A few years ago, the term ‘Red Wall’ was coined to describe the Labour Party’s former heartlands in the North and the Midlands, but the term in itself is a lie used by the political class to hide the real story. The term describes a sprawling collection of constituencies, from Bishop Auckland to Bolsover, and crucially encompasses my own battered heartlands in Teesside.
For over a century, these were the beating heart of the Labour Party, this ‘Red Wall’ built on the foundations of coal, steel, manufacturing, and the collective working-class solidarity. But following the 2019 collapse, the phrase was bastardised. It became a neat soundbite, distracting from the decades of state-sponsored economic violence that preceded it.
The narrative is a vile lie. That the decent, working-class people of the North suddenly abandoned socialism for flag-shagging, Brexit and a culture war.
The ‘Red Wall’ didn’t turn its back on socialism over ‘wokeness’ at all.
We were betrayed by a political class that didn’t give a single, solitary fuck about us. The nation and those who lead it forgot who built this country, whose blood, sweat, and tears lie in the steel that holds up the UK’s infrastructure. They abandoned the principles of economic struggle long before we did.
We didn’t stop voting for Labour because we lack patriotism… We stopped voting for a party that, for generations, failed to give us any genuine, fighting alternative to the slow decline of our communities. The problem was never a lack of love for our country; it was a lack of socialism. It was a crushing realisation that the party we helped to build to defend us against the elite had become the elite itself. It was going to manage our decline and not reverse it.
Economic annihilation and decades of deliberate neglect across the Red Wall
The true betrayal of the wall started long before 2019. In 2010, the Tories and mainstream media teamed up and successfully rebranded austerity as a necessary evil instead of what it actually was.
A disgustingly apparent, class-driven theft of wealth from the poor North to the rich South. This wasn’t innocent oversight; it was a scorched-earth policy created to weaken the institutional power of the working class permanently. And the stats remain hard evidence of betrayal, proving beyond a doubt that the North East was deliberately punished.
The public sector was the last bastion for many in the North East after deindustrialisation. During the 2010 cuts, London saw a public sector job reduction of around 10%, which in itself is a shocking statistic, but compared to the 19% the North of England lost, it’s nothing. This reduction didn’t just ruin local employment, it gutted the capacity of local government to deal with the avalanche of social issues we suffered through poverty, housing and addiction.
Waging war on our children
They wage war on our children. Since austerity began, the North saw a massive increase of over 200,000 children living in relative poverty, a devastating 22% spike. Today in the North East, it is predicted that 38% of our kids live in poverty, but if you look closer at constituencies such as Middlesbrough, the rate is estimated to be over 52%. That is over fucking half. This is not a political realignment; this is a social crime carried out by policy choices in Westminster.
And what’s worse is the cost in human lives. The chronic underfunding of health and social care has utterly decimated our basic security. Healthy life expectancy in the North East is now the lowest in the UK at a disgusting 59.1 years, which shows precisely what happens when the state pulls the plug on services. When welfare is replaced by hostility, people die younger, and it’s a clear trade-off.
Private profit at the expense of public life.
The human cost of decay, despair, and silence
When a town like Middlesbrough, which had been Labour for decades, switched paths, it wasn’t cultural. It was a silent scream for help from people who have watched their high streets hollow, their neighbours grow sick, and their children fail for years. We have watched politicians we don’t even know, who we have no common ground with, come in with the promise of a new future, only to fuck off. They leave nothing but dust in the place of promises.
In Boro, the town with one of the highest drug death rates in the country, the Diamorphine Assisted Treatment programme, a beautiful socialist solution, was allowed to fold. This initiative was making headway, saving lives and helping the public, but was ripped from the town as the Tories argued over billions for ridiculous vanity projects in the South. Billions of pounds for London, and the establishment couldn’t even stump up a few hundred thousand to save the lives of vulnerable people in one of the country’s most deprived areas.
This is the definition of political neglect.
Council funding has been systematically cut; they are on their knees and forced to choose between adult social care and the safety nets for children. This lack of political empathy is rooted in material decay. We feel disposable, that we are a burden on the nation’s finances, yet so many of us are aware of the billions the rich dodge in taxes.
When people are scared, unrepresented, and their cries are brushed aside, they rarely look to the centre-ground establishment for answers. We fucking rebel. We will look for someone, fucking anyone, who sounds like they care about us and our crumbling lives.
Scapegoating the victim
This ruinous economic trauma creates a massive vacuum. The establishment and its media attack dogs understand this perfectly. They need to distract from the reality that the average weekly wage in the North East is nearly £50 below the national average (£472.30 vs £520.70)
So, enter the ‘Culture Wars’ narrative.
The rise of racist rhetoric and the shift towards right-wing parties in the North is not a cause; it’s a symptom. The term ‘reap what you sow’ is never more evident than it is here. It is the bitter harvest of a political elite that weaponises division to protect itself and its money. The establishment points their jewelled fingers at immigrants, ‘the woke,’ and the ‘lazy lout on benefits,’ because it stops people from asking the questions they truly fear: Where the hell did all the money go, and why did those who lead us let it happen?
By feeding the working class’s anger with a cheap narrative scapegoat instead of economic opportunity, they have managed to turn us on our neighbours rather than those who rule. The true purpose of the ‘Red Wall’ label was to allow Labour to talk about identity rather than economic power. It allowed them to dodge the radical platform needed to fix the North.
How to rebuild the Red Wall from the ashes using socialism and a Green Path
The crisis which haunts the North isn’t one of identity; it is one of investment, ownership and control.
The solution must be profound; it requires a comprehensive outcome that rejects neoliberalism and the consensus held by most major parties.
To genuinely bring the North East and the wider ‘Red Wall’ region back to even a glimmer of its former glory, we need a political project built on two radical principles: Wealth redistribution and deep local empowerment.
Labour’s failure is rooted in being piss-wet cowardly on wealth and ownership. The only way to get the billions we need to fix the North’s shattered infrastructure and social beliefs is to make the rich pay their fucking way.
This is where the radical platforms of both the Green Party and Your Party offer a much-needed path.
Public Ownership and the Wealth Tax
The Greens have already taken the UK by storm, with their membership soaring on the promises they’re making to rebalance the books. The suggestion of an annual wealth tax on individual assets above a high threshold is precisely what we fucked need. This isn’t just a revenue generator, it’s a moral declaration that the ultra-rich are finally going to pay their way.
Public ownership of water, central rail, and energy companies excites me. Immediately, we could stop the extraction of billions in private profit from essential services, using that money to insulate homes, upgrade grids, deliver clean, affordable energy, and create jobs in coastal and post-industrial areas. The North could be and should be a hub for genuine, publicly-owned green manufacturing and offshore wind, making the thousands of jobs the area desperately needs.
The Greens want to abolish the hostility created by the DWP. Polanski has stood against the cruel two-child benefit cap and mandatory sanctions, which keep the people in the North in perpetual poverty. Policies like Universal Basic Income and a guaranteed minimum wage of £15 an hour would not just lift people out of in-work poverty. Still, it will also restore dignity and community stability to the area.
Building wealth in the community and reversing the flow of capital
Time and time again, Westminster and Whitehall have proven they cannot, and will not, fix the North. The key to breathing life back into the ‘Red Wall’ is Community Wealth Building – a modern revival of socialism.
This model has been implemented in places like Preston and focuses not on attracting international capitalism, but on keeping local wealth local. In Teesside, this means things such as anchor institutions in which we will harness the spending power of local hospitals, universities and councils to shift contracts to local, worker-owned co-operatives and small businesses. This breaks the extractive supply chains that bleed local money dry (see Michelle Mone as a prime example).
We must actively establish community land trusts and nurture local co-operatives. Instead of profits from new, green businesses flowing to London shareholders, they should be democratically controlled by the workers and the community that generates them. This helps restore the sense of ownership and collective stake that Thatcherism decimated and Labour never restored.
And lastly, we need to prioritise local public services. Dedicating the new wealth tax revenue directly to local budgets (as the Greens propose an additional £5 billion a year) allows councils to adequately fund public health, social care, youth services and more importantly, re-establish local, non-privatised and high-quality children’s services to address the regional crisis of children in care directly.
The Red Wall is not left behind – we’ve been dragged down
We people of the North East are not ‘left behind’ culturally. We have been dragged down by years of a cowboy Westminster stealing our money and giving it to their pals.
The people of the Red Wall deserve a political force that not only acknowledges our abandonment but also offers a revolutionary plan for economic repair. We need a fusion of socialist principles and the Greens’ vision of sustainable, high-quality jobs.
These are the only bricks that can rebuild the Red Wall.
Anything else is a fucking lie.
Featured image via the Canary
By Antifabot
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