Left for Dead?: The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party. Lewis Goodall
me, in so innumerable ways, a better journalist. After eighteen months at Sky News, I can say without hesitation that I am extremely proud to work for an organisation which reports politics without fear or favour and which, in my entirely impartial opinion, has the best political team in Westminster. In particular, my colleague and best friend in TV, Zach Brown, has worked with me since the beginning at Newsnight and now Sky. My best work – especially on matters Labour – has been with him. Long may it continue.
I’m grateful too to my friends, many of whom have contributed ideas to the book – apologies in advance if I’ve stolen them. In particular I’d like to thank Marc Kidson and James Stafford, two brilliant minds, who over the years since our Oxford days have helped shape my thinking on so many things. If you read something here that makes you think, chances are one of them had a hand in it.
As you wade through these pages, there is one man who looms large. My dear grandad, Alan. It is no exaggeration to say that without him there would be no pages. A more thorough tribute is reserved for him at the end – but it would still be remiss not to mention him here. His imprint, his essence, is in every bit of what you’re about to read. I only wish he could read them for himself. With his no longer being here, I will have to leave that to his darling wife, my beloved nan. My dearest, this book is for him.
And to my darling girl – my imp, my Cherie, the cleverest person I’ve met, the one who has had to hear all my stupid thoughts again and again and then read them in print and still be kind about them – I can’t give all those evenings and holidays back but I promise, no matter what happens to the Labour Party, this is my last word on the subject.
Probably.
Lewis Goodall
London
July 2018
Prologue
Son, where we’re from, you could put a donkey in a Labour rosette and it’d win.
My dad, many, many times
I’m not sure there’s been a time when my family wasn’t involved in making things. Some of my earliest memories involve my grandad coming home and presenting the three- or four-year-old version of me with some samples of buttons, medals or coins that he’d helped make at the Birmingham mint. Grandad, as its works manager, got my dad a job there too. He was a lanky 22-year-old, just moved to Birmingham to be with the 17-year-old mum who had just given birth to me. They’d met at a Scarborough holiday camp a year or so before – my dad’s first ever holiday. He was from Middlesbrough, the son of a dockworker, and before then he’d barely left the town as a kid. He later said it put him off holidays for life. He didn’t have a qualification to his name, except a GCE in needlework. This didn’t help at the mint, where the only job my grandad had available was on a machine that needed a delicate approach and small fingers, which probably explained why all the other workers in the department were women. He didn’t, Grandad told me later, excel himself but he tried his best.* We all lived cheek by jowl in Erdington in north Birmingham: me, my two aunts, Mum and Dad, and my grandparents. I was the apple of my family’s eye; it probably explains why I’m unafraid of the limelight. It was a mindlessly happy existence for a little boy. But after my grandad could fiddle the figures for Dad no more, my nan phoned up the Rover plant, on the other side of the city in Longbridge, where she’d heard they needed some new workers. She asked if they had any openings for her son-in-law (just about – he’d married my mum weeks before; I was page boy at the ripe old age of four). So we left Erdington and crossed the city to the south Birmingham suburb of Northfield, just next to the vast Rover plant. I walked past it to secondary school for five years.
For more than a decade my dad worked there nearly every working day. Each morning I’d leave for school just as he was getting in after a night shift; then, not long after I’d got home at around 4.30 p.m. Mum would instruct me (probably for the third or fourth time) to go and tell him to wake; he had to get up and eat before he started again. We were ships in the night. I didn’t mind. It was a given. Mum and Dad worked, and Dad worked more hours because he had to look after me and my younger sister. He worked incredibly hard (and still does), without complaint. These were the comforting rhythms of my childhood.
These days, I imagine it must be hard for kids in the playground to describe what their fathers and mothers do for a living. How, as a child, do you go about describing what Mummy, the management consultant, does? Or Daddy, who works as a computer software programmer? Or project managers? Or account directors? Or procurement experts?
But for many of us in Turves Green Primary School’s playground, we knew what our dads did. They worked at the Rover. They made cars. And most of them drove in the cars they had made. And I knew which bit my dad worked on: the doors. He was a welder. Today, in the increasingly unlikely event that you see a Rover on the roads, my dad probably welded it on its hinges.
I wasn’t uncommon. When I think back to my friends and classmates, so many of us had fathers and mothers who were employed on the Rover site and even more in the wider supply chain of the plant. Rover was ubiquitous, part of the bloodstream. They even sponsored our school technology labs and our curriculum, their branding and emblem proudly on display on many a classroom wall. Our families were connected through Rover socially via the ‘Austin’ Social Club, just down the road from the main site. I remember every Christmas Eve Dad taking me there for the afternoon, as he enjoyed a well-earned break and pint, played some snooker, or watched a football match. As we got older, some of my friends got their first jobs collecting glasses there a couple of nights a week. The company arranged trips to Weston-super-Mare and other seaside towns. Rover’s presence punctuated almost every aspect of life. It was, on reflection, an impossibly traditional working-class childhood, almost stranded out of its own time.
The plant’s quotidian certainties reassured not only our present but our futures too. I remember very clearly one lunchtime talking to another boy in my class. Like me, his father worked at the Rover. Somehow, as kids do, we started to talk about what we would do when we ‘grew up’. Even today I remember the confidence with which he talked about his own nine-year-old plans. He told me he would work at the Rover and that it would be easy; after all, his dad could easily get him a job. This was more than just the lack of imagination and naivety of a child not yet a decade old. It reflected the esteem a job there enjoyed. Longbridge was the Rover and the Rover was Longbridge.
Some 18 years or so later, I’m not sure what happened to him. I am certain, however, that he had to make a few changes to his career plans. For in the space of our schooldays the deep certainty attached to a life at the Rover gave way to the apprehension and unease of the twenty-first century. Globalisation came to Longbridge and shattered the quiet insularity of our lives. By the 1990s and early 2000s, as me and my friends grew up, changed schools and went into the sixth form, it had become ever clearer that our community was living on borrowed time.
By the time of my childhood, Rover had been manufacturing cars on the site for a hundred years. Ever since a young industrialist, Herbert Austin, discovered a disused printing works there in 1905, it had been a hive of industry. A century later, in 2005 it had largely closed. At its peak, 100,000 people were employed on that site alone; even by the dawn of the millennium, five years before closure, my father was one of 25,000, with an estimated 100,000 in the wider supply chain.
So, as its troubles mounted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we all of us were aware of just how potentially devastating the factory’s closure would be. As the national media poured in to witness the slow decay of this last British brand of motor car, we kids went to school every day in something akin to grief. I remember seeing the worry in my mum’s eyes, I remember her asking my dad, every night before he’d even had chance to take off his coat, what news there was from the union, from management – something, anything that might give us some hope and if not hope then at least some certainty. This was reflected and amplified for me