Frank’s grandson, Kevin, grew up hearing stories of the heroic acts from his father, Joe, but thought of them as merely exaggerated family lore. The truth of what he had heard only dawned on him while playing for Newcastle United in the Eighties, when he was first shown photographs of his grandfather and his fellow rescuers. And when he returned to Newcastle as the club’s manager in the Nineties, he proudly unveiled a memorial to the disaster.

Born in 1951, Keegan started his career at Scunthorpe United before playing for Liverpool and then Hamburg, where he was affectionately known as “Mighty Mouse”; he, certainly had the muscular physique of a miner, but perhaps courage and tenacity were inheritable too. As one Stanley native explained to me: “Frank Keegan went back into the mine to rescue people. He was a local hero. It ran in the family.” Those qualities defined Kevin’s football as much as his character. He was never the tallest, strongest or most naturally gifted player on the pitch, yet he played every game as though it might be his last: harrying defenders, chasing lost causes, refusing to accept that any contest was beyond saving. “In Keegan we saw a man who had the one thing we wanted, apart from his ability: his natural enthusiasm,” observed his great mentor, the Liverpool manager Bill Shankly.

That enthusiasm proved infectious wherever he went. At a time when few English footballers dared leave home, Keegan embraced the adventure of moving to Hamburg in 1977, immersing himself in a new language and culture with the same wholehearted commitment he brought to everything else. The gamble transformed him into one of Europe’s finest players, winning consecutive Ballon d’Or awards, but just as important, it revealed an openness to new experiences that never left him. Whether racing cyclists on the TV show Superstars, throwing himself into charity work, or embracing new challenges as player, manager and broadcaster, Keegan possessed a rare lust for life that inspired affection as much as admiration.

Nowhere was that more evident than on Tyneside, where he played between 1982 and 1984, helping them achieve promotion to the First Division. But thanks to his father, a pitman who had headed south from Durham to the South Yorkshire coalfield, Keegan was always conscious of his Geordie roots. Joe brought him up on tales of Hughie Gallacher and entered into correspondence with Jackie Milburn (Newcastle’s famous center forward from the Fifties) about his son’s burgeoning football career. When Kev returned to Newcastle United as manager in 1992, the club was in a dire state — on the verge of relegation to the old Third Division for the first time in its history — and the city itself was reeling from the collapse of its traditional industries. He leaned into all this: he set new standards at the club — even paying for Newcastle’s squalid and dilapidated training ground to be cleaned up over the weekend with his own money — and spoke with knowledge and affection about the great cup-winning Newcastle teams of the Fifties, assembling a team that played with the same attacking elan as Milburn, and his dazzling fellow forwards George Robledo and Bobby Mitchell.

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But he did far more than build an exciting football team. He instilled confidence and a sense of possibility and gave an entire region permission to dream again. Keegan’s swashbuckling and high-scoring team — known to many as “The Entertainers” — became one of the most beloved sides in the club’s history. But football was only part of the story. He persuaded supporters that hope was not naïve and convinced players they could achieve more than they imagined. Les Ferdinand thought the gaffer was as charismatic as Muhammad Ali, while players as varied as the diligent fullback John Beresford and the dynamic Andy Cole, and countless others, have spoken of how Keegan’s greatest gift was making people believe in themselves.

So magnetic was his personality that on his return, the local press reached instinctively for biblical language. Keegan was “the Messiah” and promotion to the Premier League was the “Promised Land”. This was affectionate hyperbole, but it reflected real devotion. The North East had once been notably devout in its Christian practice, especially in the coalfields, so maybe there was a Methodist folk memory here of the Israelites’ bondage in Egypt. But Keegan was brought up a Catholic (indeed his first football coach at school in Doncaster was a nun called Sister Mary Oliver) and he seemed to believe in good works and not just faith alone.

The stories that have emerged since his death are telling because so few of them concern famous goals or managerial triumphs. Instead, fans always recalled his small acts of kindness and generosity. There is the much-loved tale of Newcastle’s visit to Swan Hunter’s shipyard at Wallsend, when workers facing redundancy were astonished to see Keegan arrive unannounced at the gates declaring, “My name is Kevin Keegan. I’ve brought the team down to cheer the lads up if that’s OK.” There is the Manchester City tea lady who was mugged of her pension, only for Keegan to organize a whip-round among the players and personally deliver far more than had been stolen. Others remember him pushing a disabled child around a charity fun run so the youngster could finish alongside everyone else, or simply taking time with supporters until the last autograph had been signed.

It’s hard to express just how much he was loved in the North East. Maybe because, with the decline of organized religion, football clubs became the last institutions that could gather a congregation, and this invested certain footballers and managers with a sort of moral authority. Especially figures like Keegan, who always played the game in the Corinthian spirit and who could be moved to righteous indignation by the dark arts of opponents like Alex Ferguson. His famous tirade against Ferguson’s Manchester United who pipped Newcastle to the title — “I will love it, just love it if we beat them” — distilled the spirit of defiance in the face of adversity, and a refusal to surrender hope or emotion, that Newcastle fans recognized in themselves and their city.

Yesterday evening, I drove over to Barrack Road where supporters were laying flowers, scarves and bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale on the steps of St James’ Park. There was grief, certainly, but also gratitude. People weren’t simply mourning a footballer. They were remembering the man who took their dreams seriously, who had carried their hopes with him as though they mattered as much as his own.

In the end, perhaps it was always his courage that defined him. Frank Keegan’s courage was physical, descending into a poisoned mine in search of survivors. Kevin’s was quieter but no less real. Even after learning he had stage-4 cancer, he chose not to retreat from public life. Instead, he appeared at Newcastle’s Tyne Theatre, speaking to a packed house with characteristic warmth, humor and honesty about his illness. He joked about his treatment, reminisced about his extraordinary life and admitted that he hoped to return to St James’ Park one last time to thank the supporters who had given him so much.

Asked once more about the long-standing campaign for a statue in his honor, he gently brushed it aside. “You will have to wait until I die, I’m afraid,” he smiled. “My statue is the way you receive me.”

Few public figures have left behind a finer epitaph. The affection that greeted Kevin Keegan wherever he went was only partly about football. It was earned in the countless moments when he made other people feel that they mattered. Frank Keegan emerged from the darkness beneath West Stanley carrying men back into the light. More than a century later, his grandson spent a lifetime doing much the same.

But something else was troubling me, which wasn’t unrelated. A few months before, a Nazi flag had been hoisted onto an electrical cable at the very intersection where our generational paths collided, and left to fly in the mountain breeze. Many locals were horrified, and a local man was arrested. A swastika was being flown three minutes away from the home where I lived out my teenage years and my parents still dwell, in what was once one of Britain’s strongest bastions of anti-fascism? What would the miners who held these communities together have thought of such disrespect? How did it come to this?

Debates continue to rage about the meaning of flags, as indicators of identity and belonging. But they have never just been about nationalism. Back in 1831, in the Valleys town of Merthyr Tydfil, the red flag of socialism was raised for the first time in direct response to the working conditions at the Cyfarthfa Ironworks that was lorded over by Crawshay Bailey. That flag would become synonymous with this region, giving rise to the Labour Party, birthing the idea of the NHS and also becoming a key battleground in unionism and the fight for working-class rights.

Earlier this year, I co-hosted a two-part BBC radio series called From Despair to Where?. Named after the song from the Manic Street Preachers, it addressed the problem of the Valleys today. The producers wanted to show a balanced picture of the region and, to their credit, managed to find some inspiring local projects. But what I found only reaffirmed the general malaise, decline and dereliction that has come to define this place. The sense of hopelessness felt by a group of young girls I interviewed has stayed with me. As one of them tearily said to me off camera, “there is no hope for the young in these valleys. Is there any wonder that so many are taking their own lives? I sometimes wonder what the point of it all is. I want to believe in something. But it’s hard.”

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But something has also changed in the atmosphere. When I was growing up in the Valleys in the Eighties, we felt the sense of ruination and abandonment. This was captured by a BBC reporter who, in 2013, described the place as carrying an “unbearable sadness”. Yet in a political reversal of the stages of grief, that sadness turned to despair and that despair has now turned to anger that is barely contained within the valley. And who can deny these people that anger when the outside world continues to crush them?

The BBC series was inspired by a book I wrote about growing up in poverty. It also situated the history of the Valleys within the broad sweep of political and economic history to bring new attention to its struggles, and how people need to have their voices listened to by those in power but find it often denied. My hope was especially to reach out to disillusioned young people and remind them of the Valleys’ proud past of fighting injustice and inequality.

Miners from South Wales made up the largest contingent of volunteers from Britain in the fight against the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. An encounter with striking Rhondda Valley miners in London inspired the American civil rights activist, Paul Robeson, to establish lifelong links with the region, finding common cause between the exploitation of Welsh labor and racist policies in America. That is not to mention the contribution these communities gave deep underground as their coal extractions literally fueled both of Britain’s war efforts, which included untold sacrifices against the Nazis.

Yet I have also come to the sobering realization that such history means absolutely nothing to young people in these towns, who are desperately scrambling to find their place in a world that doesn’t want or need them. The mining communities that once defined the Valleys belong to a different world entirely. It is not theirs. There is nothing remotely comparable, except the poverty and the familiar strips of precariously perched terraced houses, which are home to people who continue to know their lives don’t matter. There is no nostalgia for that past. Everything from that era has been lost or abandoned.

Just as the idea of university has been looked upon with suspicion by many in the Valleys for a number of generations, so the same suspicions apply to politicians, especially those seated in Westminster. Indeed, while there was a moment in history when the peoples of the Valleys did feel some kind of representation, through the voices of politicians such as Aneurin Bevan, the Aberfan disaster of 1966 extinguished whatever faith there may have been in the national political process. Aberfan was also a watershed moment for the Labour Party in South Wales, as the governing party was shown to be removed from the people whom it was meant to represent the most.

What replaced it was apathy. The apathy continued for generations, and the palpable feeling of despondency grew more assured each time the Labour Party came to power. Local people have known the Tories never cared for their plight, but that’s OK. It’s politics and at least you know where you stand. What’s worse is to be continually held down by those who claim to be saving you from drowning.

Keir Starmer’s government has been both a monumental let down and a cataclysmic failure for these people. Cuts to benefits have been acutely felt, especially by pensioners, which has then led to further disbelief as politicians such as Angela Rayner profit from second homes. Her potential replacement as deputy prime minister, Bridget Phillipson, killed off any hopes many poor young children could have of getting into university with her hike in tuition fees. Local people suspect the next Budget, and its inevitable round of cuts, is only going to make things worse.

As I walked back through the village of Ton-Pentre a few days ago, I met an elderly lady who used to work in the local library. That has now been closed down, like most other amenities and public services. An educated woman, she told me of her concerns, and how she marks each passing year by counting more boarded-up shops or the appearance of another vape store, fast-food eatery or tattoo parlor on the high street. Those streets used to be at the heart of local communities, and at least tempered poverty with a sense of belonging. She said she barely leaves her home any more.

We spoke of the flag incident, which she said was outrageous and caused a great deal of harm to the elderly. Then, to my surprise, she told me that as a life-long Labour supporter she would be voting Reform in the next election. It seems she won’t be alone. Polling data continually shows Reform leading in these towns, sometimes with margins greater than the 10-point leads frequently reflected nationally.

While some commentators will be quick to draw immediate connections between the Nazi flag and the rise of Reform, speaking to people here tells a different story. Yes — there is some concern with migration if people are asked. But that concern is really about local economic conditions, and a belief that the more money the Government spends elsewhere, the less there is for any chance of recovery here. And let’s be fair: the Labour government hasn’t presented the argument any other way.

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To understand the rise of Reform, then, it is crucial to understand the failures of Westminster and how people are now finding meaning in their message that claims to be working for the working classes. While I don’t like the politics of Reform and have stated on many occasions my suspicions of Nigel Farage, I do understand why local people in places like the Valleys would exercise their democratic right in that way. That does need to be respected, or else we just become another external voice denying poor people theirs.

Reform may be feeding off the anger poor communities like those in South Wales are feeling today, but they didn’t cause it. The Valleys of South Wales have been in a state of economic depression for nearly a century. And the people there have always belonged to a particular class — the disposable of history.

As we look across the political landscape today, we know it has been increasingly marked by intolerance and a simple inability to sit down with people we fundamentally disagree with and have an open and respectful conversation. Should we therefore be surprised to see a swastika in South Wales? We would hope there would be universal revulsion against Nazi regalia, given the horrors that symbol of fascist power undeniably evokes. Those who fly such flags should be condemned. But that doesn’t mean we should turn away from the anger that lies beneath. History teaches us that’s the most foolish and dangerous of all the paths to take.

Beneath the ground of the Valleys of South Wales, there remain many empty tunnels and discarded mining shafts, which are still full of coal, damp, seeping toxic chemicals and even traces of floating gases. But the people there are also sitting on a social and political bomb, which is just waiting for somebody to come along and light a match to prove it was there. If we are to prevent places like the Valleys from exploding, a serious change in attitudes is necessary, starting with those in Westminster.

A good place to start is to listen to local people, especially their struggles and concerns without condescending them. If not, all the current debates about the St George’s Cross may pale in comparison.

This is rough upland, yolky with whin and nearly silent. I hear breeze and birdsong, sheep exchanging peevish mehs, and the tick of the tractor’s cooling engine. Once I’ve assured the farmer that I have no connection to the mining industry, he opens up a little, talks about his fears. “All that toxic waste,” he says. “We want to keep it like it is: green fields. We’re thinking about the next generation.”

It’s a perfect soundbite, delivered with something approaching weariness. This is understandable. The affair has dragged on for years and years. Dalradian began exploratory work at Curraghinalt in 2009, and submitted their first planning application for a mine in 2017. When this was rejected by Northern Ireland’s Department for Infrastructure, the firm submitted revised applications in 2019 and 2020. A long-awaited inquiry into the proposed mine by the Planning Appeals Commission was suspended last year, and put on hold again in January 2025. A final decision on the project, promised for early May, has yet to materialize.

Dalradian has already completed 190,000 meters of exploratory drilling. Significant deposits of gold, silver and copper have been identified, alongside minerals like cobalt and tellurium. The company estimates that the mine would produce 3.5 million ounces of gold, 1.7 million ounces of silver, and 15,000 tons of copper over its two-decade lifespan. In addition, Dalradian promises the creation of 1,000 jobs, and a £1 billion boost to the regional economy, together with £4 million worth of investment in local community groups. When the mining is complete, a comprehensive decommissioning process would return the site to something like its former glory. An exquisitely curated website envisions a “state-of-the-art modern underground mine”.

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Some welcome the prospect of employment and investment in a region where good jobs are hard to come by. A group called The Silent Majority says it’s “positive about the idea of a good well-paid, well-regulated industry like mining coming to our locality”. Yet this view doesn’t seem to be widely shared by people on the ground, whether it’s local farmers or the residents of the nearby village of Greencastle. There’s a seam of tension beneath the green fields, the kind of tension that leads a farmer to quiz a walker on a tranquil lane. As he starts his tractor and pulls away, he calls out to me: “You’ll likely be stopped again.”

A short stroll brings me to a barbed wire fence. This is as close as you can get to Curraghinalt’s southern boundary. There’s a sign on the fence, cleanly stenciled in arterial red. A skull and crossbones, universal symbol for poison, and a simple message: “DALRADIAN OUT OF IRELAND”. Then I turn around and see the valley beneath me. The little fields lock together, up and down they go, all the way to far mountains, purple as bruises on the horizon. This isn’t gentle countryside. It’s a shaggy, pubescent place. There’s brown sedge and the croziers of new bracken pushing up, cotton grass and heather and stunted trees just blurring into leaf.

This is what the farmer wants to protect. Dalradian states that their work would be ecologically sound, and has repeatedly and vigorously denied that the mine would produce toxic waste. Early plans to use cyanide at the mining site were withdrawn by the company after the failure of their first planning application, and they maintain that there is no danger of water pollution. Not everyone is convinced.

Just last week, An Taisce, the National Trust for Ireland, published a report highlighting several areas of concern. They submit that the risk of a “toxic slurry” formed of sulfuric acid, mercury and arsenic leaching from mined rock has not been fully addressed. Furthermore, An Taisce argue that wastewater from the mine, due to be discharged into the Owenreagh and Owenkillew rivers, will contain heavy metals like cadmium and lead.

Even if these concerns were baseless, it seems obvious that a mine would irrevocably change the character of the region. The Sperrins are an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. While this doesn’t protect the region from large-scale development altogether, it does mean that the local authority has a duty to “preserve and enhance the beauty of the area”. Of course, this is a working landscape already; tractors and vans are part and parcel of rural life. But the thought of huge trucks coming and going from Curraghinalt on these narrow roads is a grim one. It’s difficult to imagine a similar proposal getting this far in the Cotswolds.

“Are you a stranger?” The woman pops around a bend in the track and starts talking. She offers to squire me around for a bit, as long as I don’t name her. “A local woman,” I say, and she laughs. “Yes, that’ll do well.” We dander along the path that traces Curraghinalt’s southern boundary and chat about the mine. “Oh, it’s been total division,” she tells me. “Nearly caused war.” Division between locals, one of whom is said to have sold some land to Dalradian, and division between the community and the big corporation. Both sides have accused each other of intimidatory behavior in the past. I tell the woman about the farmer’s suspicion of me, and she nods. Dalradian has seeded mistrust among otherwise warm and generous people here. Even before it’s been approved, the proposed mine has become “an unhealthy intrusion into people’s lives”.

My guide is horrified by the potential for pollution and the destruction of the region’s way of life. But what really gets her going is the money. “Some people are always looking for the next big money spin. You know: ‘I’m all in — who can get the biggest chip? It doesn’t matter who I trample over, or the land or the culture, let’s take it all.’ And then deciding, ‘I’ve not got enough, so I’ll go back for some more.’ It’s just infinite greed.”

We’re admiring some sheep when a car pulls up. A man jumps out and the questions start again. Who am I? What am I doing? He points at my notebook: “What are you writing?” Again, there’s tension and suspicion. Who do I write for? I consider answering “Mining Illustrated but decide this isn’t the time for levity. Again, I explain that I’m here to research an article about the project, nothing more. Again, the tension passes. His face loosens into a smile, and he becomes affable and welcoming. He’s happy to talk, but he too opts for anonymity: “Keep my name out of it.”

“You can see what we stand to lose here,” he says. He sweeps his arm over the fields, full of pride. “[Dalradian] are going to destroy everything. It’s common sense.” I ask about his hopes for the planning inquiry and he shrugs, clearly not expecting much. But he’s quietly confident that the local community will win the day. “We’ll fight it out,” he grins. “Too many people spent too long keeping [this land] to lose it over this.” As he drives off, the woman turns to me and says, “If that man thought you were with Dalradian, he’d have chased you.”

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I walk out to the edge of a small field, the site of many protests over the years. The focal point is a group of trailers draped in banners. The largest reads: “We are not afraid. This is our land. This is our home. We will die for it.” Someone has painted “GPO” onto the rocks here. The acronym stands for Greencastle People’s Office, but inevitably calls Dublin’s General Post Office to mind, the Easter Rising given new meaning on a hillside in County Tyrone. On a gate further down the track, a big sign offers an even clearer message: “OVER OUR DEAD BODIES”. Dabs of red paint around the words recall drops of blood.

Criticism of the proposed mine has focused on its potential impact on land and water. Less has been said about the impact it has already had on the people themselves. Many locals have endured years of strain and uncertainty, and can only continue to protest as the planning inquiry staggers around like a drunk looking for a dropped key. Still, if exhaustion was going to set in it would have done so by now. When we say goodbye, the local woman shakes my hand and says, “If they go ahead with the mine, I’ll be leaving.” But I don’t believe her.

At one such rally in the capital, attendees are sceptical. “Politicians here are greedy for money, but they’re also seeking to play a role in between the EU, Russia and China”, says Anna Mirkovic, 30. “The foreign powers only care about what they can extract from Serbia — it’s lithium today, but they also want access to the land, to cheap labour, without any protections. It’s disgusting.”

There’s a similar mood in Gornje Nedeljice, a village in the heart of the Jadar region in western Serbia set to be displaced by the planned mine. The town is home to the mineral Jadarite, the only such place in the world it exists. The mineral deposits are so rich in lithium that they’re mooted to meet 90% of the EU’s current needs — reducing reliance on Chinese lithium. The village has been the focal point of protest for years, with the government initially revoking Rio Tinto’s licence in 2022 following a wave of mass protests. Signs by the roadside read “no to mining — yes to life”, and the green hillsides and laden cornfields remain unbroken by heavy equipment.

But the EU is hungry for lithium. Rio Tinto continued buying up land and, following intense diplomatic pressure, the government has reissued the licence — in what critics view as a quid pro quo allowing the nation to purchase closer access to the EU at the cost of its natural resources. Almost all the houses on the village’s upper ridge have been snapped up and now stand empty, earmarked for destruction with signs reading: “DANGEROUS BUILDING, DO NOT ENTER” — a startling sight in a country not normally known for its strict adherence to planning codes. In the graveyard of an orthodox chapel beside the abandoned houses, I meet Darko, 55, who was born and raised in the village. “I don’t know what our ancestors would say, if they were alive to see this,” he says. “They’d suffer with every bit of land that was sold”.

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To Darko, the region’s cultural history, — where national hero Vuk Karadzic, the founder of the Serbian language, was born — agricultural richness and water table fed by the nearby Drina river are all reasons the EU should look elsewhere to meet its energy needs. On the main road below the abandoned village, I meet three generations of a local family sitting outside their business. They offer me a glass of spring water and locally-grown figs as physical evidence of their region’s natural wealth. “It’s like a horror movie up there at night, with everything empty”, says granddaughter Bojana, 22. “We have land in the village, too, but it’s not for sale.”

But most people have sold up after being offered handsome remuneration by Rio Tinto agents, with mostly ageing villagers scaling-up to three-bedroom city apartments. After Darko leaves the graveyard, I’m approached by two young men who had previously declined to speak with me, but now identify themselves as Rio Tinto employees. They still don’t want to give an interview, but are keen to know what I’m doing in the village, and praise Rio Tinto as “the best thing that’s happened to this region. They employ 300 people already, and it will be more”. This is the government’s case — that the mine will add a claimed sum of between €10bn and €12bn to Serbia’s ailing economy. But so far, locals aren’t buying it.

The government led by Aleksandar Vučić regularly faces protests from the liberal middle classes in Belgrade, angry at perceived autocracy, media restrictions, corruption and lack of employment opportunities. Typically, the opposition calls for the liberalisation of society and a move toward the EU. But as the current pressure from Brussels suggests, the EU has long been happy to support Vučić and other regional strongmen in order to suit its own economic interests.

That’s why the Belgrade rally sees young liberals and socialists rubbing shoulders with older Serbians like Hajo, 70, holding aloft a Russian flag inscribed with the legend “you’re far from home” — a message to Brussels and the universally vilified German chancellor Scholz. “The biggest problem is not bad government, but lack of sovereignty and domination by Western interests”, he says. 

At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Milan Mladenovic, 20, has attended the Belgrade rally carrying the flag of the communist Yugoslav federation. His motivation is simple: “Back then, workers had rights, and businesses weren’t privatised.” Some older demonstrators ask for photos with the flag, a reminder of an era when Serbia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia enjoyed strong economic performance, a relatively high standard of living and outsized diplomatic influence. But younger, more pro-government and nationalist protesters spit on the flag and shout abuse.

Like many young Belgrade residents, Milan says he sees the potential benefit a pivot toward Brussels could bring: “The EU funds schools and hospitals, whereas Russia gives us MiG warplanes: you see the difference. If we were in the EU, we’d have regulations, democracy and workers rights.” But Serbia is not likely to be allowed into that club any time soon, meaning the EU will continue to view the country as “a free market, a back door, open for cheap labour”.

Theoretically, the lithium resources could boost the local economy and meet an urgent, growing global need. But locals are uniformly wary of government complicity with exploitative foreign powers, characterising the plans as neo-imperialist exploitation. “Did they build any lithium mines in Germany? In Portugal? No, they built it here,” Darko says. But to the leaders of each country, the move is mutually beneficial. Germany can export its dirty business to a country with no realistic prospects of EU accession and Vučić can enjoy their support in another round of dodgy elections. 

The government is particularly concerned by the latest protests, characterising them as a part of a coup organised by Russia. Dozens of people have been arrested for organising protests against the mine, as well as receiving anonymous death threats, while journalists covering the demonstrations have been pilloried by politicians.

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This is likely due to the bipartisan nature of a cause which can unite even the government’s normal pro-Russian, conservative constituency with Belgrade liberals. A government long accustomed to bolstering support through nationalist rhetoric may find its support dwindling by protesters angered over the perceived sale of Serbian resources to benefit European and regional elites. Many protesters carry signs reading “Rio Tinto, March from the Drina” — a reference to a song and film commemorating Serbia’s unexpected First World War defeat of Austria-Hungary, in the first victory for the Allied Powers. It’s a reminder of the potential for nationalist opposition to the lithium scheme.

But most locals fatalistically agree the mine is a done deal. “Germany, Brussels: these are powerful forces. Vučić only continues what they put in motion”, Darko says. Bojana agrees, calling the decision to re-open the mine a “force majeure” imposition which can’t be withstood by domestic politicians or regional protests.

Rather, the Western Balkans will remain what Milan calls the “back door” of Europe, a dumping-ground for toxic industry which Germany and Brussels and other powers can burden with their needs in exchange for cheap concessions. A Chinese-run mine in Eastern Serbia is already displacing villages and deforesting hillsides to fuel a growing need for copper, also vital in green technology: in neighbouring Bosnia, the 2023 discovery of lithium ore looks set to fuel a similar scramble for profits. As EU politicians trumpet their squeaky-clean green credentials, this half-forgotten corner of Europe looks set to pay the cost.

But rather than dwell on such hardships, my grandmother grew nostalgic for the everyday kindnesses and instinctive mutuality that, for all their faults, characterised coalfield communities. The extent to which ordinary people relied on one another then is hard for later generations to imagine.

Some of the best evocations of that world can be found in “Kith and Kinship: Norman Cornish and L.S. Lowry”, an exhibition which has recently opened at the Bowes Museum in County Durham. The museum itself is an astonishing sight: a vast Second Empire chateau built on the edge of Barnard Castle by John Bowes, the playboy scion of a local coal-owning dynasty, to house his art collection. Nikolaus Pevsner called it “gloriously inappropriate”. So it is pleasing to see the working-class paintings of Cornish and Lowry take their place alongside all those Raphaels and Van Dycks.

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What is immediately apparent on entering the exhibition is the contrasting personalities of the two artists. Cornish, a former miner, was an active participant in the coal town of Spennymoor that remained his constant muse, while Lowry, a rent collector, was the eternal outsider. This is reflected too in their work, where the beaten-down stickmen and women of Lowry’s Salford diverge from the warmth and joviality of Cornish’s Durham folk, a people that he always refused to portray as “cowed and defeated”.

The peasant-strength of Cornish’s subjects call to mind the works of Brueghel, Rembrandt and van Gogh, which Cornish had spent every spare moment studying as a young miner. Yet it was not just his phenomenal talent as a painter that won Cornish so many admirers, but his vision as a storyteller. “He is a painter of place in a way that Thomas Hardy is a writer of place,” wrote Melvyn Bragg. “Spennymoor is the grain of sand in which he brings a whole world to life.”

Lowry, by contrast, has a colder eye. His silent, almost robotic figures seem isolated from one another. “All these people in my pictures, they are all alone you know,” he once said. “Crowds are the most lonely thing of all. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else.” There is a hint in his Salford pictures of Karl Marx’s idea of the alienation of labour. As Robert McManners and Gillian Wales observe in The Quintessential Cornish, Lowry’s characters “are relegated to automata by the harshness of industrialisation and each figure is almost incidental. Norman’s, by contrast, are elevated to centre-stage… They are people who each have a life before, during and after the picture.”

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Durham has become a land of zombies

By Pip Fallow

One explanation for this artistic divergence is the type of industrial work that dominated Lowry’s Cottonopolis compared to Cornish’s Durham coalfield. Friedrich Engels once wrote of the “nameless misery” of the workers he observed in Manchester, and novelists from Charlies Dickens onwards described in horror its stygian gloom and satanic mills. But the coalfields were different; here was a landscape that was by no means picturesquely rural, but it wasn’t quite grimly urban either. The miners here had a strange love-hate relationship with the pits too, where the work could be debilitating and often lethally dangerous, but it could also be satisfying and often thrilling. My own pitman grandfather would recount stories about intense workplace camaraderie until the day he died.

The miners also created a distinctive culture, where an interest in the arts was not uncommon — just consider the Pitmen Painters, or even Billy Elliot. Cornish himself once said: “I’m sick of being looked at like some sort of zoo animal or specimen… It assumes that a man who works in a mine is not up to writing or painting or playing music. But it simply isn’t true.” Of course, not every miner was an autodidact. But Cornish’s attitude was certainly shared by my own grandfather, who read voraciously and always had a sketchbook to hand.

Another hallmark of the coalfields was the working men’s clubs, and Cornish was a fabulous painter of bar scenes. Among my favourites in the exhibition is his much-reproduced image of two flat-cap-wearing blokes leaning on the bar, greyhound at their feet. These men are “Tosser” Angus and Joe Hughes, miners who served in the Second World War in the Durham Light Infantry, and who were among the last men off the Dunkirk beaches, before seeing brutal combat in North Africa and Sicily.

In Cornish’s vision, the worlds of work and recreation are strictly gendered. No women appear at the coalface, where they had been forbidden from working since the 1840s, and the bar room was a male preserve. (Indeed, I saw women being ushered out of the bar of working men’s clubs as recently as the Nineties.) Miners could be as superstitious as sailors in their attitude to women, and it was considered unlucky to pass a female on the way to the pit.

This gendered division of labour was driven by the needs of the coal industry, which needed their thoroughbreds well-cared for, fed and washed around the clock. In many ways, the role of pitman’s wife was similar to that of a groom to a horse. It was common for miners to pay tribute to female labour in their writing and their art, and Cornish’s tender paintings of his wife Sarah performing tasks which might be seen as drudgery — peeling potatoes, cooking, ironing — are both reverent and dignified.

But for all their stoicism there is something wistful about these women. Perhaps Sarah Cornish — an accomplished pianist who had worked as a nurse during the war — nurtured a sense of thwarted ambition that I sometimes detected in my own grandmother. For feminist writers such as Beatrix Campbell, this was a source of shame. “No group of men has been so cold and confident in its exclusion of women, yet so dependent on their support,” she wrote of the miners of the Northern Coalfield. We don’t know if Cornish would have agreed, but a characterful, almost Rembrandtian, sketch of his grandmother, which he drew when he was only 17, says something profound about the respect he felt for the matriarchs that made these communities tick.

I am sure that many of the visitors to this exhibition will feel the pangs of nostalgia. Yet this was far from a progressive age. For the strength of community in these pit villages, and their distinctive work ethic, relied on socially-enforced codes of behaviour, and a low-level surveillance culture that our modern individualistic sensibilities would probably make us recoil from today.

And yet, in a recent interview, the political philosopher John Gray argued that much was lost when his tight-knit, “rather matriarchal” street community in the coal and shipbuilding town of South Shields was broken up. When the Gray family and their neighbours were moved out of town in the Sixties to better housing in newly-built orbital council estates, he noticed that almost immediately “there was graffiti, there was street crime, there were all the pathologies of what sociologists call anomic individualism”. He concluded that “great advances”, such as those brought about by the Labour government of 1945-1950, “are often associated with losses”. These formative early years led, he said, to a lifelong scepticism about progress.

How, then, might we assess the progress of the North of England since the days of Lowry and Cornish? The North East in particular has had a difficult last century, with only sporadic interludes of confidence and prosperity — notably in the Fifties. It now has among the very worst health, education and employment outcomes in the country. Indeed, for all the improvements in housing and healthcare, the coming of the centralised welfare state in places such as County Durham was a mixed blessing, emasculating once-proud local institutions, and bureaucratising many aspects of social life.

There are still occasional glimmers of the old days. In “left behind” Sacriston, a former pit village not far from Spennymoor, local women took over the derelict former Co-op in 2019 to establish a family centre, and local networks were set up to tackle male loneliness. These community efforts, according to a team of UCL researchers, were galvanised by a sense of “constructive nostalgia” for a time when the village was confident enough to solve its own problems through a web of communal institutions:

“But people in Sacriston are not nostalgic for mining disasters, unemployment, emphysema or dysentery. Rather, they lament a lost era of relative prosperity based on secure local employment and the erosion of the community bonds that were the basis for their struggle to improve life in the village, which produced genuine ‘pride in place’.”

By stirring our collective memory, the Kith and Kinship exhibition reminds us of what community life in the North East was and could be again. The challenge for anyone concerned about the region’s future is not to recreate the past, but to convey its history to inspire a new generation of community builders.

***

Kith and Kinship: Norman Cornish and L.S. Lowry is at the Bowes Museum from 20 July until 19 January.

Because these former mining valleys in the wilds of Glamorgan were the cradle of working-class politics in Britain. Revolutionary socialism is almost as old as the mining communities in these hills: the red flag of socialism was flown for the very first time in anger over the skies of Merthyr Tydfil in 1831. And, in time, this people and landscape gave rise to the British labour movement and the party that bears its name, a party that knew who it represented and what it wanted to change.

Keir Hardie, Labour’s founding father, was elected MP for the Merthyr and Aberdare constituency only a few years before he would oversee the transition from the Independent Labour Party to the more familiar abbreviated title in 1906. A former miner who first entered the darkness of the pits at just 10-years old, he knew first-hand the toils and struggles faced by these hardened communities, and never forgot them in Parliament, wearing a deerstalker and tweed jacket in place of the expected top hat and tails. But Hardie himself never lived to see the party he conceived in power. An idealist and a pacifist, he died a broken man in 1915, as his contentious objections to the First World War (on the basis of the working-class dead and war profiteering) went unheeded.

Just nine years later though, and 100 years ago this week, the Labour Party did form its first government. It was led, though, by a Scot, Ramsay Macdonald, later expelled as a traitor and a turncoat for his collaboration with the Conservatives. Throughout this fractious period, as the Labour Party split and reformed, mutated and reorganised, South Wales remained its natural home. It was here that institutions later synonymous with the party, such as the National Union of Miners, were first established. And the area produced the radical autodidactic streak that gave Labour’s second prime minister, Clement Atlee, his greatest lieutenant: Nye Bevan gained his education in the libraries and reading rooms of Tredegar’s Miners’ institutes, arguably the most impressive educational bodies promoting the socialist cause anywhere in Europe.

Nationwide, the party’s electoral fortunes waxed and waned after the war and into the Sixties. But, like working-class industrial regions across the United Kingdom, the party’s grip in South Wales was as firm as the iron smelted in the furnace-town of Hardie’s coronation. But now this relationship has been lost. A proud heritage has withered, and Labour means as little to these parts as “politics” itself. Understanding how such a bond could be neglected and dismantled is essential to understanding the story of Labour over the past century, and its origin can be traced to a single moment: the tragedy that stopped a school clock dead at 9.13am one Friday morning that became the moment of reckoning.

Some places are so synonymous with a tragedy that their very name becomes a byword for unimaginable suffering. Today, our own most baleful metonym is probably “Grenfell”, immediately evoking corruption, betrayal and the dereliction of state duty. But in the valleys of South Wales, a different tragedy bears a single name: Aberfan. That was the village where, on the morning of 21 October 1966, approximately 105,000 cubic metres of discarded coal waste slid into the community and engulfed the Pant Glas school and houses below. Half the town’s children were wiped out by the black avalanche that sped down the slopes, along with 28 adults.

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Aberfan had already been foretold through numerous warnings, and in previous slippages in both the village itself and nearby. But even as the slurry settled and the spoil began to be cleared, the story was only just beginning. Much as at Grenfell, those who should have been held responsible, the people this community had most faith in, were absolved of any responsibility. John Collins, whose entire family was taken by the black mountain, later said: “I was tormented by the fact that the people I was seeking justice from were my people — a Labour government, a Labour council, a Labour nationalised coal board.” This Establishment cover-up was fatal. As veteran BBC broadcaster Vincent Kane later added: “Half a dozen or so organisations or individuals should have brought help to those stricken people, but instead they betrayed them.”

The central figure in this episode was Lord Robens who, as Chairman of the National Coal Board, continually presented himself as a defender of coal, while overseeing widespread pit closures. His arrogance was matched only by the lack of compassion he showed towards the families of the bereaved. Insult piled upon injury as the official tribunal into the cause of the disaster was marred by misinformation, delays and attempts to obstruct the truth. And the victims could see it — as a father of one of the bereaved children cried out when giving evidence: “Buried alive by the National Coal Board. That is what I want to see on record. That is the feeling of those present. Those are the words we want to go on the certificate”.

Worse was to follow: it was at the behest of the Labour Minister for Wales — the valleys-born George Thomas, later Lord Tonypandy — that the villagers themselves were required pay to remove remaining slag heaps still towering over their homes from the disaster relief fund. But this tragedy was to become the epicentre of a far greater conjuncture, where Wales began to reckon with all the false promises of industrialisation and unionism. If there is no history of South Wales without Aberfan, there is no complete history of the Labour Party which does not chapter the devastation and fury it sowed in this heartland. And, while the latter part of the Sixties was marked by the beginnings of a turn away from Labour, the following decade saw nothing arrive to replace it. Voter turnout in elections started to decline, while industrial action by the miners threw the country into darkness, a faction of the working class seemingly at war with the country — and, after the 1974 election, at war with a Labour government too.

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Labour’s hold here wasn’t immediately severed. A son of the valleys, the Tredegar-born Neil Kinnock, would later assume the helm as Margaret Thatcher instigated a very different kind of revolution. An impressive intellect and pragmatist, Kinnock’s accent and bearing connected the party back to its past. He could speak with genuine feeling of the strength of those communities, “who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football”. But that would in part be his undoing: a conservative national press constantly mocked his “boyo” persona. And while he could give voice to South Wales through his own, it ultimately became the voice of political defeat, as the pits central to valley-life were shut and sealed, something the Labour Party proved powerless to stop.

The coming to power of Tony Blair offered a symbolic rupture from a party once grounded in working-class, Celtic regions. But he too had his ways of disrupting community life, for instance with his insistence that more children from deprived areas should be given the option to attend university. While many rightly welcomed the chance to escape, the continued lack of sustained investment in the South Wales valleys simply meant they had no reason to return. And, as Blair opened more of the country to the punishing writ of the free market, the last vestiges of industry petered out. The last of the pits closed, and some of the most prominent local employers such as Hoover in Merthyr and the Polikoff’s and Burberry factories in the Rhondda, dramatically cut their workforce, until their inevitable closure a decade or so later.

With the National Assembly for Wales established in 1997 following devolution in the Principality, the strength of support for Plaid Cymru, which had been gathering momentum since Aberfan, was now evident in the valley heartlands. By 1999 they would even manage to win seats in the once unimaginable ward of the Rhondda, where the old joke ran that even a Smurf would win should they be dressed in red. Blair’s appeal to Middle England was traded in Wales, and the party barely scrapes ahead of the Conservatives nationally now.

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Kinnock was probably the last leader of the Labour Party as it was originally conceived. But he was ultimately given the impossible task of trying to lead a party born in another age, a product of the dire need to have political representation to counter the exploitative nature of industrial capitalism. Now, it has lost its identity, just as much as the people it represented were losing theirs. As Thatcher transformed Britain and placed it at the forefront of the post-industrial neoliberal revolution, without the constancy of a manufacturing and industrial base, was there even any meaning to the term “labour”?

Today, as the party seeks to commemorate 100 years of its electable “progress”, it should turn is attention the places which gave the party its name and yet where poverty and abandonment persist. While you can be sure that disdain for the Conservative Party is still strongly felt, the Labour Party is regarded with something equally dangerous: an apathetic rolling of the eyes by a people whose rolling hills speaks to the layered memories of resigned weathering. Even as another Keir looks set to return the Labour Party to power, Ton and Pentre Labour and Progressive Club won’t suddenly reopen. Suspended in neglect, its rooms will remain empty as another electoral season passes. And all the while, what passes for progress will continue arriving at these towns from elsewhere, just explanations that try and fail to make sense of the greatest dereliction — the dereliction of the mind and soul of a people.

These days, the bloody-mindedness remains but has long since given up on the rebellious politics of 2016. Little has changed after Brexit. Westminster and anything associated with it — London, politicians, tourists, journalists — are despised. Alternatives such as Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish independence party, are seen as a joke. In fact, everything is a joke: spurning my predictable questions about life in the area, one gentleman does a 10-minute skit about how he’s been smuggling migrants from Calais on an old fishing boat and leaving them on the telegenic beaches for second-home owners to deal with.

Tourism has helped to create a sort of neo-feudalism in this era, warping the rental market for existing residents, and trapping locals in a seasonal economy of unreliable incomes and unresolved resentment. The prosperous parts of Cornwall have become “a giant theme park”, as one punter describes it, leaving Redruth as one of its many servile outhouses, lying beyond the gates of Poldark-cum-Surfing Land.

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In another age, Redruth was one of the wealthiest towns in the world, its copper playing a part in everything from the Industrial Revolution to Britain’s naval hegemony. That economy fell into decline in the late-19th century, long before the rest of Britain’s manufacturing base. The result is an eerie hodge-podge of industrial marvels, social deprivation and abandoned mining infrastructure. On the high street, next to some of the finest 18th-century architecture in the country, stands an abandoned Wilko.

But, in the last few years, an opportunity for recovery has presented itself. Now, it’s the area’s lithium, discovered in “globally significant” quantities in 2020, that could yet realise some of those visions of abundance and revival: the rare-earth element is essential to the production of batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage. Come 2026, Cornish Lithium will soon start extracting the gold of the green industrial revolution. The company estimates that 7,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) can be produced a year, alongside the 20,000 from 2028 provided by rival companies Imerys and British Lithium operating down the road in St Austell. This would, however, still leave Britain dependent on some of the world’s biggest producers in Australia, China and Chile, with such schemes only partially covering the 80,000 tonnes a year the UK is predicted to require by 2030.

Despite these deposits, both companies have had to jump through hoops merely to survive. But having previously relied on angel investors and crowdfunds, a package of £67 million announced in August from the UK’s Infrastructure Bank placed the project in the national interest. When Emmanuel Macron declared that “made in Europe” should be our continental motto, lamenting that a Europe without a serious industrial policy risked being left behind by the changing tides of globalisation, he was talking about the viability of quixotic projects such as lithium mining in Cornwall.

“I’m acutely aware of the sad state of the economy in the area and the potential to make a difference,” says Jeremy Wrathall, the founder of Cornish Lithium, when I speak to him the next day. Wrathall trained at Camborne School of Mining, now underwhelmingly known to the area as the “Pool Innovation Centre”. The name change is symbolic of some of the local cynicism about the project, a relic of the area’s previous attempted makeover from industry and mining to services and tourism.

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But Wrathall is well-rehearsed to shrug off such doubts about the return of mining to Cornwall. He laments the “inbuilt scepticism” towards the rejuvenation of the UK’s mining industries. Cornwall, unlike other sites in Europe being touted as potential sources of lithium, has a history of mining. One comparable site in Portugal is currently battling locals who fear the opencast mine will destroy the village. Wrathall’s method is slightly more benign. This is less mining, more extraction, pulling lithium-rich brine from the springs beneath the 280-million-year-old granite sheet Cornwall sits on. Beyond the usual suspects of rent-a-gob environmentalists and ardent Nimbies, it’s difficult to find anyone overtly opposed to the project.

But there are also factors beyond his control. For all the rhetoric about deglobalisation, the allure of cheaper lithium abroad will endure, particularly without a proper homegrown industry to sell to. While rhetoric about restoring Britain’s industrial capacity is in vogue politically, it is estimated that £100 billion would be needed to set up a sustainable electric-vehicle industry. BritishVolt, the most recent attempt to construct a domestic lithium battery factory went into administration in January. When I raise this with Wrathall, he falls back on the sort of quiet idealism that remains in pockets of the old mining country. “Our project transcends politics,” he confesses. “We don’t want to let people down.”

Here lies an almost mystical appeal to the project. Britain has a strange relationship with its mines. Dirty, exploitative, abundant — the petri dish for both our industrialisation and our first revolts against capitalist excess. From Conrad’s Nostromo to the post-Thatcher nostalgia for the demise of the coal industry, mines are a catalyst for the history-making seams that run through the nation: pride, self-sufficiency, rebellion. Romantic tosh, perhaps, but it’s a mood you can unearth quite easily when visiting an area where tourism, welfare and the faint promises of 2016 have been left to fester.

Nowhere can the faint glaze of revival be better felt than “Heartlands”, built on an old centre of Cornish mining at Robinsons Shaft. It’s a surreal non-place of conference meeting rooms, environmental hubs educating visitors on the woes of climate change, tourist tit-tat shops flogging Cornish language books, and a mining-themed tearoom. Were lithium extraction to start up just a stone’s throw away from the site, it could cast a welcome shadow over this failed offering for Cornwall’s future.

It’s a feeling suggested by many of the locals: “We’ve become a nation of numpties unable to make anything ourselves,” says a local businessman preparing for a drinks reception in one of Redruth’s reconverted buildings (ahead of a local arts festival which he describes as a “load of wank”). For all the regeneration that has taken place here, there are some wounds that Britain’s “creative” and “services” industries cannot heal.

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The return of mining, however, must rest on more than just symbolism. On the outskirts of Redruth, Stephen Barnes, the town’s mayor, reveals the stifling hold these old mining shafts still have, not just on the town, but on its visitors too. In the summer months, they lure in the tourists with plumes of dark smoke blown through the old chimneys. For a brief afternoon, the landscape is once again dotted by working satanic mills. Yet the new lithium mines offer not just an escape from England’s nostalgic doom loop, but a different socio-economic settlement. The jobs initially created would number only in their hundreds, but Barnes believes it would be a way of “restoring pride”, and make a start in lifting stagnating wages away from the exploitative grips of the tourism industry.

Back in Redruth high street, the potential tragedy of all this expectation materialises. At present, the hope of the UK setting up an electric-car industry to compete with the subsidised might of China and the US is a struggle, if not a fantasy. And so too is the idea that lithium mining alone might set the area on a path to abundance and innovation. That’s not to say the quiet longing is not there.

Next to the town’s landmark statue of a miner, a Metro station has appeared, like one of those AI-generated engineering marvels shared by dejected Anglo-futurists on the social-media doomscroll. A map shows a high-speed underground train traversing the old network of mining tunnels underneath us. It’s an art installation, erected for the festival that starts tomorrow. But for a moment, it’s also a flicker of belief under grey skies on a late Friday afternoon, as the pubs open their doors and the high street once again starts to empty.

This didn’t happen when I was growing up. One of those men would probably have been welding in a shipyard and the other passing his father through the cage doors at the pithead of the village colliery as they changed shifts.

The ex-coalfield communities of Durham are ghost towns today, their once vibrant high streets boarded up and dead. I don’t believe there is a shop or business in my village or the surrounding towns and villages that has not been burgled at least three or four times. I have a letting office in the high street that was hit three times last year. The factory unit I run my building business from has its doors pulled off at least once a year: the last time, only two weeks ago. My brother owns the last pub standing and has a list of 46 crimes committed on his premises — from serious assault to car crime — none of which have ended in prosecution. Why? Because there was no investigation. Even the undertaker’s shop has had its doors kicked off in the middle of the night, for the sake of a Help the Heroes charity box. He had buried a veteran that day. The thieves took his hearse and ram-raided the local café and made off with the till before parking the hearse in the North Sea. The dentist’s surgery, smashed up, the only remaining butcher cleaned out of meat in the dead of the night, a sandwich shop robbed and burned out, the hairdresser’s shop ransacked, the hardware shop constantly hit despite its owner taking most of his stock home every night in his van.

The last time my shop was robbed, I rang the police. I was put on hold for over one hour before being told, if I wanted an attendance, I would have to apply by email and at the present time it was taking them about three or four weeks to get an officer out. My friend and neighbour had his house burgled just before Christmas. The criminals took his children’s Christmas presents he’d hidden in his wardrobe, put them in his wife’s car and drove off. A few weeks later his wife spotted her car while doing the school run and followed it to the house of a known criminal. She rang the police and was informed after a three day wait that the case was now closed. My friend made an official complaint, which resulted in the police eventually visiting the address weeks later, only to report that the known criminal had proved it was his car despite my friend still having the original documents for the vehicle in his possession. Case closed.

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Few around here contact the police anymore. That stopped years ago. Looking at my village and the surrounding towns and villages today reminds me of the film Shaun of the Dead. The untidy queues of dehumanised zombies shuffling into the steel-shuttered shopfronts of the only thriving businesses left, the chemists, have the place I grew up in looking more like a Forties death camp than modern day Britain. This new “underclass” go there twice a day, some three, to take their supervised dose of the taxpayer-funded legal high, methadone; a heroin substitute.

The ex-mining villages and towns of East Durham have the highest rate of people on sickness benefit in the UK, the highest rate of people on invalidity benefit and by far the highest rate of people who have been on invalidity for the longest period of time. The people around here have the lowest percentage of car ownership in Britain. The highest rate of unemployment. The lowest home ownership and believe it, if you can, over the last decade, while life expectancy for men around here has not gone up or down, for women it has dropped. This is the only place in Britain where the life expectancy for women is dropping. Another friend of mine is an undertaker in Hartlepool and told me that he now has just as many clients under 35 than elderly. My brother’s daughter was one. She was kicked to death for a drug debt of £50. She was 32, witty and highly intelligent.

I’ve heard many so-called experts over the years say it is difficult to link the social depravation and high levels of crime directly to Thatcher’s deliberate policies of deindustrialisation. All I can conclude from this is that there is no such thing as an expert.

A little over 100 years ago there was nothing here; just fields. Once coal was discovered, the villages were built immediately. My forefather’s bred for cutting coal. Then came Thatcher.

I left school in 1982, just as Thatcher was riding high on a popularity wave after single-handedly taking back the Falkland Islands despite never pulling on a pair of boots or leaving London. I was not taught anything at my comprehensive school that might have prevented me from going down the pit, on the contrary, I was only ever given the skills required for when I inevitably found myself at the bottom of that 1,500-foot shaft. As coal could not be cut by pen, it had been decided I and many around me should remain illiterate. I clearly remember a whole bunch of us going to our village colliery to sign up for a miner’s life. We were told to fill in application forms. The few writers helped the many non-writers and we were asked to return in exactly one month. We did but the gates were chained. The mine closed. The dole queue I joined the back of was four and a half million souls long.

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The ship building industry was put to death soon after. British steel fell. British rail disappeared, British Gas gone, British telecom, still there, but belonging to someone else. The national Grid, chopped up and sold for a song. Even the very waterways, pipes, and drainage systems laid by our forefathers, snatched away. British aerospace with its airports, sold off. And last-but-not-least, our Royal Mail, snapped up for a fraction of its worth by wealth investors. Ours one day, gone the next.

Thatcher had been busy slipping through new legislation while the wider British public were glued to images of burned-out ships from her South Atlantic war. The miners could no longer be supported by any other group of workers. “Coming out in sympathy,” was banned by legislation so radical that even some Tories had the decency to abstain. The new laws ran rough-shod over hundreds of years of hard-earned worker’s rights.

I don’t believe any beast, person or group of people has ever survived having their heart ripped out and my community and surrounding communities are no exception.

It was like a political bomb went off on that day as we gathered, shocked and bewildered, at our pit’s locked gates, killing some, blasting some of us to the four corners of the world whilst leaving some poor souls blackened, lame and smouldering in the ashes. As for me, I left, travelling the world in search of a better life. “Deserting a sinking ship,” you might say. However, after coming back, years later, literate and witnessing not just a lack of progression but a shocking regression, I wrote a book that hopefully might create, at least some awareness, of what the poor souls here suffered, and the survivors are still suffering today.

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We have seen a string of inert careerist politicians come and go since Maggie, each one as inept and bland as the last. The working people here have nowhere to aim their vote, their will unrepresented. It seems the trapdoor under the old likeminded and relatable working-class politician has snapped opened, leaving not only an empty stage but a gapping vacuum where no one new would dare stand. The majority here, who on-the-whole still consider themselves of the Left, feel neglected. They admire straightforwardness, bravery even, yet their beloved Labour party was and still is a coward.

So, as for now, the tsunami of poverty, deprivation, alcoholism, divorce, depression, and addiction to illegal and prescription drugs is still gathering momentum. “Bad life syndrome,” the local health workers are chastised for calling it here. Thousands of lives, lacking aim, opportunity, or fulfilment, treated with pills and powders.

Recently, NHS nurses have been striking over pay, but it doesn’t appear to me that they have any real public support. It seems the tortoise head of pan-bashers who made their trendy din of appreciation during the pandemic have retracted into the safe shell of their homes; their silence, deafening. The rail workers, the teachers, the university staff, doctors, ambulance drivers, healthcare workers, airport workers, civil servants, the post office workers and more have all been involved in industrial action this year — separately. Despite them all belonging to one much larger group. The working classes.

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It is hard to believe one person in the top job could change the personality of a nation. From a once caring and united community-driven society to the fractured and divided, “I’m alright Jack, ‘loads ov money,” dog-eat-dog existence we are enduring today, but it happened. And it happened in my lifetime.

There is a new breed of politician today, claiming that British industries were put to death on grounds of the environment. This is completely untrue.

The way worker’s rights along with British industries were irradicated and the conscious effort it took to achieve this should never be forgotten. For a so-called developed nation to have treated and still treat its subjects with such contempt was, and still is, a disgrace and deserves no forgiveness. Margaret Hilda Thatcher died in the luxury of the Ritz Hotel, London, of a stroke in 2013. On the day she died and on the day of her funeral, nobody I know worked. We put up flags and bunting, flocked to our few surviving pubs, drank lots and danced into the night. You probably have difficulty understanding this depth of hatred and that I can understand. But if you had walked under my skies on the same pothole-laden paths as I, then believe me, you too would have drunk beer and danced with me long into those nights. And just to be clear, we did not celebrate because we were naïve enough to imagine that because of her death, things might now get better. It was spite.

A few years after Winn’s excavations, the first furnaces were built, and the Domesday hamlet of Scunthorpe started producing pig-iron. The borough’s old crest features a blast furnace belching flames, with the redolent motto: “The Heavens Reflect Our Labours.” Soon, the county’s companies started turning the iron into steel. By the end of the First World War, Scunthorpe produced 3% of the UK’s steel, some of it armouring the first military tanks, invented in Lincoln; by the start of the Second, it was producing 10%, some of it used in D-Day landing craft.

Since then, Scunthorpe metal has gone into everything from Sydney Harbour Bridge to the London Eye. But this elemental industry is rusting away. British Steel has recurred in the last decade’s headlines, almost always linked to job losses. Now, up to 800 of its remaining 3,200 steel jobs are at risk — a painful reversal for Lincolnshire.

Scunthorpe’s steel was for many years a magnet, attracting workers from all over Britain, and sometimes overseas — Germans before the Second World War, Eastern Europeans afterwards, Asians in the Seventies. In 1960, almost a third of Scunthonians (around 20,000) were directly employed in steel. A BBC documentary from that year, Scunthorpe is Booming, shows a town of bustling streets, with optimistic interviewees talking about all the things they could buy thanks, directly or indirectly, to steel — cars and foreign holidays and “tellies” — although a few did express reservations about the social effects of all this dynamism. Industries sprang up to cater to steel’s ever-lengthening supply chains, and all these new consumers — including Golden Wonder crisps. (Some locals claim the cheese and onion flavour was invented in the town.)

It was Steve Cook who cast Scunthorpe’s last ingots, in 2000. He started at British Steel in 1968 with just four O-levels, and retired in 2007, having risen to the rank of Quality Manager. Sitting in his immaculate house within earshot of the furnaces, he exudes quiet pride: “Scunthorpe was renowned for making one of the best steels in the world, and the name British Steel was synonymous with quality.” He recalls an avuncular employer, which sponsored his studies in metallurgy, then provided a job for life. The town, he remembers fondly, largely revolved around shift-times, with hooters announcing shift-changes. Streets would fill with men on bicycles and then as suddenly empty again, an almost instinctive mass movement of those who were busily forging the future. Now the town’s commuters, faces fixed to their phones, are living in worlds of their own.

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Not everyone enjoyed their time working in Scunthorpe steel. Conditions were hazardous in the early days. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, steelworkers would work 12-hour weekday shifts, and 24-hour shifts on alternate Sundays, with no extra pay even on Christmas Day. Veterans of the Twenties recalled their lunches being layered with fine iron grit. There were frequent accidents: on the worst day, in 1975, 11 workers died when one of the town’s iconic “Four Queens” furnaces blew up. As recently as 2021, a fireball erupted unexpectedly at the British Steel works, although luckily no-one was hurt. Last year, a 27-year-old worker was killed falling from a crane.

And not all the social impacts of the works were positive. Influxes of large numbers of young single men, and the Tartarean thirstiness of their work, resulted in problems with public drunkenness; as early as 1860, extra constables had to be drafted in. Employers took a zero-tolerance approach, with workers liable to be sacked if they had any alcohol on their breath — except for one steelworks, which ran what must have been a highly lucrative “wet canteen” into the Seventies.

A community spirit nevertheless emerged, grounded in shared experience and Methodist morality (nearby Epworth was John Wesley’s birthplace), and reinforced by institutions. Technical colleges and grammar schools, a hospital, a theatre, and an array of social and sporting clubs all began to appear, most famously Scunthorpe United, founded in 1899, and nicknamed “The Iron”. Workers wistfully recall a steely solidarity, with its own vocabulary — casters, feedstocks, gangue, sinter, trunnion — and a confidence borne of mastering dangerous elements for their own and everyone’s benefit. Steelworkers took on an almost mythic quality at times in the popular imagination, brilliantly skilled men silhouetted against incandescent orange, controlling leviathan cranes that swung 130-tonne ladles filled with 280 more tonnes of molten menace. Today’s call-centres, industrial parks, and offices are pallid by comparison.

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When British Steel was born, in 1967, as the British Steel Corporation (BSC), there was much excitement about “the white heat of technology”. Innovations would, it was argued, remould the tired old post-imperial country. BSC emphasised quality over quantity, investing constantly in technical research. Britain had always been a world-leader in steel — but the pace of change had sped up. Some of the cars snapped up by Scunthorpe’s happy Sixties shoppers would have weighed a ton and a half of mostly British-made steel, but cars were becoming steadily lighter and smaller. There was less and less demand for Scunthorpe’s product, even before the whole motor industry went into the doldrums, along with British shipbuilding.

Then as now, successive governments failed to capitalise on British technical ingenuity. Ted Heath hoped that the new local authority of “Humberside”, into which Scunthorpe was lumped in 1974, might be an English Ruhr. But BSC always found itself fighting, often unavailingly, against cheaper Asian imports and other countries’ tariffs. The would-be Ruhr sometimes seemed at risk of becoming more of an American-style rust belt.

Enter: the Iron Lady. In the first two years of her reign, Margaret Thatcher appointed the uncompromising Ian MacGregor as chairman of BSC. Two of Scunthorpe’s four ironworks were closed. A December 1979 announcement of swingeing cuts at Scunthorpe was dubbed “Mr MacGregor’s sick Christmas card” by the town’s mayor, and led to a 13-week strike. But MacGregor was up for a fight, and ultimately, he won. In 1980, BSC had employed 166,000 nationwide, and lost £1.8 billion every year; by the time MacGregor left in 1983, it employed 71,000, and annual losses had been cut to £256m. In 1985, it recorded its best results since the Sixties. Scunthorpe was a crucible of a new economic order, melted and remade by monetarism — but there was a human cost, as in the mining communities of the North. Unemployment nationwide was almost three times what it is now.

Meanwhile, the nation was losing its grip on the industries that built it. Now a profitable company, BSC was privatised, before being absorbed into the British-Dutch Corus Group — the biggest steelmaker in Europe and the third-largest in the world. Corus was itself taken over, just in time for the financial crash, by the Indian firm Tata, which ended up selling it in 2016 to a venture capital firm for £1. After reintroducing the nostalgic name, the firm sold the plant on in 2019 to China’s Jingye Group, which now operates as British Steel. With every takeover, hundreds of jobs were lost; since 2007, Scunthorpe’s annual steel production has halved from 5m to 2.5m tonnes. This most substantial of great British industries is now forced to trust in overseas investors with no stake in the borough, and its rooted community relies on boardroom decisions in Beijing. Britain’s steel production is, after all, something of an afterthought from a Chinese perspective; in 2019, the UK produced just 7m tonnes of steel, compared with the 996m made in China.

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The now barely British British Steel, reeling under high energy costs, is a pressure point for the Government. On the one hand, there is the wish to protect jobs in a “Red Wall” seat, won for the Conservatives in 2019 by the granddaughter of a steelworker. On the other, there is a national commitment to Net Zero carbon emissions, and steel accounts for around 14% of UK industrial emissions. Recently, British Steel has threatened to shed at least 260 jobs at Scunthorpe, and maybe as many as 800 — a quarter of all the jobs left — unless the Government gives it money to invest in greener electric furnaces. The Government has offered £300m, but negotiations appear to be foundering, because the money is thought insufficient, and comes with preconditions about guaranteeing employment for a decade. If all these Scunthorpe jobs do go, many Scunthonians fear they would be followed inexorably by others.

The Government claims to be committed to the industry, although support sometimes seems uncertain, and no new measures were announced in the latest budget. Steel does not contribute much directly to the UK economy — just £2 billion in 2020, when it accounted for 1.2% of manufacturing output and 0.1% of UK jobs. Still, there is strong ongoing and projected demand for steel — for projects ranging from HS2 to healthcare, flood defences to the military — and much of it could be produced here. Better to have our needs met in Scunthorpe than Baoshan, surely.

Industry veterans are sceptical about the Government’s Net Zero priorities. David Amoss, who spent 30 years working in Scunthorpe, points out: “The steel’s still got to be made and it may as well be made in Scunthorpe as in the Far East. I find this carbon footprint thing an absolute distraction and a nonsense. Not that I don’t believe we’re destroying our own planet, but if we don’t do it someone else is going to.” Steel that is not made here will just be made in another country, perhaps one with weaker environmental safeguards, and boosting their economy instead of ours. Steve Cook concurs: “From a global point of view, it’s just shifting the problem elsewhere.” Besides, closing down both furnaces could cost more than £1 billion.

Manufacturing has long been a victim of modern Britain’s focus on service industries over making things the world both needs and wants. “If steel does go, as a manufacturing country we’re buggered,” says Amoss. “I fail to understand how any country can really exist with any sort of wealth if it doesn’t make anything and consumes a lot.” To those who built their lives around industries like steel, today’s Britain can seem an unkind as well as unwise country, ungratefully casting off its past and recklessly mortgaging its future in the interests of expedience and profit.

The story of steel in Scunthorpe is unique, but it echoes that of the North’s, or Wales’s, mining communities. Our nation is replete with towns like this: so strongly associated with its industry that it is almost impossible to envisage existence without it. After 150 years of unglamorous and unrelenting endeavour, Scunthorpe’s whole reason-to-be has suddenly become ethically suspect, its Britain-building citizens at risk of being abandoned. Can a forward-looking national realism, drawing on an old sense of obligation, compete with today’s green and globalised agenda? This time-tempered town is not the only one nervously awaiting an answer to that question.

The former port, one of the most complete examples of a 17th-century village in Britain, has a long history of trade with the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and the Baltics. But that summer my dad kept it simple — he pointed at the seashore and told me how, in the olden days, boats left there for France and Belgium loaded with Scottish coal and salt, and on their return brought back building materials, including those distinctive orange tiles that are still ubiquitous in Culross today. Later I’d hunt down the architectural terms to describe those Flemish influences: pantiles, crowsteps, gablets. 

Culross suffered a very gradual loss of purpose. The harbour was filled in late in the 19th century, replaced by a rusted railway line and later a Pay and Display car park. In 1900, the village was described as “a decayed royal burgh containing many old houses”, and by the Eighties, when my dad first took me there, the place had been ghostly for decades — the water was quiet, the buildings were flaking and sad, nothing much moved but net curtains and chimney smoke. There was little life and definitely no chance of an ice cream.

Yet this small town boasted an illustrious history: it was one of Britain’s very first industrial villages. It owed its fine reputation to Sir George Bruce of Carnock (1550-1625), the engineer, merchant, MP and Privy Councillor who brought great wealth in the 16th and 17th centuries through exports of local coal and salt. Bruce earned the hamlet the title of “royal burgh” from King James VI in 1588, and went on to build the mustard-colour Culross Palace — his great lodging — which remains Culross’ most popular tourist attraction. By the time of his death, he employed 175 miners and owned 44 salt pans in the local area.

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By far his greatest achievement was the Moat Pit — a coal mine under the sea. This wildly ambitious mining operation showcased Bruce’s skills as an engineer, 150 years before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The Moat Pit shaft, a watertight tower of stone projecting up off the seabed, was built 450m from the shore and allowed Bruce access to the otherwise unreachable coal reserves under Culross Bay. Extracted coal could be loaded from the artificial island of the tower onto waiting boats which then headed straight for England and the Continent.

The shaft was a phenomenal achievement, unprecedented in Britain, and it drew admirers from throughout the country. One visitor, the English poet John Taylor, wrote: “Neither in any travels that I have beene in, nor any history that I have read, or any discourse that I have heard, did neither see, read, or heare of any worke of men that might parallel or equivalent with this unfellowed and unmatchable worke.” Even Ben Johnson, the most famous writer in the country at the time, visited during his peregrination on foot across Britain between 1618-19.

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The grandest person to brave the Moat Pit was King James VI, who made an excursion to Culross in 1617. Bruce led the King through the tunnels below the seabed and up onto the small artificial island of the Moat Pit shaft at high tide. His Majesty — no stranger to superstition at the best of times — climbed gingerly from the darkness onto a 15m-wide stone ring in the middle of the Firth of Forth, looked around despairingly at the expanse of wind-roughened water that surrounded them, and, bamboozled by what he no doubt considered some dangerous magic trick cried, “Treason!” Bruce assured the King that he was safe before guiding him to a tethered boat and rowing him back to shore. The pair then retired to the abbey for dinner and drinks.

Remarkably, the Moat Pit still exists. A storm overwhelmed the shaft and flooded the tunnels at the end of March 1625, the year of Bruce’s death, but the entrance to the sea tower — now a disc of seaweedy stone which protrudes from the surface of the water at low tide — is still visible if you know where, and when, to look. After his death, Bruce’s son continued to mine in the area, but he was unable to match the great entrepreneurial force of his father. By 1750 the boom in Culross was over, and the village entered a slow decline that lasted several centuries.

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Visiting recently with friends and family, though, it was clear that the village I knew as a child is prospering once again. In an era of historical TV box sets and cosy Instagram reels, Culross’ time-capsule beauty is flowering; the houses are freshly painted, the cobbles are weeded, there are holiday rentals and shops selling wax melts and impractical pottery. The village features regularly in Sunday pull-outs and mainstream travel guides, and The National Trust for Scotland continues to diligently restore and maintain many of the historic buildings. Visitors who come for the history can refuel on coffee and cake, even ice cream from a van.

But what explains this unexpected renaissance? A decade ago, I had few Scottish friends who knew of the charms of Culross, despite growing up nearby. Today the village is marketed in a way that wasn’t possible in the Eighties: via social media; it is attracting a generation of tourists and content creators drawn to eye-catching locations off the beaten track. Tegan Carty, who works in a cafe opposite Culross’ implausibly photogenic Mercat Cross, has noticed this trend: “It’s mainly Americans and Spanish-speaking people, and they are just looking for something to see and do away from the big well-known cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh,” she says.

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It’s not just the history and the scenery they come for: “They mention Outlander. It’s always Outlander.” The historical drama, the latest in a line of recent film and TV shows to use Culross as a backdrop, has won a legion of fans captivated by romantic storylines and creative remodelling of Scottish history. Many sites across central Scotland have enjoyed the same Outlander effect, including Doune Castle, 20 miles from Culross, which has seen visitor numbers increase by around 200% since filming there began.

The disruption in Culross hasn’t been quite so severe, and for locals like Carty there are more pressing issues than seasonal tourism: “I love working here, it’s a brilliant wee town. The only problem is you get no service on your phone.” But times are changing nonetheless. Bruce’s handsome, mustard-colour palace, for instance — one of Outlander’s main locations — now allows in only eight visitors every 15 minutes, in a bid to protect the building’s original wooden beams.

Historians can scoff at the selfie and ice cream crowd that visit Culross today, but the reality is that the twin magics of film and social media can lure visitors who would never otherwise come, and their presence, not to mention their cash, can often be a catalyst for further investigation and interpretation of historical sites. Once the crowds have arrived it is the stories, not the backdrops, that will capture their imaginations.

Chiefly, the F-35 relies on rare earth elements, or REEs, to operate. Its jet engines are coated with yttrium-enhanced ceramic to achieve supersonic speeds, and it requires powerful magnets made from neodymium for its weapons systems to function. Each F-35 jet contains 417kg of rare earth elements, of which between 90% and 95% of the world’s supply is sourced from China. Between 60% and 75% of the world’s supply of finished rare earth magnets is also produced in Chinese factories. 

So fragile is this supply chain, and so dependent on continued free trade with China, that the Pentagon has begun to stockpile a six-month supply of rare earth magnets in case of an emergency, with experts urging the US to invest in domestic manufacturing capacity “so if we go to war with China, we’re not calling them up asking for supply”. America’s new “National Defense Authorization Act” now calls for urgent action from the Pentagon to ensure that the majority of its REEs are sourced from countries other than China within five years.

Rare earth elements are not especially rare — they are more common than gold, for example — but they are present in the earth in microscopic concentrations, making it laborious and costly to extract and refine them. It takes between ten and fifteen years to establish the infrastructure to mine and process them: left to the logic of the free market, there is no case to do so, as it is simply cheaper to import REEs from China. The Chinese government, thinking in strategic rather than narrowly economic terms, has ploughed huge sums into developing the country’s domestic REE production infrastructure, and in doing so has established a system of Western dependency. 

Surveying the global scene just a few years ago, any sensible observer would have noted that there were three potential stumbling blocks to the continued smooth functioning of the globalised economy: a global pandemic, the eruption of great power competition edging into conflict, and catastrophic climate change. The Covid crisis, as a worldwide but not especially lethal pandemic, has raised awareness of the fragility of global supply chains and the strategic necessity for domestic manufacturing capacity in multiple sectors. Yet it is the intersection of the two other risks, climate change and great power conflict, that will shape the world of our near future. 

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With the great industrialised power blocs now redirecting their economies towards the “green transition”, with some form of Green New Deal now the dominant medium-term economic model for Britain, the United States, China and the EU, the supply of rare earth elements and other minerals strategically vital to the new economy will become a new arena for global competition. Just as the wars of the 20th century saw wrangling for control of oil resources, the conflicts of the 21st century will seek to establish control of the elements necessary for the new technologies to function.

Green politics seems inextricably tied, in the popular imagination, with a form of utopian optimism derived from the unworldly idealism of the parties who promote it. Yet perhaps we are looking at the various Green New Deal proposals the wrong way: there is already a great deal of scepticism about their capacity to meaningfully arrest catastrophic climate change. But if we reinterpret the Green New Deal as primarily a means to restart a sluggish global economy after decades of stagnation, a gigantic form of Keynesian stimulus analogous to the New Deal after which it is named, or to the Trente Glorieuses during which a shattered post-war Europe rebuilt itself, its appeal to global policymakers compared to the alternatives of either degrowth or the status quo makes sense. 

A perception of the various Green New Deals as a collection of industrial policies derived from strategic and economic self-interest, as opposed to wooly-minded idealism, has not yet filtered through to the British commentariat. A Times comment piece last weekend, for example, laments the lack of favour purportedly shown by the Government towards the City, and asserts that “the new-found enthusiasm for industrial strategies, which promoted favoured sectors such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence and green energy almost at random,” is merely the product of a crude anti-banker populism unique to this country, rather than what it is: a new phase of global capitalism, perhaps as significant as the Industrial Revolution in scope, which will reshape the entire global order.

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Though it has barely impinged on the popular consciousness, we are already witnessing a new “Great Game” as industrial economies seek to secure their control of elements like lithium, essential to the production of the lithium-ion batteries which are rapidly turning electric vehicles from an expensive toy into the affordable, and soon dominant, mode of transport. China already manufactures 73% of the world’s supply of lithium cell batteries, far ahead of the United States, which comes second with a mere 12%.  Yet China is not content with this vast disparity in its favour, and is buying up controlling stakes in lithium mines from Australia to Bolivia, seeking to control the global supply and establishing yet another structural pattern of Western economic dependence on Chinese manufacturing.  

With cobalt and manganese too, both elements vital to the production of lithium-ion cells, China possesses only 1% of global supply within its borders, but controls 80% of the global production of refined cobalt. Two-thirds of the world’s cobalt supply is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo: China owns eight of the country’s fourteen cobalt mines.

It is striking that while in Western countries, environmental policy has been until now limited to debating whether or not climate change is actually happening, and in the construction of an elaborate and largely meaningless system of carbon trading on the open market, Chinese policymakers have seen the future, and taken concrete steps to ensure that they control it.

It is, then, not far-fetched to imagine the Cold War between China and the United States, the initial stages of which we now live in, manifesting itself in an increased focus on and intervention in the politics of countries like Bolivia or the DRC. Myanmar, for example, mines around half of China’s supply of rare earth elements: its internal politics are therefore a matter of major strategic concern for China, and China’s leadership will aim to ensure a smooth and stable relationship with whoever controls the country, whatever their chosen system of government. This pattern will surely play out across the world, with climate change and the global order being fated to intersect, but what is the political end state? 

One strange and interesting recent book, Climate Leviathan, is a rare attempt to construct a non-utopian vision of the future political order deriving from both climate change and the industrial efforts to mitigate it. Taking their cues from the emphasis on sovereignty driving the political works of both Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, the authors, academics Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, assert that the logic of the Green New Deal, as of liberalism itself, ultimately leads towards global governance, the “Leviathan” of the title, which was perhaps always the endpoint of liberalism, as “all liberalism secretly anticipates a world government on the horizon of history”.

“A planetary green Keynesianism,” they write, “the only kind that might have a hope of confronting the problem in its scale and magnitude, is thus forced down one of two planetary paths — both of which lead, ultimately, to the same destination”: a form of Kantian perpetual rule under the hegemony of, most probably, the United States. By asserting both the urgent necessity of reordering the world in order to save it, and its own unique capacity to do so, the US will simultaneously assert itself, in Schmittian fashion, as global sovereign. 

“A US-centered Climate Leviathan like this could conceivably last a long time,” they predict, “since any attempt to defeat the United States militarily would also seem to unsettle the very management of life of Earth. Attempts to resist US hegemony would be treated as treasonous ‘terrorism’ of an extreme type, confronted with overwhelming military technology.”

Yet America does not necessarily possess the mandate of heaven: “we could see world war between two spheres of influence, leading to a collapse in the world system, or the consolidation of Climate Leviathan through collaboration between the United States and China [instead of] a US-centric Leviathan.”

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It is very possible to envisage, they observe, Earth being divided into two great spheres of influence in a grand bargain between a declining United States and a rising China, a division of “the world system in a sort of grand compromise that includes shared planetary management, a “G2” concentration of the existing order bilaterally constituted to save life on Earth.”

Whether or not this vision is convincing, the urgency of theorising the politics of the emerging global system ought to be clearly apparent. Concrete action to mitigate climate change does not necessarily herald a new age of global cooperation against a shared threat: the Green transition is just as likely, if not more, to be a new arena of international friction and competition, against a darkening backdrop of ever-accelerating climate doom. 

The competition for the strategic resources of the new global economy, no doubt to be framed as ideological contests between liberal democracy and autocracy or between anarchic barbarism and human rights, will surely shape the world for the rest of our lifetimes. Whatever the merits of the Queen Elizabeth carrier group’s deployment to East Asia, the rare earth elements buried deep within the airframes of its showpiece fighter jets points to an unglamorous, but urgently necessary task for the government: to ensure that Britain secures its access to the minerals vital to the new technologies, and in doing so, safeguards our national security in the dawning age of great power competition.

For the most perfect summation of how his Northumbrian upbringing shaped the man who became one of the greatest footballers, and football managers, of his generation, turn to the 1971 Tyne Tees TV documentary Big Jack’s Other World. It is a joyful, time-travelling 25 minutes, as Jack returns to Ashington for a weekend of whippet racing, brass bands and pints in the club. For me, it was almost exquisitely painful to watch: having grown up in Northumberland in the 1980s, I saw the glowing embers of the pit village life he describes so fondly, as well as characters who look and speak and laugh like the kind, hard-working folk I knew in places like New Hartley and Seaton Delaval.

For Northumbrians, “h’yem” (home), has a more profound meaning than just the place where one lives. It means belonging to a homeland, a heimat; it evokes the spirit of the Welsh hiraeth, or the Portuguese saudade — that sense of longing for a missing time and place.

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What’s so striking about this film about Jack’s homecoming is the magnetic personality of the man himself. He’s a natural in front of camera, displaying an easy charm as he meets his old neighbours, and respectfully asks if he can have a look inside 114 Beatrice Street, the colliery row where he grew up and shared a bed with his three brothers until he left home to join Leeds United. Not only is Ashington the only English town to have three native World Cup winners — Jack and Bobby Charlton, plus the England cricketer Mark Wood — but Beatrice Street alone produced three Footballers of the Year: the Burnley and England star Jimmy Adamson grew up there, too.

When Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, visited Ashington in 2018 he was struck by just how badly depleted the town had been by 40 years of decline. In a speech, he remarked that what he saw of the town’s local economy had shocked him, even as he was impressed by the warmth of its people. In his words, here was “barren economic tundra, permanently leeched of nutrients“.

But in Big Jack’s Other World, we see Ashington at perhaps its most confident and prosperous: the pits were still major employers, Station Road was the biggest shopping area between Newcastle and Edinburgh (with one of the grandest Co-op stores in the North of England), and the working men’s clubs — of which there were dozens in the district — were genuinely luxurious, and vied with each other to have the fanciest concert rooms to attract the biggest stars.

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In the film we see Jack in his element, getting a round in at the Northern Social Club in North Seaton — “there you are lads, get stuck into these” he says, setting down a tray of pints in front of his confreres — before launching into an arcane debate with his father about what type of wild geese they saw that morning. Indeed, with his fascination for birdlife and love of angling on the Tweed (or, in later life, on the Moy in County Mayo), Jack was a great naturalist in the Northumbrian tradition of Lancelot Brown, Thomas Bewick and the fly-fishing Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey.

The only jarring note amid all this cheerful bonhomie comes with Jack’s views on “women’s lib”. Even in an era where male chauvinism was hardly uncommon, the North East of England stood out as unusually patriarchal. Where it was typical for men and women to work alongside each other in the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, the coalfields of Northumberland and Durham were different. Here it was a mark of pride for a miner that his wife did not take on paid work outside the home — where she was needed to service the “aristocrats of labour”, as the pitmen saw themselves, much as a groom would look after a horse.

So as the Charlton menfolk stagger back home after their midday session, they’re greeted by an irritated Cissie Charlton standing at the stove in her housecoat. Ensuring that the men of the house were fed first was a custom that my own grandmother — a pitman’s wife — observed well into the 2000s. As they sit down to their dinner, Jack holds forth on the duties of women, and how girls should be brought up: “strictly.” How the women felt about this was not discussed. This is what purely economic analyses of the decline of mining towns like Ashington tend to miss: the fact that these coalfield communities relied as much on a reserve army of (largely unpaid) female labour — and all the constraints and narrowed horizons that came with that — as much as they did on government backing for nationalised industries.

Yet Jack himself had taken one look at the coalface as a teenager and decided the pitman’s life wasn’t for him. And though he was always loyal to Ashington — and even campaigned alongside Arthur Scargill in the 1980s — he was clear-eyed about the limitations of the world he grew up in. As Danny Finkelstein noted in a perceptive piece about how forward-thinking and entrepreneurial Charlton always was — in football coaching and in his business interests — when Jack looked back on the defeat of the miners’ strike, he remarked: “If you were to talk to some of them now, they would tell you that the closing of the mines was the best thing that ever happened to them. They have found a new lifestyle, and, more importantly, new hope.” But for many of them, “new hope” meant leaving Ashington behind.

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Tyne Tees TV itself was once an important vehicle for regional pride. The 1970s was its golden age of documentary making, with serious attention given to caricatural North East pursuits, with wonderful films on leek-growing and pigeon racing — both manifestations of that typical Northumbrian love of the natural world. But then, as Antony Brown wrote in his 1978 book Tyne Tees Television: The First 20 years, A Portrait, the station’s purpose was to paint a portrait of:

“a land of wide skies, bent vowels, saints, footballers, shipyards and an inventive tradition which has produced the finest engineers in England: its landscape swings from wild moorland to industrial cities and back again to the sea-fretted coast of Northumberland, Durham and North Yorkshire.”

Jack Charlton was great on the grandeur of that Northumbrian landscape. In a later travelogue for Tyne Tees, The Coast of King Jack, he swaggers along the Northumberland littoral from Amble to Bamburgh like a bandy-legged gun slinger, tossing out historical tidbits and bantering amusingly with the locals. Since Jack’s death, I have read so many testimonies from ordinary people about his personal warmth, kindness, and approachability. These qualities were nurtured in the tight-knit streets of Ashington, the “biggest pit village in the world”, and Northumbrian sociability is still one of the region’s strongest selling points.

Jack took charge of Ireland’s national team in 1986, a fraught time for Anglo-Irish relations. It was his personal charisma, and love of a pint — as much as his prowess as a football manager — that undoubtedly endeared him so much to the Irish people. After sending them into raptures at Italia 90 and USA 94, no man since the thirteenth century came closer to being anointed High King of Ireland than Big Jack (although honorary Irish citizenship and the Freedom of Dublin were high enough honours).

As this touching David Squires cartoon in the Guardian illustrated so well, here was a man who was genuinely loved. Other than perhaps the great Terry Wogan, no one did more to affect a rapprochement between England and Ireland — after decades, even centuries of mistrust. Bill Corcoran of the Tyneside Irish Centre said it well when he tweeted:

“A mighty Northumberland footballing statesman. His influence, in bringing friendship and peace between people, in his beloved England and Ireland in terrible times was pivotal but under-appreciated.”

Or, as the Irish international Johnny Giles once put it, Bobby and Jack Charlton were “great ambassadors for both football and for working-class England”. What’s made Jack’s death so poignant is that part of that old working-class England has died with him.

Dan Jackson is the author of the best-selling book The Northumbrians: The North East of England and its People. A New History, published by Hurst (2019)