As Labour takes power for the first time in 14 years, the Guardian asked three writers to describe how their home towns had changed under Conservative rule – and the challenges now facing Keir Starmer. Today, Sunjeev Sahota describes what has happened to Chesterfield.
I grew up in Chesterfield, which, according to a 2019 analysis by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, is Derbyshire’s second most deprived district (narrowly outpaced by Bolsover). Almost a third of the town’s 69 areas, including the one that raised me, are among the 20% most deprived in the country.
A composite memory: the jangly dawn light as I watch Dad arrive home from his factory shift in time to help Mum open the shop. A few houses down, a neighbour, an ex-miner, defeated-looking, gets in his car, off to the supermarket where he attends to the trolleys. And here is Jayne, too, the kind, always smiling woman, taking a final sip of vodka and then hiding the miniature bottle in her handbag as she, shaking with the effort not to shake, heads out to clean the pub. She’ll be found dead on her sofa in the year I leave for university.
Isolating the different kinds of deprivation over the last government: between 2015 and 2019 the percentage of the town’s areas in the 20% most deprived nationally rose from 26% to 34% for income deprivation, from 35% to 40% for employment deprivation, and from 51% to 60% for health deprivation.
I went to Springwell community school. Its last four Ofsted reports have judged that it “requires improvement”. It has never achieved a rating of “good”, let alone “outstanding”. The school’s leaking concrete blocks were demolished in 2011 and a new site erected. Shinier buildings, however, haven’t changed the fact that “the proportion of students known to be eligible for free school meals is above average”. At school, there was a boy, D, who called me all the usual names, told me to return to all the usual places. Things came to a head, and we fought. Afterwards, though his racism endured, he seemed to temper it: getting my name wrong, not handing me a worksheet – microaggressions, in today’s jargon. One morning, perhaps in year 8 – so around 1993 – everyone was laughing at D, who wiped angry tears: he’d made the mistake of admitting that he ate his cornflakes with tap water.
In Chesterfield, there are now more children like D: child poverty in the town was at 29% in 2014, and 36% in 2023. Much of this is Thatcher’s legacy and the industrial decimation and structural unemployment she presided over. That the right disdains the working class – and scapegoats the cultural other – is not news. What workers in the 80s might not have predicted was the extent to which the nominal left in this country would also turn on them, the extent to which a Labour leadership would further the neoliberal turn in our politics and oversee the expunging of workers from the organised left, and the insurgence of a professionalised middle class.
Chesterfield voted to leave the EU with a majority of 60%. This professionalised, academic, culturalist left made – and continues to make – no effort to show such voters that what blights their lives are the same problems blighting the lives of black and brown poor and working-class people; nor does this left understand the role that class struggle has always played in changing people’s preconceptions, in forging solidarity and fighting racism. Instead, this left tells everyone that they are to understand their grievances primarily through the lens of their cultural identity, and then it scolds Chesterfield’s leave voters, telling them that they just need to stop being racist. From the standpoint of political discourse, the last 14 years of Tory rule have seen the left and the right entrench the belief that social justice battles are to be fought on the ground of culture and identity – for the obvious reason that arguing about culture in no way challenges the neoliberal status quo that benefits the elites on both sides.
Chesterfield remains a betrayed, emptied town. The centre, from which even the bent spire now appears to turn away, is a scrappy silence, all beleaguered women and men with long stares. It’s no accident that these towns are habitually referred to as “former” – former mining town, former market town, former heartlands. Formerly important, formerly valued, formerly alive.
In that sense, the cost of living crisis hasn’t changed anything much. A town that was on its knees is now on its face. But the coinage “cost of living crisis” is revealing. Because when have the poor and working class ever not been in a cost of living crisis? When have they ever not struggled to pay the bills, feed their kids, buy and heat their homes? It seems things only get called a crisis when the middle and professional classes feel the pinch; only then must something be done. I don’t recall anyone giving a shit when my parents were battling to keep a roof over their heads, when D was adding water to his cereal. Still, maybe one good thing to come out of this crisis will be the middle classes twigging that their class privilege isn’t as robust as they had always thought; and if they now find themselves in the discount aisles alongside a member of the working poor, they might even be shamed into showing some solidarity, and not contempt.
The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota is published by Harvill Secker