In Ken Loach’s “The Old Oak” 2023’s final installment in his trilogy of films about the struggles of post industrial North East England, there’s a tiny but telling snippet of dialogue that stuck with me long after the credits closed out one of Ken’s more mawkish offerings.
Syrian children, recently arriving in Durham, are given a bike by the film’s lead from inside his van.
“It’s all donated from local people” he says to the local children looking on, unimpressed.
“They‘ve been getting everything lately”
“I wish I could get a bike”
Presented as an unfortunate slip into un-saintliness that Loach’s working class characters predictably overcome, it is possibly the only real detour the film takes into the tensions in declining, post industrial towns and their relationship to the state and politics in 2025: “When is someone going to come and help me?”
In my lifetime, Labour has become ever more disengaged from communities like these. Constituency Labour Parties in the “red wall” have vanishingly few foot-soldiers and a trip out to knock doors with them often reveals voters that haven’t heard from Labour in-person for a long time.
The party has become ever-more weighted toward a class of metropolitan graduates that live in major metropolitan areas, speak only to people exactly like themselves and have become innately suspicious of “gammons” and their flawed nature. Labour people who often take a Pygmalion-like, moralistic attitude to the majority-white and working-class communities in areas like Durham and indeed most of the North East that once made up their most loyal base. Where Labour votes were weighed like so many wheelbarrows of freshly won coal.
They have every right to ask why the government spent more on asylum seekers than Levelling Up
Similarly, the phrase “white working class” has become taboo. The moment it is mentioned in Labour circles the response is immediate and reflexive, like a hammer landing square on the knee; “Don’t you know the working class isn’t just white!”. As though this hardly revelatory observation carried some deep insight. As though to even say this collection of words will summon forth the ghost of Enoch Powell and so must be banned from being said aloud.
These are inconvenient votes that can’t be named but which are needed as a means to a greater end: climate leadership, anti-racism, rejoining the EU.
The Old Oak’s tagline, “It’s not where you’re from, it’s what you bring” feels antagonistic toward the idea of rootedness that can be so meaningful to communities that have begun to baffle Labour. Something once celebrated by socialists like Simone Weil in the 1940s and more recently discussed in David Goodhart’s dissection of the cultural element of anti-globalisation sentiment The Road To Somewhere.
Communities that both birthed the labour movement and that went on to play the role of burnt offering to neoliberalism under both Conservative and Labour governments for three generations, like an insect that dies after procreating.
Places where the people and their role in the world are presumed spent. Living museum artefacts housed in old mining terraces. It’s this question of what remains of use in communities that industry vacated that lies at the heart of The Old Oak and also at the heart of Labour’s collapse. Loach’s film is a celebration of how Britain’s problems can be shipped off to the poor corners of England to be stored safely in the Kilner jar of Northern solidarity — with almost nothing expected in return. We have no money but we are kind, aren’t we?
In the North West, this sentimentality has evidently worn thin.
Where you’re from does, in fact, matter. Labour has been especially slow to learn this but these disastrous local elections could finally be instructive to a party struggling to understand what it is for, other than callously shitting all over the people it is supposed to represent.
The North East has the highest child poverty rate in the UK, most of this poverty found among children of working parents. It is full of what the Social Mobility Commission refers to as social mobility coldspots — places where those born poor are most likely to die poor. North East wages are the lowest in England and the area has the lowest amount of household wealth in England: less than a third of those in the South East.
The ruthless discarding of aging workers is most prevalent here, with the lowest rate of employment for over 50s in the whole of England. When workers are terrified of the kind of deindustrialisation that closed Tata Steel in Middlesbrough, or that threatens Nissan in Sunderland, it’s because many know from the bitter experience of their father’s lives that losing their job could mean they never work again.
The North East is also the sickest region in England. It has the highest working age PIP claimant rate and is set to be worst hit by the government’s cuts to disability support, twice as badly as London. Ex-mining communities like Easington are due to lose nearly £24 million each in local expenditure as people with the chronic respiratory and physical injuries that come from a lifetime’s work keeping Britain’s lights on see their income slashed for the sin of not being disabled enough. Some areas of County Durham have among the lowest life expectancy in the country.
These are places that have every right, after 14 years of punishment under Conservatives, to ask why Labour has continued the trend of valuing their lives so little and yet expecting so much uncomplaining compliance. They have every right to ask why it is that a government that conned them with Boris Johnson’s promises of a more equitable share of national wealth, went on to spend more on asylum seeker accommodation than it did on Levelling Up.
They have every right to ask what strategic genius in “their” Labour party came to the conclusion that the national books were to be balanced on their backs.
It was those Westminster strategy wonks I thought of as I tramped along to the election day Labour HQ phonebank and tried to imagine how I would persuade people out to vote. Climbing the lift in an unassuming building in a Southwark, past the Union flag hanging at reception, into the back office where phones were set out on tables. Calling voters in Durham and hearing “Reform, Reform, Reform” as I asked their voting intentions.
One old lady, Maureen, broke the trend. “If I don’t vote Labour my nan will come back and haunt me”.
My own paternal grandmother, growing up in Jarrow in the era of Palmer’s shipyard, would tell us how she traded her Labour vote for a two bed home. You voted Labour and they looked after you. You passed that tradition on to your kids and their kids.
This deep generational loyalty has frayed to threads. Many are wondering now whether it might be that the ghosts aren’t real. Maybe if you put a cross in the other box you’ll not be visited in the night by the ghost of Labour past — the Labour that respected people like you.
Reform, now in control of the council that hosts The Miners Gala — the biggest event on the British socialist calendar — might well prove themselves capable of exorcism. Thursday’s result could be an augur of the party’s complete collapse with the working class.
If the party leadership has any real understanding of the class they were founded to represent, they ought to be terrified.
