In northeast England, an hour south of Newcastle next to the beautiful Yorkshire Dales, sits the post-industrial city of Middlesbrough. Its story is that of the country’s industrial rise and fall.
250 years ago, Middlesbrough was a speck on the map. Coal mining and steel and iron production propelled its rapid ascent into a thriving hub of British industry 100 years later. Like many cities and towns of England’s north, it transformed the country’s economy from an agricultural to an industrial one. It employed millions and served as the furnace of the imperial engine.
It’s also where my mother was born and raised. Her father, Alfred Shaw, left school at age 12 to work. A mechanic with the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, he went on to serve as a foreman in a dairy, and then to British Steel until retirement. My grandmother cut hair for extra money and raised my mother and aunt. She wanted to get out of council housing in Middlesbrough into a privately-built home in nearby Martin in Cleveland.
My grandparents were modest members of a community. Men would go to the factories together, their children to school together and, on Sundays, families to church together. Their stories are testament to a quiet northern resolve.
London, southern England and Britain’s aristocrats were another world to them. What these northern working-class families sensed, and perhaps still do, is that England’s south and upper class viewed them with snobbery and even disdain – if they thought of them at all.
Economic Contraction
The situation for the average family in Middlesbrough since the end of World War II remains dire. The humming sounds of Teesside Steelworks where my grandfather and his father before him worked have long been silent. Real income adjusted to 2015 pound sterling is revealing: in 1949, the average family earned just over 150,000 pounds a year compared to nearly 21,000 pounds today. Drug use and drug mortality rates are among the highest in the United Kingdom. The city’s unemployment rate is above the national average.
The 1970s were catastrophic for the United Kingdom. The Second World War didn’t just bankrupt the country; the dissolution of its empire meant that Britain’s access to those former colonial markets came to an end.
Meanwhile, militant trade unionism continued to make demands for higher wages that wholly uncompetitive industries, like British Steel, could not support. The country was roiled by significant unemployment, strikes and power outages – even the trash wasn’t picked up. Britain needed radical change which came in the form of the now famous shop-keeper’s daughter, Margaret Thatcher. She promised to clean house and fix the economy. She accomplished that goal. But while those market reforms were needed, they did little in the short term to provide relief in the north or endear the north’s working class to the Conservative party.
Dramatic Political Shifts
This decades-long economic contraction has altered the quiet, northern resolve into a loud scream and rebellion that has turned into political power. Today parts of the north are seen as the most important voting blocs in the United Kingdom. Once reliably Labour, these regions have changed as their economy, way of life and place in the future Britain have changed.
Since the Thatcher revolution and the ensuing “new Labour” years of Tony Blair (which saw no real attempt to change things in the north, despite Tony Blair having a seat in Sedgefield), the region has in recent years started to move away from the traditional Labour-Tory paradigm of British politics, opening the door to a new, different breed of political cause.
In the early 2010s, cracks in Labour’s hold over the region began to spread. The UK Independence Party – or UKIP – under the leadership of Nigel Farage began to flourish, fueled by European skepticism and questions over mass migration. Former steelworkers and miners and their families, who felt long abandoned by London politicians after decades of false promises, made their anger clear in a sequence of regional elections and referendums – moving away from Labour and towards new upstart causes.
That simmering anger played into the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. In the 2016 referendum, the north overwhelmingly voted to leave. The slogan – “Take Back Control” – resonated with millions from Newcastle to Bradford. In Middlesbrough, 65.5 percent voted to leave. Labour’s demand – “Remain” – failed and the party’s hold over the region, known as the Red Wall, broke.
In 2019, the north backed Boris Johnson and his pro-Brexit Conservative Party, gifting the newly radicalized Tories dozens of seats in Parliament. It was no surprise then that this was the first time a Tory won the Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland.
After five years of failure to change, the Tories are – at least for now – not trusted with the north’s vote. And the quiet revolution shows no sign of abating. In 2024, the newly named Reform Party – formerly UKIP – for the first time was elected to Parliament. Fueled by anger over the state of Great Britain, Reform surged to second place across the country, notably in the north. A Survation poll conducted ahead of the soon-to-be held May 2025 local elections found that 68 percent of “Red Wall” regions believe Britain is broken. Both the Labour and Conservative parties are under threat.
The Labour government’s recent decision to take over the last remaining operational steel mill in Scunthrope shows the political potency of steel to England’s identity. Its closure would have been an ignoble end to Britain’s once proud industrial past. The government action is a direct appeal to working voters, a key constituency for Labour, Conservative and Reform parties alike.
Maybe this rebellion is in character for a region with a different identity dating back to the Viking settlement in the 9th century. Indeed, in the 16th century, the Pilgrimage of Grace rose up out of Yorkshire against Henry VIII and his split with the Catholic Church and the subsequent dissolution of the monasteries.
While Henry VIII could dispatch forces to crush the rebellion, in today’s Britain, the powers of Westminster and Parliament will have to find another way. Either they will seek to address the real economic hardships that people are facing in Middlesbrough and across the region or they will be supplanted – and this time by a political party that is well outside of the mainstream.
