The cost of apathy in England's mining towns

New Statesman​

3 days ago

Riot police hold back protesters near a burning police vehicle after disorder broke out on 30 July 2024 in Southport. Photo byOne year ago, as the riots that started in Southport spread across the country, people in the old coalfields started to join in the action. In Wath upon Dearne, a former pit area in the metropolitan borough of Rotherham, rioters clashed with police outside a Holiday Inn Express, leading to some of the most appalling violence of that summer. The hotel's residents, housed there by the Home Office while it processed their asylum claims, said they felt a deep terror when they saw the mob set bins alight and storm the building. It was the event that produced some of the most memorable images of the riots. For all the distinct 2020s character of the livestreamed disturbances, the clashes invoked the past too. Not only was the hotel built on former colliery land, but to some former miners, the violence was reminiscent of the battle between police and picketers at nearby Orgreave 40 years earlier. Back then, protesters also claimed to be defending their way of life, though from deindustrialisation rather than immigration.
Britain's former coalfields have become deeply disenchanted with politics. When I conducted ethnographic research in mining areas in Nottinghamshire back in 2021 and 2022, long before the events at Southport and beyond, people predicted social unrest. Millie, a care worker and mother of four, told me then that she was done with mainstream politics. 'Don't like Labour much, don't like the Tories at all. They come in, 'You will do as we say.' Don't have much of a chance of standing up to them.' In her view, the media was complicit and ordinary people were kept in the dark. She told me: 'I've been predicting there will be riots soon.'
On recent returns to Mansfield and its surrounding villages, the prospect of further rioting has become more urgent. Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner have also spoken of the risk of renewed unrest. Only last month protesters from north Nottinghamshire mining communities marched against asylum hotels, spurred on by the comments of local Reform MP Lee Anderson about an ongoing rape trial. Some locals are animated principally by anger at immigration. In their apocalyptic visions, they are defending not just women and girls but their whiteness, too. For others, however, these concerns are secondary to a wider sense of political voicelessness and apathy in national decline. Millie was among this latter group, which feels that politicians had done nothing and that all they did was tell lies. I asked her why that was. 'Money,' Millie said. 'It's always money. Money and greed. You're not telling me they're not having their pockets lined.'
Millie's anger was driven by the loss of sports facilities, the disappearance of the Sure Start centres, and the loss of the shared spaces she held dear. Everything had been 'taken away'. Even simple activities such as a family cinema trip or roller-skating at one of the few remaining leisure centres set her back more than she could afford. She would love to be able to drop her kids off to play with the pit band, as her father, a miner, had done with her. But the facilities had shut. 'When the pits started closing, they lost funding and stuff. I mean, it's still about, don't get me wrong. But it's not as rife as it used to be… My kids don't understand it because they never had it. But it hurts me, because what am I to do?'
[See also: One year on, tensions still circle Britain's asylum-seeker hotels]
To understand the anger of the mining towns, we need to understand the history of miners' welfare. This takes us back to Southport, long before Southport became a shorthand in the national press for the disaffected working class. The Victorian seaside resort was the preferred location for conferences of the northern working class. Its train station was easily reached from Liverpool and Manchester and grand hotels sprang up to host them. (One of these was the ornate red-brick structure of the Scarisbrick Hotel, which would much later be used as an asylum hotel for several months.) Late-19th-century accounts in regional newspapers describe a remarkable sight at one of the conferences: in the early hours of the morning, the sky above the town came alive as the miners – many of whom flew pigeons for a hobby – released their birds to fly back home, while the miners themselves remained in Southport to vote on proposals for the eight-hour working day.
After the First World War, the miners met at Southport again to discuss their demands, having paused strike activity for the duration of the fighting. They wanted to be put in charge of the industry – nationalisation under worker control, as well as wage increases and a reduction in the working day. They threatened to go on strike. The government baulked at their demands, but the ensuing Sankey commission did recommend that colliery owners be charged one penny per tonne of coal, to be put towards social, cultural and medical amenities. This was promptly made law in the Welfare Fund clause of the 1920 Mining Industry Act – the clause from which welfares derive their name.
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Sports pitches, pithead baths and social clubs sprang up around Britain's collieries, all funded by the levy, and, after nationalisation, by the state. The welfares and other amenities were not just useful for community well-being, but also helped to forge a social tie between representatives and the represented. Bolstered by social investment, MPs could prove they cared about the communities that had elected them. In reality, the Welfare Fund investment reflected the structural power of miners over the energy source upon which industry and households depended. Nonetheless, people use the provision as an example of care and recognition. When these were lost in the ravages of deindustrialisation and austerity, it was felt like a moral injury. Politicians still claim to care, but what have their constituents got to show for it?
Quantitative research by the economic geography professors Maria Abreu and Calvin Jones has shown that former coal-mining areas have lower levels of political participation, a lack of political trust and a low sense of political efficacy even compared with economically and demographically similar places. Other recent research tells us that closures of GP practices, pubs and shops are all associated with elevated support for the far right. These losses of social infrastructure are all the more impactful in former mining areas because there was more to lose. The decay of amenities won by the labour movement have become a potent symbol of decline. Today, ex-miners who were once connected to hundreds of others through a dense web of social provision tell me they live increasingly private lives in their private homes. Some end up on dubious Facebook pages and YouTube channels. They come to imagine their homes as embattled fortresses, under siege from disorder and diversity outside.
The Wath Main Colliery memorial in South Yorkshire is a ten-minute walk from the Holiday Inn where everything kicked off in August 2024. Fifteen minutes' walk the other way there's a large distribution centre, which regeneration officials had hoped would provide an employment alternative. It is often said that places like Mansfield or Wath were forgotten or left behind, and many of us are guilty of talking about ex-industrial areas as though time stopped shortly after the miners' strike. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Wath, like in Mansfield, there have been frantic policy interventions to lure footloose businesses and make the land productive again. As a result, many former pit areas have similar landscapes: a big Tesco, expensive newbuild housing and a waste incineration plant – if planners can get it past the local residents.
Like Nottinghamshire, Wath ended up with distribution centres. Here, it is the clothing retailer Next; in Nottinghamshire it's Amazon and Sports Direct. In Wath, as in the South Wales valleys, they received call centres too. And of course, where land, rent and rates are cheap, the government will soon see an opportunity to make savings. There is never any money to keep Sure Start going or to keep the welfare alive, but people who depend on the state can be dealt with on the cheap. It is, perhaps, easier for Serco and other government contractors to house asylums seekers in one place, rather than disperse smaller groups more widely. To the surprise of no one, this is not a recipe for social cohesion. Racism and xenophobia exist everywhere, but combined with structural decline they make for a particularly toxic politics, and it is not hard to see how far-right visions of civil disorder and societal breakdown could meld with more mundane concerns and a widely shared anti-politics.
In a new report for IPPR, I make the case for the return of a miners' welfare fund to combat declinism and alienation. Where it was once levied on colliery owners, it should now raise its budget from the large online businesses, such as Amazon, that have filled post-industrial Britain with gargantuan distribution centres. Private-sector-led approaches to regeneration have left mining communities with exploitative jobs and crumbling social infrastructures. Things seem only ever to get worse. Instead, the state could use a 21st-century welfare fund to revive community centres, facilitate affordable family activities and help community groups take neglected spaces into common ownership, reclaiming the mundane utopia of the sports pitch and the pit band. Memories of the affordances of the previous generation of welfare facilities speak to its understated pleasures. 'Pit bands – you really got a feel for the pit community,' Millie told me. 'Stuck together, had a laugh.'
[See more: British decline is as much intellectual as it is political]
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