Levelling Down in The Fens

As promised last week, this time we’re taking a deeper look at Britain’s safest Tory seat, South Holland and the Deepings, whose MP is anti-woke culture warrior Sir John Hayes. 

Earlier in the week I wrote about Hayes and fellow Brexiteer Sir Christopher Chope. These Tory backbenchers and Knights of the Realm are the kind of guy who was too young to fight in WW2 but has nevertheless imagine that the local windfarms are giants that they must battle as part of their Quixotic fantasies. Naturally, I’m interested in the kind of places that would elect MPs like this.

Rolling in the Deepings

South Holland and the Deepings, in Lincolnshire, is the safest Tory seat (in % terms), and had the second highest Brexit vote in the UK. South Holland is part of The Fens, an area which was drained (by Dutch engineers, giving South Holland its name) to create new farmland starting in the 1630s. The area remains overwhelmingly agricultural, with 50% of jobs connected to the Agri-Food chain.

I talked to a number of people who have lived in the area, including Henry Tinsley (Chair of Left Foot Forward’s board), Spalding Civic Society Chair John Bland, and Twitter users Patrick and Abi who both grew up there.

Patrick told me that “the place has a bleak, melancholy and isolated atmosphere.” Tinsley also noted that “parts of it are geographically quite isolated and old fashioned – so it’s not difficult to stir people up in culture wars”. There’s one train that goes from Peterborough to Lincoln every hour, making it inconvenient for commuters, while Rob Colwell, a Lib Dem councillor in King’s Lynn to the East of the constituency, said that broadband speeds in rural areas also meant that it wasn’t ideal for people working from home.

John Bland told me that “folk around these parts are independently minded and essentially Liberal in their values. Historically… Liberalism was very strong. Spalding had one of the last Liberal MP’s in the form of Herbert Butcher who was first elected for the National Liberals in 1937 and served until 1966. The National Liberals eventually merged with the Conservatives.”

“Demographically, it is overwhelmingly old and white and lower-middle/home-owning working class”, says Patrick. There are also few graduate jobs and the top 20% of pupils in 11-plus exams go to the two local grammar schools, who push them to go to university. Few graduates return to the area.

Abi told me “When I moved up I had my strong estuary accent and I got told by another kid to go back to where I come from. There is a lot of faux nationalism and support for the army around that area, like on the A17 there is a tank pointing out.”

The pride of the area until 2013 was a local tulip parade, which promoted the agricultural heritage of the area. Eventually tulip production became uneconomical and the parade was cancelled when austerity cuts hit the council. Patrick says “It was definitely a blow to the town’s communal identity and something that caused a lot of miserable grumbling among the older folk.”

In tandem with these financial pressures, immigration from Eastern Europe began to pick up significantly from the mid-2000s. Boston and South Holland, which would record the biggest pro-Brexit votes in the 2016 referendum, experienced double the average UK population increase between 2001-2011, a 15.1% increase in South Holland. 

Here’s an excerpt from a 2007 Citizens Advice Bureau report I found:

Patrick again: “For an area with very little history of immgration, they really did change the face of the town quite rapidly… There were parts of the town that could legitimately be called “little Poland”. My little sister’s primary school class suddenly went from 0 to a third of children with English as a second language – something they struggled to address promptly.” 

Abi says that “Some working class people in that area resented employers hiring people from the EU as they saw it as taking their jobs in factories. Whilst the farmers from what I saw just saw EU nationals as cheap labour. This led to a resentment between the working class British people towards the EU nationals.”

But at the same time, the exodus of skilled workers and capital to urban centres eat away at Spalding. “The courthouse was closed, the hospital downgraded and moved out of town, the library “streamlined”… There is not much to do, it is boring. It feels like real life is happening somewhere else”, Patrick said.

The only other political force on the Council is a growing group of independent councillors, though some of these people are ex-UKIP councillors.

What interests me about this area now is how it will be affected by the results of the Brexit process. Brexit is not going to bring investment, better jobs, infrastructure, or culture to the area. So far all it has brought is more low skilled agricultural jobs which locals don’t seem that keen on doing – just read this report on labour shortages in the daffodil picking industry, or this one on wider skills shortages in haulage and food production. 

The very same local news site that prints these reports, Spalding Today, gives Tory MP John Hayes (CBE, Knighthood, Privy Counsellor, MP for 25 years) a weekly column, where he wages his culture wars on faraway ‘woke’ elites, who he accuses of being a “fifth column” which “has marched beyond Higher Education to infiltrate schools”.

Some of Hayes’ success can be put down to his attentiveness to constituents. Bland describes him as a “good constituency MP… His responses to letters are always personal and unique – takes weeks for him to reply.” However, in the absence of any real political challenger, he obviously feels the need to create a straw man out of “woke liberals” to fight against. 

The results of the 2021 census are also due to be published in May this year, which will give us significant data on the demographic effects of Brexit.

Another irony I can see here is that, given Hayes’ opposition to windfarms, his constituency is one of the most at risk areas of the country to sea level rises caused by global warming. US nonprofit Climate Central predicts that the Fens will once again be underwater by 2050.

I have a couple of further questions I’d like to explore about South Holland: is the area a write off for the Left due to demographics, or can anything be done to rescue rural constituencies ravaged by an exodus of capital to the metropole from the clutches of the Right? Secondly, what does the government’s Levelling Up agenda mean for rural areas like this? 

Given that the recent Levelling Up White Paper plagiarised parts of Wikipedia and seems to rely on private equity firms for most of the heavy lifting, the signs for South Holland are not promising. And why would the Tories want to level up a place like this when levelling it down has worked so well for them thus far?

John Lubbock leads on the Right-Watch project at Left Foot Forward

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