This year’s Byline Festival was hosted by Keele University which sits at the top of a hill overlooking my home town of Newcastle-under-Lyme. I applied to Keele University in my early 20s after drifting for a while and was astonished to be invited to an interview in spite of not meeting the entry criteria.
After 2 hours, Professor Brian Doherty and Professor John Proops offered me a place. I worked hard for three years and graduated; I truly believe Keele University saved my life. A young white working-class man was given a fighting chance.
Byline Festival: a celebration of progressive thought at its best
Recently, my alma mater hosted the Byline Festival. Reading the programme with my son, a student of International Relations, we decided to attend on Saturday.
As we travelled from event to event, I pointed out some of my progressive heroes. Mike Galsworthy, who helped inspire us to travel from ‘Brexit central’ in Stoke-on-Trent to march three times for a second referendum while holding our Staffordshire flag proudly aloft. Carole Cadwalladr is surely one the bravest people alive, who exposed Cambridge Analytica and stood up to billionaire Aaron Banks. Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu, critically fighting to restore high-quality journalism through the excellent pages of the Byline Times. We laughed too as I pointed out a certain Lord, remaining nameless, who once publicly called me a “clipboard-wielding bureaucrat” at a Local Government conference for daring to ask him an awkward question.
The panels were excellent. The humour was on point. We agreed with almost everything that was said. It was quality father-and-son time too. As the sun shone I indulged in the nostalgia of walking round the place of my salvation with my son, sharing – maybe over sharing – our student stories. In many ways, it was a perfect day.
Poor working-class people face a harsh reality
But as the day wore on, my son and I began to reflect on something missing.
The ritual shredding of The Telegraph and Daily Mail by cartoonist Martin Rowson was hilarious, a catharsis for middle-class and acquired middle-class liberals like me. The critique of oligarchy and media decay, the session on alternative economics, and the debates on citizens’ assemblies were all stimulating enough to cast all thought of petty small talk aside.
But what, my son and I asked each other, does any of this really mean for people in impoverished working-class communities day-to-day?
From the entrance of Keele University, you can look across to the Lyme Valley and see much of Newcastle-under-Lyme and Stoke-on-Trent. In the foreground sits Walley’s Quarry, a landfill site in the former mining village of Silverdale. Locals have campaigned for many years about foul smelling, toxic hydrogen sulphide fumes, apparently emanating from the site, making their life completely miserable.
Aaron Bell, the former Conservative MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, posed for many performative photos about the issue. But despite tens of thousands of complaints through the proper process, it took the Environment Agency years and years to act. When they finally did, enforcing a closure notice in February 2025, the operator folded into liquidation and walked away. The taxpayer was left with the bill and no visible accountability for the harm done to the local community has yet emerged.
Staffordshire communities are deprived and under-supported
Slightly further up the valley, your eyes fall on Knutton and Chesterton which are among the most deprived communities in England. They face low incomes, high unemployment, poor health, fuel poverty and lower-than-average life expectancy. Due east, Stoke-on-Trent, marking its centenary year in 2025, ranks as the 13th most deprived local authority in England. Over half its households are in the bottom 20% nationally.
The area has never recovered from the decline of mining, steel, and pottery. Despite energetic representations from our local Labour MPs, once again the government neglected the plight of the pottery industry in the recent industrial strategy. Last summer, Stoke saw a far-right riot inflamed by social media disinformation following the tragic murders of children in Southport. Many residents, like those in similar predominantly white working class towns, feel left behind by politics, and increasingly, by democracy itself.
These communities aren’t just metaphorically dying. As David Walsh and Gerry McCartney argue effectively in Social Murder? Austerity and Life Expectancy in the UK, the cumulative impact of decades-long austerity is literally killing people, by the hundreds of thousands, across the entire country. Many millions more are psychologically traumatised by the grind of merely getting by day-to-day.
Communities are right to feel abandoned
Faced with this, the left seems at sea. On one hand, it appears to believe that education, better media, and improved democratic processes will allow people to see through the lies, and make better voting decisions. On the other, it echoes the populist right’s talking points on immigration and welfare, hoping to win back lost voters. The first comes off as elitist, patronising, and smug. The second reinforces narratives that hurt the most deprived and legitimise the arguments of the populist right. Mea culpa, I have been guilty at times of both.
Meanwhile, communities like those where I grew up are left with almost nothing. No vision. Too few outcomes.
The populist right, for all its bile, talks about outcomes. It identifies real pain and offers simple, albeit wrong, solutions: Brexit, Stop the Boats, Rwanda, Build the Wall. Of course, the tragic irony is that much of the pain identified is caused by their policies. Meanwhile, the progressive left talks about processes. Important, for sure, but meaningless without delivery.
The people of the Lyme Valley: where were their voices?
At the Byline Festival, we could have heard from Silverdale residents affected by the stink. From youth workers in Knutton. From dads in Tunstall and from mums in Bentilee. From the young people at our outstanding YMCA in Hanley. There is a vibrant community sector across Stoke and Newcastle, capable of coming together quickly to set a new world record, as they did recently in our centenary celebrations. These are proud, resilient communities that are happy to talk uncomfortable truths. But as they suffer, they see little in the way of delivery. Lectures about processes towards better media, new progressive economics, and civic engagement merely highlight their increasing alienation. Or they would, if they were even there to hear. Instead, the middle classes talk to themselves over nice coffee.
As my son observed, “it should be a political discussion, and not just a bunch of people in a room that agree with each other.”
To the communities where I was raised, political processes – dominated as they are by traditional power – feel like the famous Orwellian boot, stamping on their face forever. People in places like Silverdale, Knutton, Chesterton, Blurton, and Burslem are unlikely to find relief from the day-to-day psychological stress of economic exclusion by reading higher quality journalism or participating in a citizens’ assembly, important though they may be in the long term. Egged on by algorithms serving easily digestible social media memes, injected directly through all our eyeballs by libertarian oligarchs, many people are increasingly losing faith in democracy itself. As a result, combatting populist memes and click bait has become a distraction.
Carol Vorderman delivers a message for deprived communities
Interviewed by Carole Cadwalladr in Keele’s beautiful chapel, Carol Vorderman criticised the London-centric nature of politics and called for investment in struggling working-class areas like ours. She was absolutely right. We cannot wait for deprived communities to agree with us politically. We must invest in them now. We cannot create the fiscal headroom we need by judging and punishing people even further through ill-considered and politically toxic welfare reforms. That is surely the worst kind of coercive, disapproving liberal elitism. An open goal for the far right.
Perhaps the only way to defeat the populist right is to deliver. And deliver quickly. Trust communities. Fund them properly. And pay for it by taxing the richest. As Carol Vorderman indicated from the stage with waving hands, if the billionaires choose to leave, then good riddance. Others will step up to take their place.
Trust the people not the process
As a desperately lost youth, I wrote to Keele University. Two truly wonderful men used their leadership to set aside the process and gave me access to the resources I needed to change my own life. Three years later, walking across the stage in the chapel where Carol Vorderman sat this weekend, I collected the first of my degrees thanks to their investment in me. What predominantly white working-class and deprived communities across this country need is that kind of trust and investment.
What we need now is progressive politics and politicians that offer a big positive relatable vision, leadership, and quick access to resources for tangible change – for the many, not the few.
To misquote Bob Dylan, there’s no time for one more cup of coffee, we must move our attention to the valley below.
In memorial: Dedicated to the memory of Professor John Proops, 1947 – 2024.
