Progressive Politics Beyond Cities

In recent months, Reform has taken a polling lead over Labour in a huge swathe of post-industrial seats, from the South Wales valleys to the Midlands coalfields to the erstwhile steel hubs of the North East.^[1] In the post-industrial town I know best,  Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, some models have Farage’s party at 48 per cent of the vote.^[2] If the Government wants to survive it will need to make big changes and fast — but what can it do? When Britain feels broken to so many, how can a progressive government effect palpable change outside of the big cities? I focus here on England, sketching the outlines of an idea that could provide a route for social mobility, revive town centres and help save the NHS.  

Much of the sense of hopelessness in post-industrial England can be traced back to the long fallout from deindustrialisation. In North Nottinghamshire, where I have conducted ethnographic research and interviews over the past five years, the last pit only closed in 2015. Economists have found that former miners typically saw their hourly wages fall by 40 per cent and earnings by as much as 80 to 90 per cent one year after redundancy.^[3]

This loss of income has proven large and persistent. The children and grandchildren of former miners and factory workers continue to feel the effects, as many ex-industrial towns, including Mansfield, score poorly on social mobility indicators.^[4] The combination of deindustrialisation and austerity has proven especially devastating. “There are many things they don’t tell you”, one ex-miner and union official told me. “I mean, the bursaries on the nurses.” When his daughter first trained, prospective nurses received a bursary to cover fees and maintenance costs, but since 2017, they have had to pay their own way. Several people in Mansfield cited this as an example of the uncaringness of the state.  

And it is not just about jobs. When interviewing former textile workers in Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire, the women all told me about the buzz — the life, the excitement, the noise of the town centre. On a Friday afternoon the bus from the factory would drop the textile workers off near the market, and from there they would cut a route through town, stopping off at seven, eight, even nine pubs. At every bar the queue would be five deep. Imagine the most thriving high street you know, with a bustling market, pubs and clubs. Now imagine that, in 25 years’ time, it is all but abandoned. That makes for a discombobulating experience —one common to many post-industrial towns, whose shared spaces, markets and high streets have declined even while the towns have added to their populations through newbuild housing along their fringes.  

People also spoke about the loss of medical facilities. Some factories had their own medical clinics and certainly many of the local pits did — if you had an accident, you would often go to the pit nurse, not the hospital. It is one of the many ways in which decline is felt. The former textile workers and miners are growing older and increasingly finding their bodies failing them after a life of toil. When they fall ill or develop pains, they must bear long waits to access care, which are only worsened by a regeneration strategy which has seen new housing built but not the public service infrastructure needed to support it. There is so much to love in Mansfield — the community spirit at its allotments, the dry humour of its residents and the beautiful Sherwood Forest nearby. But the loss of opportunity, conviviality and care have led many people to believe, with some cause, that things can only ever get worse, which is poison to progressive politics.  

What if there were a way to tackle all three problems at once? A large investment in local education provision, especially nursing education, would be a major win on all three fronts. Above all, progressives ought to think of underused town centres not primarily as a political problem, but as sites of possibility, which can be democratically reimagined and remade to meet our needs and desires. Even smaller towns continue to be important nodes in bus, rail and road networks, which makes them ideal locations for many forms of social provision. In particular, they might be reshaped not around shops that people no longer visit, but as hubs of leisure, education and care.  

To turn things around, towns require anchor institutions to draw people in. In many places, universities fulfil this role, while generating considerable employment too. But not every place can have a university. We need a strategy for the next tier of town; Telford, Rochdale and Mansfield, for instance. These places are usually home to Further Education colleges which have often delivered great work against daunting odds. However, policymakers have failed to think strategically about how to leverage the life and the buzz that students bring. It means that the college campus is often on a motorway on the way out of town and not in the town centre, where it might invigorate the streets, the squares and the pubs.  

Thinking through town centres as sites of opportunity invites us to consider the social needs they might meet. For example, the country as a whole has a desperate need for more training places for nurses. The Long Term Workforce Plan,  published by NHS England in 2023, envisions that the NHS nursing workforce in England will have to grow to approximately 550,000 nurses in 2036/37, up from some 350,000 nurses in 2023.^[5]  

The Royal College of Nursing has expressed scepticism at the ambition of the plan, which does not seem to be matched by appropriate resources.^[6] Training all the new nurses will require a considerable expansion of training capacity and facilities. Training places are supposed to almost double,^[7] but applications have been falling for years, in what has been described as a hammer blow for NHS reforms.^[8] Continued failure to train and recruit enough nurses will lead to intensifying bottlenecks throughout the health service. Curbs on immigration will only intensify the pressures.  

The last government made an underfunded promise to provide some 24,000 more nurse and midwife training places a year by 2031. An additional £600 million was earmarked for training more doctors and nurses, but this has proven insufficient to achieve the ambitions set out in the Plan. What if this Government doubled the investment to deliver on the dream? 24,000 training places could translate into roughly 50 new nursing colleges with 500 yearly places. Through partnerships with existing regional universities, many could be set up in the largest towns in Britain that currently offer fewer post-16 options. A few hundred trainee nurses would breathe life into many a town centre. Iconic abandoned buildings, including beloved former department stores, could be taken into public ownership and retrofitted to be sites of learning.

Acquiring and retrofitting centrally located sites will be more expensive than throwing together a newbuild on a remote stretch, however taking the path of least resistance would be a missed opportunity. Executed well, this plan would amount to a comprehensive package to strengthen the NHS and save town centres and provide an avenue for social mobility. The policy package would also be genuinely popular. By putting underused town centres in the service of learning, they cease to be a policy headache and become the seed for a popular reform agenda.  

This would require, first, the restoration of the bursary for nursing education, perhaps attached to a commitment to work for the NHS for a set number of years. Second, the expansion of nursing training places. Third, a commitment to creating these educational facilities in town centres. At present, Mansfield’s post-16 education provider is predominantly located on the edge of town. The college has started to run some of its adult learner courses in unused retail units in the shopping centre and initiatives like these deserve to be scaled up dramatically.  

The town centre is full of beautiful buildings which stand empty. Where these are in private hands, they could be brought into public ownership and refurbished to become spaces for learning, with hundreds of young people and adult learners bringing the buzz back in.  

How to pay for all of this? There is a political opportunity in national insurance. Although essentially another form of tax, it is popularly associated with health care spend. By extending national insurance contributions to landlords’ rents, shareholder dividends and other forms of investment income we could pay for the ambitious plans outlined here.  

Arun Advani, of the University of Warwick, has calculated that levying national insurance on the incomes of landlords, shareholders and people with other investment income could raise £10 billion a year.^[9] This would be a progressive form of taxation, in line with the spirit and history of national insurance, which would provide ample funding for nursing education, while also creating scope for other large health-related investments, such as in social care.  

Reform feeds on the sense that Britain is broken. Every new price increase at the supermarket, every boarded-up shop, every demoralising day at a bad job deepens this sense of brokenness. For this reason alone, progressives need to pursue big policy ideas which force a shift in who can access opportunities and who pays for them.  

Having spoken to so many people in Mansfield, I can picture exactly who would see their lives improved by the nursing colleges:  the woman for whom a steady nursing job would mean the possibility of leaving a bad partner. Then, as the life returns to town centre, the former textile worker who has stopped visiting the pub she used to love because the place makes her too sad. Then, down the line, as new nurses enter the workforce, the warehouse worker with the bad back and everyone else who needs to be able to get a GP appointment at short notice.  

These are not hypothetical cases — they are real people, and this policy programme would offer them hope. Every big policy drive comes with its risks, but the bigger danger lies in leaving things as they are.