The Gateshead-born journalist toured former left strongholds, talking to politicians and local people, to write this illuminating study of a seismic shift in British politics
Halfway through this immensely readable compendium of local reportage, interviews and analysis, Neil Kinnock regales Sebastian Payne with a splendid anecdote from the 1974 election campaign. Doing the rounds in his safe south Wales seat, accompanied by a “theorist comrade” named Barry Moore, the future Labour leader came away from the only Tory street in the constituency with a flea in his ear. “I said to Barry and my agent: ‘What a bunch of bastards,’ recalls Kinnock. “And Barry said: ‘Yep, but you better hope those bastards never get organised.’ And I’ve remembered that to this day. The working-class Tories are not an isolated crop who are separated from the rest of the communities in which they live. They have relatives, they have friends, they have workmates, they have drinking buddies. When an area switches, it switches rapidly and suddenly.”
Broken Heartlands is an exploration of how, in the election of December 2019, just such a seismic switch to the Tories took place across huge swathes of the Midlands and northern England. The collapse of the “red wall” of safe Labour seats was a pivotal moment in British political history. It handed an 80-seat majority to Boris Johnson and plunged Labour into an existential crisis from which it has yet to emerge. So how did Labour lose the loyalty of the kind of people it was set up to fight for? Brexit confusion, Jeremy Corbyn, deindustrialisation, New Labour neglect, globalisation, “wokeism”, the excesses of the hard left and the impact of austerity: all have been offered in partial explanation. Between the autumn of 2020 and the spring of 2021, Payne bought a red Mini Cooper and embarked on a road trip to reach his own conclusions, following up on his own reporting over the past few years for the Financial Times. Having grown up in Gateshead in the 90s and 00s, in a mixed political household, he can claim some northern skin in the game.
Continue reading...source https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/12/broken-heartlands-by-sebastian-payne-review-a-tour-of-the-red-walls-ruins
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