“We’re basically going through a deindustrialisation of the country at the moment and I think we’re losing a lot of jobs,” says John Mac, over a pot of tea in a bustling Caffè Nero in the centre of Stockton-on-Tees.
The local candidate for Reform UK worked for years at the Billingham plant of Imperial Chemical Industries’s (ICI), before taking voluntary redundancy in the 1990s.
Having witnessed decades of industrial decline on Teesside first-hand, including the dismantling of the once-mighty industrial behemoth, Nigel Farage’s pivot to court the working class is speaking Mac’s language.
The Reform leader is targeting voters in post-industrial communities across Britain, outlined in a Guardian series showing how Farage views the “next Brexit” as reversing net zero to create a manufacturing renaissance.
This, the third in the series, looks at the future of another of Britain’s industrial heartlands.
Higher unemployment and poverty
If the latest opinion polls are anything to go by, four of the Tees Valley’s constituencies would go to Reform if an election was held tomorrow – including for Mac in Stockton North. Labour – which now controls six of the seats – is at pains not to allow a repeat of 2019, when its so-called red wall heartlands fell to the Tories, with many places – including on Teesside – turning blue for the first time.
Wednesday is market day in the town on the north bank of the Tees and Mac would usually be handing out leaflets to passersby. Many people are frustrated with the cost of living, lack of opportunities for young people, and immigration, he says.
“They just think Labour don’t represent the working class any more,” Mac says.
His uncle, Maurice Foley, was a trade unionist and Labour MP in the 1960s who left parliament in 1973 to become the deputy director general for development at the European Commission. Ironically, Mac says it was Brexit that turned him to Reform.
Stockton and the wider Teesside area has higher than national average rates of unemployment, poverty and low educational attainment – trailing the rest of Britain in no small part as the legacy of a de-industrial revolution.
Once described by William Gladstone as an “infant Hercules”, a hotbed of steel making, shipbuilding and chemicals, Teesside has suffered waves of job losses in the past half century amid Britain’s broader industrial decline.
“It was central to British industrial capitalism, as a relatively prosperous booming place. The fall from grace has been huge,” says Luke Telford, an academic at York university and author on Brexit and industrial decline.
“Deindustrialisation acts as the economic backdrop to a lot of the problems, combined with the lack of an alternative. It has been an unjust transition, without really a plan in place.
“It gives rise to this sense that nobody listens to us, nobody really…
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