Why frustrated voters are turning away from the mainstream
I’m standing in light rain in a rabbit warren of streets in Deeplish, a few hundred yards from Rochdale train station. In front of me is a primary school with an intake of 450 kids, one of whom is white. To my left is a mosque, to my right another, and across the way six more. The former local headquarters of the now proscribed Hizb ut-Tahrir is across the street. Women with burkas are walking their little ones, going into terraced houses.
Over the past week, I’ve been travelling across the nation to get a sense of where we are and where we might be going. Not just to Rochdale but to places like Ashfield, another area that has gained political notoriety in recent days due to the antics of Lee Anderson, its MP. To some pundits, George Galloway’s victory in Rochdale and Anderson’s defection from Conservative to Reform portend a realignment of politics in the UK, the tectonic plates shifting yet again in the aftermath of Brexit. But what, I wonder, is going on under the surface? Are we on the verge of a major transformation or just more national decline?
In Deeplish, I meet Ewan McPherson, principal of the primary school, and glimpse a truth that we ignore at our peril: great teachers are one of our nation’s most precious assets. He took over the school, in special measures according to its Ofsted report, in 2013 but has — with the help of brilliant staff — turned it into a “good” school on the cusp of “outstanding”. In the corridor outside his office are pictures of children, some of who arrived at the school unable to speak anything but Urdu or Pashto, who have gone on to top universities. It shows what is possible with leadership and courage.
It hasn’t been easy, though. When the school began to teach the required curriculum on marriage and relationships, there was an outcry. McPherson received an urgent phone call from a colleague (he was at a meeting in Yorkshire at the time) who said: “You have to come back!”
“It was after Friday prayers,” McPherson says, “and my office had 40 parents crammed into it with dozens more into the corridor and foyer. They were objecting to our telling the children that gay marriage is legal. They thought this was unacceptable. But we had to stand firm. It isn’t just my legal duty to teach the curriculum but my moral duty. And I won through and the children have benefited from hearing about this vital aspect of British life.”
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Deeplish is symptomatic of an unfolding story in British national life that has remained hidden in plain sight. It is a story of Islamic patriarchs wielding huge power, block voting, and marriage within clans, often to cousins, permitting these groups to retain a sharp demarcation with the rest of the community. You don’t only see this in Rochdale but in other northern cities, and it plays havoc with civic life. This means that without a hero like McPherson willing to challenge the creeping Islamification, the children of these communities are often cut off from the opportunities on offer. It is a terrible indictment of liberalism that this was never confronted out of fear of offending cultural sensibilities.
I leave Deeplish and go to Darnhill, three or so miles away. The rain is now heavier, lending a certain Lowryian gloss to a council estate built to house bombed-out residents of Manchester after the Second World War. People here are predominantly white and yet I am struck by a realisation: this community is almost as isolated as Deeplish, albeit for different reasons. Rather than cultural sequestration, there is economic sequestration. A city that once thrived with decent paid jobs — a hub of the industrial revolution — is now cut off by the economic model pursued by successive governments which has prioritised financial services in the City and neglected our great regional towns. One resident told me: “There are no jobs and nothing really happens.”
I go to a pub on the borders of the estate and see a family of three generations: the granddad had a job in textiles and the pride that comes with it; his son couldn’t get one and went on the dole; now his son may be going the same way. At the local primary school, a teacher (who doesn’t wish to be named) said that children are arriving in reception year only able to speak a few words of English, not because they speak Urdu at home (these are white kids) but because they hardly speak at all.
“They are put on an iPad and left to their own devices. They are still in nappies and can’t ‘share well’.” I learn that the rate of special educational needs is higher here than in Deeplish primary, despite half the intake, and that educational outcomes at the age of 16 are lower. It is confirmation of the truth that shines out of the Sewell report and the work of Professor Steve Strand of the University of Oxford: white working-class children, particularly boys, are being terribly let down by our system. If integration and inclusion are going to mean anything, it must include them.
At the Wetherspoons in Kirkby-in-Ashfield (a drive across the moors and down the M1 from Rochdale), I enjoy a bottle of Erdinger (a German wheat beer) and bump into Jimmy, who is savouring a pint of Otter Dark with almost philosophical contemplation. He is a former music teacher who now plays occasional gigs with a small band of friends. “I moved here a few years ago and it is a great place with massive potential,” he says. “But it is tragic to see that potential going to waste.”
It’s a common lament in an area that would have been, a few decades ago, rocking to the beat of coal mines and three railways stations: the weft and warp of a small town at the heart of industrial England. The high street is struggling, shops have shut down, shutters are up. Even Wetherspoons, I am told, is due to close within months. Andrew, 53, who has lived here all his life, is friendly but frank: “I have seen the decline of the area and it is heartbreaking. There used to be a sense of pride, but it has largely gone.” These are dangerous echoes of what I heard in Rochdale.
I drive out of the town area looking for grains of optimism, but they are few and far between. Elizabeth, who works for the county council, says: “The decent jobs have given way to low-paid work like warehousing. Many young people don’t feel that they have a chance.” In the Nag’s Head, I ask George — middle-aged and unemployed — about Lee Anderson and he says: “He at least speaks his mind but doesn’t offer any solutions.” In the Ladybrook estate, Jean, a septuagenarian who works 1pm to 2.30pm as a dinner lady, is chatty. “I like to get out of the house,” she says. “I’m a bit of an optimist at heart, but the last 20 years have been tough.” All talk about how much they love their town but that it has lost something intangible, almost spiritual.
It is yet further testimony to the failure of our economic model. Some blame can be placed at the door of the present government, whose corruption and infighting make it perhaps the worst of the postwar period. But many of our problems predated Sunak, Johnson or even Cameron. For much of the 20th century, regional inequality was relatively low by international standards but in the 1980s it started to rise to levels unique in the western world, aided and abetted by governments that became hooked on the tax revenues from financial services, not realising that it was a narcotic rush that couldn’t last. Taxes and immigration kept rising to meet growing social needs, but without a productivity uplift to compensate we have become trapped in a vicious circle that, left unchecked, will lead to national debt rising to 300 per cent of GDP by 2060.
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It is in this context that pundits have talked of a political realignment. One insight offered by Matthew Goodwin in his book Values, Voice and Virtue is that there is a growing schism in values between a progressive liberal elite — educated at Oxbridge and Russell Group universities, typically the children of the managerial classes — and what was once called the working class, who have been cruelly left behind. It was this schism that sat partially behind Brexit and could lead to more shifts in British politics.
I don’t dismiss this argument but I can’t help thinking that questions of party politics and coalitions are somehow peripheral to the huge challenges we face. Because fundamentally, our nation has been struggling because we have failed to harness the potential of all our people, in all our wonderful regions. Too many areas have been cut off. Levelling up has become a slogan not a policy. Political and financial elites have gamed the system while ignoring and often shafting ordinary people, as the Post Office scandal so eloquently revealed. It is all indicative of power being concentrated in too few hands, by people who have become detached from what we might call “real life”. Immigration has been too fast while politicians lied about it. And while it is rightly said that diversity is a strength, it is also true that diversity is a tragic weakness without integration and where communities are severed as if by a scalpel. And who deals with the consequences? Never elites.
As I walk down the high street towards the last remaining train station in Kirkby, I get talking to two young women, perhaps in their late teens. Again, they are warm and friendly. “What do you think of this area and where it is going?” I ask. They giggle, and I reflect that this is probably a rather odd question to be asked on the high street by a strange chap in his early fifties. “Oh, I quite like it,” one says. The other looks more contemplative: “I just think — well, it is difficult to put into words — that there could be so much more going on here; that there could be so much more to life.”
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