It has taken only three years for Lee Anderson to rise from fledgling Tory MP to deputy chairman of his party. It’s a remarkable achievement for a man who, until 2018, was a Labour politician. Since his election, Anderson has frequently hit the headlines – not least after an interview in The Spectator earlier this month in which he backed the death penalty. ‘100 per cent effective,’ he said of the ultimate punishment. For that intervention, Anderson was promptly lambasted and denounced as ‘thick’ and monstrous – but also won plenty of support. It’s clear Anderson is a politician loved and loathed in equal measure. But it’s difficult to understand him without finding out about the town he came from.
Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, the seat Anderson represents, is a staunch working-class community. Once full of coal mines and factories, the area – which I grew up in and where all of my family still live – sits in the heart of the Red Wall. So how did a man who worked in the mines here and was a long-time member of the Labour party become the Tory party’s deputy chairman? It’s not a short story – and, despite the claims of some commentators, it didn’t start with Brexit. Nor has it ended with the landslide Tory victory that swept through Labour’s heartlands in 2019, bringing Anderson and his Red Wall colleagues to power.
Towns like Ashfield have still not recovered: they are limping on, used by both Labour and Conservatives
Anderson is the illegitimate political child of Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. All of these politicians would wash their hands of any blame in the rise of Anderson. But there is no way of understanding why a politician like Anderson has been so successful, without coming to terms with the last two generations of British politics.
Anderson was raised on that mining tradition of great platform speakers, the likes of Dennis Skinner, Arthur Scargill and Tony Benn – and his political views were forged in the dying embers of the local mines.
From the Second World War until the 1980s, little changed in this part of Nottinghamshire: you left school at 16 and got a job. If you were a man, you went underground. If you were a woman, you worked in a factory. Yet, in 1984, everything changed. I didn’t know it then, but that year marked a turning point in my life and the lives of half of the country. It was when my dad joined Lee Anderson’s dad on the picket line. While some families were united during the strikes, many were not: Nottinghamshire was a deeply divided place throughout the strike. Eventually, as the months wore on and money ran out, many miners drifted back to work. Those, like my family who continued to strike, were isolated in our communities as a result. It was a grim period, as my dad – and those like him – fought to earn a wage that gave a sense of self respect and meant he could put food on the table.
It was a battle for dignity. Yet by March 1985, the strike collapsed. Today, the strikes are valorised by some of those on the left. But the truth is that there was no glory in defeat in those communities. Striking miners in Ashfield were few in number and went back to work under duress – dressed down and humiliated by the political class and their bosses. There were no marching bands to mark their return to the pits.
Within a few years, the mines started to shut; by the early 1990s, all had gone, including my dad’s pit Silverhill that employed over a thousand workers. Thousands of jobs in Ashfield alone were lost in a few short years. By the mid-1990s, the hosiery, knitwear and clothing factories also began to close: those things could be made more cheaply abroad. This time it was women who found themselves out of work.
Ashfield, which, until then, had only ever been an area of working-class coal miners, and factory workers, was cast adrift. A generation earlier, the historian Dean Acheson described how Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role; on a smaller scale, something similar happened in the former mining communities. Families in Ashfield were never wealthy, but they had secure jobs that paid their rents, food bills, and usually left over enough for a small holiday in Skegness. The towns had a vibrant and busy culture of pubs, clubs, singing and dancing.
The people of Ashfield were connected to the politics of the area through the Labour party and the local Labour clubs, trade union-affiliated sports and social clubs and, of course, through the miners’ welfare clubs. The area was fiercely Labour and staunchly working class even during the strike: the people here knew who they were, knew how they voted and knew their communities – arguments and disagreements were welcome and necessary. It was a place where, it was said, if you put a red rosette on a pig, the poor animal would soon be on its way to Westminster.
Anderson has his work cut out if he is to retain his job
But as the mines and factories closed their doors, the organisations that formed the bedrock of the community also started to disappear. It was at this point that the ‘pigs’ moved in under the flag of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour.
Our representative was Geoff Hoon, a privately-educated politico parachuted in by his New Labour friends. It’s true that he was fairly local – from Nottingham – but his main focus (and that of many New Labour types) was not on Ashfield but on a new order of Labour politics: a third way which was to centre on Westminster and London.
The people of Ashfield or Stoke-on-Trent, or Hartlepool, where Peter Mandelson was elected, were merely cogs to the New Labour wheel. Those areas were deprived of their autonomy and instead treated as fodder in the mechanism to change the country in the way Blair and Brown envisioned.
The years between the end of the strike, the new Labour years, followed by the new Tory years of Cameron, Osborne and then May were not kind to Ashfield. Opposition leaders in the Labour party – Miliband, then Corbyn – also had their focus elsewhere: on young millennials in university towns and middle class liberals. Working class politics became gentrified – the former working class replaced with a ‘better’ class that cared about climate change, refugees and ‘the poor’ as long as they didn’t have to live near them.
As politicians averted their eyes, Ashfield longed for the days when coal mines, and the sewing machine, provided a dignified life. People here were an embarrassment; ‘left behind’ was the rhetoric of Brexit, but the truth was they had been left out – unwanted, difficult and embarrassing. The people in deindustrialised communities were fully aware of the rhetoric about them: gammon; racist; thick; stupid. If you go to these communities today, not as a daytrip visitor – like the journalists who seek the obligatory ‘send them all back’ vox pop – but as someone who sticks around, then people will start to tell you about their fears for their children and grandchildren having nowhere to live; having no job that can provide a life lived with dignity. Food banks and charity support networks are common here – too common, perhaps, even for Lee Anderson to admit. Although some will agree with Anderson’s tough straight talk about immigration, and even the death penalty, in Ashfield most peoples’ fears and worries are more mundane: keeping food on the table – and paying the gas bill – is a priority for most families.
Places like Ashfield, that we now refer to as the Red Wall because of their once impenetrable working class and trade union Labour politics, fell to the Tories in 2019. But while Boris Johnson won the credit for that landslide victory, it was scarcely his doing: this was a story that went back to 1984 and beyond. While Labour was punished for taking the Red Wall for granted, there is no love lost for the Tories: their free market ideology smashed these places to bits. Towns like Ashfield have still not recovered: they are limping on, used by both Labour and Conservatives to justify broader political visions (in the Tories’ case, Brexit) that have done precious little good for local people.
People in Ashfield, like many of those in de-industrialised communities, heard the ‘levelling up’ promises from Boris and reflected on the last 40 years: they were sick to death of Labour politicians using them as voting fodder, so they backed candidates like Lee Anderson. These people were outsiders in Westminster, but insiders to those communities. Anderson, to his credit, is visible and available in his constituency. He makes interesting videos and posts them on his social media ‘on his way to work’ to put a shift in at Westminster. But he could find himself in trouble come the next election: unless he is prepared to turn on his party and demand a fair adjustment to how Britain is run – and seek a proper redistribution of wealth – Anderson will lose the good will of those that gave him a chance.
There is no doubt in Ashfield that Anderson is ‘one of us’, but he has his work cut out if he is to retain his job: the question for Conservatives or Labour in the next 18 months is what will they do about communities like Ashfield. More talk of levelling up won’t do: that project has been exposed as a fantasy and people in these communities are poorer than they have ever been. Rhetoric about sending people to Rwanda also won’t cut it: what good will that do for the hard-up family in Ashfield who are struggling to pay their bills?
People all over deindustrialised Britain, including in Ashfield, want their dignity back – and a chance to live life without fear of putting the heating on or ending up at the food bank. Lee Anderson has enjoyed a meteoric rise in politics. But unless he can address the immediate fears and worries of people in Ashfield, his career could come to an abrupt end at the ballot box.
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