This is a story about Stoke-on-Trent, one of those northern post-industrial cities which most people in the Westminster bubble would have difficulty locating on a map or rather, it is several stories which sometimes fit together and sometimes cut across each other; a story about industrial decline and the failure of government-directed regeneration to make any significant impact on the social and economic penalties paid by local residents for that decline; a story about the disintegration and then collapse of a traditional Labour Party, leaving a vacuum into which various right-wing and fascist tendencies have marched (which, at the time of writing, are poised to take us into an isolationist and chauvinist Little England); a story about the continuing poison of racism (encouraged by the public utterances of government Ministers of all stripes); and a story about the dismantling of one of the most important historical means of promoting social mobility (at least in the last century), workers’ and adult education, whether in the community or in the realm of higher education, shunned by universities as irrelevant at a time of mass higher education and deserted by the organisations of the workers themselves for both financial and ideological reasons. Sounds familiar?
It certainly did to me, not least because (and the commissioning editor will not have known this) but the author grew up on an estate in Stoke on Trent which, though not named, was almost certainly the one where I cut my teeth as a young community worker in the early 1970s. I recognised the picture he draws of the city, six small almost self-contained towns melded together in a strange linear sausage (even Arnold Bennett’s Anna managed to overlook the fact that there were six, not five), beset by intra-party rivalries (which makes a bit of a mockery of the City in the title of the local football team), overshadowed by the ‘great’ cities of popular imagery to the North and South (Manchester and Birmingham), totally overlooked by the political elites because it was never quite poor enough to have major investments or special programmes, never had quite the violent ‘riots/protests’ of, say, Handsworth or Brixton, was never quite politically assertive enough and thus suffered the indignities of being put into special measures, of having Party elites parachuted in as MPs and suffered the kind of regeneration over which local people had little influence ahead of arrival and little control once it arrived.
And I recognised the story of the estate, physically isolated, poorly served by transport and other facilities with, as the mines were closing and the potbanks were also well on the way to closing too, young people faced a bleak future which, with the aid of the yellow press and the failure of the Labour Party to provide an alternative narrative, they could only make sense of by blaming ‘foreigners’ (and this soon came to mean first, South Asians who moved into the poor housing of the central towns and then the East European migrants who came to ‘steal their jobs’).
It is quite impossible to do justice to the rich mix of material in this book which, although at times quite difficult to follow in a linear way familiar to those who expect to read either a traditional story with a beginning and an end, or a logical academic or political argument, is actually a fundamental challenge to the way we ‘do’ politics. Doubtless the reader might think that this review is (un)structured in the same way!
Stoke-on-Trent, with its three political constituencies, was for a long time seen as a milk cow for Labour votes, a safe set of seats mostly occupied in time-honoured fashion by those who had served their time as local councillors and with very rare political headlining (although one honourable exception must be the erstwhile MP for Stoke South, Jack Ashley, who demonstrated to Parliament the courage and determination of a man who became profoundly deaf but still continued his parliamentary career with integrity and energy.) Yet the city, despite the total disdain with which it has been treated within the national polity, has bred and housed some exceptional people. Not just Roy Shaw and Eric Tams (both of whom I met and worked with on occasions) within the broad workers’ educational movement, but A.D. Lindsay, who left the comfort of Balliol College to establish Keele University and tried to make the university relevant to the community it served, a process which has now largely, despite the rhetoric of impact, been flung strongly into reverse within most universities, and, most of all, the many working men (and some women – although they are poorly represented here) from the mines and the potbanks who, through engagement with the WEA (alas now also a political shadow of its former self) and other adult education opportunities, found their way into higher education and became effective organisers and spokespeople in and for their class.
The failure of the Labour Party to provide this alternative narrative, the disinterest of national elites and the industrial disasters which befell the city largely explain the growth of the kind of virulent racism and ignorant nationalism which has become all too familiar and which has been, if not generated, certainly exploited by the far Right. What the city appears to need now on this reading is both a political revival (and not just party political) which draws on the distinguished informal educational history of the area (matched only, perhaps, by the work of places like Fircroft College and Northern College), major democratically controlled investment in creative employment opportunities, a huge commitment from Keele University to put its resources at the disposal of the city and the development of a sense of belief in the city as just as deserving of political attention as its neighbours. In the meantime, it would be a good start if all Labour MPs worked out on a map where Stoke is, and read this very challenging book! For many, alas, it is too late. Stoke voted more overwhelmingly than most in the referendum to leave the EU, a reflection not only of distress in the city but of the distress of those who feel abandoned by the political elites.
Gary Craig Professor Emeritus of Social Justice, Wilberforce Institute, University of [email protected]