talk was of ‘capitalist realism’ and a dominant neo-liberal dystopia; now we anticipate a brave new world of ‘postcapitalism’, even ‘fully automated luxury communism’.1 It is utopian thinking of a type unrecognizable to my East London constituents.
Dagenham is a blue-collar community built to house the labour necessary to propel twentieth-century capitalism. We have relied on this labour at moments of national crisis, in wartime munitions and the production of Bren gun carriers. Most recently, when on 30 March 2020 a consortium of UK industrial, technology and engineering companies came together to produce medical ventilators as the globe was consumed by pandemic, Dagenham was the designated site to physically build the machines to safeguard the health of the nation. Work and Dagenham are synonymous.
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Dagenham is proud of its working-class traditions. In the names of the streets and public buildings, the community respects East London Labour leaders such as George Lansbury and Clement Attlee and union agitators like Jack Jones and Ron Todd.
Its foremost building, the Civic Centre, aka ‘the Kremlin’, is symbolic of earlier generations’ struggles for citizenship and access to justice through slum clearance. The mighty Becontree Estate upholds the virtue of mass public housing and the pre-war advance of working people. Dagenham’s Ford plant represents both the twentieth-century mode of production and epic industrial struggles of the past. Yet the more recent story is one of deindustrialization, extraordinary demographic change and struggles against the British National Party, which by 2010 held twelve of the fifty-one local council seats. This shifting history of class and work was dramatized in two recent films.
Nigel Cole’s Made in Dagenham was nominated for Outstanding British Film at the 2010 BAFTAs. It is a romantic tale of class solidarity and the fight for equal pay amongst a rehoused post-war generation. It centres on the 187 Ford seamstresses that went on strike in 1968 but received mixed support from within the Labour government. It had a stellar cast including Bob Hoskins as a dodgy union guy, John Sessions playing a lovable Harold Wilson, and Miranda Richardson as feisty minister Barbara Castle.
Andrea Arnold’s 2009 Fish Tank won the 2009 Cannes Jury Prize. In it a dance-obsessed 15-year-old Mia is chased around her estate by social services. We see plenty of daytime special brew and the parading of weapon dogs – Mia’s is named ‘Tennents’. Work doesn’t feature; it is something only brought in by the lover/father figure outsider. In one scene Mia is bewildered by his payslips; they represent something she cannot comprehend. Family hardly exists. Where it does there is little communion or dialogue. Mother and daughter finally talk, not in words but through dance, as Nas raps ‘life’s a bitch and then you die’.
The two films were shot within months of each other on the same estate – the Mardyke – in my Dagenham and Rainham constituency.2 A simple contrast between the films suggests an economic and social transformation driven by changes in employment. It offers a historic arc whereby the hopes and solidarities of an era of mass production and consumption, of Dagenham Fordism, are replaced by the indignities of worklessness, relational disintegration and violence. In one film pride refracts through socialized housing, intergenerational advancement and material progress. In the other it descends into modern isolation, mental decay and nihilism.
One film is awash with dignified possibility, a visual slam dunk of Full Monty or Billy Elliot working-class nostalgia. Add in some cockney swag and sus and the viewer feels good. It reappeared as a successful West End musical. The other film is a tougher watch. It offers us a modern parable to globalization, economic liberalism and the destruction of family; a dystopia where a once noble class is barely recognizable.
The films act as companion pieces, where political hope journeys towards despair and humiliation in a story refracted through the changing character of work. Their release occurred as the country changed. Both came out months after the 2008 economic crash. By then New Labour was destroyed. 2010 was to be the party’s worst defeat since 1918, although worse was to follow five years later. In the late 2000s, Blair was despised by many in his own party. Gordon Brown had shown early promise but was sunk even before Mrs Duffy blindsided him on a Rochdale street in 2010. On release, Arnold’s dose of social-realist commentary appeared to fit with David Cameron’s talk of ‘Broken Britain’. In Dagenham there was anger, best expressed in battles with the far right, but mostly a sense of resignation, loss and abandonment. At the 2010 General Election, BNP leader Nick Griffin believed he would triumph in the neighbouring Barking constituency and his party would take control of the council the same day.
The political environment of the 1968 of Made in Dagenham was very different. Wilson’s vision of ‘White Heat’ was in retreat after 1966 but traditional Labourism was not. Alongside, in the slipstream of Crossland’s The Future of Socialism, Roy Jenkins was striving to legislate a rights-based equality. 1968 also saw the publication of The May Day Manifesto – co-authored by Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall – a radical socialist humanist counterstatement to Labour policies and practices.
The contrast between the state of the left in 1968 and 2010 is stark. In the late 1960s it was alive and agile, reflected in this active contest between alternative models of justice – the utilitarianism of the economist Harold Wilson, the rights agenda of Labour revisionism, and the ethical concerns of the New Left, the first two battling it out within Cole’s 2010 take on retro Labour.
By the time Fish Tank hit the screens, the left was running on empty. The Berlin Wall had been down 20 years. European social democracy had surfed a nineties’ growth spurt built on debt. The left went all in on the ‘Third Way’ and the ‘end to boom and bust’. By 2008 when the music stopped, it looked little more than a vainglorious punt. Environmentalism was under siege through questionable statistics and the appearance of a manipulated science. The soaring Obama rhetoric had landed around moderate health reform and deepening material injustice. The 2015 election loss was one of the most significant defeats for the left since its organized inception in the 1890s. Then things deteriorated.
Amongst the party membership the election of Jeremy Corbyn provided a virtuous antidote to what had gone before. Many extracted renewed hope from significant seat gains in a 2017 election loss that offset underreported chinks in what was later termed Labour’s ‘Red Wall’. At best a brittle unease remained between the party and significant sections of the electorate. At worse palpable resentment and anger were clearly on show amongst many the left was created to represent. They were there at the Brexit referendum twelve months earlier and festered in the years of Brexit stasis that followed, before the wall formally collapsed, bringing with it an 80-strong Tory majority in late 2019.
In Dagenham, 70 per cent voted to leave the EU. On election day pollsters assumed a significant Tory victory.3 We held on, just. We chiselled out a 293 majority by somehow retaining nearly 90 per cent of our support, one of the few bricks that stayed upright in Labour’s disintegrating ‘Red Wall’. Months later a virus detonated politics, undermined the government and created unanticipated space for a demoralized left under new leadership.
The following chapters navigate this terrain. We focus on the work people do, what it means to them, how this has changed and what might happen in the future following the pandemic. We inspect fashionable visions to overturn the system – new left utopias – fuelled by technological change compared to more prosaic traditional desires to civilize capitalism. Talk of a ‘post-work’ nirvana sits uncomfortably with traditional attempts to regulate employment and respect the dignity of human labour, especially given the calamitous effects of a tiny virus. We will ask if such modern utopias offer ‘radical hope’ and help build a new left telos to confront authoritarian populism, or distract with bouts of indulgent scientific fiction, detours symptomatic of a dying political tradition. Throughout we bend the conversation through Dagenham.
Notes
1 1.
