My birthplace: how Chesterfield changed under Conservative rule
As Labour returns to power for the first time in 14 years, the Guardian asked three writers to describe how their home cities have changed under Tory rule – and the challenges Keir Starmer now faces. Today, Sunjeev Sahota describes what happened to Chesterfield.
I grew up in Chesterfield, which is the second most deprived district in Derbyshire (just surpassed by Bolsover) according to 2019 analysis by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Almost a third of the city’s 69 wards, including the area where I grew up, are in the top 20% of the country’s most deprived wards.
A composite memory: the morning light dribbling as I watch Dad come home from work at the mill, in time to help Mum open the shop. A few houses down, a neighbour, an ex-miner, looks defeated as he gets into his car and heads for the supermarket where he works the trolleys. And here is Jayne, the kind, ever-smiling woman, taking a last sip of vodka and hiding the miniature bottle in her handbag as she sets off, shaking with the effort not to shake, to clean the pub. She will be found dead on her sofa the year I go to university.
Looking more closely at the different forms of disadvantage during the previous government, the following has emerged: between 2015 and 2019, the percentage of urban areas in the top 20% most deprived areas in the country increased from 26% to 34% for income disadvantage, from 35% to 40% for employment disadvantage, and from 51% to 60% for health disadvantage.
I went to Springwell community school. The last four Ofsted reports have deemed the school “requires improvement”. It has never been rated “good”, let alone “outstanding”. The school’s leaky concrete blocks were demolished in 2011 and replaced by a new site. However, shinier buildings have done nothing to change the fact that “the percentage of pupils eligible for free school meals is above average”. There was a boy at school, D, who called me all the usual names and told me to go back to all the usual places. Things got out of hand and we had a fight. After that, although his racism remained, he seemed to tone it down: mispronouncing my name, not giving me a worksheet – microaggressions, in today’s jargon. One morning, maybe in Year 8 – so around 1993 – everyone laughed at D, who was wiping away angry tears: he had made the mistake of admitting that he had eaten his cornflakes with tap water.
Chesterfield now has more children like D: child poverty in the town was 29% in 2014 and 36% by 2023. Much of this is Thatcher’s legacy and the industrial decimation and structural unemployment she presided over. That the right despises the working class – and scapegoats the cultural other – is not news. What workers in the 1980s perhaps did not predict was the extent to which the nominal left in this country would turn on them too, the extent to which a Work Leadership would further advance the neoliberal turn in our politics, pushing workers out of the organized left and creating a professionalized middle class.
Chesterfield voted by a 60% majority to leave the EU. This professionalised, academic, cultural left made – and continues to make – no attempt to show such voters that what plagues their lives are the same problems that plague the lives of black and brown poor and working people; nor does this left understand the role that class struggle has always played in changing people’s prejudices, in forging solidarity and in combating racism. Instead, this left tells everyone that they should understand their grievances primarily through the lens of their cultural identity, and then it berates Chesterfield’s Leave voters and tells them to just stop being racist. From the standpoint of political discourse, the last 14 years of Tory government have seen left and right entrench the belief that battles for social justice must be fought on the basis of culture and identity – for the obvious reason that arguing about culture in no way challenges the neoliberal status quo that privileges elites on both sides.
Chesterfield remains a betrayed, empty town. Its centre, from which even its bent spire now seems to turn away, is a stark silence, full of beleaguered women and men with long gazes. It is no accident that these towns are usually referred to as ‘former’ – former mining towns, former market towns, former heartlands. Formerly important, former valued, former alive.
In that sense, the cost of living crisis hasn’t changed much. A city that was on its knees is now on its face. But the term “cost of living crisis” is telling. Because when have the poor and the working class ever not been in a cost-of-living crisis? When have they ever not struggled to pay the bills, feed their children, buy and heat their homes? It seems that a crisis only occurs when the middle and working classes are struggling; only then does something need to be done. I don’t remember anyone giving a damn when my parents were struggling to keep a roof over their heads, when D added water to his cereal. Yet perhaps some good has come out of this crisis, if the middle class now finds that their class privileges are not as robust as they once thought; and when they now stand in the discount aisles next to a member of the working poor, they may even be shamed into showing some solidarity, rather than contempt.
The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota is published by Harvill Secker