Tag: Stroud

A Labour landslide – what next?

10.30, Friday 5th July. The day after an election in which Labour won a landslide victory. Mainly because the Tory vote imploded …

It’s raining as we wait for Rishi to say goodbye on Downing Street. As it was when he announced this election. It won’t dry up any time soon: this is a bad July. But, yes, good for Labour, though its share of the vote hasn’t changed from 2019. That’s remarkable. What matters, though, looking at it backwards, is that they haven’t lost voter share. They’ve held theirs, while everyone else, save for the Tories, has gained.

Yesterday’s vote was the ultimate anti-incumbent protest. No British government has, arguably, ever made such a mess, and they’ve kept it up over fourteen years. The electorate though hadn’t abandoned the Tories until Johnson partied and Truss went over the top.  Vast swathes then went in different directions, moderates to the LibDems and populists to Reform.

Underlying it all, and I’ve been doing a quick calculation with every result, and I was watching until 4am (lazy you might say – why not all night?), is the left-of-centre against right-of-centre vote, broadly defined. How do the combined votes of left and right stack up? On the left we have new Labour (mark 2) and old socialist, including one Jeremy Corbin. And we’ve the LibDems – wow! I didn’t expect that. And the Greens. And Plaid Cymru. They are all democrats, all part of a great tradition of evolving liberal democracy.

As for the right-of-centre, many will be died-in-the-wool Tories who simply couldn’t change their spots, or soften their deep-blue shading. But there are the Bravermans. And there is Reform.

How do the percentages work out? 52.6% for Labour, the LibDems and Greens, taken together. And 38% for the Tories and Reform. Others including the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Northern Ireland parties 9.4%. (Figures corrected from the first version of this post.)

I was watching those early results, from Sunderland and Blyth. The North East was so strongly Brexit and that left-behind, anti-sentiment now finds a home in Reform. It is those two descriptors – left-behind and anti-immigrant – that go far to define Reform.

What Labour has to do is take the North/South divide head-on. If they do their almost 35% share of the vote should increase next time. Labour has to re-establish that link with those old, and socially conservative, and indeed older-by-age working-class constituencies. It can still be a big-city party. Its performance will be judged, it goes without saying, by the performance of the economy, but also crucially by its attitudes to health and social care. They, even more jobs and housing and education and climate and indeed gender, will be the defining issues. Get them right, and so much else will follow. Not least a healthy and motivated workforce.

Stroud is my local constituency. High turnout, 71%, a Labour gain. Twickenham, my old constituency, LibDem hold on a 72% turnout. Compare Sunderland and Blyth, both 53%. There, Reform got their vote out. Vast numbers of others, maybe of the ‘they-are-all-useless’ persuasion, will have stayed away. Trade unions used to give voters an identity. No more. Devolving power and local accountability will help. But they must show tangible results. Otherwise, the Britain-is-broken, keep-the-bastards-out Reform mentality, the Farage farrago of false and half-truths, will entrench.

Look over the Channel. The second round of the French election is this coming weekend. I was listening to a radio piece about Langres, a rural French town with a grand cathedral, where I stayed several times on childhood trips through France. It has these days 25% unemployment. It votes National Rally (RN). The perceived gap between Paris and the provinces is, and is perceived as, vast. This gives the RN its way in, with all the anti-immigrant, find-a-culprit mentality that goes with it.

I don’t doubt Starmer and his crew are more than aware of all this. That’s what will make the next few weeks so interesting. It’s so crucial to get the direction right. France will probably have chaos before any resolution.  Macron has big ideas and big solutions, he’s been looking to the future, but, it seems, he hasn’t paid sufficient heed to the present. Starmer must take that hard lesson on board. Think small as well as big. Country as well city. Somewhere (where you’re rooted, where you’ve always been) as well anywhere (where you’ve left home, you’re metropolitan, you’ve been to uni).

Charisma helps. But then Farage has a warped mind of charisma. Being ordinary also has its big advantages.

Mill country – from Hebden Bridge to Stroud

[The first paragraphs of this blog originally appeared as the blog, ‘One cheer for enterprise and two for poor’. I’d taken my cue from EM Forster’s short book from 1950, Two Cheers for Democracy. I’ve decided rather late that both title and allusion are too obscure – but there still is a story to tell.]

Back in 1907 there was a creditors’ meeting in Manchester. A low-key winding-up. Not such an unusual occurrence. In this case it was ‘Mr Joseph Spencer, carrying on business… as tailor and outfitter’. He was my great-grandfather.

You saw an opportunity, you seized it, ‘set up shop’, a mill maybe – or literally a shop. That’s what Joseph Spencer did, in Hebden Bridge in Upper Calderdale, that hybrid seriously-Yorkshire but edging-Lancashire area which, with the Rochdale Canal sneaking through the Pennines, linked to Manchester as much as Halifax, and manufactured cotton goods (especially fustian) which traded on the Manchester Exchange.

In the 1890s he looked west, across the border, and opened further shops in Burnley, Accrington and Oldham, and in 1901 transferred his main business to Deansgate Arcade in Manchester. His son, my grandfather, Thomas, aged 22, stayed behind to run the Hebden Bridge business.

I will need to research further whether Joseph simply over-traded and ran out of money, or whether there was a wider slump. Either way, it’s in the nature of enterprise. Our lives run on enterprise, our own, or that of others. Small traders live on the edge, big businesses ossify. Get taken over, or in extremis, they collapse. Shipbuilding and steel. Coal. BHS, Arcadia, Debenhams.

My house in Stroud, in Gloucestershire, is next to the old Severn-Thames canal. An abundance of Cotswold wool, fast-flowing rivers in the ‘five valleys’ and, later, coal brought up the Severn, drove a multitude of mills, many of which, re-purposed, still survive.  It seems I can’t escape from mills, though it was wool in Stroud, and cotton (and especially fustian) in Hebden Bridge.

Across the canal from my house a mill turned out military uniforms, and a few yards to the west two mills co-existed with the railway viaduct which sweeps over both the canal and the river Frome. To the north, up on the hill, was the workhouse, a substantial structure, an ever-present reminder of how the wheel of fortune goes up, and also comes down.

It’s a peaceful landscape now. As indeed is Hebden Bridge. Both places, as I’m finding, have remarkable stories to tell. Once upon a time they were all energy, and noise, the endless working out of success and failure. All has leaked away downriver. (In Hebden Bridge’s case with an occasional big flood. The Frome in Stroud runs a deeper channel.) Downriver – and overseas.

There are many remarkable personal stories to tell. My great-grandfather’s being one. He was fortunate. He wasn’t brought low by his bankruptcy. But it’s a useful reminder to me (if Covid wasn’t enough!) how fickle fortune can be.

Camino – all about symbols

The Camino runs in, pretty much, a straight line, but I love the way it weaves itself into your life, with reminders here and there of that extraordinary heritage into which I tapped last autumn.

We stopped in Ludlow ten days ago, and visited the wonderful parish church, which has held on to its medieval heritage better than most. A palmer was someone who’d completed the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the palm was his symbol. Ludlow’s Palmers’ Guild was formed in 1284 and with wide commercial interests across the area they became very wealthy – and they put that wealth into the church.

But, curiously, I noted that another symbol of pilgrimage, which appears more than once, is the shell, rather than the palm.

The palm had other symbolic meanings, not least triumph and victory. The shell, very much the symbol of the Santiago pilgrimage, had become a symbol for all pilgrimages.

Once you’ve walked the Camino and knowing how many routes cross-cross Europe you’re always on the look out for the shell symbols. It’s there even in biblical representations of St James with no pilgrimage associations – his supposed burial place wasn’t discovered until eight centuries after his death.

I found one in an unlikely place last week, on a muddy track, just off Offa’s Dyke. It was – a large shell-shaped fungus, of guaranteed impermanence, and a clear case of the symbol being in the eye of the beholder.

Camino reminders don’t only come fungus-shaped.

The chancel of Leonard Stanley church near Stroud has a carved capital depicting Mary anointing the feet of Christ, his hand raised in blessing. There’s a wooden head of Christ at South Cerney, a little further east into the Cotswolds, that’s comparable, and it’s thought likely this was brought back by a pilgrim to Compostela in the mid 12th century. The way the beard curls apparently gives the clue: I love that kind of detail. A curling beard another symbol? (Acknowledgements to David Verey’s Cotswold Churches for this information.)

And finally, guess what I’m cooking for supper tonight – scallops, with bacon, and it’s clear from one or two looks in my direction that it’s time I headed for the kitchen…