Before you even park your car, you can feel what’s happened to towns like this. The butcher shop is boarded up. The old building society is now just another vape shop. The pub’s window is still broken and covered with a wooden board. The same three old guys sit there, trying to keep it going since 2012. The chip shop is hanging on, but the portions are smaller now.
The bus timetables barely mean anything anymore. This place didn’t fall apart overnight it just slowly faded, piece by piece. The government called it “levelling up,” and they talk about “left behind towns,” but if you grew up in a place like this, you know it wasn’t just bad luck. It was the result of years of decisions made without care.
Jobs disappeared. Bus routes vanished. Banks shut down. People lost hope. If this Labour government really wants to rebuild the country, it should start with towns like this—not just because they’re in need, but because they show where things started to fall apart. And if you can’t fix things here, how can you expect to fix them anywhere?
Some people talk about a new deal between politicians and the public—a promise of shared responsibility and a sense of belonging. That sounds nice, but promises mean little when people have been let down for years. You don’t win back trust with words. You earn it by doing things that matter—like fixing the streetlights instead of walking past them.
Take jobs, for example. I didn’t grow up during the coal mining days, but older people talk about it all the time—the sound of shift changes, the steady pay, the sense of purpose. That’s all gone now. The sites are abandoned, overgrown, as if they were never important. The jobs we have now are often insecure, with no pensions or proper training. No pride either.
Reindustrialisation might look good in a campaign leaflet, but people don’t want slogans. They want decent work—jobs that make them feel useful and respected, not endless hours on a zero-hours contract just making money for someone already rich.
And energy? It’s not just a headline here—it’s real life. When your bills go up, your house gets cold. You shut off rooms to save money. And businesses suffer too. Some factories can’t afford to stay open because power costs are so high that it’s cheaper to produce in other countries. We need energy that’s affordable, clean, and reliable—not catchphrases.
Public services? They’re falling apart. Try getting home after 7pm without a car. Good luck. Try finding a dentist. Or just try talking to a real person when there’s an issue with your water bill. These services used to belong to us. They were dependable. Now they feel like private businesses just looking to profit. Somewhere along the line, we lost ownership of the things we used to count on.
When it comes to taxes, most people don’t mind paying their fair share. What they do mind is seeing that money used to support a system that lets landlords own ten houses while nurses can’t afford food. If you’re earning big from property, you should pay more than a guy earning minimum wage behind a bar. That’s not radical—it’s just fair.
And then there’s the stuff people don’t always say out loud. Immigration changed a lot of areas—sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. And often, those changes weren’t managed well. People who had concerns were told they were backwards or wrong. That didn’t just offend—it broke something.
The truth is, people who move here to work and contribute aren’t the problem. They’ve faced the same struggles with housing, pay, and services. The real issue is a political system that made huge changes without asking locals, and then ignored them when they asked to be heard. We shouldn’t blame immigrants. We should hold politics accountable for forgetting the people who live here.
People want to feel like they’re part of the change, not just watching it happen around them. They want their voices heard in the places they grew up.
And crime? You feel it walking through the town centre. The unease. Shops with protective screens. The same faces hanging around all day. Some of it’s harmless. Some of it’s not. And when people report things, nothing changes. If Labour wants people in forgotten towns to trust them, they need to show up where things are getting worse—not just where they’re already good.
People here deserve safety, respect, and fairness too not just the middle classes.
And finally, let’s talk about power not the idea, but the reality. The power to decide what gets built, what gets funded, and who gets listened to. Right now, that power feels far away. Having a mayor is something. But real change means giving towns their own say, their own budgets, and the freedom to make decisions without jumping through hoops.
There’s still a lot of pride in these towns. There’s love. There’s strength. You see it in the people who give their time at the youth club, in the guy mowing the rugby pitch, in the young woman who started a café just because no one else would.
These communities aren’t broken. They’ve just been neglected and underestimated for too long. If we’re going to rebuild the country, we need to start at the edges—in the places that gave up on politics because politics gave up on them. They’re not asking for miracles. Just a government that sees them, hears them, and believes they still matter.
