Left, the Social Democrats rigorously re-assessed its attitudes and biases. They produced a pamphlet called “Just And Realistic” (Retfærdig og Realistisk) that was distributed to members. Frederiksen led a debate that scrutinized her party’s losses: heavily and transparently. This produced a new strategic, moral message: “You are not a bad person because you do not want to see your country fundamentally changed. And you are not naive because you want to help other people live a better life.” And she made sure to deliver on the second part of that message.

In government, the Danish Social Democrats practiced some of the most aggressive tax-and-spend policy in the world. Their returning working-class voters at the next election prioritized welfare, the economy and the environment. Immigration and asylum issues became a much less salient electoral issue for every party voter, save the now irrelevant populist Right. With these issues off the table, the focus landed on the economic policy that is the neglected pillar of Blue Labour thought — indeed, which is so far almost completely absent from Labour’s governance.

Instead, we have an approach that’s more “Blue Labour on immigration, Tony Blair Institute Labour on economics”. It has produced an industrial strategy that ignores Britain’s neglected towns and struggling heavy industry, ignores the mutual ownership models that are a socialist tradition, and instead favors cash bungs to American AI industries located in major cities. Having carried its “Ming vase” over the electoral finish line, pledging almost nothing, Starmer’s Government has found itself with no mandate to raise tax — and unable to raise money from the ever-fewer winners that characterize the most regionally unequal, unmeritocratic economy in the developed world.

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How Labour lost the Welsh Valleys

By Brad Evans

In Denmark, Frederiksen’s party had one of the most egalitarian, socially mobile, secure and radical societies in the world to fight for after the debate on asylum. What will Labour have, besides the prospect of calmed markets?

The victory of soft Left candidate Lucy Powell in Labour’s deputy leadership election shows that the party’s infrastructure isn’t really able to manage the kind of paradox it is being asked to tolerate. The current administration is on notice. The lack of effort to convince its internal structures has come back to haunt Starmer. The local elections in 2026 will be a day of reckoning.

The Labour leader’s only real attempt to develop a rhetoric vaguely similar in tone to the Danish Social Democrats in his “Island Of Strangers” speech was excoriated by the party’s members and voters, and later rescinded. He has never understood, let alone made, an authentic Left-wing argument against an asylum system that drains a foreign aid budget intended to save children from malaria. This is money that instead now lines the pockets of corporate behemoths like Serco. Starmer is now the least-popular prime minister, among pollsters, since records began. Most of Labour’s members want him to leave.

Mahmood may represent Labour’s last attempt to magic back those voters they claim to represent: the angry, disempowered and downwardly mobile, living in areas that have been neglected for a generation. People who should be on Labour’s team but are on Reform’s. Certainly, in this world of paradox, where class politics is imposed by Oxford PPE graduates, those voters haven’t been given their own voice in the party machinery. Since Angela Rayner’s departure, there is no prominent Labour politician that has had a “real” job.

If this last conjuring trick fails, it might well be that Labour’s only option is to concede that its working class traditions are dead. To beat Reform now may mean trying to ditch First Past The Post, to run another Brexit referendum alliance of educated urban graduates and middle-class professionals, absorbing Lib Dem and Green votes.

The middle class graduates that Labour came to depend on know the Labour they want — and they are annoyed. As it is, Labour has begun to resemble a scene in Armando Ianucci’s In The Loop, where James Gandolfini’s military general remarks that if you fight a war and have no soldiers left “it looks like you’ve lost”. If you claim a politics based around class relations, and working class people aren’t part of it — but a lot of the elite are — well, you know the rest. The next Labour leader will need to figure out what in this project, a battle against the odds for the party’s soul, is worth saving.