Opening the issue was an expansive and historically astute essay by Eric Hobsbawm, in which the historian charts the ascendency of neoliberalism as a governing doctrine in Britain, a doctrine that had taken first Thatcher and then Tony Blair to No. 10. Forged in the crisis-ridden Seventies, neoliberalism served to insulate the workings of the market from political control. It also created new forms of individualism, which undercut the collective solidarity that has formed the basis of the old labor movement.

Yet by 1998, a year into Blair’s first term, things seemed to be changing. The late Nineties saw financial crises in the once-booming economies of East and South East Asia, while in Europe and the US, the market economy was now producing increasingly unequal societies, as manufacturing jobs were offshored and communities decimated.

The special issue’s cover gave some clue as to what the writers of Marxism Today thought of New Labour’s Thatcher tribute act. Splashed in lurid red, and set over an image of a distinctly awkward and toothy looking Blair, was a single word: “Wrong”. For Hobsbawm, seemingly the only person who couldn’t see the way the wind was blowing was the man in No. 10. “If there is any way of losing the next election,” he wrote, “it is by not recognizing that the age of neo-liberalism is over.”

We know how that went. Now, nearly three decades on, we have a prime minister who is finally saying what none have said before: that neoliberal orthodoxy has failed the country. Andy Burnham’s speech at the Labour party conference in Liverpool may have been mawkish and light on detail. But it was remarkably radical in its forthright rejection of Thatcherism, with the Prime Minister proclaiming that “Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time”, before listing a litany of neoliberal ills from privatization to austerity.

Whether Burnham will be successful in stopping the rot remains to be seen; so far, nothing that Labour has announced has signaled the level of ambition needed to fundamentally reshape Britain’s ailing and deindustrialized economy. It will take more than cheap buses and electoral reform to undo the damage of 40 years of Thatcherism. Neoliberalism, it must be remembered, entailed a radical overhaul of the state, the economy and even personal identity. To overturn it will require an equally ambitious project.

As Hobsbawm’s essay implies, neoliberalism easily outlived its obituarists. Just how did it last so long? The easy answer is that Thatcher won. Her electoral success may have been as much the product of events as it was of her skills as a politician — in 1983, for instance, she relied on the warm glow of Mark VIII torpedoes in the South Atlantic, and on a divided opposition split further by the formation of the SDP — but you can’t argue with three electoral triumphs. Besides, success, by its very nature, can force the opposition to fight on terrain of your choosing. So much so, in fact, that by the early 2000s the New Labour stalwart Peter Mandelson was moved to declare that “we are all Thatcherites now”.

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But there was something deeper at work too. As Hobsbawm himself concedes, part of the success of Thatcherism was its strain of autonomy. It answered a previously unfulfilled wish on the part of the electorate, not least a desire to see fundamental changes made to a statist system that appeared both remote and unresponsive to their needs. In this way, Thatcher was able to draw on what a number of historians have called “popular individualism”.

This new individualism emerged during the Seventies in reaction to the hierarchies and inequalities of postwar Britain, and served to challenge them in more or less political terms. That decade saw the rise of new forms of mass politics in the feminist movement; in the growth of new forms of anti-racist organizing; and in radical forms of grassroots action within the previously hierarchical trade unions. Popular individualism also took more conservative guises, not least in the emergence of new modes of consumerism — think Habitat furniture, and the craze for dinner parties and DIY home improvements — as well as in the generalized and much remarked upon decline of social and political deference.

Importantly, these were not the products of Thatcherism; if anything, she was the product of them. Yet Thatcher herself skillfully exploited these forces, promising to give people a stake in the new system she was both formed from and was, in turn, creating. Nowhere is this clearer than housing. Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme was part of the New Right’s promise to create a “property-owning democracy”, a foil for statist postwar social democracy. In the decade from 1980 alone, some 1.3 million council houses were sold at huge discounts.

In creating a new class of property owners, Thatcher struck a new political bargain with the electorate: give up the state-backed stability of the postwar decades, and in return enjoy home ownership and asset price inflation. All the while, Thatcher told a new story about ordinary life. The council tenant became an owner, even a landlord, while workers became shareholders. Dependence was now shameful; in place of an out-of-touch state, markets, we were told, would respond to what people actually wanted. In doing so, the relationship between citizen and the state was fundamentally refigured, while new voter blocs had a material stake in the order’s success. In this way, Thatcherism created not just a political settlement, but whole new political constituencies too.

Think, here, of “Essex man”. A term coined by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph in 1990, it described a kind of voter who had become increasingly influential over the past decade. As Heffer put it, Essex man was “young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren”, a nouveau riche ex-Cockney working in the get-rich-quick City and now voting Conservative. To really hammer the point home, the image accompanying Heffer’s story showed an Essex Man standing squat and square in front of his shiny motor and his newly purchased ex-council house.

Yet if Hobsbawm was premature in his diagnosis of neoliberalism’s death — its demographic roots were far too deep for any single crisis to upend — Burnham’s seems belated. Since 2008, if not earlier, it has been clear that the old Thatcherite settlement is broken. Nothing has so far replaced it. No one seems to have either the will or the vision to forge a new economic consensus.

Perhaps this is why both the Right and the Left seem so haunted by the past. Burnham’s conference speech was brimming with nostalgic references to the stability of the Fifties and Sixties, when workers could earn a decent wage, and when ordinary people could feel confident that their lives were getting better. That postwar settlement produced the NHS; strong trade unions built on the foundations of solid industrial employment; and steady, even historically unprecedented, levels of economic growth.

For the Right, on the other hand, the golden age came in the Eighties, when Britain got its act together and the country reclaimed its confidence. Forget the miners’ strike and the dole queues: this was the decade when you could make it big, when wealth was made and flaunted, when Britain and its people were liberated from the albatross of national decline. All this happened before the advent of mass immigration. For much of the Right today, it is Blairism that is the wound, with the “Blairite revolution” ushering in a new statism of quangos and red tape while the world’s poor were allowed free entry.

Of course, there is a grain of truth here. Some people really did do well in the Eighties, and Blair really did produce a complex para-state system of regulations and subsidies that the energy historian Arthur Downing has called “Zombie neoliberalism”. But there is much missing, too. If anything, Thatcher was a response to the crises of the late Seventies, which saw the start of what the economic historian Robert Brenner has called the “long downturn”. Increasing international competition had, by then, begun putting a heavy downward pressure on profits, while the financialization of the global economy saw assets sweated even as investments dwindled.

Thatcher’s sell-off of state-owned enterprises, alongside a program of austerity and a steep rise in unemployment, bought some relief from the increasingly grim economic picture. But as Harold Macmillan put it, there’s only so much family silver to be hawked before the cupboards are finally bare. Another dose of Thatcherite medicine, with a bonfire of the quangos and a new free-market push, would therefore only deepen the malaise.

Likewise, the image of the relatively stable and prosperous postwar compact may play well against our increasingly precarious present — but there is no returning to postwar years. As the chancellor John Healey remarked in his own conference speech, “without growth, there is no social democracy”, a comment more apt than perhaps Healey himself knew. The political and economic conditions that confront the Chancellor and his boss are far more constrained than those faced by any of their predecessors. Britain’s economy, as economists like Brett Christophers have shown, is increasingly a rentier economy, with essential infrastructure converted into assets optimized for stable returns with minimal capital expenditure. For their part, climate and energy-induced inflation will only make these problems more acute.

Burnham therefore faces an unenviable task. A decade of austerity has failed to kickstart growth. The country’s privatized infrastructure is decaying, while industrial policy and nationalism are returning on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet if there’s clearly a broad public appetite for the state to do something about energy prices, water, rail and rents, Burnham’s politics must be based on more than fine words alone. The vacuum created by the fracturing of the neoliberal consensus must, instead, be filled by a democratic, ambitious and municipal-minded Left.

In this, there are lessons to be learned from the Thatcherite experience: to truly secure its revolution, a renewed Left must create its own political constituencies. A good start would be to relieve some of the pressure on renters. A wave of council house building — prompting a cultural shift that sees such accommodation as more than a last resort — would not only allow hundreds of thousands of people to live more stable and comfortable lives. It would also create a coalition of voters with a material stake in the system, just as Thatcher’s owner-occupiers once did. The same might be said of quality public transport; stable and clean energy; and indeed Burnham’s much-vaunted national care service.

At any rate, the stakes could not be higher. Failure from the Left now would leave the doors open to a Right intent on dismantling the last vestiges of the state, selling it off to whichever private contractor or crypto billionaire happened to be around at the time. God knows what Marxism Today would have to say about that.

It is difficult today to think of any comparable figure, not least another historian: a scholar who, as well as producing a number of innovative essays, wrote a series of major mass-market history books alongside vast amounts of politically engaged journalism, all while communing with politicians and members of the cultural and intellectual elite. Yet Hobsbawm managed it, along the way offering a vital window onto the momentous, world-changing developments of the past two-and-a-half centuries, structuring how millions see both the past and, often, the future too.

And yet, as I discovered while reading his books again over recent months, set against the standard of contemporary historical writing they are also curious works. The historical blockbuster of the 2020s is likely to be a work of narrative writing, focusing on the texture as well as the structure of life in the past. If not the story of a single individual or of a small group, it will nonetheless be extensively peopled, peppered with quotes from diaries or journals, and all hanging on a dense web of narrative. 

Not so the Ages books. The Age of Revolution, for instance, starts not with people but with an analysis of the “agrarian problem” of the late 18th century. “From the point of view of agrarian property relations,” we read only a few pages in, “we may divide Europe — or rather the economic complex whose center lay in Western Europe — into three large segments.” And on it goes: hardly barnstorming stuff, even if it is written in Hobsbawm’s distinctively crisp and limpid prose and sprinkled throughout with wonderfully telling details (a page later we are quoted a Russian advert selling “three coachmen, well-trained and very presentable, and also two girls, aged 18 and 15, both of good appearance”).

As Emile Chabal writes in his superb new intellectual biography of Hobsbawm, “this was pedagogy of the old-school fashioned lecture hall, in which a man stands on a podium and explains what the audience should think”. Driven not by narrative or chronology, the Ages books are instead works of deep synthetic and analytical scholarship, written from an Olympian height rather than the perspective of the common man or woman. There are, of course, risks in such a style, not least a seeming lack of intellectual or epistemological humility, carrying as it does the distinct whiff of omniscience. But, Chabal notes, in the hands of a master historian like Hobsbawm, it can be intoxicating. The reader, he writes, approaches the books “searching for explanation but left in awe of [Hobsbawm’s] encyclopedic knowledge”.

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If there were a model for this sort of historical writing, it was provided by the Annales school of French historians, particularly its leading figure, Fernand Braudel. Clustered around an eponymous journal, this set of postwar historians pioneered writing over what they called the longue durée, privileging deep structures such as climate or geography, or the broader forces of economic and political change, over what they contemptuously termed “event-based history”. 

In Hobsbawm’s case, of course, there was another influence too: Marxism. A lifelong Marxist, Hobsbawm would tell an interviewer in 1985 that those like him who were influenced by Marx will always be “interested in the large-scale totalizing history”. “The basic Marxist question”, he added, is how “culture, ideology, politics and so on” fit in with the economic development of a society. What is key, in other words, is interconnection, or the question of how each of the constituent parts of history fit together into what Hobsbawm likened to a “web”, as opposed to a single unidirectional “thread”. 

If his Marxism helped give shape to his historical writing, it would also become one of the most contentious aspects of his life and work. Even those with only a passing familiarity with Hobsbawm’s work will know that he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from his undergraduate days at Cambridge to the party’s dissolution following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Trailed through much of his life by the security services, on his death in 2012, at the age of 95, he attracted the ire of the kind of anti-communist who, like those Japanese soldiers in the jungles of South East Asia, were seemingly unaware that the Cold War was over and that their side had won. As A.N. Wilson (quite wrongly) predicted in the Daily Mail: “Hobsbawm himself will sink without a trace. His books will not be read in the future. They are little better than propaganda”. Wilson even went so far as to accuse Hobsbawm of being a possible “traitor” like his Cambridge near-contemporaries Philby and Blunt. Michael Gove, for his part, went further still. At the 2008 Conservative Party Conference Gove declared: “only when Hobsbawm weeps hot tears for a life spent serving an ideology of wickedness will he ever be worth listening to.”

Even those who came to praise him seemed uncomfortable with Hobsbawm’s politics. Tristram Hunt, while celebrating “the breadth of his work and the reach of his intellect”, could regard him only as a slightly neutered “Enlightenment giant”, while his official biographer, Richard Evans, passed over in a slightly embarrassed manner the extent and nature of Hobsbawm’s radical commitments. This is particularly apparent in Evans’s treatment of 1956, the annus horribilis for communist parties worldwide, when the dual shock of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” and the Hungarian Revolution, brutally suppressed by Soviet troops after 12 days, led to mass resignations and public recriminations. Unlike many of his contemporaries, not least his fellow historian E.P. Thompson, Hobsbawm chose to remain in the CPGB, a decision he would be repeatedly asked to account for later.

Evans, explaining Hobsbawm’s decision, emphasizes that his “loyalty was not so much to the Communist Party as to the cause of socialism in general”, a position driven by his childhood in Thirties Berlin. Which rather seems to leave the question begging. Chabal, on the other hand, tackles it head-on. For Chabal, Hobsbawm was what the French would call an “intellectual engagé”: a committed intellectual. He was, Chabal writes, “a communist, and, from the age of about fourteen, communism acted as the guiding thread for his life and work”. Unless we understand this fundamental aspect of his life, we will not be able to appreciate either Hobsbawm’s work or what endures of his contemporary appeal.

Of course, Evans wasn’t wrong in tracing Hobsbawm’s communism to his upbringing. Born in 1917 in Alexandria, then part of the British protectorate of Egypt, to a father from the East End of London and an Austrian mother, Hobsbawm’s early years were spent as a member of the secular Viennese Jewish middle class, albeit one constantly on the verge of tipping into poverty and destitution. He would later recall his sense of “embarrassment” at being given an old second-hand bike, its frame visibly bent, as a gift by his mother, as well as at his threadbare shoes which barely withstood the harsh Central European winters. Although he makes little of it, it seems clear that this sharp early awareness of material privation was pivotal in the early development of his political commitments.

After his parents died young, the 14-year-old Eric moved to Berlin to live with an aunt and uncle. As he would later stress, there were few better places to be a politicized teenager. “The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist,” he wrote in his autobiography Interesting Times, “or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy.” Published when he was 85, the book is a curiously impersonal document, but the sections on the death throes of the Weimar Republic hum with life. It is there that we hear of his first exposure to mass communist demonstrations in the twilight of German democracy, and how Hobsbawm learned of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor as he walked his sister home from school.

Soon after, Eric was moved again, this time to the apparent calm of North London, before he went up to Cambridge, where he read history. Hobsbawm chose the subject, he says, mainly because he was good at it, though there must have been something of the young communist in the decision too. After all, the materiality of history is both the key to understanding the world — and to changing it.

Never an organizer, Hobsbawm’s political commitments remained primarily intellectual even after he joined the CPGB, brief forays into the world of political protest notwithstanding. This limitation is something he was long aware of. His teenage diaries are filled with an ecstatic, even quasi-sexual, longing to throw himself into the cause. He wanted, he wrote, to “dive” into Marxism, to “love it, both sensually and yet spiritually, like one loves a woman”, to “melt into it like a snowflake in the snow”. It is tempting to read a lot, perhaps too much, into the overwrought private scribblings of a pubescent boy. But within them is a glimpse into the Janus-faced nature of his political self. Marxism, Hobsbawm was sure, could provide him with the key to unlock the meaning and working of the world, but he was instinctively aware of the limitations of his faith in the cause. As a bookish and awkward young man, he could never live the revolution like the working-class KPD toughs he saw in Berlin.

This, too, may hint at why Hobsbawm was able to weather the turbulence of 1956 more easily than his peers. If his political engagement was lived predominantly via the mind — “we were communists in the way in which, in other places, we should have read each other poetry,” he wrote in an autobiographical story while at Cambridge — that was in marked contrast to someone like Raphael Samuel, another pioneering historian whose apprenticeship was served in the Party. In his memoir-cum-study of the culture of communism, Samuel writes of his family, steeped in the cultures of the Left. Both his mother, the composer Minna Keal, and his uncle, the historian Chimen Abramsky, were party members, as were many other members of his family, and much of his childhood was spent engaging in party activities. Samuel even became, he writes, “a kind of juvenile commissar of the family”. 

For Samuel, in other words, communism was then both a mental and a bodily form of commitment. It was the intellectual sea in which he swam, but also the lifeworld in which he was formed. So when Soviet T-54s rolled into Budapest, and the crisis came, Samuel experienced it as a profound and destabilizing break. He threw himself into the New Left, editing Universities and Left Review and later New Left Review. As the intensity of the New Left dissipated, however, Samuel found it increasingly difficult to continue as he had. Not long after, he would move to Ireland and had a nervous breakdown — the long-delayed after-effects, perhaps, of 1956. 

Yet Hobsbawm, from what we know, suffered nothing so drastic. Could this mix of commitment and detachment have served to keep him in the fold? It certainly helped that he had a hinterland beyond the expectations of the CPGB to fall back on. Cambridge opened Hobsbawm to the taste of real intellectual excitement, but it was also where, as Tony Judt later wrote, he “began his lifelong ascent into the British elite”. Judt’s comment is not without merit, even if it has the distinct tang of vinegar. For it was at Cambridge that Hobsbawm joined the elite debating society, the Apostles, whose other members included Wittgenstein, Forster, Keynes and the Cambridge spies. Later, in the Eighties, Hobsbawm would become a member of the exclusive Athenaeum Club, while in 1998 he was honored with appointment to the Order of the Companions of Honor. If, because of his communism, Hobsbawm was always something of an outsider, then he was very much an insider’s outsider.

Yet Cambridge offered more than simply a passage into the upper echelons of British society. In fact, as Chabal notes, much of the next few decades of Hobsbawm’s life can be read as an attempt to return to the intense intellectual atmosphere of the interwar Cambridge Left. We can see this, for instance, in the way he threw himself into the Communist Party Historians Group in the decade after 1946. This group, which would gather in the inauspicious surroundings of the Garibaldi restaurant in Clerkenwell, or in the Marx House nearby, would come to include some of the most celebrated British historians of the 20th century: Thompson, Samuel, Christopher Hill, and Rodney Hilton, who, alongside Hobsbawm, redefined what was until then a rather stuffy subject dominated by aloof political narratives. That all of these historians were incubated not only in the CPGB, but over meatballs and plonk at Garibaldi’s, is surely testament to the intellectual ferment of postwar British communism.

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The Historians Group would, however, be another victim of the Hungarian Revolution and its aftermath. Over the next six months, many of its most able members left the party. Yet in a strange twist, Chabal suggests that whatever the emotional effects of the dissolution of the Historians Group, in the long run it may actually have helped Hobsbawm’s career. As Chabal explains, Hobsbawm was always a “highly effective networker”; more than that, he was something far more easily recognized today than in mid-century: an “academic entrepreneur”. Possessed of a hard-nosed commercial instinct, throughout his career he had a strong sense of who his intended audience was. Not just other academics, or even communist converts, Hobsbawm wanted to write for a wide general readership. This aim was only heightened by the dissolution of his close party network.

As universities increased their intake through the Sixties and Seventies, and with a burgeoning middle class with new consumer appetites to satisfy, there arose a massively increased audience for serious works of non-fiction. Hobsbawm, with his genius for simplifying complex processes and an encyclopedic knowledge of 19th-century history, as well as his terse English prose and his keen sense of the market, was perfectly positioned. Between 1970 and 1990, Hobsbawm’s books earned around £20,000 a year on average in royalties in today’s terms. On top of that came ever-larger advances for his work and royalties on foreign editions. Not only did these years see Hobsbawm become a very well paid writer, they also allowed him to bring Marxism to the masses like never before.

There was, however, a tension between the cosmopolitan writer and the committed intellectual. Then again, his was a life of contradictions: Hobsbawm was the loyal party man who wrote sympathetically of peasant revolutionaries; the aficionado of jazz who castigated the deadening effects of mass culture; the refined intellectual who helped open up the study of working-class organization. His communism, however, was the guiding thread throughout. Yet it also poses problems for us in receiving his work today. What, for one thing, does it mean to be a writer who was publicly committed to a cause that’s now more-or-less extinct? More than that, how should we, in our hyperpolitical age, when political causes are backed and discarded at the click of a button, understand someone who dedicated their life to a political project that ended in failure — or worse?

It certainly helps that he wrote so well. Avoiding the kind of jargon that can easily overwhelm even the most lucid Marxist writing, history under Hobsbawm’s pen begins to take on a new clarity and sense of movement. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Age of Extremes, a book which in many ways was a very personal attempt to account for his faith in the cause of communism as a world-historical force. The book presents a riveting picture of the 20th-century “age of catastrophe”, framed on either side by the Great War and the fall of the Berlin Wall and punctuated in the middle by the horrors of the Forties. What adds power to this framing is the centrality of the communist experiment. The vital fact of the short 20th century was that there existed an organized alternative to capitalism, even if it wasn’t in the end a more appealing one. And the defeat of that grand experiment, in Hobsbawm’s hands, turns the story of the century into a tragedy. There is no liberal triumphalism of the kind that became so dominant in the Nineties here.

Today, as Lea Ypi writes in a searching recent essay, the status of the Soviet Union in public memory is still not settled. For those who remain committed to the political project of socialism, neither of the dominant stories we are told about the history of actually existing communism are particularly satisfying. “On the one hand,” she writes, “we have the liberal account in which communism was a totalitarian disaster from start to finish, and every emancipatory aspiration of the twentieth century was an early sign of the catastrophe to come. On the other hand we have the defensive view that state socialism was a deformation or betrayal of a model that is thought to remain philosophically intact.” We could add to that the Govian mode we saw earlier, which would force anyone who wishes to make the world anew to account for the sins of those who came before. What we need instead, Ypi insists, is a new form of narrative, one which can reopen “the past as morally contested rather than closing it off as nothing more than the slaughter bench of history”. 

One model for this can be provided, I would argue, by the work of Eric Hobsbawm. As he wrote in the famous final lines of Age of Extremes:

“We do not know where we are going. We only know that history has brought us to this point and—if readers share the argument of this book—why. However, one thing is plain. If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.”

The past cannot be a dead weight around our necks. But, just as vital, it cannot be forgotten either. The darkness that Hobsbawm predicted in 1994 seems ever closer.

Yet history, for much of the contemporary Left, is merely one moral disaster after another. This is Ypi’s “slaughter bench of history”. When the Left writes history, it is often done in the denunciatory mode, as a kind of a morality play, where good guys are set against bad guys, and which is hamfistedly shaped by contemporary concerns. Or, on the other hand, it is a simplistic “red thread” kind of history: a tale of Left-wing heroes meant merely to invigorate the faithful. 

Of course, there is much value in this form of history, when it is done well. But, as Hobsbawm and Chabal both know, history can also teach us where we’re going. It can give us the tools to understand the world around us, and perhaps even to begin to change it. The retreat to the small, and the jettisoning of grand metanarratives of the kind that Hobsbawm excelled at, has reduced our understanding of who we are. As Hobsbawm wrote in the late Eighties, in a letter to a doctoral student:

“I am not particularly interested in ‘reconstructing a narrative in which gender, ‘race’, sexuality and subjectivity are central rather than adjuncts to the [grand narrative].’ …Anyway the sort of history you propose is not my kind of history, I don’t think it is Marx’[s] ‘kind’ either… In my view, the project you are engaged in is just another symptom of the retreat of [the] Left.”

We can forgive, perhaps, the cranky tone in which this letter was written, if not his often-curt dismissals of feminist history. But his diagnosis of the retreat to identity as a symptom of a historic defeat feels especially acute today. 

How, then, in the wake of the Left’s historic defeat, can one begin to rebuild a shared collective project of emancipation? History does not offer easy answers. Then again, nor does the fragmentation of the past into a series of seemingly discrete moments, not least when the public status of historical memory is more unsure than ever. As Hobsbawm noted: “the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century.” And if, as the old cliché goes, those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it, then what amounts to the wholesale destruction of the link between history and the present goes far further still. “Most young men and women at the century’s end,” Hobsbawm continued, “grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in”, producing the spread of “an absolute a-social individualism”. Against this, historians must be “chroniclers, remembrancers and compilers”. To do so means being the kind of engaged historians who can make sense of the mess of the historical record. They must, in short, be like Eric Hobsbawm.

Yet, those of us who would wish to write the kind of wide-angled history that can once again ask the big questions of our past and our future cannot simply replicate the work of writers like Hobsbawm. The historical moment for that has passed. We need new histories. But the questions he asked must once more take center stage: what forces have shaped the present moment, bringing us to where we are today? And what tools can we find in them to remake the world in a fairer and just manner? In this, there is still much to learn.

What, then, explains Andy Burnham’s triumph? The most obvious factor is Burnham’s local popularity and easy going, affable manner. Had he been blocked from standing, as he was in Gorton and Denton, and replaced with another wooden Labour technocrat, the result would have been very different. Equally, Reform’s candidate, the local plumber and former army reservist Kenyon, was hobbled by his woeful performance on Question Time and a digital paper trail in which he came across as boorish and misogynistic. There’s a lesson here about the limits of the political everyman: it only works when it comes with a dash of professionalism.

Yet there’s clearly more going on here than personalities alone. As polling from the constituency has shown, the coalition that Burnham managed to form combined both urban progressives, of the sort that Labour has been losing nationally to the Greens, alongside soft-Conservative and Reform types. These are people who have turned away from Labour in recent years because of its rejection of progressive social and economic policies, as well as its new identity as the party of the “lanyard class”.

Many have since switched to Reform, or stopped voting altogether. Yet as the sociologist Sacha Hillhorst has shown, Reform’s vote in the last general election was basically unstable. In 2024, the party’s base comprised both nostalgic ex-Labour voters and former Tories bruised by the party’s years in government, retired miners and flash property developers, all “brought into a shared political project by varying degrees of opposition to immigration, a sense of decline, and a desire for political renewal”.

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Despite the seeming glee with which the press and politicians have written off these voters, and many others in post-industrial areas, as either inherently or incipiently reactionary, Burnham’s victory shows otherwise. Of course, the desire for renewal can take many political forms — some reactionary, many not. All, however, have come to revolve around the symbolic void of Englishness, the gaping wound at the center of our national self-conception. Both Reform and Restore have staked their claim on an exclusionary form of English nationalism, based in the former case on a racialized idea of “honest, hard-working people” against both the establishment and those who leech from the system. For the latter, it is built on an ethnocentric idea of whiteness.

For Makerfield’s new MP, identity has been key: not least in his Northernness. Blunt and plain-speaking, pitched in opposition to both an out-of-touch Westminster elite personified in Keir Starmer, and a particularly Southern brand of conservatism, Burnham, in his semi-ironic guise as “King of the North”, has managed to carve out symbolic space for a renewed vision of social democracy. His ability to talk to working-class people without condescension is a valuable asset, as is the fact that he is genuinely rooted in the community he now represents.

It’s clear that many voters in Makerfield bought into this, voting for a chance to remove the much despised Keir Starmer as prime minister, and for a platform which called for taking back control of key utilities. The country, its working-class and Northern redoubts foremost among them, are crying out for change, and a new vision for what the country can be. Burnham now has the mandate to deliver it.

The new MP seems to recognize this, promising a “new path” for both Makerfield and Britain as a whole. There is, however, a danger in this strategy. In claiming to speak for “the North” against an aloof establishment based in and serving the needs of the South East, there is a risk of him appearing to speak only for voters north of the Trent. Will this alienate Labour voters in London, let alone somewhere like Cornwall, clearly not Northern but marginalized nonetheless. There’s also the question of what kind of Northerness it is that Burnham embodies: can someone from the Northwest claim to speak on behalf of those from, say, Sunderland or Middlesbrough? Given Burnham’s talk about wanting to bring the nation together, he must tread gently here.

Another potential pitfall lies in his call, made during victory speech on Friday morning, to end “HMO Britain”. The deeply unpopular spate of outsourced houses that have sprung up, often in poorer, Northern parts of the country, have in recent years become something of a byword for economic decline and state failure. The fact that many of them are used to house refugees and asylum seekers provides fertile ground for a Right intent on tethering economic dysfunction to the question of immigration. Whatever vision of Northernness, or indeed Englishness, that Burnham manages to articulate will have to sever this link.

Doing so will be tough. As he has attempted this during the campaign he has been dragged to the Right on social policy, for instance in voicing support for Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms. This has put him on a collision course with more progressive elements of his base, a section which under Starmer has gravitated towards the Greens.

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He is on safer ground with the political economy. His vision, dubbed “Manchesterism”, is yet to be fully articulated, and there is some internal competition on its true meaning. But, in its more radical form, as defined by Mathew Lawrence of the think tank Common Wealth, it involves the reversal of the privatisations of the Eighties; new publicly owned transport networks; and more social housing and the development of what Lawrence calls the “productive state”. All of this essentially amounts to a kind of “pro-business socialism”. As Burnham told his supporters, this by-election must be “known as a byword for the change that came to British politics”, which can usher in an “economy that works for everybody”.

Whether Burnham can achieve this remains to be seen. He is, after all, currently only an MP. There’s a long way to go until he reaches No. 10. And, much like Reform, Burnham’s coalition is an unsteady one. British politics has perhaps never been as fissiparous as it is today. Parties rise and fall; new blocs cohere and disintegrate. For Burnham to solidify his support and take it into the next general election, whenever that will be, will take a huge amount of political skill.

In doing so, there will be pressure for him to tone down his Northernness, to blunt the sharper edges of his populist appeal and appeal to “Middle England”. He should resist this. What’s clear from his success is that many voters have taken to his very rooted politics — a politics of place in the most literal sense — with genuine enthusiasm. There is real power in the ability to speak for the particular, for the local, but only if it is tethered to a vision which can reach beyond that too. Burnham can, and must, speak from the North; but in doing so he must transform the whole country. Voters, wherever they are, are desperate for a change; Burnham will have to deliver it. If he can’t, the path for a new Right government seems likely, whatever his outsider credentials.