The New Parochialism

Sam Wheeler represents Piccadilly Ward on Manchester City Council. He writes:

“From Preston Bolton Oldham and by Colne I’ve tramped the roads and never been alone” — Alan Bell 

Last week Labour lost a by-election in Radcliffe, a small town in Greater Manchester. Long considered a solid seat, and delivering two-thirds of its votes for Labour just a couple of years ago, this would be a disappointment at any time. 

Yet this was not just one of those council-level flukes that we see on occasion. Labour had a strong local candidate and a popular core message about securing a new school.

Rather, this is part of a pattern of losses not to the Conservatives or Liberals, but to a local independence movement — in this case the Ronseal-style “Radcliffe First.”

This has followed similar wins in Farnworth, Kearsley, Horwich, Blackrod, Irlam and elsewhere across the county, with indications that these groups are linking up.

Of course some element of “local ratepayers” organisation isn’t new to British politics. Stockport has had one since the 1920s, and from Morcambe Bay to Cheshire East and across the south of England this has been a norm for a while.

But this current incarnation is different. It isn’t motivated by the sort of parish council idea that we should keep national politics out of organising hanging-basket allocations.

Rather, it’s emerging from a sense of being ripped off, let down, left behind and that someone, somewhere is getting the better of the deal.

And the problem for the Labour Party isn’t that these people are wrong in their analysis — they’re not. It’s that for some reason they don’t think Labour is the solution to their anger.

There is, still, a tribal hatred of the Conservative Party across swathes of this country. But a non-Labour brand — independent, Ukip, Brexit Party and others — can tap into it. 

Scottish comrades will be smiling sadly to themselves at this point, ahead of this by a few years as they are, and as Scotland usually is in British political trends. 

Red Clydeside might have appeared to collapse in a night in 2015, but it took a decade of being undermined.

Helped by proportional representation, the SNP got councillors, then it got MSPs and then, finally, the weights of first past the post swung and it swept the board.

The concern in England is that even with the strength of the electoral system favouring Labour at local level, the collapse in turnout is allowing breaches.

This isn’t everywhere. In cities with strong civic identities that people want to opt in to, this grievance struggles to find a foothold.

Manchester’s bees are as likely to be emblazoned on walls and wrists in Stockport or Stretford as they are within the official limits of the local authority.

The demand from Liverpudlians that any erstwhile Scousers reveal the colour of their bin is a running joke.

But for too much of the rest of northern England, we have boundaries determined not by history, or belonging, but by a set of bloodless economic graphs drawn up in the late 1960s and early 1970s under the Wilson and Heath governments.

To look just at Greater Manchester, we have the home of Manchester United sitting in Trafford borough, part of the West Riding of Yorkshire annexed into Oldham, and Atherton, a Wigan ward in a Bolton constituency with a Manchester postcode. 

Sprinkled through this you have the Mancunian diaspora estates of people deported under the slum clearances, who half a century later are still in mutual resentment with the Lancashire towns they were dropped on. 

Perhaps most egregious is the lashing together the historic Anglo-Saxon towns of Stalybridge, Hyde, Ashton and others under “Tameside,” a name which smacks of clinical, Whitehall committee planning.

Previously the economic drivers of the region, the “cotton and coal and steam” could bend and reforge identities.

In the “new age of leisure” of the mid-20th century, a focus on civic infrastructure; libraries, swimming baths, parks and sports pitches, could provide enough that different communities didn’t feel short-changed, and elements of this held even unto the New Labour government.

But in a time when unions are weak, austerity still reigns and competition, rather than collaboration, is prioritised, it’s scarcely any wonder that an older sense of belonging is desperately needed and embraced.

Indeed the whole discussion over our relationship with the European Union has not been couched, by either side, in the cold calculations of trading blocs.

It has been about a sense of identity: I am an internationalist, you are a bigot. I am a patriot, you are a traitor.

And it is no surprise whatsoever that the Labour Party is being torn apart on the wrack of constitutional identity.

Over a century ago that old rogue Ramsay MacDonald was lamenting how sectarianism divided working communities not only in Ireland itself, but how the stance on the Irish question set people whose economic interests were the same into different camps in Britain.

“Whenever there is an attempt to root out sweating in Belfast the orange big drum is beaten, and the men and women who are suffering in these mills from wages that cannot enable them to keep body and soul together, immediately go, one section on one side of the road and the other section on the other side of the road, and one section dresses itself in green and the other in yellow, and they forget all the real problems and those who beat the big drums and arrange for the beating of them go on sweating the people.”

And this is the real threat to the labour movement. Across Europe, the social democratic coalition is collapsing. 

Voters from France to Poland are given a choice between a reactionary nationalism that will look after you as long as you conform, or a laissez-faire liberalism where the individual is permitted every freedom, including the freedom to starve.

It’s as if the industrial proletariat, that union of solidarity and liberty forged through collective struggle for your rights, never existed.

A by-election in a small town along the Irwell may seem a very small thing, one more raindrop at quite a drizzly time for Labour. But I beg comrades not to ignore it. Because a flood here, in one of our last bastions, could wash the whole party away.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. A new party is now in the process of registration. 

After nearly 30 years of suggestion, speculation, and even a sort of preparation, I will stand for Parliament here at North West Durham. 

The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.