In some of the comments below my piece last week about Reform UK, I spot the usual answers: Farage’s supporters are dim, racist, deplorable. Yet away from Westminster and the news cycle, Reform voters are being manufactured – not with headlines or crypto funds but through the failure of institutions they once trusted to protect them. To see what I mean, leave SW1 and go 40 miles up the road, to Luton.
In a deserted hotel bar, five men are reminiscing about how their world ended. Their minds are on a Friday afternoon in March last year, as the place where they had worked for two or three decades apiece, making friends and even meeting future wives, is about to shut for good. Vauxhall came to Luton not long after the death of Queen Victoria; it helped build the town and gave it an economy and an identity.
At its peak in 1971, the company directly employed 37,000 staff in Britain, mostly in Luton. On this afternoon, these men and so many of their soon-to-be ex-workmates are crowded around the assembly line. As the last white van comes off, they clap and cheer with pride for what they had been part of.
Later, he walks back out on to the line and surveys the site where until this afternoon 1,600 people had worked. For the first time ever, the machinery is still and he hears nothing but silence: “an industrial graveyard”. Then he wonders what comes next, for him, his mates and his town.
For the hard right and far right alike, Luton is a contemporary hell. The star of countless memes and YouTube films, it spells migrants, Muslims and growing poverty. For some key players, the connection is personal.
Luton boy Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, has talked of how his stepfather worked at Vauxhall. Andrew Tate grew up in what he calls “the worst area of the worst town” (actually, the same estate as Geary). They lived through Luton’s long decline; then they monetised it.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
