Fox believed that England could be a united and peaceable land, almost a preview to heaven. But some four centuries on, we have Pendle instead. A council area in eastern-most Lancashire, it contains all the failings of modern Britain. In the top 10% of most deprived areas in the country, it also suffers a 53% employment rate. Yet as it elects new councilors today, its story is anything but local. Its atomization and apathy portents, perhaps, of England’s future too.

Last year, the Mail called Pendle “Britain’s valley of strangers”, mostly on account of the town at its center. Nelson is a place with one pub and 19 mosques. The high-street shops are either shuttered or bear Urdu script (of people whose first language isn’t English, 38% of the borough’s residents speak little-to-no English). And yet drive a mile or two out of the town, towards the hill, and it’s quixotically different — an “undiscovered” Cotswolds, frequented by travel supplements, with “quaint” limestone cottages and “cozy” inns.

This was once a placidly apolitical bellwether seat, a testament to the two-party system. But today, its fractured political landscape houses everyone from middle-class Starmerites and Restore-curious farmhands to long-established British Asians and more recent migrants — to say nothing of Nelson’s beleaguered white working class. Out of work and in despair, the latter are often in the town’s last remaining pub: the Station Hotel, a detached and convoluted late Victorian building on the edge of a carpark.

“It’s just a dying town,” Sean tells me, dragging on his cigarette in the pub’s carpeted portico. It’s mid-afternoon on a Friday, and it’s raining emetically. Sean has lived in Nelson all his life and eagerly rehearses the statistics of its decline. “Loads of mills, 13 pubs, and six nightclubs,” the best of which hosted the Stones, Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix. Now there’s only karaoke night at the Station. “Can’t hate them for it, but Asians don’t drink,” he says. “That’s why there’s no pubs or nightclubs and so many mosques. Getting robbed of our culture; I don’t mean it nasty.” He drops his cigarette on the carpet, and slouches inside towards the bar. “This place is just too old to bother.”

Sean was born in 1960, by which point Nelson had already stopped bothering. The town, which had sprung up to accommodate local millworkers in the mid-19th century, had little to offer once the mills closed. And as Britain’s cotton industry died, the number of looms in Nelson dwindled in sympathy, from 22,000 to 10,000 in the half-decade to 1964. To cut costs, the few remaining jobs were filled by an influx of lower-wage, skilled laborers from Gujrat in Pakistan, who moved here in the Sixties for a better life. All that remains of Nelson’s former glory is a statue of a weaving shuttle, which some kids scrutinize like an alien object. “It’s a pencil,” one says. “No, it’s a Muslim thing,” chimes another. According to the 2021 census, certain wards in Nelson have populations over 85% British Asian.

“I don’t know whether I would use the term ‘divided constituency’,” Jonathan Hinder, the local MP, tells me as we walk through Nelson. Almost everything we pass — the mall, the roads, even the pavements — is scaffolded, awaiting demolition, or else under construction. Hinder was born on the other side of the hill, in a village near Clitheroe. He’s still getting to know Nelson, but Nelson resists knowing him. Only one man, who works at the train station, stops him to talk, grumbling about the timetables.

Whatever Hinder might claim, that struggle to be heard hints at Nelson’s deep divisions. With the town already split between a demoralized white rump, and the Sixties Pakistanis and their children, the past 15 years has seen even greater change. Between 2011 and 2021, Nelson’s population increased by 14.8%, its Asian population climbing especially. This growth was largely driven by newcomers the locals call “Europeans” — migrants of Pakistani heritage, who moved from Portugal, Italy and elsewhere in southern Europe to join their families in the last days of EU free movement.

These latest arrivals were not met kindly by the more longstanding British Asian community, yet another tear in Nelson’s social fabric. “They are nothing,” says Fozia, 44, who sells pakoras in Nelson Plaza, one of two neighboring bazaars on Scotland Road. “They are originally from Pakistan, but they’re not really educated people… They are claiming new benefits in the UK, which is not fair on us.” They have, she insists, changed the character of the town. “It used to be more like an English town,” Fozia says, “now it’s more like an Asian one.” According to the 2021 census, certain wards in Nelson have populations over 85% British Asian, which accounts for the number of mosques in the town — one of which is the Masjid Sunnah Nelson, attended until recently by the Manchester synagogue attacker Jihad al-Shamie. In 2024, it was reported for “fuelling antisemitism” after the imam Abul Abbaas Naveed linked the Gaza conflict to “the plotting of the kuffar against Islam”.

There are louder tensions too. The noise starts at 6pm most days: a murder of sportscars rumbling down Regent Street. Sometimes, there’s drag races, other times it’s just showboating. Pete, lounging at the bar in the Station Hotel, shrugs: “Ferraris, Lamborghinis — I don’t know where they get them, but they hire them and scream around.” In the past few weeks alone, two Lamborghinis have crashed — one in Nelson, the other in nearby Blackburn. Pete says he could cope if it were just the cars, but it’s not. A little  later the fireworks start. “It’s not meant to aggravate anybody,” Pete says, as he explains that they’re being let off at wedding parties. Others disagree. “It’s the younger Asians,” says 64-year-old Karl. “They have no respect for their own culture.”

Little wonder, given such animosity, that Hinder believes controlled borders are essential if Britain’s fragile civic nationalism is to endure. But he worries: this town has challenged his previous faith in integration. He describes how he sometimes knocks on doors in Nelson which are opened by young Asian women who can’t speak English. “A young Asian woman,” he says, hesitantly. “That’s the key thing for me; it’s not the elderly, who you might be more… kind of…expecting to be… kind of… unable to speak English or whatever. It’s people that are more recent… um… who have come over and haven’t necessarily… really… kind of… integrated.”

Pendle’s politics splits sharply along the community fractures. Since 2024, the local council has been run by Gaza independents in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, which seems likely to remain the case after today’s elections. Before that, though, it was the last stronghold of the BNP, with councillor Brian Parker presiding over the Marsden ward for 12 years until 2018. More recently, it’s been flagged as one of the places in Britain most vulnerable to Right-wing extremism.

Today, though, there’s little sense of a pending nationalist revolt in the town of Nelson. A solitary St George’s cross hangs limply from a streetlight on Scotland Road. Most people I meet are like John, a former publican who hasn’t voted since the Nineties. He tells me that they’re all the same — even Reform, which is “corrupt” and “piss in the same pot”. Few people I speak to seem unaware local elections are on. Even fewer know Hinder is their local MP.

But not everyone in this valley is similarly apathetic. Five miles from Nelson, in the hilltop village of Trawden, locals are struggling with a profusion of boy racers. A blacked-out BMW nips past the Trawden Arms, a community-owned pub that serves smoked pheasant chips. One man, an army veteran, spills his pint as he angrily launches himself from his picnic table to chase after the car, shouting: “Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!” He then returns to his seat, only to be set off again by another passing car. He won’t say his name, but he does tell me that Nigel Farage is a “faggot”. (He tells me I’m one too.)

Strikingly, though, people here seem energized by politics. The former soldier tells me he’d like Rupert Lowe to be the prime minister because he’d bring back “hangings for murderers and rapists”. He smiles. “Better make sure I don’t kill someone myself then.” Once a predictably Tory electorate, Trawden’s wealthier voters now split between the Liberal Democrats and Restore Britain. There is, though, a begrudging acceptance of the area’s British Asian community. “There’s not hatred here,” says one man at the Trawden Arms. “Just two ways of life.” One woman said that Nelson’s existence was handy. After all, it means there’s a supermarket open on Christmas Day.

To be fair, Hinder does have some grudging supporters — or his party does anyway. These centrist dads can be found at — where else? — the Parkrun on the hill above Colne, a well-to-do town up the road from Nelson. One run marshal, stretching by the course, is bemused by the clash between Nelson’s longer-standing migrants. It’s always been the same, he tells me. “People always complain about migrants taking their jobs.” Having said that, he never goes there. When I press him, he explains: “because of the shops. They have their own shops.” He doesn’t know who he’d vote for if Labour axed Starmer. Maybe the Lib Dems, he says over his shoulder as he trots off.

In his 1977 essay “The English Enigma”, Tom Nairn foresaw the death of Britain’s ancien régime, squeezed between the “combined pressures of external collapse (e.g., breakdown of currency) and internal upheaval (whether as national or as social revolt, or as the two at once)”. But what Pendle suggests is something more concerning — that the ancien régime will stumble on for some time yet. More than that, it’ll be bolstered by the very upheavals Nairn foresaw: sequestered communities, begrudgingly tolerating one another, their flirtations with radical politics canceled out by their neighbors. Come the General Election, it seems unlikely that any single politician will muster the popular strength to patch together enough support to rule these varied and intractable tribes — whether in Pendle or anywhere else.

* 7 May 2026: This article has been amended to correct the statistic on English speakers in Pendle.

The first time I visit Cookson Street, it is Saturday morning and, despite its reputation, there are no red lights: just a string of boarded-up shops and a building site at the end of the road. A new “Civil Service Hub” for 3,000 relocated government workers is nearing completion. Around the corner, a Royal British Legion club stands opposite a gay sauna. Which, I wonder, will the civil servants prefer?

Only one brothel is open and a car loiters outside. The driver leans over a baby in a car seat, watching the door. Is he waiting to go in, or for someone to come out? He drives off before I can ask.

The second time I visit Cookson Street, the groan of revellers near the North Pier lingers on the wind. Natalie’s is flanked by darkness; her LED lights in neon contrast with the squalid buildings on either side. Fluorescent blue picks out her pink door. I press the buzzer.

A lingeried woman, perhaps in her late-20s, appears at the door. She smiles vacantly, and guides me into a waiting room. The walls are crimson; the leather sofa is black; a vending machine vibrates in the corner, selling chocolate bars and crisps. “We do not tolerate harassment,” reads a poster, provided by the police. A CCTV camera flashes. There is a faint scent of hand sanitiser.

“Have you been here before?” the woman asks, before reeling off her prices. “It’s £40 for hand relief: £50 for topless hand relief; £60 for oral or sex; or it’s £70 for all three. And that’s for half an hour.” She summons two younger women from a backroom. They shuffle in nervously, introduce themselves in Lancashire accents, and ask me to choose.

I decline and explain I want to talk about their business, the punters, and whether the brothel — technically illegal in the UK — had been approved by the police. “NO,” a woman shouts from the backroom. “He needs to ask Joanne.” The two younger women quickly disappear; the third passes me a phone number.

Joanne Andrew has run a brothel out of 27 Cookson Street since at least 2010, when she was caught advertising it as a “beauty salon” on the local council’s website. As punishment, the council removed the listing, but the punters kept returning. For six years, they came and went — until a police raid discovered a 16-year-old runaway from Manchester hiding half-naked under a blanket. Pulled up in court and facing a closure order, Andrew apologised for not knowing the girl’s age: it was a “one-off mistake”, she told a judge. It wouldn’t happen again. She claimed she had a mortgage to pay, and worried what would happen to her “girls” if the brothel closed. This satisfied the judge who allowed Natalie’s to remain open. Since then, the police have carried out regular inspections, the most recent taking place earlier this year.

When I asked Lancashire Police about this visit, they — like Andrews — refused to comment. And who can blame them? Far easier to stay quiet — to accept that Blackpool’s vice and politics are too entwined to untangle. Far easier to pretend the underworld doesn’t exist.

Last year, it was revealed that 105 serving police officers were under investigation for corruption; this year, it was the turn of Blackpool’s representatives in Westminster. In Blackpool North, the MP stands accused of misusing taxpayers’ money, while his colleague in Fylde allegedly paid a teenage escort for sex and later used campaign funds to pay off “bad people” who had locked him in a flat. For now at least, neither has fallen as far as the MP for Blackpool South: in March, Scott Benton was forced to stand down after agreeing to lobby ministers in return for money from journalists posing as gambling industry investors.

There’s a by-election next month, but few believe change will follow: every year or so, political betrayal washes up on Blackpool’s shores, and lies there ignored. Three decades ago, Tony Blair chose the resort’s Winter Gardens as the demolition site of Clause IV, his party’s commitment to socialism, and in return promised to build an opulent supercasino; but the project was moved to Manchester, and finally binned. Then, 15 years later, Boris Johnson came to town and promised to Level It Up. The Government claims the resort has received more than £100 million of funding since 2019. But how did they spend it?

Today, eight of the country’s 10 most deprived council wards are in Blackpool. And on all counts, the southern ward of Bloomfield tops the list: 40% of children live in poverty here, 25% of adults are on out-of-work benefits, and nearly 20% suffer from GP-diagnosed depression. It is a petri dish for political negligence. There are no by-election placards; just the resigned and despairing.

Jimmy, David and Dylan are no exception. Perched outside a crumbling house on a crumbling street, a 10-minute walk from Blackpool’s South Pier, the trio of oversized urchins are smoking a “biff”.

“Do you want to see the seedy drug side or the seedy sex side?” Jimmy asks. He’s the eldest of the three, probably in his early-30s, and boasts that he knows all the “rough places”. He tells me, too, that “nobody messes” with his brother, while his nephew is on the run in Dubai and “looking at 30 years”.

Jimmy’s eyes flicker as he describes his own predicament. “I’ve got a problem with this bloke, Robert,” he says. “And I’m going to have to have it with him.” But Robert won’t fight “man-to-man” with his fists. “He’s driving about on one of those electric bikes with a bottle of acid for me. Do you know why he wants to do that?” Jimmy answers his own question. “Because he’s a soft cunt.”

On cue, a car screeches wildly down the road and skids to a halt on the pavement next to us. Jimmy’s smile has disappeared; his torso has tensed. He looks terrified.

“Look here you maggot,” the driver is livid. “What have you been saying about me?” Jimmy tries to dart around the car but is cut off. “You’ve been saying to people that you’re going to kill me,” the driver yells, reaching to get out. But Jimmy has disappeared down an alleyway — and the man can only fire off insults: “You’re a MUPPET. You’re a fucking muppet.” He turns to a teenager who has emerged from a nearby house. “Tell me where he lives,” he demands, speeding off as soon as the boy replies.

With Jimmy gone, the younger pair open up. David is 20; Dylan is 18. Both deal drugs and both are homeless. They have black rings around their eyes, filth under their fingernails, and the wispy moustaches of young men unable to grow a full beard. Occasionally, they admit, they rob tourists at knife-point.

David was “kicked out of care” when he was 18, and had nowhere to go. He worked as a roofer for a bit, living on-site, but then the jobs dried up. “I’m selling weed right now to get some p’s on the table.” On a good day, he’ll make around £70 — enough to pay for a twin room in a mouldering backstreet hotel. On a bad day, the pair spend the night wandering the streets, bitter gusts off the Irish Sea making sleep impossible.

Dylan was 16 when he was kicked out by his mother, and doesn’t know why. He lived on a friend’s sofa for a few months, and was passed between family-members. But eventually they tired of him, and he knew couldn’t go home. “My brother is a paedo,” he says matter-of-factly. “He’s been done for it… If I go near that gaff, that’ll be me done. I know I’ll just go for him.”

When they’re not dealing, the boys — they’re still boys — hang out on the resort’s Central Pier, where a security guard brings them food and lets them charge their phones. Sometimes they smoke a “biff”; other times they glare at tourists. Both claim to have girlfriends who don’t know they’re homeless. “They just think we sell a bit of weed,” Dylan says. David starts to tell me about his last girlfriend who had two miscarriages, before catching himself. “It’s just one of those things,” he shrugs.

By contrast, they seem to feed giddily off the violence they see. “A few months ago, I saw someone get run over, stabbed, and then run over again,” Dylan says. David interrupts: “I’ve seen someone with their intestines hanging out.” He then pulls up his jacket to reveal scars down his arms. He first got stabbed when he was in care, he explains. Not to be outdone, Dylan lifts his shirt proudly: his pale stomach is pockmarked by knife wounds.

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“We’ve all seen shit,” Dylan adds. “We’ve all been forced to live through it… I watched one of my friends kill himself.” The friend, inconsolable after an argument with his mother, was on FaceTime to Dylan when he pulled out a knife and plunged it into his chest. Dylan sprinted to his house, but arrived too late. A coroner blamed “unmanaged ADHD”. The boy was 15.

A few hundred metres away, up towards the promenade, Martin is sitting in his toy shop. Surrounded by puzzles and dolls and brightly coloured beach balls, he is unforgiving of Blackpool’s young criminals. Just three weeks after the store opened, a group of teenagers smashed through its windows and ran off with its contents. Every now and then, one will return. Today, the shop is empty. It’s been a slow start to the year, he explains.

Martin dismisses those who claim it’s hard to find a job in Blackpool. “If you want work, you just need to ask around,” he says. “There’s always a job somewhere.” The problem, according to everyone I speak to, is that crime has anchored itself in Blackpool — and few can escape it. Martin describes how a nearby flat was colonised by dealers and turned into a drug den. Just a few weeks ago, somebody was killed around the corner: he says a heroin addict went to attack her boyfriend with a knife, who then took it off her and stabbed her 18 times.

A few doors down from where the attack took place, Jenny is having a cigarette on her porch. She claims a prying neighbour spotted a wall caked in blood, but isn’t sure she believes it: “Surely it would’ve been reported in the papers?”

Born in Huddersfield and now in her 50s, Jenny has worked behind almost every bar in Blackpool, but is currently unemployed. She suffers from spinal degeneration, pulmonary disease, bipolar disorder and anxiety. “There’s nothing rare about that here,” she adds. “Everyone has a story behind it though.”

And hers? “My dad was a Glaswegian gangster and one of Britain’s longest-serving prisoners, and my step-dad beat the seven bells out of me.” She breezily describes her father’s downfall: “He killed a child molester and then they put him in a prison full of child molesters. So he went ahead and killed a few more…”

For Jenny, moving to Blackpool provided an escape and a livelihood for her and her children. But it was a limited one. She points to Central Drive to chart the resort’s decline. It used to be the proud backbone of Blackpool. Today, it is an assortment of derelict buildings, its main attraction — a joke shop from the Seventies — finally collapsing in December.

Eastern European gangs now operate out of the creaking houses, selling drugs and trafficked women on soiled mattresses. A Romanian newsagent stands accused of trying to solicit schoolgirls. Jenny tells me how a bunch of local lads went down to “kick the shit out of them”.

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When I visit at night, lights flicker behind torn blackout curtains. A few young men skulk up the street and into a disintegrating building. Just the sort of place where a 16-year-old runaway could be hidden; or a young man stabbed; or an MP held ransom. A patrol car turns on to the road, and then off again. “Everyone knows about what’s going on,” a neighbour says. “But the police do nothing.” Some residents blame their councillors, others their MP. All are resigned to the fact that nobody will step in. “It feels like they’re letting the Romanies and Romanians take over,” says one woman.

Back on the promenade, a Romany disagrees. Jade claims to read hundreds of palms each week, but, like every business owner here, has to contend with thieving gangs and delinquents. They descend in balaclavas during the day, many as young as 11. “You can’t do anything because they’re underage,” she adds.

Vice is written into Blackpool’s stars, Jade says. And then dragged down to earth: to the brothels and backrooms, to the drug dens and open streets. For decades, politicians offered platitudes and promises — and look at what they delivered: a party town thrown into the abyss. “People just don’t have enough money,” she sighs. “Businesses are closing and there’s more homeless on the streets. It all adds to this restless atmosphere.”

She’ll always have her regulars, though. Even in turmoil, people want to have their palms read; to be told that they matter, that they have a future. As if to prove her point, a woman sticks her head through the curtain and demands a reading. “Just don’t tell me if I’m going to die,” she pleads.

The fortune-teller laughs. “But of course you are.”

***

Some names have been changed.

West Lancashire’s largest town, meanwhile, has a population of just under 40,000. Skelmersdale — or “Skem”  — was one of the very first New Towns, built in the Sixties to accommodate families from some of Liverpool’s worst slum housing. They were plonked down in the middle of a rural, mostly Tory-voting wilderness; the railway line to the city had closed to passengers in 1956, so these new arrivals were completely cut off from relatives and friends. This isolation was probably the main reason why “Skem” never flourished. But it nevertheless changed the fate of the surrounding area.

In West Lancashire the Tory tradition remained strong. But Skem’s growing size meant that the district council of West Lancashire had a strong Labour representation. Meanwhile local Toryism, once a powerful force, has fragmented. When the constituency of West Lancashire was formed in 1983, it elected a Conservative MP, Ken Hind, but it has had a Labour MP since 1992, as the “red” political influence of Liverpool spread well beyond Skelmersdale. Middle-class Liverpudlians have steadily relocated to the old market towns of Ormskirk and Burscough while continuing to commute into the city. Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, has boosted the economy of the area, as well as making the population more cosmopolitan, with a more Liverpool-centred attitude.

All of this begs what we might call the West Lancashire Question. While Tam Dalyell’s West Lothian Question related to dilemmas facing Scotland as part of a devolved UK, the West Lancashire Question might consider the fate of English regions in an increasingly muddled local government jigsaw. The constituency may be about to decide who it wants to send to Westminster, but how does it want to rule itself?

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Today’s local government structures completely fail to represent the reality of the area and its hinterland. At the moment, the local authority is West Lancashire Borough Council, which operates as part of Lancashire County Council. And yet the politics and economics of the area are shaped by Liverpool: surely, then, it should be part of the Liverpool City Region?

LCR represents around 1.5 million people, comprising the councils of Liverpool, Sefton, Knowsley, St Helens, Halton and Wirral. It has its own elected mayor, Steve Rotheram, and, with a remit that covers transport, housing and economic development, it has more power than not only West Lancashire Borough but the entirety of Lancashire County Council can dream of.

Although West Lancashire increasingly looks, feels and even sounds like the Liverpool City Region — listen to the accents in Ormskirk pubs and cafes — it is stuck within Tory-led Lancashire County Council, which has very limited resources. The county council does collaborate with Labour in Liverpool City Region and West Lancashire Borough: close work between them yielded what seemed an attractive bid to bring trains back to Skelmersdale with a direct link to Liverpool. But this was turned down by central Government, suggesting that cheaper options should be explored. The bid was backed by Rosie Cooper, who described the decision as a “betrayal”.

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If, however, this project had been proposed across the water in Wales, which has devolved powers over transport, the decision would have been different. As it was, Whitehall scuppered a project which would have brought major benefits to a town strongly in need of “levelling-up”. And the Westminster representative could do nothing about it. The region needs its own powers.

There is no simple solution, though the most obvious would be to make the constituency part of Merseyside. But some in West Lancashire, particularly those living to the north of the constituency, would argue that the link to Preston is just as important as the link to Liverpool. The irony of the current “combined authority” arrangements is that they are too restrictive: the old “historic” Lancashire included all of Liverpool, Manchester, Preston and beyond. It was a mighty region, dismantled by Government edict in 1974. The effect has been to weaken and divide what was a powerful province through its own democratic structures.

Part of the problem is one of democratic accountability. For all its faults and limitations, Lancashire County Council is a democratically elected body with county councillors representing local wards. The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, apart from the mayor, is indirectly-elected. It doesn’t make for good governance and makes the combined authorities difficult to influence. The London model, where the Greater London Authority provides oversight for the mayor, would be an improvement: like the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it is elected through a proportional system.

It’s too late to restore pre-1974 Lancashire. Rather, we should imagine a much-enlarged Lancashire, which can include the combined authorities of Liverpool and Greater Manchester. Perhaps we could even start to seriously consider John Prescott’s idea of a “North-West” regional government with the resources and powers to create the sort of vibrant regional economies that the German Länder have supported. Most other European countries have strong regional governments, which are able to raise their own taxes and make decisions independently of the state. Here in England, even relatively small projects have to get approval from Westminster; all too often, they get rejected. Why not give Lancashire — which has almost as many residents as Northern Ireland — the same democratic government, and powers, that Scotland and Wales have?

Labour should be hammering away on this. Not many miles away, in Oldham, the highly-respected Coliseum Theatre is closing because every penny of its funding from Arts Council England has been cut. Keir Starmer has been silent on this and other local disappointments. Is it because he doesn’t want to be seen to be too “Northern”?

Labour is likely to win this by-election. But it is not doing enough for West Lancashire. If it had any idea what was good for the region, the party would empower it, by supporting the creation of a Greater Lancashire authority. And not make it go to Whitehall with a begging bowl which is all too often thrown back in their face.

From her bench facing the sea, one elderly lady rearranged her sleeping bag and sat up to light her first cigarette of the day; another rough sleeper was angry as he stumbled, yelling into the waves: “Yer English, yer oughter to be ashamed of yersain.”

He has a point. Britain’s biggest seaside resort is home to a sharp and uncomfortable paradox: while it accommodates millions of visitors every year, several of its wards are among the most deprived in the country and with the worst life expectancy. This is a place which, for all its beauty and associations with pleasure and fun, results in shortened lives blighted by debt, ill health and substance abuse.

When William Beveridge set out to eradicate five “Giant Evils” from Britain, “want” was first on his list. In the early Forties, as the social reformer gathered his data and prepared his plans, this priority seemed straightforward: people needed basics such as food, shelter, warmth and clothing. His plans for a social security system “from cradle to grave” would ensure that no one would go short. But 80 years on, Blackpool provides a grim example of deprivation not seen since the Thirties. Food banks report a 54% increase in the need for food parcels in the last year, dependence on charity has become normal for hundreds of families in the town, and the rise in energy prices brings particular hardship in a place with poor housing stock, well-known for its bitter winds and rain sweeping in off the sea.

Further up the coast, in Morecambe, a similar story is playing out. The North Lancashire Citizen Advice Bureau (CAB) has seen a massive rise in clients desperate for help — in some places, a staggering 566% increase in the last year. The most common issue is struggling with utility bills, followed closely by problems with debt. Households get caught in a pattern of borrowing and relying on charity because levels of benefit are not sufficient, suggests Joanna Young, the CAB’s head of research for North Lancashire. She adds that their clients talk of how one “mini-crisis” — it can be as routine as the need for a new pair of school shoes — can set a family back for months. Precarity has become a way of life.

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What would Beveridge make of places such as Blackpool and Morecambe? No doubt he would view his dream as a failure, despite a huge increase in the country’s GDP in the intervening 80 years. But what would also have surprised Beveridge are the causes of that poverty, and the fact that at least some can be traced right back to gaps and mistakes in his original plans.

Beveridge was no socialist, and he believed that work was the true solution to poverty (after all, he listed “idleness” as one of the other five Giants). But, as Professor Jonathan Bradshaw has noted, he overlooked the issue of low pay. Roughly 40% of the CAB’s clients in North Lancashire are in work — and this figure is supported by nationwide data, such as research by Joseph Rowntree Foundation which found that three out of four children living in poverty have a working parent. Chronic low pay particularly affects coastal resorts because so much of their employment is in the worst-affected sectors such as care and hospitality; the average wage in Blackpool is a third below the national figure. The result is a coastal pattern of some of the lowest average wages, highest levels of indebtedness and insolvencies. And this was already getting worse well before the devastating economic damage of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.

But Blackpool and Morecambe do not just illustrate the failure of Beveridge’s ambition; they also demonstrate forms of “want” that he never envisaged. Beveridge’s interpretation of poverty was strictly material, but in the 21st century the relevance and importance of another form of poverty has become starkly apparent. Blackpool and Morecambe are just two of the dozens of seaside resorts struggling with what are known as the “diseases of despair”.

Seaside towns have been left to cope with a disproportionate number of the most troubled in society. When relationships break down, when prisoners are released, when people with substance abuse issues want a new start, the childhood memories of a seaside resort can appear to offer hope, and every year thousands arrive on the coast looking for a new start. A major driver is housing costs: as they have soared out of affordable reach in most cities, many of the poorest and most vulnerable are effectively forced out. They get on a train to the end of the line. In the South-East, this includes towns such as Clacton (where the neighbouring resort of Jaywick has held the designation of the poorest place in the UK since 2010), Hastings, and the Thanet resorts of Margate and Ramsgate. Similarly, rising prices in Manchester and Preston ensure that people end up drifting to Blackpool and Morecambe. And this holds for countless other resort towns, from Scarborough to Skegness, Ilfracombe to Weston-Super-Mare and Rhyl in North Wales.

When I visited Blackpool in September, I spoke to Ian Treasure, who has worked on a number of local projects for rough sleepers. As we passed along the streets adjoining the promenade, he pointed out the tell-tale signs of “Houses in Multiple Occupation” which dominate the area. Long lines of door bells and rows of bins mark out the bedsits created out of the former hotels. The cheap housing stock is often bought up by absentee landlords and divided up into accommodation which can be rented for a fraction of the cost. This is what draws the approximately 8,000 people who arrive in Blackpool every year; a large proportion of whom are on benefits and are disproportionately male and single. They bring with them many of their demons, lack of trust and relationship. What ties they may have had – family or friends – are left behind, making this type of coastal poverty often lonely and unsupported.

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These forms of emotional and relationship poverty were not something Beveridge grasped in the Forties, but with them comes poor mental health, and in the case of Blackpool, some of the highest suicide and self-harm rates in the country. Four Blackpool wards have the lowest life expectancy in the country at 66.6 years, compared to a UK average of 82.3 years. As the Chief Medical Officer’s annual 2021 report on seaside towns makes clear, Blackpool has “the single most vulnerable population in the country in the most inappropriate accommodation”.

Yet the growth of this desperate poverty has only accelerated in recent years; during the pandemic, the buy-to-let market in Blackpool boomed, encouraged by the relaxation on stamp duty and promises of high investment yields from tenants on housing benefits. Elsewhere, Beveridge would have been appalled by the misuse of public funds; his central argument in support of the welfare state was that it would make the population healthier and better educated in order to underpin economic growth. In contrast, Blackpool (and many other coastal towns) has resulted in the opposite; a system of farming the most vulnerable in society at government expense, with the profits sucked out by landlords who do not live in the area.

As if this were not enough, many seaside towns also face another of the great social challenges of our time — one which Beveridge did not envisage, and which is, in many ways, the result of his great achievement, the founding of the NHS. That is, the fact that we are living longer, and that many choose to spend their retirement years in coastal towns; Minehead in West Somerset and Skegness and its neighbouring Lincolnshire coast resorts have some of the most elderly populations in the UK. This will be the great test of the NHS over the coming decades; our longer lives require the management of complex chronic health conditions, leading to greater demands for health and social care. Yet vacancies for doctors and nurses are higher on such poorly connected coasts, while the ratio of elderly to people of working age is worsening, raising concerns over who will care for the growing number of octogenarians by the end of this decade.

The big picture here is the power of geography to determine lives. The British economy is driven by the vitality of cities and this has shaped infrastructure investment (disproportionately concentrated in London). Meanwhile, the periphery is neglected, only useful as a form of cheap investment or a zone to dump those whose needs are no longer accommodated elsewhere. The challenges for the coasts’ overstretched councils and health authorities are Sisyphean, with little recognition of their unique nature in Westminster or Whitehall. The Levelling Up agenda of recent years may have dominated the headlines, yet it has showed scant insight into these areas’ plight given its preoccupation with driving up productivity — always a challenge in care and hospitality. Eighty years on, the entire of Britain needs another Beveridge. But perhaps more than anywhere else, its forgotten seaside towns need a Beveridge who can actually get the job done.

In recent years, though, Europe’s largest bus station has had the sandblasters round; the facade doesn’t exactly shimmer, but now it seems friendly. One side of the terminus has been pedestrianised. It has always been a great way to get out of Preston. Now, it might even be a great way to arrive.

“It’s about investing,” Matthew Brown gushes. “All it needed was someone to think long term.” The Leader of Preston City Council is a Labour man almost to the point of caricature: a lanky Lancastrian in a flat cap and thick British Racing Green workers’ shirt. Increasingly, he is also an unlikely Lenin to a new wave of global leftism. The stuff he’s doing here, not too far from the factories whence Friedrich Engels once minted his champagne kitty, has been profiled all over the world as “The Preston Model”.

Until their defeat, when Corbynites wanted to point to an economic policy, they would often wave towards Preston. John McDonnell was a frequent visitor. Funds had been earmarked, in the event of a 2019 Labour victory, to frank Prestonist policies across the country. More lately, yesterday’s man Ed Miliband devoted an entire chapter of his new book, Go Big: How To Fix Our World, to the town’s schemes. In an age of thinning possibilities, Preston seems to suggest somewhere that the Left can go.

From the brow of the hill, Brown points to a big hole in the centre of town, where a slew of brutalism has been torn down. Soon, it will rise again, as a cinema, owned by the council, and run by an independent contractor: the Preston model is based on keeping money in circulation in the town, rather than having it bleed back to some distant corporate HQ. The contracts for the old building’s demolition were won by local businesses.

But the problem with buying local is so obvious entire books have been written about it. The nation-state is inherently redistributive: that’s part of the bargain. The block grant that Preston receives from central government is funded through the dark satanic number mills of Canary Wharf. But once it arrives, they convert capitalism into socialism: a perfect economic cycle.

Just outside the Council’s offices, a cafe-restaurant has been turned into a worker’s co-operative, The Larder (4.5 stars on Google reviews). “It’s about putting power in people’s hands,” Brown tells me. In his section of the Left — the one that once contained Tony Benn — democratic participation is the cure for all ills. It’s an idea that seems to conform to basic human psychology: taking decisions at the closest level of organisation won battles for the Wehrmacht, and profits for GE.

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How you get to that point is a different issue. Whereas previously socialism asked how can a state become like a company — incorporating workers into its overall plan — Prestonism asks: How can a company become more like a state, giving democracy to the workers? “With a co-operative,” Brown says, “everyone gets a vote. From the cleaner to the managing director.”

But where will the money come from? This is the eternal dance of history. The Left says: wouldn’t it be nice if we all worked as a team and pooled our winnings. To which the Right replies: yes, it would. You first.

Yet Brown points to a student accommodation block: black brick, four storeys, undistinguished, but no failure. It was funded by the Lancashire Pension Fund. “See, there are millions of pounds that would otherwise go to fund something in Abu Dhabi.” But if a new spa resort in Abu Dhabi pays a higher rate of return, that might be useful to the Prestonian pensioners scraping by. And worse: if the market in Preston collapses, well, there are suddenly a lot of eggs in one local basket.

Still, there is something here that most “neoliberal” economic theory doesn’t quantify well: the power of reputation, and observation. Nassim Taleb touched on it with his idea of Skin In The Game. If the Lancashire Pension Fund goes bust, the university accommodation managers will have their own community to answer to. And the Lancashire Pension Fund can at least keep a much closer eye on their asset here than they might on, say, a condo block in Vancouver.

At its heart, the Preston Model is a reaction against globalisation, on a Legoland scale. We are alienated from the fruits of our labour, and that gap between the observable allows for all sorts of perversions to creep in. In the long run Preston will always be out-competed by the forces of capital — an invisible shapeshifting enemy — but at an instinctual level, they’re not onto nothing.

There’s a certain vacant fatalism, for instance, in the attitude of Councillor Ron Woollam, deputy leader of the Preston Tories, to what the town centre should actually look like, who it should be for. “We’re quite worried about the bank actually,” he says. “We don’t think it’s the job of the council to be making these kinds of investments… and as to the model, well, we keep asking for evidence, if it’s worked then there should be signs. But none is ever really forthcoming. In fact, we think it’s actually discouraging investment. People are put off by the meddling.”

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A decade ago, LendLease turned up in Preston. Britain’s largest property investors had successfully backed Liverpool’s One mall development. Now, they proposed to extend the favour to Preston with a £700 million investment. Heavy change. But the deal fell through, in part due to niggles from the Labour-lead council.

LendLease might have been something great for Preston. But then, as anyone who has been to a British shopping mall will know, this is highly unlikely. The town’s gig staple, The Warehouse, “would have been bulldozed if the shopping centre had gone ahead,” Brown tells me. Here, Joy Division recorded a live album twelve weeks before Ian Curtis’ death. Here, generations of bands have had their start.

Now, instead of LendLease’s glistening food courts, what persists is a far smaller rebuild of the old Edwardian market, reborn in glass panels with independent traders. Paired with where the cinema will go, it’s a core that will likely revitalise the downtown precinct: a place worth congregating, in a town centre worth spending money in.

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But that invites problems of its own. If the Preston Model is as successful as its inventors boast, then Big Capital will be along soon, ready to get its tentacles of jobs and investment into the place. So what’s an ardent socialist to do? Is this a model that can only win under conditions of failure?

In this country, we aren’t even close to answering these questions. In France, where they think from their gut first and add their reason after, they have long maintained a separate tax code for small business. Their small, independent shop sector thrives, but their big enterprises do OK too. The Monop’ is at the end of your block, but Marie at the boulangerie also gets by. In the UK, the Tesco Express squats at the end of your block, and the boulangerie is a Gregg’s. We don’t seem to have a cultural mechanism to price the value of autonomy, of community connections. And through some twisted vision of materialism, we don’t seem to believe that we even should.

As national politics comes to seem ever-more removed from our lives, the Left especially is retreating to a local level, where they can still hold power. But then, alongside this localism of the Left, the Right are also becoming invested in their own notions of local: of tradition, authenticity, capital-P Place. Preston was the site of the last battle fought on English soil — the Jacobite rebellion of the Young Pretender.  Now that the Left has bet its future on an ex-mill town in Lancashire, it may again decide who reigns.