Blue Wall Bishop Blues

Frances Coppola has suggested that "getting on your bike" might be the best message to give the "blue wall" (formerly "red wall") seats that have become the cynosure of British politics over the last three months. It wouldn't be a popular message, and like any form of social exhortation would be largely ignored, but it does have the virtue of recognising the reality on the ground. However, there is a problem in her analysis which becomes obvious when she draws a parallel with the early 1980s and the then government's answer to deindustrialisation: "Of course, in many traditional manufacturing and mining communities, people never did what Tebbit said anyway. And nor do their children. A report from the Resolution Foundation finds that in the so-called “blue wall” constituencies in the North of England, the Midlands and Wales – the Labour Party’s “lost heartlands” – people are much less likely to move to another part of the country for work. They stay where they are."

This is an example of the confusion between "blue wall towns", i.e. the seats that flipped from Labour to the Conservatives in the 2019 general election, and "left behind towns", i.e. those that suffered decline in the 1980s and which have struggled to recover since. It is a confusion of social and economic geography but also of time. Many of the blue wall seats are actually on the margins of the old industrial areas, rather than in the heart of them. This is particularly obvious in Durham and Teeside, where North West Durham, Bishop Auckland, Sedgefield and Darlington all flipped from red to blue in December. These are seats that sit between Tory-dominated rural areas (the North Pennines and Yorkshire Dales) and Labour's actual Northern Eastern heartlands along the coast between Tynemouth and Middlesbrough. Some are seats with a history of periodic Conservative incumbents, such as Darlington, or abut seats like Stockton South that have traditionally been marginals.

The temporal difference between these seats and the coastal areas where Labour still dominates is that the social and economic changes experienced in the 1980s and after were much more pronounced in the latter. The former certainly saw incidents of deindustrialisation - the closure of the Consett steelworks or the Shildon railworks were famous examples - but large parts of these constituencies escaped the direct effects of the Thatcher government's policies. This reflects the semi-rural nature of the seats and the reliance on more flexible light industry. The latter shouldn't be taken to imply modernity - these are areas of low productivity - but it meant that the loss of high-employment industries during the 1980s was often not as traumatic as in the North Eastern coastal constituencies that lost shipbuilding, much large-scale manufacturing and the remnants of the coal industry at the same time (most of the the pits in West Durham closed in the 50s and 60s). It also meant that these seats saw little of the regeneration championed in the 1990s in the region's cities and missed out on the emergence of new technology industries after the millennium.

Many of the blue wall seats historically had a substantial Tory vote, like Bishop Auckland, which was obscured in the media by the assumption that Northern constituencies where humans outnumber sheep must be solidly Labour. Though the seats are generally thought of as urban, they are "edgelands" more than inner-city and include substantial semi-rural hinterlands and market towns, like Barnard Castle. Many are former mining areas - as are many of the Midlands seats won by the Tories, such as Bolsover, Ashfield and Bassetlaw - but the media symbolism of that is invariably "heavy industry" rather than the reality of "countryside". To put it in antiquated literary terms, the blue wall is more DH Lawrence than Alan Sillitoe. To put it in contemporary sociological terms, these are areas of low mobility and a scarcity of cultural goods. The Resolution Foundation report that Coppola cites, Painting the Towns Blue, notes the high levels of car usage and poor public transport (this is gilets jaunes territory, hence the hostility to fuel duty). It also notes that while incomes are low relative to the national average (which is heavily skewed by London and the South East), they are marginally higher than incomes in nearby Labour seats - the actual "left behind" areas.

Home ownership is also more extensive, which reflects both higher incomes and low house prices but also historically lower levels of both public and private rental stock. That might be assumed to imply an ageing population, but the average age is actually close to the national average. However, I suspect this is less a sign that the young are reluctant to move away (i.e. insufficient push) and more a reflection of the fact that the significant migration following deindustrialisation happened over 30 years ago. Since then, younger generations have tended to stick around because the opportunity to move to the big cities on spec, particularly London, has reduced due to the high cost of rented accommodation and the greater difficulty of securing temporary benefits (i.e. insufficient pull). The ease of mobility from small Northern towns to the capital in the 1980s simply doesn't exist any more, but this is due to structural reasons, not a lack of interest or will. The Resolution Foundation is correct to talk of these areas having a "low level of demographic dynamism", but this was always so. There was never a halcyon time in the postwar period when the population of Bishop Auckland was being rapidly turned over by youngsters moving away to college or incomers attracted by new industries.

The discussion on what can be done for these blue wall constituencies, whether from the perspective of the Tories seeking to hold onto them in 2024 or Labour trying to regain them, has tended to reinforce the confusion with the left behind towns narrative and the longstanding calls for industrial regeneration and large-scale infrastructure investment in depressed regions. Historically, the blue wall constituencies took their place further down the industrial pecking-order, providing peripheral manufacturing support to the larger conurbations and localised service support for the rural hinterland. This means that employment generation in these areas is likely to be more dependent on the growth of demand in regional cities, but I doubt the Tory government will want to pump more money into Labour seats in Nottingham and Sheffield in order to hang on to Ashfield and Rother Valley. As the decision to proceed with HS2 indicates, transport investment will continue to disproportionately favour the big cities (and the biggest of them all in particular). While money has been earmarked for buses, the sums are relatively modest and the lion's share will probably end up being spent in the North East in smaller cities like Sunderland and Middlesbrough rather than small towns like Spennymoor and Lanchester.

The problem of small towns is both global and local. Stian Westlake defines a small town, with just a hint of right-populism, as "population roughly less that 300,000, that’s fallen on hard economic times and isn’t populated by metropolitan elite types". These face four key issues: "(i) towns everywhere, not just the UK, are becoming less productive relative to cities; (ii) UK cities outside London are poorer than we’d expect by global standards, probably because of poor infrastructure and investment; (iii) the UK invests less than other rich countries in a range of things, including skills and machinery, in part because of recent policy changes; (iv) our planning system makes it hard for people to move to prosperous bits of the UK, which makes the plight of left-behind places a more urgent problem." This is the conventional neoliberal wisdom, to which you could add the belief that Britain lacks a sufficiently dominant second city that could counter the draw of London (though whether this is possible is moot).

If we convert this analysis into a policy prescription then we're looking at investment in infrastructure, skills and technology to raise productivity, with some deregulation of planning in growth areas like Oxford and Cambridge. This may not be wrong, but it's little more than pabulum. The problem is that no one has managed to come up with a credible plan to regenerate the big Northern cities beyond trying to encourage agglomeration in Manchester, to the detriment of Liverpool and Leeds, or connecting them via high-speed links to London, which will simply suck more high-value economic activity south. This is not to say that those cities aren't growing and don't have examples of high-productivity or an entrepreneurial culture, but the growth rates are modest and the spillover effects geographically limited. In other words, the big Northern and Midlands cities can just about take care of themselves but aren't likely to do a lot to help haul up the small towns.

Given that investment funds will always be rationed, even at a time of low interest rates, it is hard to imagine much government largesse finding its way to the blue wall constituencies. The large cities offer a far better return on investment and at least some wider benefit in supporting regional supply chains and labour demand, though that indirect effect will be larger in those towns closer to the cities - i.e. what remains of the red wall rather than the repainted blue wall. Gateshead will still see more benefit than Bishop Auckland. The reality for the latter is that direct investment isn't going to happen in any meaningful way under a government both committed to avoiding significant tax rises and seduced by the allure of mega-projects. In any rational assessment of the investment priorities required to "level up" the country, the blue wall constitiuencies would be near the bottom of the list, and political realism means they're likely to lose out in any fight over the crumbs with longtime Conservative-held rural seats.

But the truth is that Bishop Auckland is a constituency that probably doesn't expect much anyway, and in this it may be typical of the blue wall. Beyond Brexit, there is little in the way of a coherent political objective uniting local voters. For all the media talk of disadvantage and resentment, it is relatively comfortable with its marginal status and happy that its kids haven't generally deserted for the bright lights of either London or Newcastle. A few more buses, a little more money for council social care and panegyrics in the press to the glorious post-EU future may be enough to convince voters that their concerns are being addressed. The broader worry is that between pensioner-friendly "shoppas" and construction-friendly HS2, the actual "left behind towns", like Hartlepool and South Shields, will continue to struggle due to a combination of political posturing and weak growth outside the South East.