The West Midlands has long been the heaving capital of Britain’s industrial heartlands. A region defined by the dark pluming smoke of the Black Country, its boundaries are dominated by Birmingham, the ‘motor city’ of sprawling car plants. Towards the region’s north can be found the Staffordshire Potteries, home to a centuries-old and world-renowned ceramic industry. It has been the site of major moments in working-class history, such the infamous Battle of Saltley Gate, where 30,000 engineering workers and train drivers fought in solidarity with striking miners to close down a fuel storage depot in 1972. Its trade union alumni include the likes of GMB founder Will Thorne, the AEU’s Terry Duffy, and the legendary Jack Jones, who was adopted as the TGWU’s secretary for the region.

Without doubt, this is labour country. Yet this was also the place that the Labour Party lost, decisively, to the party responsible for the forty years of deindustrialisation that has ripped the heart out of the West Midlands. How could this have happened?

Perhaps it started in the mid-noughties when MG Rover — employing 6,000 people at its Longbridge plant in Birmingham Northfield alone — ran into serious financial trouble. The then Labour government of Tony Blair was approached by the T&G, the largest union at MG Rover, to rescue the company. Renationalisation or any form of state aid was ruled out, with instead a temporary £6.5 million loan being given, equating to just a week’s wages. Five days later, 6,000 Brummies walked out the gates at Longbridge for the last time, and 30,000 jobs were lost in the supply chain across the West Midlands over the subsequent months.

No wonder then that in 2016, ‘motor city’ voted decisively to leave the European Union. Three years later, the constituency of Birmingham Northfield turned blue. What happened at Longbridge was shorthand for what happened across the West Midlands in the preceding decades, where now the only place that dark pluming smoke can be found is the Black Country History Museum at £20 a head. In Stoke-on-Trent and surrounding Staffordshire the absence of any government intervention meant cheap imports and automation became the death knoll for the Potteries, now replaced with widespread unemployment and crumbling infrastructure.

The end of these industries also heralded the bell tolls of the community-based politics that gave people in these areas collective meaning and rootedness in their lives. The work which vanished was work that gave people an innate sense of pride in themselves and their surrounding communities, whose mantra was one where no job was ‘unskilled’ and every occupation was a vocation. Nobody was just a cleaner or a simple factory hand, they were a Rover worker or a Potteries worker or a steelworker. It was in these circumstances that organised labour was born, as thousands of workers toiling under the same roof saw themselves as one. It was in places like this where 30,000 Brummies heard the call of the miners at Saltley Gate, and downed tools to help them win. In their act of conscious class solidarity, these workers brought down the government of Ted Heath and put Harold Wilson into power.

The impact of deindustrialisation was never just economic — it was political, and was intended to hit at the heart of the communal lives of working-class people. Thatcher knew that deindustrialisation would break the traditional link between Britain’s industrial working class and the Labour Party, which was developed from the shop floor upwards by the trade union movement. Work under neoliberalism became estranged from organised labour, taking place in disparate, separated silos with no sense of collectivity between them. Collectivism was relegated to a bygone world as work became no longer a communal act but merely individual exploit. Trade unions were pushed into being individual membership organisations instead of collectives of organised workplaces with their accompanying shop steward structure.

With that traditional link between workers and the Labour Party broken, the party over the years became distant to the everyday lives of working people. It understands them, at best, in crude economic terms and not in the fullness of their cultural lives and the values that inhibit them. At best working-class voters are to be taken for granted and at worst seen as the residents of illiberal backwaters, Brexit being a poignant example.

Nowhere was this disconnect more obvious than in the debate over free movement. Rejecting the importance of place, community, and belonging, free movement instead advocates for a globalised world where human beings are reducible to mere economic units caught on the moving coat-tails of industry, where workers are to be moved from place to place, following one temporary job after another. Communities were no longer places were people laid down roots but instead becomes merely ‘sites’ for goods and services until they moved elsewhere with lower margins and better returns for others. It departed from previous models of migration too which, like Commonwealth migration, had a degree of permanency. Now migrants were simply transient, temporary individual labourers drawn from across Europe on a short-term basis, to be exploited for a time and not allowed the economic security to decide their own destiny.

These non-permanent workers were not given the time to build a stake in the long-term future of their workplace or to build the workplace relationships which form the nucleus of militant trade unionism. It is no wonder then that Amazon and Sports Direct have failed to create communal lives around their large warehouses. The entire model on which they depend hollows out communities and uses economic insecurity to deny migrants place and belonging.

Rather than listen to these anxieties about globalisation, many in Labour chose instead to caricature people from areas like the West Midlands as dog-whistling racists from a prejudiced white working class. This figment of liberal academic imagination ignores that many ‘white working class’ areas like Stoke-on-Trent or Walsall have longstanding sizeable BAME populations. Stoke-on-Trent particularly has a strong Kashmiri community which has moved closer to the Tories over the years, with several Tory councillors being of Kashmiri heritage. Walsall is another example where the size of the new Tory majority belies any simplistic narrative that it was just an abandonment by white voters. Even in Birmingham, the Labour vote virtually collapsed in its post-industrial working-class areas like Erdington which saw a 9.4 swing away from the Labour Party and in Birmingham Northfield, which became a Tory gain.

Labour’s road to recovery must include a recognition of its disconnect from the everyday lives of people in post-industrial Britain. It is a peculiar position where a party of labour no longer understands vast swathes of working-class Britain. To reconnect, it must genuinely listen to the concerns of people in post-industrial areas instead of resorting to caricature and stereotype. Most importantly, it must have a cultural narrative that accompanies its radical economic offer — an offer that understands the importance of place, belonging, and community and accompanies a radical economic offer of reindustrialisation, trade union rights, and better pay.

In cultivating that cultural offer, Labour must be careful in rejecting any kneejerk pivot to a faux blue-collar conservatism. It must channel the communitarian traditions of Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan, rooted in the working-class cultures of Lanarkshire and South Wales. Traditions from which the Tredegar Medical Aid Society gave us the National Health Service and later generations of Commonwealth migrants sustained it.