Memory lane, post-industrial decline and the future of British politics
This Substack has been going for almost three years, but has yet to feature a personal post. Given we are at the end of summer, a time at which we take a break from professional responsibilities, I thought of combining a review of my summer and some reflections on politics.
Though I stayed at home in Cardiff for most of the holidays, we spent two weeks in Llandeilo: the (fairly affluent) West Walian town in which I grew up and my mother still lives. Primarily, this stay was dedicated to children’s activities, yet I had some time to myself and travelled one evening to Ammanford, a nearby former mining town in which generations of my mother’s family lived and I spent lots of time as a child.
In retrospect, the recent coverage of the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike probably inspired my trip and, strolling in the town centre, I noticed a club called the Pick and Shovel. I had never been inside, but had heard of the ‘Pick’. This is/was a miners’ social club and one of the places at which my great-grandfather, a miner during the inter-war years, drank eight pints a night. My grandfather, who (for obvious reasons) had a strained relationship with his father, remembered the Pick for political reasons. After the Second World War, he was secretary of the Ammanford Communist Party! To his credit, he left after the 1956 invasion of Hungary, became a Christian and social democrat and bitterly regretted his earlier sympathies.
I had never been inside the Pick and, on this occasion, literally stuck my head around the door. But my interest had been piqued and, on my return to Llandeilo, I sought more information about the club. Fortunately, there is an excellent website dedicated to Ammanford’s history[1] – I have no idea about the author’s background, but the romantic in me hopes he is one of the working-class intellectuals for which Welsh mining communities were famed – and this contains detailed information about the 1936 establishment of the Pick. Striking miners had wanted a place of their own to meet and, with their own funds, set up the club.
Among many interesting pieces of information, I learned that the Pick featured photographs of the Ammanford men who volunteered for the International Brigades. My grandfather often talked about these men. Ammanford is a small town, yet produced five volunteers, two of whom died fighting Spanish fascism. From what I could gather, the photos remained on display – unlike a hitherto prominent photo of Lenin, apparently taken down in 1991(!) – and, having another free evening a few days later, returned to the Pick in the hope of seeing the photos for myself.
The Pick of today is as you might expect it to be. Ammanford’s mine closed in 2003 – today, there are very few working mines left in Wales – and most of the drinkers were older. Like the establishments one sees in documentaries about the miners’ strike, the place feels like it has seen better days. But the barman responded kindly to my questions about the photos and told me that there was a museum room on the third floor. This room features little information about politics, yet has several fascinating items from the old mine. I spent half an hour looking around the room – unfortunately, there was no sign of the photos – and then drove back to Llandeilo.
Inevitably, these trips made me think about contemporary politics. Following the UK summer riots, there has been lively debate about the politics of the working classes, particularly in post-industrial areas such as Ammanford. Some assert that the populist radical right now represents the interests of the white working classes. There are different versions of this argument, yet such authors emphasize the metropolitan focus of social-democratic parties and the relationship between post-industrial decline and immigration.
Ostensibly, such arguments are attractive. Like other post-industrial areas, Ammanford has flirted with the right; in the 2019 general election, votes in the town almost delivered the Carmarthen East and Dinefwr seat to the Conservative Party. Nonetheless, this argument is unconvincing. As the political scientist Tarik Abou-Chadi shows, radical right parties have won few voters from social-democratic parties. To state the obvious, these are very different traditions; left-wing movements tend to be internationalist and solidaristic. Reading the biography of one of the Ammanford men who died fighting Franco, I got the impression that he would have hated Tommy Robinson. In my grandfather’s case, there is no need for conjecture; he lived until 2015 (in Ammanford) and loathed Nigel Farage.
Yet this scarcely absolves the left of its troubled relationship with the post-industrial working class. Of course, this debate is old; at the time of the Brexit vote/election of Trump, one could not move for articles about places like Ammanford (indeed, there was a Guardian article about Ammanford at around this time). Eight years later, one has the sense of living in Groundhog Day. Places like Ammanford remain run down – unfortunately, the town centre was much nicer when I was child – and many of its voters observe politics with a dangerous mix of apathy and distrust. Brexit has been no panacea.
Of course, one can overstate the extent of decline. There are still nice places in Ammanford; the cricket ground, nestled in a large green park, is one of the loveliest in Wales. The Guardian piece, possibly the work of a London journalist, painted a nihilistic picture which I did not recognize and ended with the suggestion that its subject was better off working as a London escort than living in Ammanford (read it yourself)! The Labour Party continues to have support in Ammanford – in this year’s election, the party’s vote recovered, though they failed to beat Plaid Cymru to the new Carmarthen seat – and some hope that the new government will regenerate such areas.
I am less optimistic. As I have written before, there is little difference between the economic policies of the main parties and the Labour government has already braced voters for a difficult October Budget.
Where does this end? Pieces such as this often end with predictions of some kind of snap – to some extent, Brexit was such an event – but such occurrences are irregular and have complicated relationships with economic decline. For example, the vast majority of British voters opposed this summer’s rioters and I am sure that opinion in Ammanford (which had no trouble) was typical.
Yet the ongoing decay of post-industrial areas is a source of poison in the British/Western body politic. It drives disillusionment with politics and the Labour government is already feeling the effects of such permanent discontent, recent polling suggesting that Starmer faces the trajectory of François Hollande and Olaf Scholz.
It is difficult to conclude with suggestions for improvement. We have been here many times before and, after the post-Brexit hand-wringing and my own contribution to this discourse(!), it is easy to fall into despair.
But one thing is sure; places such as Ammanford deserve better.
[1] Unfortunately, this website is currently down but can be found here. I apologize if some information in this piece is inconsistent with the site; I last read it a few weeks ago and am unable to check its veracity.
This article is a valuable corrective to people who think Reform can easily take over Labour’s old base. Consider me cautiously sceptical too. But I wonder if you overstate your case in the opposite direction. I notice that you never once mention Maurice Glasman’s concept of “Blue Labour”.
1) People can be all over the place politically. On the pages I visit - not a representative selection, I know - I find people who want a vigorous policy of immigration restriction, but they also want ultra-high taxes on the 1%, plus the total abolition of private schools. In the other direction, I’ve come across some super-woke pro-LGBT people who support capital punishment.
2) I think the internationalism of the working class can be overstated. International politics is complicated, and subject to strange twists and turns. Back in the 1930s, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact confused many of those who’d fought for the PCE and PSUC in the Spanish Civil War. Unherd magazine recently commissioned an opinion poll on foreign policy. It found that the majority of voters want something pretty close to isolationism. Not full-on Sakoku era Japan level isolationism, but something far closer to Swiss foreign policy than US foreign policy or even French foreign policy. Needless to say, this is just about the only foreign policy no party’s actually offering.
3) Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party, became embroiled in a row over Scottish businesses importing Lithuanian labour to work in the mines and steelworks of Lanarkshire and Ayrshire. Hardie struggled to balance his socialist internationalism with the complaints of Scottish workers. Eventually he settled on the position that immigration was okay in principle, provided it was from countries where average wage rates were similar to those in the UK. Sooner or later, someone’s going to rediscover Hardie’s argument, and apply it to 21st century immigration.
4) The British working class has a national story, a culture and a heritage, which many take pride in. It can include the Peasant’s Revolt, the Levellers and Diggers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, the Jarrow Marchers and, yes, the Miners’ Strike of 1984. The new academic left, captured by American narratives about intersectionality and decolonisation, is more destructive of this heritage than all the Conservative governments of the 20th and 21st centuries combined.
I remember when I was a teenager I read E.P. Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class”. Thompson was a dissident Marxist, who’d be considered outer left by most readers at the time. But today, a lot of the new woke left loathe Thompson’s book. They think it’s right wing. Why? Because it gives those vile gammons and chavs a culture and a heritage to take pride in, and we can’t have that. Okay, their trapper forefathers were sent down mines from age six, worked 12-hour shifts in total darkness and died in their 30s of black lung. But such people were still colonisers and oppressors. Or something.
Touching, thank you for writing it.
My grandfather on my mother's side was a miner and probably spent a lot of time in clubs like the Pick. However he was (I'm told) never political, and quietly resented the hardships that industrial action inflicted on him and my mother's family.
It's easy to forget how radical that generation really was though. Much though I loathe wokeness, I'm pretty sure the miners would see them as centrist pussycats. To only give up on communism after the crackdown on Hungary is remarkable given that it was already known soon after the Red October that Lenin was using forced labor camps. It makes me wonder what media they consumed back then (probably the Guardian!), and to what extent their understanding of the USSR was accurate at all.
It's possible these areas will never solve their decline. They'll just wither and depopulate entirely, being left only as ruins. Such things have happened throughout history, and it's natural. Usually towns and villages emerge due to some inherent benefit of the local geography, like being on a river or at a crossroads. If a town only exists because of a mine then when the mine closes either due to mineral exhaustion or union sabotage, the town loses any purpose and will disappear too.
I guess the real question is what villages and towns are actually for, in a post-industrial society? Without the need for "natural industry" like canals, waterwheels, mines, trading posts etc, we are left with needing only agriculture and cities, with a smattering of countryside houses that exist primarily for people who want to be closer to nature.
Of course in reality we do need industry. The practice of mass outsourcing of industry to Asia feels inherently fragile, and like it could go horribly wrong any day now. I wonder if one day these pits will re-open, albeit far more mechanized. Perhaps though, the equipment would all be operated remotely from suburban settlements or city blocks.