The Daily - Switching Sides in Britain

Episode Date: December 17, 2019

To pull off its landslide victory in last week’s election, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party flipped dozens of districts in the “red wall” of British politics — a gritty stronghold of coal and factory towns that had supported the Labour Party for decades. Our correspondent traveled across the United Kingdom to understand what the region’s political realignment may foretell about the future of the country. Guest: Patrick Kingsley, an international correspondent for The New York Times, who spoke with constituents in Shirebrook, England. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading:“Votes for the pro-Brexit Conservatives had 10 times the effective power of votes for the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats.” Our columnist writes that this is thanks to the electoral system used in Britain and the United States.On a road trip from London to Glasgow, our correspondent found a country longing for a past that may be impossible to revive.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, to pull off its landslide victory in last week's election, Boris Johnson's Conservative Party flipped dozens of districts long held by the Labour Party. long held by the Labour Party. Patrick Kingsley, on what that historic realignment looked like in one small town. It's Tuesday, December 17th.

Broadcasting to South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire. This is BBC Radio Sheffield. Patrick, tell us about this road trip that you took back in November. So in the run-up to the British general election, I went on a 900-mile drive, starting off in London, but really aiming to get out of London, trying to get a sense of what people outside the capital were thinking about the election, and in particular, thinking about Brexit. And there was one place

that I went to that really, I felt, evoked a lot of these themes. I'm just arriving in a town called Shirebrook in a constituency called Bolsover. Pretty much the centre of England. It's not a very important place on the face of things. It's a place of 10,000 residents, perhaps, living in 20 or 30 streets of red brick, one-storey houses. But nevertheless, it kind of represents the seismic economic and political changes that Britain has witnessed in the last generation.

You have arrived at your destination. And in particular, I wanted to visit a grey, vast, quite dismal warehouse on the edge of town. I am in the car park outside the Sports Direct factory. It's a warehouse that stores sportswear, tracksuits for a British company called Sports Direct factory. It's a warehouse that stores sportswear, tracksuits for a British company called Sports Direct, which I understand may have an American equivalent in something like Dick's Sporting Goods. And I wanted to visit this warehouse

because it personifies all these economic and political changes that Britain has experienced and also offers quite a big clue about why there was this surprising election result in Britain last week. So where does the story of this grey warehouse and this entire town begin? Do you want to just sort it in?

Who are you to start off with? I know who you are, but it might make sense. Well, to piece all that together, I spent a few days meeting anyone I could. I'm a resident of Bolsover constituency. I've raised my family here. Longtime residents, teenagers. Employees of the warehouse and also local politicians. Mark Fletcher, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Bolsover.

And it seems the story of the town of Shirebrook really begins in 1896, when there was no town, and instead, a coal pit was dug on the edge of what is now Shirebrook. Someone once said that Britain is an island built on coal and surrounded by fish. The town then was built for the coal pit. It was built to house the coal miners who would go down the mine every day digging coal that would power industrial England. More and more the nation is concerned with getting more and more coal from where it's easiest to get. For decades the mine was the heart of the town.

You were either working down the mine or you were selling things to miners, and if you had children, they would likely go down the mine. What kind of a place was it like for you? All these places were hard places. There was nothing to do or anything like that, you know. But then you start work at 15 anyway, you know, you went to the pit. Your dad did it, your granddad did it, so just one of them things.

It's dangerous work, but it's also eventually reasonably well-paid work, and it also provides a job for life. I always used to say that the pit, the pit, like the mother, yeah, sort of looked after everybody. It fostered a strong union movement, and in the process of that, it also became a stronghold of the Labour Party, the left-wing political party that emerged from the union movement

to represent workers and workers' rights in Parliament. workers' rights in Parliament. But as the decades go by, and the 60s move into the 70s, coal is no longer such a central player in the British energy industry. You've got oil, suddenly you've got gas, and you also have cheaper forms of coal from abroad. And all of a sudden, you've got politicians thinking

it doesn't really make much sense to have this industry here in Britain. And so both Conservative and Labour governments try to close the coal pits. Friday, the 7th of January, the last shift at Armthorpe near Doncaster, and the beginning of the miners' first national strike for nearly 50 years. But they don't do it that successfully initially because the unions and the mine workers are too strong. They can go on strike and they can deprive the country of coal and of energy and of power. And so the government usually has to cave

instead of closing so many coal pits. This sets off a cycle of turbulence and protests and governments trying to shut coal pits and miners responding by going on strike. And all of this tumult nationally of course deeply affects Scheiburg as a mining town. Most of the miners are part of the strike, they refuse to go down the mines. And during this strike... Conflict continues. So we don't run away from it. The local Labour Party lawmaker, who is a former miner himself, plays a key role in supporting the miners in their struggle.

And I understand it as well as any, because I saw it in its harshest terms when I was down the pit. And he's called Dennis Skinner, nicknamed the Beast of Bolsover. What a great name. Why the Beast of Bolsover? Well, Bolsover is the name of the wider area. And Beast, because, yeah, he's a fiery person. He's like a tiger on behalf of these miners. He pays a portion of his salary to miner support groups.

He comes and joins the miners on their protests. And he becomes a real icon to the community of Shirebrook and the mining towns around it. I think about the hacking away, the injuries, the mauling, the class conflict. That should sustain us all. And he kind of represents how the Labour Party was very strongly tied to the union movement.

No one wishes to have young people without work. You know too that unemployment has afflicted Europe. This all comes to a head with the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. If you want more jobs, we've got to win more customers. There's only one way to win more customers. Good design, competitive prices. A conservative prime minister comes to power in 1979 with the aim of putting to an end all of this mayhem. But what exactly is her message? How is she going to end this cycle of protest, given the power that the coal miners have

in places like Sharbrook? Well, Thaddeus' main message is that she wants to completely liberalize the British economy. We want a very prosperous coal industry and reasonable-priced coal that can be sold to electricity here and can be sold to electricity here and can be sold overseas. That's what I have in mind. But you can't do it by failing to invest in the new and by clinging to the old and having high-priced coal.

And it all comes to this big showdown in the mid-1980s. By 7am, 4,000 miners were at Orgreave waiting for the coke lorries to arrive. Police had been expecting them. They equaled the number of pickets. When, as usual, the Conservative government threatened to close some coal pits, and as usual, the mining unions went on strike. What was different this time was that Thatcher was determined to win this one. And so her government had stockpiled a lot of coal, which meant that when the miners stopped producing coal from the pits,

the government had a reserve to draw upon, and it meant that the country could go on being powered. And so the strike goes on for a year, but the government still doesn't give in to the strikers because it doesn't really need to now. And it ends in 1984 with the government having won, with Thatcher having won, and the miners having lost. Wow.

So Thatcher basically called the miners bluff, and she wins. Exactly. It's a pivotal moment of her premiership, maybe the most emblematic moment of her time in power. So Patrick, at this point, just so I understand the political lay of the land, the conservative party under Thatcher is positioning itself as a foe of organized labor, of the kind of miners in Shirebrook. And Shirebrook is a labor town. Exactly. Almost everyone would have voted labor in Shirebrook. So what ends up happening after Thatcher succeeds in effectively breaking the back of the miners' union in this standoff? Well, it happened slowly, but basically the coal industry starts to die. Well, when Pitt were closed, it was heart-wrenching.

You know what I mean? Hundreds of coal mines close across the country, and the Shirebrook coal mine itself closes in 1993. It was a complete devastation. Around 2,000 people's jobs were lost. And that is what it was like for the next decade. People were out of work. There was no major source of local industry that could employ people. So a huge vacuum is created in the absence of the coal mine. There's no work. There's no alternative employment. This was a town built for mining, and now there's nothing to replace it. And then in 2005, something does

come along. It's this warehouse for Sports Direct, which is built literally on top of the site of the old coal pit. And it's a game changer, but not necessarily in the way that the town had hoped. We'll be right back. Patrick Kingsley, what changes in Sharbrook once Sports Direct comes into town? Well, initially, it seems like something positive. For the first time in 12 years, there is a major source of employment in the town. 3,500 jobs, which is more than the 2,000 jobs that the mine had previously provided. but it quickly becomes apparent that this isn't the savior that people thought it might be because what it's offering is a very different kind of work to the work that was offered at the mine the mine was dangerous but at least it gave secure work the work at the warehouse is insecure it doesn't offer benefits it's not full-time work it doesn't offer a full-time contract you don't

get a pension you don't get sick pay you don't get holiday pay it's not full-time work, it doesn't offer a full-time contract, you don't get a pension, you don't get sick pay, you don't get holiday pay. It's also paid at the minimum wage or actually when all is said and done below the minimum wage. There was even a government inquiry into the practices of this warehouse a few years ago and they found that people were getting penalized even for taking breaks to drink water. And in the most notorious example, there was a woman who apparently so terrified that she was going to lose her job if she didn't turn up to work, who actually gave birth in the warehouse and left the baby in a bathroom. Because she feared that if she acknowledged she was about to have a baby, that what would happen?

That she might get fired. That seems to be the implication, yes. So if you think about it, the warehouse really didn't offer anything like what the mine used to offer the town of Shirebrook. the mine used to offer the town of Shirebrook. The mine meant a job for life, whereas the warehouse basically offers temporary work from which you could get fired at any point at very short notice. And the mine provided pride to the community. It provided the coal that powered the nation, whereas the warehouse just stores mostly polyester tracksuits that get sipped around the country. So it sounds like everything about this work is just shallower and less meaningful. Exactly. And because of that, local residents in Sharbrook and indeed from across Britain didn't fancy doing this kind of work because it was humiliating and for Britain quite badly paid. But there were plenty of people elsewhere in the European Union who, because they were members of the European Union, were able to come and work in Britain and earn

what they believed was actually quite good money and in conditions that they didn't feel were particularly humiliating as a result. So you had lots of people from Poland and Romania coming to places like Shirebrook and indeed across England and working in warehouses like Sports Direct. And as a result, they changed the social fabric of Shirebrook. And what does that change look like on the ground? You can go around every house and every door and 99.9% of people are going to say to you, Polish people take our jobs. And then people moan about it. When it starts to create a lot of resentment residents start to

believe that their town is being quote-unquote invaded by foreigners these factories are supposed to be for locals but if you i mean to me if you live in the area that you're a local you've got a lot of eastern europeans around here but when i actually spoke to people i said but did you want to do these jobs? Have you ever done these jobs? They would actually say, no, we wouldn't want to do something like that. And the English people moan about Polish people taking the jobs, but it's not that, it's just the English people are lazy and they didn't even really want the jobs.

But now that the jobs are taken, they want to moan about it. So what you're hearing is a group of people mourning their past, the kind of work that's no longer available in this town. Yes, you're right. They are mourning just the passing of a way of life. They're mourning the passing of a more secure form of employment than when suddenly no one had any secure work any longer. And their instinctive reaction is that the town started coming apart

primarily because of the arrival of all these European immigrants who are taking everyone's jobs. Three years ago, I committed to the British people that I would renegotiate our position in the European Union and hold an in-out referendum. And that's why in 2016, when a referendum arrives on the horizon. On Monday, I will go to Parliament and propose that the British people decide our future in Europe. The choice is in your hands. It gives people in Britain the choice. Do you want to stay part of

Europe or do you want to leave it? The people in Shirebrooke and indeed the surrounding constituency vote by one of the highest proportions in the country to leave the European Union. And what makes this interesting is that you have a very strongly Labour town voting in accordance with a measure that is supported by the majority of the Conservative Party. that is supported by the majority of the Conservative Party. So for the first time in the town's history, the population of the town are kind of drifting away from the political moorings that they had been tied to for all of the 20th century.

And what do the people in Sharbrook see Brexit as suddenly giving them, given the situation they're in? I think for people in Sharbrook, first and foremost, it's something that will stop all this immigration. And by proxy, it would be something that might restore pride and energy to a once bustling town that has seen better days. Right. Because one of the things that Brexit promises is an end to this open borders system by which anyone in Europe can come into Britain and work in Britain in a place like Sports Direct in Shirebrook. Exactly.

And of course, Brexit passes by a narrow margin, but it passes. Right. And so for the first time in a generation, people in a town like Shirebrook have experienced a win. And we know that that win didn't last very long because three years go by and Brexit doesn't happen, despite the fact that it's supposed to have happened. It still hasn't happened. Exactly.

And as a result, in places like Shirebrook, what I was hearing when I went up, there was deep, deep frustration. For the last three and a half years, I've been watching the mess that is Brexit. And we're just livid that this vote hasn't been delivered. Which brings us to last week. Good evening and welcome to another night in which the future of our country hangs in the balance. When we had a general election in Britain that was basically a quasi-second referendum, but instead of voting on a question of whether to leave Europe, you had to vote for a political party. This is the most important UK general election in a generation.

Britain is heading to the polls to elect a government in the hope of finding a solution to that Brexit crisis. Boris Johnson's Conservative Party have a simple message, get Brexit done. In 2017, Labour did unexpectedly well, but they still ended up the minority party. Their Brexit policy is less clear cut than others. And so that gave voters in

Shirebrooke this very difficult choice between voting for a party that their parents had voted for, that their grandparents had voted for, that was very closely tied to the history of their town, and whose candidate, Dennis Skinner, the beast of Bolsover, is this local hero, lionized by basically every household as far as I could see. And on the other side, the party that had, in the local consciousness, destroyed Schaerberg, destroyed the mine, destroyed the unions, destroyed the social fabric, but which was resolutely pro-Brexit. And people had to decide, do they go with the party they'd always voted for, or do they go with the party that supported Brexit?

In a sense, do they vote their heritage, or do they vote their future? Exactly. Here we go, then. I, Sarah Sternberg, the deputy returning officer at this election, give you the following results. And once the votes were tallied, we know that conservatives, and by extension Brexit, won a huge percentage of the vote. So what did the local results look like in Shirebrook? Well, for the first time ever, the local constituency returned a conservative lawmaker. local constituency returned a conservative lawmaker. And I do hereby declare that Mark Peter Fletcher is elected to serve as Member of Parliament for the constituency of Bolsover.

Thank you. And Dennis Skinner. The man they called the beast of Bolsover, the man who nobody could remember without that constituency. Dennis Skinner then pushed into second place. He's out of Parliament for the first time in 49 years. Wow. It's that kind of moment when you've forgotten all the rest of the detail from these sorts of nights. It's the moments like Bolsover that you'll remember. It was an extraordinary change.

Huge sways of the country that for years, for decades, supported Labour, have suddenly voted Conservative. And that's how the Conservatives won last week's election. Because, essentially, of Brexit. Because of Brexit, but also because of all the things that led to Brexit. Because of the destruction of the main center of employment in the town, because of the loss of the pride and the purpose in the community that came hand in hand with that place of employment, and because of the warehouse that came to replace it. And the people who came to work in that warehouse.

And the people who came to work in that warehouse. And the people who came to work there, yeah. Patrick, I spoke with our colleague Mark Landler, a head of the general election, and he predicted that this political realignment would happen in towns like this, that labor strongholds would fall to the conservative party. And he said the great danger for voters who conflated this election with a vote on Brexit is that Brexit may not mean over time

what they think it will. It might not bring the restoration of a life that many people are still mourning in Britain. So with that in mind, what does this election outcome seem to mean for Shirebrooke and its economy? Well, if you take an optimistic position on Brexit, you believe that, sure, there'll be a bit of turbulence as Britain comes out of Europe, but that will spark a kind of national revival that regenerates British trade and British industry, and Britain alone, on its own,

will be forced to come up with creative solutions to many problems that have just been allowed to fester during Britain's membership of the European Union. But the pessimistic take on Brexit is that once Britain leaves the European Union, it becomes less of an attractive proposition for foreign companies to base their factories and their businesses. And so in order to keep foreign investors coming into Britain and in order to attract new ones, the government is going to have to slash regulations, make it even easier to hire and fire people, and in the process, make it easier to set up a warehouse like Sports Direct. And so there is a scenario in which post-Brexit Britain looks a lot more like Shirebrook in 2019 rather than less like it.

Which would not, of course, be the outcome that the people in Shirebrook are looking for. Absolutely not. Patrick, thank you. Thank you. It's great to chat. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee formally presented its case for impeaching President Trump to the entire House of Representatives, saying that he, quote, betrayed the nation by abusing his office. That report is expected to become the basis for a historic vote on Wednesday in which the House will impeach the president

and trigger a trial in the Senate. So in the coming weeks, senators, particularly Republican senators, will have a choice. Do they want a fair, honest trial that examines all the facts? Or do they want a trial that doesn't let the facts come out? In a news conference on Monday,

the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, demanded that Senate Republicans hold a trial that calls new witnesses from the Trump administration and produces new documents from the White House, something that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has resisted. Trials have witnesses. That's what trials are all about. And documents.

If Leader McConnell doesn't hold a full and fair trial, the American people will rightly ask, what are you, Leader McConnell, and what is President Trump hiding? And Boeing said it would stop manufacturing its 737 MAX jet, which has been grounded for nearly a year, following two crashes that killed 346 people. 346 people. The decision is one of the most consequential in Boeing's 100-year history, since the plane brings in tens of billions of dollars a year, and its production involves thousands of workers. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.