Thomas Frank: "From rust belt to mill towns: a tale of two voter revolts"

[Denzil_DC]

The Red Shed is a simple, one-storey wooden building in Wakefield that houses a meeting place and a bar. A sign on the front wall informs the world that it has been the meeting place of the Wakefield Labour Club since 1966: “50 Years a Socialist Shed”.

I happened across this unlikely outbuilding in the course of an effort to understand the politics of modern Britain as it hurtles toward the momentous decision it will make on 8 June. Theresa May presents herself as a strong leader who can go toe-to-toe with the big boys in Brussels; if her mandate is big enough, she will be free to seek the most extreme form of Brexit. If her victory is less convincing, she will have to moderate her stance. Either way, the actual details of the deal that will determine the future of this island are anyone’s guess.

And so I have come to this city of 76,000 in West Yorkshire to see how this country on the brink compares to my own. Hanging around in the affluent and cosmopolitan areas of London wouldn’t do. To come to grips with what has been going on here required a visit to the Britannia that is not cool; the regions where people largely exist outside the lustful gaze of the world.

The history of this part of England traces the history of industrialisation, its rise and its fall. With coal and steel and textiles, Yorkshire witnessed the beginning of the industrial revolution 200 years ago. With politics and organising, it is a place where the English working class came into its own. Then, with Margaret Thatcher and the big free-market beatdown of the 1980s, this was the first corner of the western world to see how it would all come crashing down. Last year’s referendum on the European Union was a hint of what comes next, and this time the hindmost were in the forefront. Like much of the rest of northern England, Wakefield voted leave, and its residents did so by 66%.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/07/from-rust-belt-to-mill-towns-a-tale-of-two-voter-revolts-thomas-frank-us-and-uk-elections

[elleng]

1. 'Then, with Margaret Thatcher and the big free-market beatdown of the 1980s,

this was the first corner of the western world to see how it would all come crashing down. Last year’s referendum on the European Union was a hint of what comes next, and this time the hindmost were in the forefront. Like much of the rest of northern England, Wakefield voted leave, and its residents did so by 66%.

The self-destructive qualities of the Brexit vote have been much noted, of course. In the satisfied, bankerly quarters of the country, the choice to stay in the EU was an easy one – for reasons explained at length by free-trade stalwarts such as the Economist and the New York Times. But the satisfied were outnumbered by the furious. It was the shifting allegiances of the hard-bitten post-industrial areas of Britain, historic Labour strongholds, that shocked the remainers – these are the British equivalents of rust-belt towns and the shattered mining communities of West Virginia. People in these places rallied around soundbites like “Britain has had enough of experts,” talked of insane over-regulation by faceless EU authorities in Brussels, and blamed their misfortunes – many of them brought on by Tory austerity policies – on the convenient European bogeyman. . .

One action in particular stood out from the others commemorated here: the apocalyptic coal miners’ strike of 1984-85, when mineworkers fought the downsizing and eventual termination of their industry at the hands of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. The strike is the subject of a triptych painting that hangs in the Red Shed, and is also commemorated by a hunk of coal mounted on a piece of wood that sits next to the bar. As I proceeded from town to town in this part of England in the days that followed, the miners’ strike came up again and again. Without any prompting from me, people mentioned where they were when it happened, how they felt about it, what it signified.

And what did it signify? One answer was suggested by something a patron of the Red Shed told me: that “industry has been deliberately run down in this area”. The ending of a way of life here was not the doing of the godlike forces of capital, but instead the deliberate result of a government campaign to destroy the power of workers – of ordinary people – and to put the country on a track that was more in keeping with the free-market ideology.

The viewpoint I just described is one you don’t often hear in the US these days. We think it is ancient and obsolete, and besides, very few American liberals sympathise with the coal mining industry. But there is also something refreshing and healthy and even populist about this perspective, emphasising as it does the obvious role of political struggle and human agency in economic developments – that it’s not just an invisible hand making all the decisions for us. This is an understanding that has proven increasingly difficult for Americans to grasp as the years have gone by. Maybe we all need to spend a few evenings at the Red Shed.'>>>

[Denzil_DC]

2. Thanks, but DU gets jumpy about copyright if we quote more than 4 paragraphs. n/t