The Red Shed is a simple, one-storey wooden building in Wakefield that houses a meeting place and a bar. A sign on the front wall informs the world that it has been the meeting place of the Wakefield Labour Club since 1966: “50 Years a Socialist Shed”.

I happened across this unlikely outbuilding in the course of an effort to understand the politics of modern Britain as it hurtles toward the momentous decision it will make on 8 June. Theresa May presents herself as a strong leader who can go toe-to-toe with the big boys in Brussels; if her mandate is big enough, she will be free to seek the most extreme form of Brexit. If her victory is less convincing, she will have to moderate her stance. Either way, the actual details of the deal that will determine the future of this island are anyone’s guess.

And so I have come to this city of 76,000 in West Yorkshire to see how this country on the brink compares to my own. Hanging around in the affluent and cosmopolitan areas of London wouldn’t do. To come to grips with what has been going on here required a visit to the Britannia that is not cool; the regions where people largely exist outside the lustful gaze of the world.

The history of this part of England traces the history of industrialisation, its rise and its fall. With coal and steel and textiles, Yorkshire witnessed the beginning of the industrial revolution 200 years ago. With politics and organising, it is a place where the English working class came into its own. Then, with Margaret Thatcher and the big free-market beatdown of the 1980s, this was the first corner of the western world to see how it would all come crashing down. Last year’s referendum on the European Union was a hint of what comes next, and this time the hindmost were in the forefront. Like much of the rest of northern England, Wakefield voted leave, and its residents did so by 66%.

The self-destructive qualities of the Brexit vote have been much noted, of course. In the satisfied, bankerly quarters of the country, the choice to stay in the EU was an easy one – for reasons explained at length by free-trade stalwarts such as the Economist and the New York Times. But the satisfied were outnumbered by the furious. It was the shifting allegiances of the hard-bitten post-industrial areas of Britain, historic Labour strongholds, that shocked the remainers – these are the British equivalents of rust-belt towns and the shattered mining communities of West Virginia. People in these places rallied around soundbites like “Britain has had enough of experts,” talked of insane over-regulation by faceless EU authorities in Brussels, and blamed their misfortunes – many of them brought on by Tory austerity policies – on the convenient European bogeyman.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Conservative prime minister Theresa May. Photograph: Marko Djurica/Reuters

The turn of the disgruntled against Europe presented the British right with a golden opportunity: use the ongoing Brexit process to strike a populist pose and go after the Labour party on its home turf. Making this gambit even more attractive was the perceived weakness of Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a leftwing London vegetarian whose own MPs tried to vote him out in a no-confidence motion last year.

And so it came to pass. Theresa May called a snap election for 8 June. She posed, Trump-like, as a big-league dealmaker. Underscoring her populist strategy, she presented her party’s platform in Halifax, yet another former cotton-mill town in West Yorkshire, talking up her supposed toughness as the country prepares to negotiate its divorce from the EU.

But then the Tory steamroller seemed to break down. Prime Minister May, who had called the election, flip-flopped on a range of policies and couldn’t rouse herself to show up for the televised party leaders’ debate. Meanwhile, the platform Labour drew up was sensible and popular, and Corbyn turned out to be the opposite of feeble on the campaign trail. Maybe he was the one with the unstoppable populist mojo, the country’s pundits fretted.

It is worth reminding ourselves once again of the great lesson of the Age of Trump: these days, anything is possible.

So here I was, watching another country wrestle with issues that are strikingly similar to America’s. As I travelled this part of England, I met with charity workers who have seen first-hand the effects of the Conservatives’ austerity policies; I went door-to-door with members of parliament from the Labour party; I had long conversations with candidates of the UK Independence Party (Ukip), an alternately nutty and populist outfit that, having been a driving force behind the British public’s decision to leave the EU, now sits on the political sidelines.

And, of course, I wandered about places like Wakefield – this sagging post-industrial town, with its “To Let” signs and its empty mills – and stumbled across this curious low building daubed fire-engine red. There it sits, a brightly coloured socialist haven next door to a gigantic Debenhams department store.

The Red Shed is a sort of time capsule from a more generous age, a living museum of the British left, but with real, live, beer-drinking people still inhabiting it. There is a nice selection of hand-drawn ales, their provenance explained to me by other customers. The walls above the bar are covered with commemorative plates, the sort of thing you sometimes see in fussily genteel American homes. When I looked more closely, however, I noticed that the plates were the opposite of genteel: many of them had been issued by trade unions, and what several of them commemorated were strikes. (A typical one: “National Ambulance Service Dispute, 1989-1990.”)

One action in particular stood out from the others commemorated here: the apocalyptic coal miners’ strike of 1984-85, when mineworkers fought the downsizing and eventual termination of their industry at the hands of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. The strike is the subject of a triptych painting that hangs in the Red Shed, and is also commemorated by a hunk of coal mounted on a piece of wood that sits next to the bar.

As I proceeded from town to town in this part of England in the days that followed, the miners’ strike came up again and again. Without any prompting from me, people mentioned where they were when it happened, how they felt about it, what it signified.

And what did it signify? One answer was suggested by something a patron of the Red Shed told me: that “industry has been deliberately run down in this area”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ornamental plates commemorating strikes hung on the walls of the Wakefield Labour Club, also known as The Red Shed. Photograph: Jon Super/The Guardian

The ending of a way of life here was not the doing of the godlike forces of capital, but instead the deliberate result of a government campaign to destroy the power of workers – of ordinary people – and to put the country on a track that was more in keeping with the free-market ideology.

The viewpoint I just described is one you don’t often hear in the US these days. We think it is ancient and obsolete, and besides, very few American liberals sympathise with the coal mining industry. But there is also something refreshing and healthy and even populist about this perspective, emphasising as it does the obvious role of political struggle and human agency in economic developments – that it’s not just an invisible hand making all the decisions for us. This is an understanding that has proven increasingly difficult for Americans to grasp as the years have gone by. Maybe we all need to spend a few evenings at the Red Shed.

Rob and Spyder were the names of two men I met in the socialist shed; their taste in beer ran to Czech Budweiser Budvar, a choice of which I approved.

We bonded over an improbable but nevertheless real shared taste in a certain species of punk music from the 1970s and early 80s. Both of them, I discovered, were partial admirers of Trump – our ridiculous president comes up in nearly every conversation here.

As we spoke about bands such as Sham 69, a TV screen on the wall played vintage pop videos by the likes of Musical Youth. Here we were, three men in our 50s, drinking and talking about the youth culture of long ago.

It wasn’t a political conversation per se, but thinking about it a week later, it seems like everything that happened that night at the Red Shed came through a kind of time warp– as if the building itself was a sort of beacon from the past, flashing a warning light on the eve of this momentous election.

One of the aspects of English public life that surprises an American like me is that, in this country so closely related to ours, there exists a mass constituency for a form of politics that in the US is regarded as being far outside the bracket of the acceptable. In the parts of Yorkshire where I travelled, I learned that it is perfectly commonplace for people to call themselves socialists, to argue for the nationalisation of the rail network, and to expect government to pay for people’s healthcare. Every day while I was here, I was astonished anew by some example of this sort of thing.

The issues that should be propelling Labour back into power are obvious. Mounting student debt seems to drive people crazy here, just as it does in the US. The austerity that Conservative governments have inflicted on the nation for seven years has hollowed out public services, including hospitals and schools; it is deeply unpopular and should in any sensible universe be immediately reversed. Even the recent terrorist attacks in Manchester and London have served to play up the folly of austerity, with Labour politicians pounding away at the Tories for the cuts they made to police forces.

Unfortunately, the Labour party’s race to the top is considerably slowed by a heavy legacy of past mistakes. We have all heard by now the loud criticism of Corbyn, but I also listened to people who were still pissed off about the preceding Labour party regime – the Clintonesque “Third Way” crowd – for its role in the Iraq war, the bank bailouts, and accepting the terms of Thatcherism.

The biggest stumbling block of all is Brexit. In Wakefield, where I accompanied Labour MP Mary Creagh as she went door-to-door in a neighbourhood of council housing, I heard a woman of around 65 declare that what she cared about most was breaking completely with the EU. This woman seemed to understand the domestic issues. “I don’t like what the Conservatives are doing,” she allowed, “but I want out.”

“I’ve worked all my life,” she continued; she had always voted Labour, she said; and she knew that “the economy of this city’s bad”, but “I still want out. I want a hard Brexit.” I heard similar statements probably a dozen times in the short time that I was in England.

Brexit is obviously the perfect wedge for separating the Labour party from its traditional supporters, but driving that wedge home is not as simple as it might seem. For one thing, it requires someone more acceptable to those voters than a representative of the Conservative party, which is widely hated in the part of the country I visited. Enter Ukip, which drew in disaffected voters from across the political spectrum by campaigning on a single issue: a dislike of the EU.

Ukip got its way on that single issue last year in the Brexit referendum last year, but in winning that great victory it would also seem to have rendered itself obsolete. The question for 2017 is where Ukip’s voters will go next. Back to their traditional allegiances? Or, as Tory strategists clearly hope, perhaps Ukip is a sort of gateway drug for Theresa May’s version of conservatism – a British parallel to the “Southern Strategy” by which Richard Nixon and his Republican successors peeled away millions of Democratic voters.

Complicating the question slightly is the confusing nature of Ukip. For the most part, it is a Trumpian outfit whose best-known leader was a London commodities trader. The party’s official views verge on the xenophobic, if not downright unhinged. But, as I discovered, some of its representatives are also capable of coming across as leftish, if not downright proletarian.

I got a glimpse of this curious amalgam at a radio debate I attended between politicians in Sheffield, one of the few large cities in England to vote leave in last year’s referendum. The showdown was held in a well-known local nightclub and was chaired by a local media personality named Harry Gration. Five parties were represented on stage: a guy from Ukip, a Green, and a Liberal Democrat, in addition to Labour and the Tories. The idea was to quiz them all on issues of interest to young people, a sampling of which demographic filled the nightclub in question.

An incumbent MP from the area, the Labour party’s Louise Haigh, won my vote (had I been a voter here, that is) with the contest’s very first question, when she was asked to describe herself in three words and chose “red-haired socialist”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sheffield Ukip councillor John Booker (left) being interviewed by Thomas Frank (right). Photograph: Jon Super/The Guardian

John Booker, a Ukip member of Sheffield city council, was the only man in the room wearing a tie. Middle-aged, with a shaved head, a blue suit and a shiny pound sterling pin badge on his lapel, Booker quickly established himself as a man of forceful views and colourful expression. He did not stand up for many of Ukip’s more extreme official positions – he let pass, for example, the opportunity to blame the recent Manchester terrorist attack on Islam or immigration. He also had a skill for one-liners. “Democracy may be expensive,” he said, in explaining his support for Brexit, “but it’s worth it in the long run.” I also liked the twist he put on a famous saying of Trotsky’s: “When you say you’re not interested in politics, believe me, politics is interested in you.”

The show concluded after an hour, and an audience member approached Booker with a handwritten question he had not been able to ask during the debate. I was struck by this young man’s appearance: he had a painful-looking purple bruise under one eye – not the ordinary look for a politics enthusiast back in the US. He described himself to me as “a jobseeker”; his question read as follows:

Three out of four newly created jobs go to immigrants. Therefore, even if leaving the single market to stop immigration caused us to create only half as many jobs, we would still double the number of British workers getting new jobs. Do you agree, then, that leaving the single market would be good for British workers?



Booker didn’t really answer it. Instead, he led me over to a nearby parking garage where we climbed into his red Hyundai van, which had a Carling lager bar towel on the dashboard and was filled with tools and equipment from his day job as a seller and installer of domestic appliances. Booker seemed to be a man of tremendous self-confidence. “I have the logic of an ordinary working man,” he said as we drove through Sheffield. He bitterly criticised the US military-industrial complex and described Donald Trump as a “big child”. But American liberals, in his telling, were no better. They say, “‘let’s open the borders’, and they go back to the gated community, got walls all around them”, he explained. A little while later, on a completely different subject, he told me that “corporate America rules the world”.



Booker had similarly conflicted opinions about British politics, as I discovered when we repaired to a pub for a few pints of bitter. For starters, and like nearly everyone else I met on my trip to Yorkshire, he strongly disapproved of Conservatives. Anyone in this area “who’s thinking of voting Tory, they must be mad”, he declared. Again: “Never trust a Tory.” And again: “Tory is a four-letter word.”

But even though Booker called the Labour party “the best thing that ever happened to the working men of this country”, he now feels that Labour has turned its back on its own voters. The party used to be against the EU, he pointed out. “Strongly against it. They said it would flood our market with unskilled cheap labour – and that’s exactly what happened.” The EU, he said later, “makes the wealthy people wealthier … and it makes the poorer people poorer”. And when Labour ceased to oppose the EU, the party “was losing its core values … they let the workers down.”

John Booker’s chances of being elected to parliament are not great, but his disaffection from the Labour party is worth taking seriously. It is, after all, the characteristic sentiment of the moment and, while it is clearly not Booker’s intent, it is precisely this sort of disgruntlement that could result in five more years of Tory austerity.

Waiting for a train in the steel town of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire: two little kids are playing in the empty station, pretending to be this familiar superhero and that. Then they come up with one that puzzles me: “I’m Donald Trump!” – a superhero whose devastating power appears to be passing wind in the direction of his adversary.

Later the mystery is explained to me: “Trump” is British slang for “fart”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labour candidate Holly Lynch campaigning in Halifax, West Yorkshire. Photograph: Jon Super/The Guardian

Grimsby is an old fishing town in Lincolnshire that has become famous for its decline, poverty and assorted economic misfortunes. A few years ago a Channel 4 TV show titled Skint was filmed here, giving affluent viewers an exciting peep into the lives of the town’s sex workers, petty criminals and unemployed people. It was “poverty porn”, critics charged, but the region’s decline was not imaginary. Grimsby’s main business street, I found when I visited, is lined with closed shops, and over its downtown hovers a set of empty high-rises – failed public housing developments that were closed several years ago. Kim Ward, who is a manager at a local branch of a charity named Christian Action Resource Enterprise, told me that Grimsby’s appearance has deteriorated with the years of austerity: “Litter, clothes chucked about, stuff discarded … [the town’s] got that feeling of being derelict.”

Ward is extremely knowledgeable about the intricate workings of the British welfare state, thanks to her job dealing with the town’s most unfortunate people. Although the system appears generous, she said, the reality is that there are hundreds of holes through which such people can fall – and those holes are being enlarged all the time.

The conversation turned, of course, to Brexit. The district in which Grimsby is located voted 66% for leave. (The demise of Britain’s fishing industry has become one of Ukip’s signature grievances.) What’s more, this utterly proletarian town is now a marginal constituency, meaning a battleground where the Tories have a chance to take a seat away from Labour.

Knowing that I was interested in politics, Ward had quizzed her charity’s clients on the subject of Brexit before my visit. Most of them had no view on last year’s referendum; many didn’t even know what it was. But one was apparently quite ready to explain it. I transcribed their remarks directly from Ward’s notes:

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alexander Dock in Grimsby, a town on England’s east coast whose residents voted 66% in favour of Brexit. Photograph: Alamy

I didn’t vote in the EU referendum as I was working away – the migration of labour that came here in the factories that rubbed people up the wrong ways as they were scared – they just wanted it to slow down.

Ward herself voted leave, she told me, along with the majority of workers at the charity. For her, it was a reaction to the EU’s regulatory policies on food, appliances, light bulbs, and so on. “I’ve never felt so over-regulated,” she said, looking at me directly with piercing blue eyes. Moving away from the subject of the EU, she told the story of a nearby hospital where a megaphone outside constantly repeats a recording instructing people not to smoke. “It’s Orwellian,” she said. “And the CCTV everywhere. It’s never felt like this for me.”



To an American, this kind of talk is an immediate signal that you’re chatting with a rightwinger, or a libertarian at the very least. That was obviously not the case with Ward. She told me that she comes from a Labour background, and related her hopes that Corbyn will be the country’s next prime minister. “I think Jeremy Corbyn is so refreshing – so different from every politician we’ve seen.”

The conversation moved on to a trip she took recently to London. Somehow this woman who works with homeless people in Grimsby ended up staying in a hotel in Mayfair, one of the richest neighbourhoods in one of the world’s richest cities. Ward was unprepared for what unfolded around her: “Shop windows [declaring] ‘We will build your yacht for you.’ Phenomenal wealth, the likes of which I’ve never seen.”

The coal mines are all gone from around Barnsley, South Yorkshire, along with glass-making, steel and textiles. The closure of the mines has left the town looking bedraggled, with the empty buildings and storefronts that I have become accustomed to in my tour. A report produced by the local council declares Barnsley to be the “39th-most deprived local authority” in the country; the town voted 68% for leave, making it also one of the leaviest locales in the country.

The city’s impressive limestone town hall has a plaza dedicated to the memory of the “Barnsley Pals”, two first world war army battalions of home-town friends who suffered horrifying casualties on the first day of the Somme campaign. Inside is a memorial to a different but by now familiar martyrdom: a wall hanging made by local schoolkids patterned (according to an explanatory placard) after “banners each colliery carried when returning to work at the end of the miners’ strike in the 1980s”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A banner made by local schoolchildren at Barnsley town hall. Photograph: Jon Super/The Guardian

Similar memories seem to jump out around every corner. Enter the Experience Barnsley museum, for example, and you are immediately confronted by a different colliery banner, this one depicting a miner mounting a sort of heavenly staircase toward a glowing orb marked “Socialism”. But on your way out of town, you pass a reminder of the real future toward which British workers are advancing – not a shining socialist sun, but a gigantic modern warehouse belonging to Asos, the online fashion retailer that is known for its snappy delivery.

Less well known is the journalism over the last few years criticising working conditions at the warehouse. Yet the bill of complaints lodged against the company is instantly familiar to anyone who knows anything about the online fulfilment business. It includes flexible contracts, under which a worker’s hours can change at short notice; an invasive surveillance regime; exhausting physical work against punishing deadlines; and lots of migrant workers apparently hailing from central Europe.

None of these charges is unique to Asos, of course. Almost exactly the same criticisms have been directed at Amazon, Sports Direct and Wal-Mart. Powerlessness and exploitation sold as “flexibility” – they’re the future, your future, and as it happens they’re right down the street from your past: the abandoned Grimethorpe colliery, one of the mines where workers fought Thatcher in the 1980s and lost everything.

A sign in front of the Asos warehouse urges people to travel something called the “Road to Zero”. I suspect this slogan was meant as a traffic-safety exhortation, but it makes just as much sense as a commentary on the direction of history. The world of empowered workers that those Grimethorpe miners once dreamed of slips ever farther away.

Or rather, it is being swept away, by an enlightened new world of globalised markets with a populist narrative all its own: each of us, voting with our dollars, clickety-clicking global citizens in a thriving, borderless, online democracy in which every distinction is a matter of taste, and in which all tastes are created equal. It is not a coincidence, I think, that the Asos warehouse is just about the only building I saw in my entire time in England that was flying the flag of the EU.

Theresa May unveiled the Conservative party’s manifesto in the Yorkshire town of Halifax, an area that voted leave and is one of the biggest battleground districts in this year’s general election contest. The woman in that battleground’s crosshairs is the local MP, Labour’s Holly Lynch, who is 30 years old, with vivid red hair and often a cellphone jammed into the back pocket of her jeans. She had been canvassing voters for seven weeks when I met her a week before Britain’s big day, and exhaustion was the result. Still, she headed out for another go, and I tagged along.

We walked through a neighbourhood of old terraced homes, light-brown stone dusted with centuries of coal smoke. One had a sundial over the door, a Latin inscription and a date: 1709. Some had laundry drying on the line; nearly all had roses or something else in magnificent bloom – rhododendrons, bellflowers, you name it. The sun was low in the sky and the light was golden. For an American, it was a kind of ideal image of England.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labour party activists campaigning in Halifax in West Yorkshire. Photograph: Jon Super/The Guardian

But politics is a frustrating business. At one house, Lynch was met by an older woman who sternly rebuffed her appeal. She doesn’t like Jeremy Corbyn. She doesn’t like all the benefits that people get. At another house, a newer one, another voter also objected to Corbyn, this time after protesting that her ancestors had a hand in building the Labour party. At a third, another former Labour voter, said the party “shouldn’t have let the bankers carry on like they did”. He was to the left, but with the next breath he seemed to the right, saying, “I just think Theresa’s the one to take us through this Brexit”.

But Lynch was persistent. She tried to persuade voters to her side and succeeded several times. One man was concerned about crime and ready to hear the argument that the Tories’ cutting has gone too far. Another, a 22-year-old worker, made an almost perfect conversion story. “Can you raise the minimum wage?,” he asked. Yes, the party will try. Can you get better childcare? Yes again. I was astonished to hear him then say, “You’re gonna fight for us then, us young’uns.” And then, a little later: “Right. I’ll vote for you. How do you vote?”

The polls tell us that the Conservatives have a good chance of taking seats from Labour in several of the beaten-down districts I have described here. If that comes to pass, it will represent something remarkable and yet increasingly familiar in this modern world: a shift of working-class votes toward the Tories, the party so many people here say they hate, the party that did so much to damage their region in the 1980s. The damage will roll on, of course, with the pointless policy of austerity getting yet another renewal. There will be many to blame for such a Trumpesque catastrophe, should it happen – including the current and previous Labour leaderships – but the real culprit will remain the same as always: the western world’s misguided response to the economic challenges of recent years.

In the course of this essay, I have described a few of the reasons I heard for voting to leave the EU, but there are countless others I haven’t mentioned: fear of the power of Germany, fear of some kind of neo-Bonapartism, and so on. What they all have in common is that none of them is particularly convincing and some of them are flatly specious.

I suspect the truth is something more blunt, something symbolic, something captured in that image of the Asos warehouse flying the EU flag. It is simply this: as Britain advances down the Road to Zero, as its average, working-class citizens find themselves losing more power over their lives, as austerity deepens, and as they watch their way of life crumble, they will (like we Americans) grab at any chance they are offered to take a swing at society’s winners.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Road to Zero sign outside an Asos warehouse near Barnsley in Yorkshire. Photograph: Jon Super/The Guardian

That Brexit will do little to restrain those winners, and will instead injure the people of Barnsley, Grimsby and Sheffield, is almost certainly true. That it will result in yet another triumph of the hated Tories seems highly likely. That it will conclude in outright disaster like the miners’ strike of 30 years ago is also very possible.

But it is not hard to understand. Just as in America, a certain chunk of the British ruling clique now traces its legitimacy to its globalist enlightenment and an intimate familiarity with the thinking of the new-economy god. They meet every year at Davos; they conjecture about the nature of creativity and how innovation will save the world; and in happier times they swooned for the idea that Britain’s great national virtue was its coolness. And it is bullshit, all of it.

But there was much that I found refreshing in the north of England. For example: almost no one boasted about their university education. Many of the people I talked to had indeed collected university degrees, but with only a few exceptions, no one mentioned this unless you asked them about it directly. Absolutely no one talked about their kids’ test scores or shared their anxieties about early admission or boasted about being accepted at some highly selective liberal arts college. Indeed, the whole great honking meritocratic scramble that defines life for people in our wealthy American suburbs was simply absent in the neighbourhoods I visited.

Another difference: in America, the paramount problem with the news media is its annoying professional-class assumptions. But in the United Kingdom the problem is shrieking rightwing hysteria, with each conservative tabloid seeking to outdo the next with panic and doomsday and offence-taking and (basically) JEREMY CORBYN’S SECRET PLANS TO UNDERMINE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER KNOWN AND LOVED. Take a Republican party direct-mail letter spreading alarm about INSANE GUN-GRABBING LIBS and turn it into a nation’s means of exchanging information and you’ve pretty much got the idea.

When I try to put my finger on exactly what separates Britain and America, a story I heard in a pub outside Sheffield keeps coming back to me. A man was telling me of how he had gone on vacation to Florida, and at one point stopped to refuel his car in a rural area. As he was standing there, an old man rode up to the gas station on a bicycle and started rummaging through a trash can. The Englishman asked him why he was doing this, and was astonished to learn the man was digging for empty cans in order to support his family.

The story is unremarkable in its immediate details. People rummaging through trash for discarded cans is something that every American has seen many times. What is startling is that here’s a guy in Yorkshire, a place we Americans pity for its state of perma-decline, relating this story to me in tones of incomprehension and even horror. He simply couldn’t believe it. Left unasked was the obvious question: what kind of civilisation allows such a fate to befall its citizens? The answer, of course, is a society where social solidarity has almost completely evaporated.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A street sign in Halifax. Photograph: Jon Super/The Guardian

What most impressed me about the England I saw was the opposite: a feeling I encountered, again and again, that whatever happens, people are all in this together. Solidarity was one of the great themes after the terrorist bombing in Manchester, as the city came together around the victims in a truly impressive way, but it goes much further than that. It is the sense you get that the country is somehow obliged to help out the people of the deindustrialised zones and is failing in its duty. It is an understanding that every miner or job-seeker or person with dementia has a moral claim upon the rest of the English nation and its government. It is an assumption that their countrymen will come to their rescue if only they could hear their cries for help.

I hope Britain can hold on to that sensibility. But as the country travels the Road to Zero, I predict this saving dream will eventually fade away, that what has dawned on millions of American workers in the last few decades will eventually dawn here as well. People will look out over those mine-scarred Yorkshire hills, those first world war monuments, those rows of crumbling terraced homes, and realise that the distant people who rule them simply do not give a damn.

Main image by Jon Super for the Guardian

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