Attlee, Bevin and the New Jerusalem

The next UK government will inherit a mess, but not as bad as Clement Attlee did in 1945. Yet the Attlee government not only coped. It made Britain better. Meanwhile his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, played a key role in forging the Western security framework that has endured to this day. Who were these men, and what were they really like?

Attlee takes power in 1945 (Leslie Priest/AP)

When Labour came to power in July 1945, Britain was broke. Much of its gold reserves had been spent on the war, and the US had insisted, as part of its postwar loan agreement, that sterling be convertible within a few years. This was a huge financial bomb waiting to go off. Meanwhile the occupation of the British Zone of Germany was also costly; it was in a terrible state, not least because of Britain’s own bombing. 

At home, labour shortages in the mines restricted coal supplies and would immiserate everyone in the awful winter of 1947. There was a huge housing crisis; about 2 million houses had been destroyed or badly damaged across Britain, and an estimated 750,000 new houses were needed – quickly; according to the Royal British Legion, a staggering 4.2 million service personnel were to be demobilised by December 1946. Meanwhile there were about 400,000 German prisoners in Britain, and large numbers of Polish and other servicemen whose countries were about to come under Stalinist occupation. It was becoming clear that they would not be able to go home.

Abroad, India was ready to explode but the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, could not get Indian politicians to agree a path to independence. Britain was also still fighting in Greece, where left-wing forces could have taken the country into the Eastern bloc along with its neighbours. There was armed conflict in Palestine, which was still under the British mandate. In 1948 the emergency in Malaya would start.

Not all these problems would be solved. Some, especially Palestine, would leave a toxic legacy. The houses wouldn’t all be built. But in six years, Attlee would build a social democracy in which people’s basic needs mostly would be met. Abroad, despite some failures, his remarkable Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, would play a leading role in the postwar global order and in forging the Atlantic alliance. At home, he would guard Attlee’s back against rivals in Cabinet and keep it stable.

Who were these men?

***

Francis Beckett’s biography Clem Attlee was originally published in 1997 but reissued in an updated edition in 2015. It’s not alone; there are a number of well-regarded Attlee biographies, notably John Bew’s Citizen Clem and Michael Jago’s Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister. But I think for most people Beckett’s will be all the Attlee they need.

Attlee has been seen as an accidental Prime Minister who was in the right place at the right time. In the schism and electoral rout of 1931 many of Labour’s ablest people either crossed over to the National Government or lost their seats or both. Attlee was one of the few survivors. Otherwise, it’s said, he would never have been deputy Labour leader and would not have become leader when Lansbury stepped down in 1935.  Biographer Michael Jago thought this was nonsense. Beckett agrees. Attlee, he argues, rose to the top on his considerable political skills and the strength of his beliefs. He was anything but an accident. Reading Beckett’s biography, I partly, but only partly, agree with this. Throughout his leadership, rivals such as Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton would deride him as a grey man and insist Labour needed a more charismatic leader (e.g. them). Without the events of 1931, he might have been a capable Minister but never Prime Minister; the post would have been filled by one of his “charismatic” rivals. It is our good fortune that it wasn’t, for the grey man did rather well.

Clement Attlee was born into a large middle-class family in Putney in 1883. His father was a Liberal barrister and Attlee himself went into the law after Oxford. But it bored him. One night in 1906 his younger brother took him to visit a club for disadvantaged boys in Stepney, then a very poor part of London where he would not normally have gone. The visit transformed his life and he ended up living in the East End as a social worker and campaigner, becoming involved in left-wing politics. In 1914 he joined the army and served with some distinction in the Gallipoli campaign and in the Middle East. In the former, he caught dysentery and was almost the last Allied soldier to be evacuated. In the Middle East he was badly wounded. Beckett says he felt strongly that the army and navy had mismanaged the Gallipoli campaign but that Churchill’s strategy had been sound. This would matter in 1940, when Attlee would bring Labour into Churchill’s wartime coalition.

Beckett obviously covers Attlee’s part in the wartime coalition and his subsequent premiership. He takes a broad-brush approach. I don’t think that’s a bad thing; the minutiae of long-ago governments do not always tell us much. Beckett does show that Attlee played a crucial role from the beginning, backing Churchill against Chamberlain and Halifax, who wanted to negotiate with Hitler. He also demonstrates that Attlee could restrain or influence Churchill, and did – but tactfully; he would have ‘a word with the PM’, rather than row with him in Cabinet. Beckett quotes several examples, not least Attlee’s defence of de Gaulle, who Churchill and Roosevelt loathed – not always without reason. But Attlee realised they had no right to remove him. At the same time Attlee quietly chaired the main committees concerned with postwar reconstruction, which helped him set the agenda for the government he would soon lead.

He was not to regret his part in the coalition. He later acquired the original of Low’s famous 1940 cartoon (“All behind you, Winston!”) and according to Beckett it was on the wall of his living room when he died in 1967.

***

Beckett takes the same broad brush to the postwar government. Here a little more detail might have been welcome, and there are some omissions, or matters covered briefly. The latter include the fuel problems that beset Britain in the very bad winter of 1947, and the constant plotting of Attlee’s rivals for the leadership – they are there but not in depth. Beckett may be right not to get into the weeds. Still, he could have said more about the pension and social security reforms, which were to have a huge positive impact, and their prime mover the Minister of National Insurance, Jim Griffiths. A Welshman who had left school at 13, he is largely forgotten now. But his work in that Attlee government had a positive and lasting impact on millions. He seems also to have been a likeable and capable figure.

Ellen Wilkinson
(Bassano Ltd./National Portrait Gallery)

What Beckett does bring out is Attlee’s magnanimity in government. Besides leadership rivals like Morrison and Dalton, he also brought in Aneurin Bevan, who had been a fierce critic throughout the war years, and Ellen Wilkinson, who was apparently Morrison’s mistress and had been involved in multiple plots against her new boss. (Beckett says she had a Damascene conversion about Attlee as soon as she was in government.) These decisions have sometimes been seen as wily plots to neutralise opposition. The reality, according to Beckett, was that Attlee felt all the best people were needed in government whether he liked them or not. 

And for the most part they did well. This was especially true of Bevan, although he could be difficult; and of Wilkinson, who implemented the important 1944 Education Act. Beckett covers her role fairly well. But he says little about her death in office in 1947, possibly by her own hand but more likely of an accidental overdose. This was a poignant episode; a charismatic woman with a gift for friendship, she was mourned on both sides of the House. Morrison did not attend her funeral.

There is one episode of Attlee’s premiership that was very grave, and about which Beckett is perhaps a little generous to him. This was India.

By 1945 it was clear that Britain could not keep control in India much longer. There was a Secretary of State for India and Burma; this was a Cabinet-level position in its own right, occupied by Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, a long-time Labour figure. However, he was by then 76 and besides, Attlee seems largely to have directed India policy himself – a legacy perhaps of his service on the Simon Commission in India in the 1920s. Early in 1947 he sacked the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, who had tried hard but failed to get Indian politicians to agree with each other on the shape of the transition to independence. Attlee replaced him with Lord Mountbatten, telling him to get the British out quickly and leave India as a single nation if possible but if not possible, to partition it. Mountbatten was given plenipotentiary powers to this effect. He chose Partition, and brought the date forward to just six months hence.  Attlee let him do it. Should he have done? It led to a huge, unplanned exchange of populations – something that might have been predicted. This left a million dead and is a difficult part of Attlee’s legacy.

Beckett is with the defence. By 1947, it is argued, Britain could not keep order and any delay would make things worse. This might be true. But perhaps Attlee should have given the same authority to Wavell when he came to power two years earlier. Wavell’s diaries were published in the 1970s and they do suggest that, given the same freedom of action as Mountbatten, he might have negotiated an agreed path to a united India.

But history is full of what-ifs; in the end they take you nowhere, and maybe Attlee was right. His support of partition may have sprung from his realisation, decades before others, that the Western model of democracy could not always be exported. In May 1943 he had circulated a remarkable paper to Cabinet in which he argued that in certain situations – Palestine, Ireland, South Africa – two groups might so distrust each other that one would oppose governance by the other under any circumstances, at least without an outside referee. Perhaps Attlee believed that in such a scenario the two parties must go their separate ways altogether. If so, Partition was the logical step. But the price was high, and it was not the British who paid it.

***

Attlee shaped Britain as no other single person has in modern times. But what was he like?

He lived quietly – and modestly; when he went to the Palace to kiss hands in 1945 it was in an eight-year-old Hillman 14 driven by his wife Violet, and the couple used the same car in the 1950 election campaign. For 1951 they had upgraded to a Humber Hawk, but Beckett says this was still prewar (other sources do say it was new). His wife Violet usually drove him on his election campaigns. He was moderate in his personal habits. The family home was a semi in Stanmore, north-west London, and he returned there whenever he could during the war years. He had married at nearly 40; the marriage seems to have been a devoted one, and lasted until Violet’s death in 1964. They had four children.

Outside the home, Attlee was a quiet, undemonstrative man. He was also almost weirdly calm and self-controlled. His years in government, as deputy and later Prime Minister, were the most crisis-ridden in modern British history, but he seems to have been completely unflappable (even when chauffeured by Violet, which is said to have been terrifying). He was also quite able to detach himself when the day’s work was done however crisis-ridden it had been, and read a book or write letters. He was concise to the point of abruptness; he never used two words where one would do and never used one word when he could grunt instead. He had little small talk. Ministers who did not perform were dismissed perhaps not rudely, but certainly without ceremony. One imagines that Ministers and civil servants might have respected rather than loved him.

There was however a more jocular face to Attlee’s government. This was his closest ally: his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. He, too, is now the subject of an accessible and absorbing biography – by a more recent Labour minister, Lord Adonis.

***

Ernest Bevin was born in Somerset in 1881. His mother was a widow; his father’s identity has never been known (though Adonis has evidence he was a local farmer). His home was very poor but not unhappy; however, his mother died when he was eight and at 11 he left school and worked as a labourer. By the age of 13 he had had enough of this, and went to Bristol, where he became a drayman and, in time, a Baptist lay preacher and union organiser.

Bevin: a 1945 portrait by
Thomas Cantrell Dugdale

In the latter role he did well and his influence grew. He started to travel, building links with trade unionists in Europe and elsewhere. During the First World War he visited the USA, where he had a cordial meeting with the powerful labour leader Samuel Gompers, who had helped found the American Federation of Labor.  Eventually Bevin founded Britain’s own first ‘super-union’, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). By 1940 he had for some time been the country’s most important union figure. Distrustful of Labour intellectuals after 1931, he decided that Labour’s taciturn and business-like new Deputy Leader, Attlee, was the horse to back. The two men were a contrast; Attlee a silent ascetic to whom many found it hard to relate– and Bevin, big, bluff and sometimes a bully, forged in the furnace of labour negotiations and union politics. He was genial and ruthless.

In 1940 Attlee and Churchill found Bevin a seat and brought into the wartime coalition as Minister of Labour, believing this to be the best way of mobilising the workforce behind the war (wisely, they seem to have realised this was not a given). As wartime Minister of Labour, he played a key role in uniting the labour movement behind the war effort – something Churchill, no friend of the unions, could not have done without him. Finally, as Foreign Secretary from 1945, he was at least partly responsible for forging the US-European alliance against the USSR. Bevin was thus the father of the modern British union movement, a key pillar of Attlee’s reforming government, and a key architect of the postwar global security settlement.

Given that these three legacies are now under threat, a new look at Bevin is timely. It arrived in 2021: Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill, by Andrew (Lord) Adonis, a strong New Labour figure and himself a Minister in the 200s. I have some reservations about this book (not least the title). But it is well worth reading. It isn’t the first Bevin biography; there are several, including Alan Bullock’s mighty three-volume account. For the casual reader, there’s Mark Stephens’s short book Ernest Bevin, written to mark Bevin’s centenary. However, Bullock’s would probably be too much for most readers. Stephens’s book is concise, but it was published by the T&G itself and is not especially critical (though it’s not a hagiography – and it is very well-written). Adonis’s book is short and lively enough to be readable. And it’s even-handed; Adonis clearly admires Bevin, but he is sometimes very critical, especially of Bevin’s period as Foreign Secretary.

The book is mostly not based on primary sources. Adonis draws heavily on the previous biographies (including Bullock’s) and other books germane to the period. I think that’s fine. He’s clearly trying to project a readable image of Bevin, not find out what he had for breakfast on a given day. Now and then he does rely rather heavily on one source. One chapter is partly an extract from the memoirs of Nicholas Henderson, who worked for Bevin at the Foreign Office and was later Ambassador to Washington. Adonis will certainly have sought permission for this, and it does add important background. But although he is scrupulous about quoting sources, they are sometimes hard to check as there is no reference list – an odd oversight.

Adonis credits Bevin with a great deal. The early parts of this book depict a determined man who was not expected, by background, to amount to much, but whose determination, occasional ruthlessness, showmanship and humour helped build a truly national trade union movement where none had existed. Then he became wartime Minister of Labour, and later the first postwar Foreign Secretary – both crucial roles at a time when things could have gone very wrong. In Bevin’s hands they mostly didn’t. Adonis also shows us someone who, although ruthless, could be very loyal. He always was to Attlee, and did much to buffer the rampant egotists in Cabinet who would have liked Attlee’s job – one which Bevin himself never sought. He must thus be credited at least in part with the stability and success of Attlee’s government, the more so as Attlee’s own personality sometimes did not help him.

Adonis also states that Bevin stiffened Western resistance to Stalin more or less alone, getting – he says – little help from a rather supine Truman administration. There is probably much truth in this. Truman’s Secretary of State was James F. Byrne, a Southern Democrat who had had a long and ambivalent career. He had been a segregationist in his native South Carolina but had also crossed swords with the Klu Klux Klan, and would do so again as the State’s Governor in the 1950s. He had also been a New Dealer and had opposed isolationism in the 1930s. But he was indeed ‘soft’ on Stalin; other sources also confirm this. In fact, Truman himself was worried about this himself, and sacked him in January 1947. Still, Adonis is very persuasive in arguing that Bevin helped forge a united Western front against Stalinism. He argues that Bevin’s background in union activism greatly influenced the way he saw Hitler in the 1930s and later saw Stalin, as his international union contacts meant he could see what fascist governments did to unionists in the 1930s. But was also keenly aware of communist tactics in the union movement, and loathed those as well.

I wonder if Bevin’s instant distrust of Stalin was also just native shrewdness. Bevin was no fool and knew a stinker when he met one. Also, Adonis doesn’t really discuss the poor relationship between the UK and the US immediately after the war and the US dislike and distrust of British imperialism. But they were important context for what happened in 1945-48. Even so, I think Adonis is on the money. Not all Labour MPs were happy with what they saw as Bevin’s warmongering, but his contribution to Western peace and security was immeasurable.

But Adonis is hard on Bevin in some respects, noting again that he did not like opposition. He is also very critical of some aspects of Bevin’s tenure at the Foreign Office. He takes a rather black-and-white view sometimes. Thus he is merciless in judging Bevin’s handling of Palestine. It is true that, on Bevin’s watch, Britain’s mandate over Palestine ended very badly. People in the region are still paying the price. But it is not always clear what Adonis thinks Bevin should have done. After all, the problem preceded Bevin and has not been solved since.

Adonis is also highly critical of Bevin’s imperialism. It’s true that Bevin regarded the colonies as an ongoing resource and neither he nor Attlee was interested in decolonisation. In Africa it would take a remarkable Conservative Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod, to force the pace some years later. Again, I think Adonis has a point here. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Arthur Creech-Jones, was a Cabinet minister in his own right and had a long-standing interest in colonial affairs. It may be that he would have liked to move faster and that Attlee and Bevin frustrated this.  (Bevin did not have responsibility for India.)

The Potsdam Conference, 1945; Attlee and Bevin had taken over
from Churchill and Eden during the conference itself.
Front row, Attlee, Truman and Stalin; at rear,
Truman's Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy; Bevin; Secretary of
State Byrne; and Stalin's Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov
(US National Archives/NationalMuseumof the US Navy) 

Last but not least, Adonis deprecates Bevin’s lack of interest in the nascent European Union, in the shape of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) formed in 1950. It is true that Bevin was negative towards British participation, partly because he wanted to protect Britain’s own coal and steel. 

But as he left the Foreign Office early in 1951 and died a few weeks later, he may be excused for not understanding just how consequential the ECSC would be. One could in fact argue that Britain’s absence from Europe was not culpable until its failure to attend the Messina Conference in 1955, a decision made by Anthony Eden’s Tory government, not by Bevin. And as Adonis himself records, Bevin had close contacts with European as well as American labour movements and travelled widely in Europe in the 1930s. But Adonis is right; Bevin failed to understand how Europe would develop and how important it was to be at its heart.

So did Attlee. He did not want Britain involved, then or later. Shortly before he died in 1967, he gave a brief speech in support of anti-Marketeer Douglas Jay. “The Common Market,” he said. “…Very recently this country spent a great deal of blood and treasure rescuing four of ’em from …the other two.” These attitudes were common in Britain then and have not disappeared. There is a contrast here with the graceful pragmatism and foresight shown by France and the Benelux countries, who understood the need to bury the hatchet forever. To be sure, Adonis – angry perhaps, like a lot of us, about Brexit – is judging Bevin from our own time; things looked different then. But his criticism is at least partly fair.

***

I would have liked Adonis to convey more of the private man. The chapter drawn from Henderson is quite vivid, and now and then Adonis does give us a glimpse into Bevin’s family life. We do learn that he lived for many years in suburban contentment in Golders Green – but didn’t mind a little luxury and some good booze. And Adonis quotes a splendid comment by a contemporary that Bevin, a very large man, both looked and dressed like an overstuffed sofa (pictures suggest this was accurate.) But something about the man is elusive here. His wife Flo appears in the book very little, although they had a long marriage. Neither do we really learn much about Bevin’s siblings, who like him were born working people and unlike him remained so. Still, Bevin came from a time when one’s private life was not on display, and maybe his remains hidden.

Adonis does tell us what Bevin was like to work with. His ally Attlee was decent to others but as we have seen he never dissembled, and used very few words, even in public; one imagines he could be a strain. Bevin, by contrast, was bluff, friendly and fun, fond of a good glass of wine and capable of great warmth and kindness. To be sure, he was ruthless with those who crossed him. But those who didn’t do so liked him, and his civil servants thought him a fine minister.

***

These books are both worth reading. They do contain some odd omissions, and Adonis is too swift to judge in some areas. But Beckett’s is a readable and thoughtful portrait of Attlee. He shows us clearly why Attlee succeeded where others might have failed. As for Adonis on Bevin, he provides an accessible picture of a remarkable man, and his book should be essential reading for anyone interested in Labour history.

And both books are a window into one of the most effective governments that Britain has ever had – one we should all try to understand. For all its flaws, it steered the country through one of the hardest periods in its modern history, played a key role in building postwar global institutions, and left the British with universal healthcare, social security and proper pensions for all. They had had none of these before. One of the most moving passages in Beckett’s comes in his discussion of Attlee’s Minister of Education, Ellen Wilkinson, who introduced free milk and school meals.

Before the war, private school children were noticeably taller, better built, healthier and stronger than state school children, because they were properly fed. …In the Fifties this was no longer the case, due to the provision of free school meals and school milk.

These were not perfect men, but they had the courage to make things better. It seems now we are too scared to try.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

The Red Wall: How Labour lost its safest seats

Britain’s Labour Party lost many of its “safe” seats in 2019. Can it get them back? First it must know why it lost them. Two books explain why, after decades of voting Labour, voters deserted the party

The Red Wall is a group of parliamentary seats in England’s North and Midlands that have traditionally voted Labour; they form a line across the north and Midlands, hence the name. Depending on who you ask, there are about 43 of these seats. In the 2019 General Election, the Tories took 29 of them (and a 30th, Hartlepool, in a by-election some months later). These seats were a large proportion of the 47 that Labour lost to the Tories in 2019, leading to their severe defeat.

Hartlepool: A Labour loss
(Alexander P. Kapp/Wikimedia Commons)

So what happened? How did Labour lose all these seats that had (mostly) been theirs for 80 years? In 2020 two people, researcher Deborah Mattinson and journalist Sebastian Payne, decided, separately, to find out.

Sebastian Payne is Whitehall correspondent of the Financial Times; he also pops up on Sky News and elsewhere quite often as a political commentator. He is only 31, looks younger and seems one of those infuriating young people who have risen without trace. But he is very well-connected; some very prominent people talked to him for this book, and they had a lot to say. Deborah Mattinson has long been a Labour advisor and strategist. She worked until May 2021 for Britain Thinks, a market research and strategy, a research agency that she co-founded, and for which she undertook numerous research and public opinion jobs on behalf of Labour. She is now Director of Strategy for Labour leader Keir Starmer.

Their fieldwork took place some time ago (in Deborah Mattinson’s case, in early 2020) and both books were published before the autumn of 2021, when Boris Johnson’s government made a series of missteps that have cost it crucial support. If the polls are to be believed, the Tories wouldn’t hold many of these seats in an election now. But there could be nearly three years to go before the next election, and as Harold Wilson said, a week is a long time in politics. So Labour still needs to know how it lost those seats in 2019. After all, as Mattinson points out, it needs a net gain of 124 seats next time if it wants an absolute majority of just one. So it needs these seats back. Besides, both these writers are politically influential and their opinions on the Red Wall are of more than passing interest, whatever the polls may have done since.

First, Sebastian Payne.

*

In 2020 and 2021 Payne braved the COVID pandemic to visit the so-called Red Wall seats. Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Lost England is the result. On the basis of this book, I’d say that Payne is a Tory – perhaps with political ambitions of his own. But he’s a good journalist; he’s talked to a lot of people from both sides, and the fact that he’s himself from Gateshead will have helped. At the end, you don’t have to accept his conclusions. This is a good enough book to help you reach your own.

Not liked in the North? Corbyn visits a hospital
not long before the 2019 election
 

Payne sees two immediate causes of Labour’s defeat in the Red Wall; party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Brexit. One of Tony Blair’s senior ministers, Alan Johnson, now retired from front-line politics, tells Payne that Corbyn is at least partly responsible for 2019. “Absolutely no question, they hated Corbyn,” he tells Payne. “They had sussed out his hard-left politics, his lack of patriotism, this view of the working class, a patronising view, that we have no agency whatsoever, we have to be moulded and directed by middle-class people from Islington.”

Payne also cites the party’s refusal to fully get behind Brexit although its northern voters had supported it. On the latter point, he detects real anger across the North. He is clearly at least part-right about Brexit being a driver for the Labour loss in 2019; it’s pointless Remainers trying to deny that. But was this was about Brexit itself or the turmoil it unleashed? It could be argued that voters simply wanted the whole wretched business over and done with. Still, Payne stresses the anger that some voters felt when Labour seemed anxious to frustrate the Brexit vote, and the resentment they felt at being told “you voted wrong”. It’s a point clearly acknowledged by Labour MPs Payne talks to, such as Lisa Nandy, who tells him: “We were told that these people are xenophobic, they were racist. Or we were told that people were just in so much despair about how terrible their communities were that they had nothing to lose. All of which is deeply offensive and completely wrong.” Nandy could have added that the Remain campaign in 2016 was hopelessly complacent, and should take some blame for its own defeat.

Payne is on to something else as well. One of his key observations is that Labour’s traditional support in the north is amongst the industrial working class – and they’ve changed. The landscape he travels through is peopled by families with homes, cars, aspirations; Labour messages about deprivation and misery didn’t strike a chord. In fact the opposite; if you’ve got your life together and are doing OK, you really don’t want to be told that you’re part of suffering humanity. They felt patronised. Labour wasn’t really speaking to those working-class voters whose lives have got better and whose aspirations have changed as a result.

So far, Payne may be on the money. Dislike of Corbyn and annoyance about Brexit drove much of the 2019 defeat. So did the fact that many of the northern working class had moved on, and Labour couldn’t see it. Payne also hears a broader feeling that the political class at Westminster is simply out of touch and has stopped caring about what Northern voters want. It’s a point put to Payne by John Bickley, who very nearly won the Heywood and Middleton seat for the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party in 2014. “I look at the British political class and I’m afraid I have nothing but disdain for them,” Bickley tells Payne. “I think back to the old Labour Party, the front bench did seem to be populated by people who’d done proper jobs, people who had some substance to them, and some intellect. It’s the same for the Tory Party. I look around now and I see career politicians. I don’t see a level of intellect, commitment to principles.” Bickley eventually left UKIP after it swung too far to the right; he seems to be someone who supported it because he wanted an upheaval and renewal, and he thinks its voters did too.

This disillusion is widespread and again, it may be that Brexit had become a vehicle for it, rather than a cause in itself – something Payne does not really unpack. But he does point out that the defeat wasn’t as sudden as it seemed; the Labour vote in some Red Wall seats had been slipping for a while. Northern voters had been losing faith in Labour for a long time, but the party continued to take them for granted – something that comes across also in Mattinson’s book (more of that below).

But there are also forces that Payne notes, but perhaps underestimates – and which may have been key factors behind the Brexit vote and its aftermath, especially in the old industrial areas. One is the whole question of lost identity. Early in the book he meets Dan Jackson, an NHS executive but also a local historian of Northumbria (and author of a book, The Northumbrians). Together they visit a colliery, long closed now but site of a long-ago mining disaster, and tour a rather tired-looking Blyth shopping centre. Mining has gone. So has shipbuilding, an industry in which Tyneside was once preeminent. (As a child I twice crossed the Atlantic in ships built on Tyneside.) New industries and activities have emerged to replace these, and besides, one wouldn’t necessarily want them back; mining was a dangerous, dirty and uncomfortable industry – a point Neil Kinnock makes to Payne when they speak. Fishing was also physically demanding and very hazardous. But they carried with them an identity and a sense of community that (say) a software startup does not have.

Payne certainly does get this, whether he realises its importance or not. He writes that “Maintaining some sense of community spirit part is a crucial part of where English politics heads next. Jackson’s departing remark circled in my mind. ‘The north-east was about big industry, we never did small boutique firms. That’s why the region was hit so hard when the heavy industry began to close.’” He seems to doubt that newer jobs can replace the sense of identity that the big industries gave. Later, in Grimsby, Payne comments on the effect of the collapse of the fishing industry. “Whether it was mining in Northumberland, steel in County Durham or fishing in Lincolnshire, there was a collectivized lifestyle in the red wall that bound people together.” A friend of mine from the north of England tells me that this is true – and thinks this has changed people’s values, making a link with the new aspirational class referred to earlier. “My cousins who work at Nissan feel nothing like the same pride or solidarity of their forbears, “ my friend tells me. “They now focus on owning their own house, the best car and the individual needs of their family.”

The old identity: An anchor chain for the
Mauretania, Tyneside, 1907
(Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)

I am reminded of the final passages in The Stars Look Down (1935), by A.J. Cronin; a novel of a Northumberland miner, Davey Fenwick,who gets elected to Parliament. Deciding, in the end, that it is useless, he returns to the pit; and at the end, as he walks to the pithead with the others at the start of his shift, he is heard to think that he is a miner, he has always been a miner, that’s who he is. (The book still seems to impress those who read it, and the 1940 film has a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes.) I’m also reminded of Kahlil Gibran’s words:

Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave,
eats a bread it does not harvest,
and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.

Is this the driver behind a lot of the discontent that Payne finds in the Red Wall seats? Might it also be the driver behind Brexit – a search for an identity, especially among the English? Is nationalism replacing the old collective identities? Payne never says so; he may suspect it, but I wonder if it’s something he underestimates. 

More of this identity question later, when we look at Mattinson.

*

There was much to like about this book, but I did feel Payne had ignored some elephants in the room. Two of them Mattinson also ignores – again, I’ll come to them later. But with Payne in particular, there was a failure to challenge some dubious statements by his interviewees. Thus he talks to Imran Ahmad Khan, who won Wakefield off Labour's Mary Creagh, and who tells him: “Nothing has lifted greater numbers out of the pernicious state of poverty than free trade, and for free trade we also require free markets.” But Ahmad Khan is a Brexiter who supported removing Britain from the only really large free market there is. Payne does not challenge him on this hypocrisy.

There are other points where Payne’s interviewees says things that he could have at least questioned. During his visit to Grimsby he talks to Lowestoft fish auctioneer June Mummery, part of Fishing for Leave and a former MEP. She tells Payne she is furious about the fishing deal, turning down all interviews at the end of 2020: “I couldn’t speak for three weeks. ...This government just took away our aspirations and opportunities. By handing over our industry straight back to the EU when our prime minister said he would take back full control.” But Boris Johnson never meant to fulfill those promises; he knew full well he couldn’t – he just did not hold enough cards in his negotiations with the EU, and had bigger fish to fry, so to speak. Loads of people could see that at the time, and Mummery damn well should have done too. Payne does ask the new Tory MP for Grimsby, Lia Nici, to comment on the fishing question but her answer seems evasive. Again, he does not really challenge her. Payne could argue that he was there to listen, not to put his own view; but taking that approach means some readers might assume he is endorsing Mummery’s, or Khan’s, views. Is he?

Even so, this is a book with huge strengths. Payne has made a long journey and spoken to a lot of people on both sides – including both party leaders. He also speaks to Tony Blair – who, predictably perhaps, blames the defeat on Labour’s swing to the left under Corbyn. And he has an interesting conversation with Neil Kinnock (now Baron Kinnock). He does not speak to Jeremy Corbyn, which is unfortunate given how much he blames him for Labour’s defeat. However, he doesn’t say why he didn’t; it may be that he was just not granted an interview. He does talk to one or two key Corbyn allies, including John McDonnell.

Payne does seem to be a Tory, but that hasn’t stopped him listening carefully to his Labour interviewees; in fact, on a personal level, he seems to have liked them more. In Hartlepool, Payne has an extended interview with Boris Johnson himself, but one senses he does not really like him that much, though he doesn’t say so. On the same day he meets Angela Rayner and seems to respond to her quite warmly, as he does to Lisa Nandy. You can quarrel with Payne’s analysis (or lack of it, sometimes), and I thought he should have challenged some of what he heard. But he lets his interviewees speak, and their views are frank and interesting. And some of his insights seem very shrewd.

*

So to the second book, Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next?, by Deborah Mattinson. She is from the other side of the political spectrum, and since writing the book she has become Director of Strategy to Keir Starmer.

For her book, she talks to an entirely different group of people. Payne drives around much of the Red Wall and speaks to MPs, ex-MPs and prominent locals, but doesn’t do a deep dive with the voters themselves. Mattinson does, organizing focus groups in February-March 2020 in Accrington, Darlington and Stoke. (Stoke had to be virtual as the pandemic kicked in while she pursued the project.) But some of her conclusions are strikingly similar.

For her “deep dive” in Hyndburn (Accrington), Stoke-on-Trent and Darlington, Mattinson specifically recruits people who have historically voted Labour but voted Tory this time. There is an obvious danger here of getting people who felt more strongly than the average. But she did the selection indirectly, using an attitudinal questionnaire to select those who fitted her profile, rather than asking outright for those who had switched parties. She restricts her choice somewhat by looking for people from the C2DE social grades – manual workers, carers, drivers, construction workers and factory workers. But she does go for a representative spread of age and ethnic identity.

The key messages Mattinson gets are not so different from Payne’s. Labour had stopped listening. Early in the book she makes a startling admission: “Other than the occasional by-election, at no point in the decades that I spent advising Labour did we ever consider running focus groups or polling in any of the Red Wall seats. Their reliability was seen as a given.” This is revealing, as is a later passage when she records that she did once do such an exercise in Scotland and found clear disaffection with Labour; she then spent what she says was an uncomfortable afternoon briefing the then Scottish Labour leader, Johann Walton, who she says “pushed back” on all her findings. The party lost most of its Scottish seats to the SNP very soon afterwards. For decades, Labour didn’t listen to its core supporters – and Mattinson knows it.

Again, Corbyn was loathed. Mattinson finds a very strong feeling among her participants that Labour represents London middle-class people and students, not them. This is also reflected in priorities that seem sometimes to obsess Labour activists, but are of no interest to the voters. An example is Trans rights, which were “dominating the leadership contest when I was up in Accrington in March 2020….’How many trans people are there?’ one asked the others in the focus group. ...’There’s thousands of kids here with no work and no hope. Why don’t they think about them instead?’” Mattinson at no point suggests that Trans rights do not matter. But as she says, this looks to many voters like a politically correct, morally superior Labour, fixated on priorities irrelevant to most people, antagonistic to northern voters and tied up with Corbyn, who they deeply dislike.

This cultural divide is also reflected in attitudes to patriotism. Mattinson finds that the latter is very strong amongst Red Wall voters, more so than down south. (She backs this up, quoting a 2018 survey that found folks in the northeast, Yorkshire and the Midlands were more than 10 per cent more likely to be ‘proud to be British’ than people living in London.) A perception amongst Northerners that Corbynites and the like were not patriotic like them clearly hurt Labour. Mattinson is thoughtful about this, connecting it to the participants’ feeling that their towns have declined, leaving them less to identify with. “If they… feel little sense of belonging either to nearby cities or the capital, it is perhaps not surprising that they look to the country as a source of pride,” she writes. She also detects a deep sense that the industrial heritage of which many were proud has disappeared; while there may be new jobs in some places, they can’t replace that. It fits with Payne’s finding that the loss of mining, steel and fishing brought a sense of lost identity.

But while both writers pick up on this, neither seems to see its long-term dangers. People who feel they do not belong will look for something to which they feel they do. The search for identity – for belonging to a group, nation, race, what have you – is a key element in authoritarian politics, a phenomenon described (in rather different ways) in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), in Jan-Werner Müller’s more recent What Is Populism? (2016), and in Peter Ftizsche’s intriguing dissection of the rise of Nazism, Germans Into Nazis (1998). There is a potential hellscape here and the Brexit vote may have been an early warning.

Lisa Nandy thinks the approach to Leave voters was
"deeply offensive and completely wrong"
(Kevin Walsh/Wikimedia Commons)

Unlike Payne, Mattinson isn’t uncritical of the attitudes or statements she hears. She makes one comment that I found very striking: While Red Wall voters have some genuine grievances (she doesn’t deny that for a minute), they need to take more responsibility for the decisions that affect their lives, rather than expecting solutions to be delivered to them. If democracy is to work, she says, then voters must not just expect government to deliver solutions and then be “furious” when they fail. I was also struck that her participants seem to have real hatred for the south of England and its people, although some have never really been there. This isn’t reasonable. It’s true the south has had a lot more spent on it. But as a southerner, I wondered how many of her focus-group members had ever struggled to breathe on a Central Line train at rush hour, or despaired at house prices that mean they will never own their own home. (It should be said that none of Payne’s interviewees expressed this hatred for the south, and a northern friend of mine strongly questions that it exists – rather, he says, there is hatred for a distant Westminster etstablishment. He also points out that many Londoners have never been to the north of England and still think everyone there wears clogs.)

Mattinson gives a short list of measures that Labour need to take if they are to recover these seats. Voters, she says, need to know what Starmer believes in. This is surely important. In his own book, Payne says that almost none of his Labour interviewees could tell him what the Labour “big idea” should be. The only exception is Kinnock, who tells Payne that the source of individual liberty is collective provision. If Labour can be the “security party” in terms of personal security, employment, national security and everything else, he says, they can appeal across the divisions in British society. “It was the first convincing thought I’d heard about how Labour can reconnect to its lost voters,” writes Payne. Mattinson offers nothing like this, but clearly sees the need for Starmer to offer a clear statement of belief. It may be that, as the new head of strategy, she has discussed it with Starmer in private. If she hasn’t, she needs to; it is sorely lacking.

Mattinson also thinks Labour needs to convince people that it can be trusted with the economy, and talk to them more about their real concerns, like immigration and crime. She also says Labour must address the north-south divide. Lastly, she says Labour must be positive about Britain. As one person says to her, “I want to see them really stand up for the country. Show they believe our history is great, not evil.” She does not point out an inconvenient fact: that unfortunately, some (not all!) of our history actually is evil. And as I suggested above, a search for identity can lead to some horrible places. Labour may want to be a bit cautious about this one.

*

These are both interesting books, by two people who have gone out, met people, asked the right questions and really listened to the answers. They are also both well written, Payne’s in particular. I came away with a clear, credible explanation as to why Labour lost its “safe” seats in 2019. To be sure, the authors are less clear on what Labour should do about it. But they could argue that that wasn’t their purpose.

However, as I suggested earlier, I felt that both books ignored two huge elephants in the room. They’re as follows.

First, there’s the electoral system. I’ve written about the UK’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system before (see link) so won’t do so at length here, but it’s worth noting its relevance to Brexit and the Red Wall. Mattinson notes that the EU referendum was the first time these northern voters’ voices had been heard. I am sure this is true, and that it intensified their anger when some politicians seemed to want to overturn the result. However, Mattinson and Payne both ignore the role of FPTP in this; basically, it means parties need not listen to most voters. This is because the system delivers victory on the basis of wafer-thin margins, as there are usually only two serious candidates in each race. The House of Commons Library states that, in 2019, 67 out of 650 seats – more than one in 10 – were won by a margin of 5% or less of votes cast. (In 2017 it was worse, with 97 such seats.) This means that even in the few marginal seats that decide the election, the parties have to appeal only to the very small percentage of voters who might change their minds; under FPTP, they have no need of second preferences. So elections are usually fought on narrow ground, and reflect the concerns only of those voters who might change sides. In short, a party only need listen to a minority of voters, and the rest can sod off.

Not everyday wear: Clog dancers in Skipton, 2014
(Tim Green/Wikimedia Commons)

In their 2017 book Brexit and British Politics, Geoffrey Evans and Anand Menon argue that in recent years all debate has been concentrated in the ideological centre; as Labour chased Basildon Man, a broader polity disappeared. One might call this centrification (my phrase, not theirs). They refer to it as an elite consensus, within which globalization and values on matters such as gay marriage and capital punishment were not open to question. So the Brexit vote actually was the first time people felt they had been asked about anything. They saw a chance to rebel against this elite consensus. Oddly, Evans and Menon, too, ignore the influence of the electoral system in this, but it surely helped drive the phenomenon they describe. Candidates need appeal only to those who may give them their first vote; they have no need of second preferences, so will not bother with anyone else. In a safe seat they need not bother with anyone at all, as the voters have nowhere else to go. This is why Labour had felt able to neglect the Red Wall seats for so long, and why the voters took a rare chance in the referendum to kick them in the teeth. Three years later, their patience with Labour snapped altogether.

The second elephant in the room was political morality. I was frustrated by both authors’ tendency to quote interviewees as saying “Labour ignored its voters over Brexit” and present this as a failing, at least by inference. Are they saying that Labour MPs should have got wholeheartedly behind Brexit? Some did, but others (and some Tory MPs) made a moral decision that a “hard Brexit’” was bad for the country and they could not vote for it. Are Mattinson and Payne saying those MPs should have voted for something they knew was wrong? What are the moral implications of that?

Mary Creagh, the prominent Labour MP who lost Wakefield in 2019, tells Payne: “I can’t bring myself to do something that I know will cause hardship to people who are already struggling. I can’t pretend that something bad is somehow going to be good.” In Grimsby, former MP Melanie Onn also tells Payne of the anguish she felt deciding whether or not to vote for a withdrawal deal that she really did not believe in (she eventually did). This is a tricky moral area for MPs; if your constituents want something bad, should you vote for it anyway? If you push that to its ultimate conclusion, Hitler could have said he was simply following the will of the people. I didn’t feel Payne confonted this question – and Mattinson doesn’t either; given that she’s now Starmer’s Director of Strategy, that worries me.

*

Mattinson’s fieldwork was nearly two years ago, Payne’s 18 months. Mattinson admits that there is never a good time to end a book like this because things can change so quickly – especially now. “In years of monitoring public opinion, I have never known it to be so volatile,” she says. Moreover the autumn of 2021, after both she and Payne had gone to press, saw a series of missteps and outright blunders by the Johnson government, starting with the release of sewage into British waterways and followed by empty shelves and dry petrol stations because of the driver shortage. Then came the botched attempt to shield Owen Paterson, a Tory MP and former minister facing corruption allegations. Finally it transpired that Johnson had permitted wholesale breaches of lockdown in No 10 itself, with multiple parties and gatherings in the garden, the Cabinet Room and even in the PM’s flat. On January 19 2022 a poll by J.L. Partners for Channel 4 News suggested that, if an election were held then, the Tories would lose all but three of their Red Wall seats.

This should not make Labour too optimistic about the next election. It could be nearly another three years before it comes around, and once again, a week is a long time in politics. Moreover, as Mattinson warned, Labour will need a gain of 124 seats to secure a majority of just one. Even if the Tories are wiped out in the Red Wall and its seats there all revert to Labour, it’ll need big wins elsewhere as well; it must remember that as well as a Leaver north of England, there is a Remainer south, where much of its support now lies. It needs to retain it, and so far liberal Remain voters I know are not very impressed with Starmer’s leadership. There is a risk that the party could lose the support it still has without really regaining its traditional voters.

Labour should also remember that it must believe in something if it is to govern, rather than cut its cloth to focus groups. For all their importance, these books are not instruction manuals.

Sebastian Payne, Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour's Lost England (Macmillan, September 2021)
Deborah Mattinson, Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next? (Biteback, September 2020)

I would like to thank Kevin Wilson for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this piece.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or Amazon and other online retailers as paperbacks or e-books. Follow Mike on Twitter and Facebook.