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1Where We Are & How We Got Here
2- A quick run down of the last 50 years
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4Disclaimer: This piece of writing is my own account, based on my own perceptions and experiences. I will not include sources therefore it is truthful and honest but not factual.
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6I’m the son of rage and love. Born to a striking miner and a shop worker in the Durham in the winter of 1984-85. Without the stubborn attitudes of Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher I wouldn’t be here but the story really begins a few years earlier.
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8In 70’s, there were strikes. Lots of them and they hit hard. Obviously I wasn’t around so can’t comment on who was right or wrong but by the end of it the country was in a state with power cuts happening and bodies left unburied. The government folded, the miners and everyone else went back to work and the unions had proved their power.
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10Around this time, Britain had a referendum on whether to stay in the EEC. This was an organisation, which my parents were told, would make trade easier between European countries and wouldn’t really make any difference otherwise.
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12You have to remember that at this time there was no Internet. News was spread via the papers, chat in the pubs and working-men’s clubs and over the fence in the back yard among women putting the washing out. My mother would tell an amusing anecdote that my father’s family were completely unaware of the entire cold war happening until she mentioned it on a date one time.
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14Never the less, I’m proud to say that my father didn’t believe the lies around the banality of the EEC, predicting accurately it’s morph into the EU years later. However his vote and those of others like him wasn’t enough and we stayed part of the organisation. This was when a young man named Nigel Farage, also seeing where we were heading decided to pack in his job as a commodities trader and dedicate his career to keeping Britain sovereign.
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16A few years later, more strikes. But this time things were different. The country was no longer as reliant on coal and a much harsher government, led by Margaret Thatcher was in power. They ran the UK on gas and imports. Some workers, having to feed their families had no choice but to cross picket lines, resulting in bloodshed. Eventually the strike was crushed, the unions lost and were stripped of their power and the whole coal industry essentially disbanded.
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18As you can imagine, this had the knock on effect of ending steel production and much of our manufacturing sector as well. The north and in particular the North East were left destitute. Depression was rampant. The men simply stopped caring or were so angry at the Tories that they vowed never to vote for them (or anyone) again. My generation was brought up thinking of Thatcher like Hitler. Gen-X was heavily unemployed and it was not uncommon for 2 or 3 generations in a family to live on the dole for years on end (always voting Labour or nothing because they had become dependent on the state, their pride broken).
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20During the years that followed, the status quo wasn’t really disrupted. The Tories had ditched Thatcher a few years earlier and the country was being ran by the ever-grey John Major. Of course when the Maastricht Treaty was brought out he signed it with no referendum despite it clearly overreaching what was promised back in the 70’s. You can imagine how much this annoyed the likes of Nigel Farage but people were generally too busy with day to day activities to really care. The EEC changing to the EU simply made the intent more clear but again, no one cared.
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22At the end of the 90’s, the Tories lost. People were sick of grey, boring, same old Major. We elected Tony Blair, a young guy with a radically different outlook. “Things can only get better” his campaign song went. I remember people in my school singing that, hoping that with a Labour government, the region would see a return of jobs, that maybe we wouldn’t be a generation of benefit dependents. Maybe there would be a rebalancing and finally we’d get to enjoy some of the modern luxuries that the South was seeing.
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24And to some extent we did. Cash was thrown around like confetti. Public sector project after project went up. Lots of “culture”, celebrating our lovely new European identity (and proudly boasting “funded by the EU” plaques of course). But did we get new schools to replace the ones full of asbestos? Did the motorway get widened? Did we get new and better hospitals or broadband? No, just more benefits and weird, non-British culture. Meanwhile, countries across Europe were joining up to the EU, getting handouts and having help to build up their industry. Germany was doing great, picking up the very industries that had been destroyed in the UK.
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26Still Blair was liked. His “people’s princess” speech after the death of the universally popular Princess Diana went down well and it was hard to find anyone who could be completely sceptical of the man, despite his globalist leanings. Yeah things weren’t the best but they were OK.
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28Then came September 11th 2001.
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30I remember the day clearly. I was at college (not university for any American readers, college is just post-school, usually pre-university over here). Suddenly our Internet connection dropped, which wasn’t unusual but it didn’t come back. Someone had a radio and turned it on but we weren’t clear on what had happened other than “something big”. So we called it a day and went home a bit early.
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32The 2nd plane had just hit as I came into my living room. My mother was watching it on the news while baby sitting my young nephew. We watched for a bit not really knowing what to think. But looking back, that day was the end of the era. My nephew would grow up in a completely and utterly different world to the one I had.
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34People criticized George Bush for his immediate reaction to the news of the attack but I feel like he also knew this was the end and just finishing that book reading would be one last tiny, unimportant event of a simpler time. The man did a lot of wrong things in my opinion but that wasn’t one.
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36The new era was all about war, terror, panic. The USA and UK went in hard on the Middle East, Islam was the new thing to be afraid of, even more sinister than the IRA bombings of the 90’s because at least they would give warning and only attack the system, not the public. But this new enemy was scary, they were out to get us and we needed to get them first, their culture was so alien (no one normal really knew or cared about Muslims until then, the only interaction being with the Pakistani guy who runs the shop, which is conveniently open on Christmas).
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38Dossiers were produced, stating Saddam Hussein would wipe us out in minutes, that he had weapons of mass destruction and we needed to get him gone, bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. We were cajoled into thinking that the Taliban had been involved in the attacks in America and besides, they needed some freedom too.
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40Of course there were protests, huge ones. Many people didn’t believe the stories and felt that we didn’t really have a place interfering in that region any more than we already had (in fact we’d put Saddam there in the first place but shh don’t mention that). And why invade Iraq anyway when it was Bin Laden who orchestrated 9-11? Was it just about oil?
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42The protests didn’t work though, the invasions happened, too many soldiers lost their lives, the region destabilised just as we all knew and said it would, the influx of refugees began and the terror attacks kept going. And of course it turned out that the dossier had been incorrect all along; there were no WMDs.
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44That did it for Tony Blair. He was disgraced and forced to step down. He was replaced by a nice, grey man, his friend/rival and chancellor Gordon Brown. The same man who decided it would be a great idea to sell the gold reserves at their lowest price in 20 years a little while earlier.
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46Gordon Brown was never popular, being seen as a Tory by many in the North and an incompetent chancellor, an opinion which seems valid to me seeing as he had continued to spend a fortune, leaving us unprepared for the financial crash of 2008. That didn’t really change much in Durham though as people were already poor. If anything many gloated at the London financiers finally getting a bit of karmic justice.
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48All through the Labour years, the Tory party had floundered, electing leaders who just didn’t really make an impression with the public, totally unable to break through Tony Blair’s spin and gloss. Eventually they managed to choose someone younger and a bit different, someone more like Tony Blair and less like Gordon Brown.
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50The next election returned no majority but the Conservative party were the biggest and as such they were able to attempt to form a government. David Cameron’s Tony Blair-ish approach managed to win over enough voters and he compromised with Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats to form a coalition. The truce worked because of David Cameron’s slightly progressive attitude as well as the Liberal Democrats desperation to make use of their large number of MPs, having taken a huge chunk of disillusioned student Labour votes. In Scotland, the SNP had taken away much of Labour’s support, putting the blame for their issues on the UK government and vying for Scottish independence.
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52The coalition set about unpicking the situation that they inherited from the previous administration. Budgets were slashed, deep cuts were made, departments were merged, Quangos were binned. Austerity we were told, was needed if the country had any hope of getting a hold on its finances and improving the lives of its citizens.
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54This didn’t go down well with the Liberal Democrat voters, having elected MPs who ran on the total opposite premise, with their manifesto pledging to scrap student loans for example. This was the betrayal, which would haunt them for years to come.
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56The coalition’s plan did essentially work. Much of the waste was curtailed and the overspend did start to go down. The cuts hit hard though, especially in the poor areas where Tories were already unpopular and especially in the NHS where waste is still a huge issue but talk of reforms are always met with screams of terror.
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58While the coalition was in power, the Labour party chose Ed Miliband to be their leader. He was young, centre left and should have been a great fit, however David Cameron simply got the better of him. He was a better debater and his PR image was simply superior. Even making it much easier to become a member of the Labour party wasn’t enough to win people over.
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60Meanwhile, Nigel Farage (remember him) had been beavering away in the background, talking to those working class voters all over the country who were rather annoyed at their situation, especially given the supposed success of the EU and the ability of workers from elsewhere to come to the UK and send all the cash back home, thus driving wages for and access to low paid jobs (the only kind available to them after the loss of industry) down even further. This was exasperated by the influx of refugees from the regions destabilised by Tony Blair, George Bush, Gordon Brown and now Barack Obama, seemingly fast-tracked through the EU countries to Dover. The working class of the North East felt like outsiders in the country they grew up in, “you can’t say that these days” would be uttered. And all the while, people were still living in fear of the existential threat of Islam taking over.
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62That’s not to say it’s all racism as that’s too simplistic. Yes there are many racists. But the feeling came from genuine fear. These were people who had had everything taken away, the heart of their culture ripped out then no real choice but to live and raise their children on benefits. Then the politicians who were supposed to look after them took them for granted and decided to concentrate on a new set of vulnerable people. Suddenly the culture of immigrants was special and needed protection. Multiculturalism was here, was the new thing and if you didn’t like it, you were a racist. “Look at the new interesting food” they were told, but culture is deeper than food and elements of some cultures are simply incompatible with each other.
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64And so came the election of 2015. David Cameron, seeing the threat of UKIP under Nigel Farage promised a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. His logic appearing to be that he couldn’t afford to ignore the rising anti-globalist sentiment that the recent EU election results had demonstrated while also having an excuse to renegotiate some aspects of the UK’s continued membership. Rest assured though, we’d vote to stay and things would settle down again.
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66The election delivered a majority for the Conservatives. The Scottish didn’t come back to Labour, instead almost wiping them out in favour of the SNP. The Liberal Democrats were equally damaged, losing their status as king-maker for their perceived betrayal in siding with the Tories.
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68Ed Miliband had  no choice but to resign. This triggered a leadership debate, which no one could have predicted. There were many candidates, however one was nominated essentially as a joke. This old relic of the 70’s was a known Marxist, a pacifist, sceptical on the EU and very pro trade unions. About as far from Tony Blair as you could get. There was no chance of him winning.
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70Except he did. The membership change brought in by Miliband allowed vast numbers of far lefties to join, from students annoyed at the Liberal Democrats to the children of miners. And they all got a vote. Jeremy Corbyn took over the party and started work in turning it from a centre left party into a hard left, union focused one. The only trouble being – the lefty activist student types and the working (dole) class voters didn’t really agree on much other than “Tories bad”. Still, maybe clever messaging and fence sitting could win the day and it was a problem for another time.
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72David Cameron, pleased with and secure in his election victory eventually followed through with his promise to hold the EU referendum but also held one on Scottish independence to try to put a stop to the SNP’s rise. Winning that one the EU result would seem to be in the bag too. Never the less, he went around Europe, attempting to tweak the rules a bit but ultimately came up short. He was mocked by Nigel Farage and others for this failure but still campaigned for us to remain.
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74Had there been a Labour leader who was pro-EU, remain would have won. But Jeremy Corbyn fence sat. He knew that working class voters tended to dislike the project where as the southern, student voters were keen. So he didn’t do much either way.
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76David Cameron also misjudged the mood. He campaigned hard for remain “project fear” was deployed, telling us we’d all die and the economy would fail if we voted to leave and he even brought Barack Obama over to tell us we’d be at the back of the queue in a trade deal. That last point more than likely secured the vote for leave. We don’t like being told what to do, especially by an American after all the trouble they got us into recently. And besides, life in the north was barely affected by the 2008 crash so who cared if there was another?
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78So leave won. Not by much as percentages go but David Cameron, being arrogant had not specified either minimum voter turnout or minimum victory percentage. It was (we were told in an official, government printed leaflet) a once in a lifetime choice that the government would enact. Unfortunately it turned out he had no intent to carry out that decision after all as it was revealed that no plans had been made for actually leaving the EU in the event the vote went that way.
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80David Cameron resigned the very next day, humming to himself as he walked back into No. 10. And yet another leadership battle took place to appoint another prime minister who the general public had not voted for.
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82That prime minister was Theresa May. Basically a female version of John Major. Grey, boring, not very good with people and very weak. She was given the task of getting the UK out of the EU, preferably with some kind of decent trading agreement to prevent project fear from occurring. She of course went through the motions, even visiting the new US president Donald Trump (another surprise for the establishment but not so much of one in retrospect).
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84Nigel Farage, his job seemingly done took some time out from politics and resigned as leader of UKIP, leaving the party to carry on it’s new goal of pushing against Islam specifically.
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86Theresa May’s administration suffered from her weak leadership. She was undermined by MPs who didn’t really want to leave the EU even though she herself shared their views (positioning herself as a leader of unity). And Jeremy Corbyn was always there, somehow scoring points from leave and remain voters against her. What she needed was to get a mandate from the public by winning a general election.
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88Unfortunately, even though opposition MPs happily allowed her to call one, Theresa May did not win the general election. She and her team produced one of the worst manifestos ever, for some reason straying away from the only important task on her plate and meddling with social issues instead. She lost the parliamentary majority that Cameron had worked so hard to gain, only just keeping the Conservative party in power through an agreement with the Northern Irish DUP (but not even in official coalition).
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90Next followed years of stupidity. Although article 50 had been invoked, starting the process of the UK leaving the EU there were legal challenges, MP defections from all sides, new parties were formed, even the Liberal Democrats found a new cause to champion; revoking article 50. Talk of another referendum was abound.
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92Nigel Farage had to make a comeback, eventually founding the Brexit Party. The sole intent of which would be to carry out the referendum result or to at least put pressure on the Tory government to do so.
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94Delay after delay, deadline after missed deadline, finally Theresa May came back with a new European treaty. It wasn’t popular. After all of the mess, parliament couldn’t vote it through. Neither could it vote to revoke. We were in deadlock and there was nothing Theresa May could do. So she resigned as well. A new unelected prime minister. Maybe 3rd time would be a charm?
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96Boris Johnson won the contest. His message was clear “Get Brexit Done”. He’d be “dead in a ditch” before extending any more. He tried but he failed. All those defecting Tories meant that he was subject to the whims of a parliament in which a large majority of MPs disagreed with his way forward. He even managed to renegotiate some of the more egregious parts of Theresa May’s treaty (to the amazement and annoyance of parliament) in time for his deadline of October 31st 2019. Parliament accepted the treaty but still would not allow it to be made law, rejecting his timetable and as such forcing him to send a letter asking the EU for an extension.
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98The situation was absurd. Boris Johnson called for a general election several times but parliament, seeing how unpopular their behaviour had made them refused until he’d sent that letter, which he did to the minimum legal level. Finally an election was called.
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100The campaign was hard and vicious with no quarter given on any side. Allegiances were made and deals struck. Public opinion shifted like the wind if the press were to be believed. Jeremy Corbyn stuck to his tactic of trying to play both sides and promising a truckload of sweeties but he forgot one thing, it’s not the 70’s any more and we have access to the Internet now. People didn’t believe his promises and when exposed to opposing views his support evaporated. Moreover, voters who vowed never to vote Tory could at least back Nigel Farage, even if he had no chance of winning.
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102On Friday 13th of December, 2019 the Conservative party under Boris Johnson won 365 seats, giving them a larger majority than they’ve had in my father’s lifetime.
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104Not only did Boris Johnson manage to convince much of the Midlands and traditional Tory voters but even Tony Blair’s old constituency in Durham went over to their side. His clear message on leaving the EU had cut through compared to Jeremy Corbyn’s dither and the Liberal Democrat’s undemocratic remain. But not only was this about the EU. He had captured the mood of the country, including the working classes. He appeared to “get it” and in the days since, his speeches and actions have made me think it’s more than bluster.
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106Whether those Durham seats stay blue or go back to red really depends on what happens over the next few years. The government can’t simply increase benefits, we are a proud people. We need to work and rekindle our northern culture.
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108The 9-11 / Brexit era is now at its end. I have hope that the new one will be better.
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111-Anon / Some northerner / St. Jimmy