For a certain kind of commentator – even, maddeningly, many on the Left – there was something repetitive, even yawn-inducing about mention of the ‘left behind’ and ‘Red Wall voters’ in the late 2010s and early 2020s. It’s always useful to deconstruct such media clichés, of course. But for far too many people, scepticism about these terms eventually became an excuse for forgetting about the existence of disillusioned voters in post-industrial areas altogether (and not, we might add, for the first time).

Now, in the wake of Reform’s devastating success in County Durham (and elsewhere) in the various local election results pouring in overnight and this morning, those of us unlucky enough to be embroiled in this corner of the discourse must find a way to interpret the narrative of the ‘left behind’ all over again.

As usual, there are all kinds of psephological nuances to bear in mind. Turnout yesterday was low. Governing parties often do poorly in local elections, especially at this stage of the cycle. As for the basket-case opposition, they were starting from an unusually high base: the last version of many of these contests took place in an odd historic glitch, while Covid was still percolating widely and Partygate had not yet arrived to nudge the Tories off an electoral cliff edge. They had, in short, a long way to fall.

But beyond such subtleties, it is clear that the British political and media class – even and perhaps especially a Labour government still basking in the wake of a flukily comfortable general election victory – still has no real understanding of the slide into anomie and bitterness of voters across the margins of this country, many of whom continue to be neglected, stereotyped, and yes, left behind, in all sorts of heinous ways.

In my own corner of the country – the English North East – there is always an attritional battle to foreground the reality of things against a backdrop of cliché and media inanity, so I will start with a specific example and zoom out from there. Yesterday I spent the morning campaigning with my friend, Declan Mulholland, the Labour councillor for Dipton and Burnopfield, as he contested the new ward of Derwent and Pont Valley on the northern edge of the former County Durham coalfield.

A thirty-year old local lad who lives with his fiancée in the ward and works part-time for the Newcastle Foodbank, Declan is, as they say, one of the best to ever do it – an objective truth evidenced by the fact that a small gaggle of left-wing Labour members from other parts of the country had travelled to help him out yesterday (in some cases snubbing campaigns in their own areas where right-wing Labour tendencies held sway – unfortunately almost everywhere right now).

Further proof of Declan’s popularity arrived on the doorstep yesterday (as indeed it had on a previous canvassing session I had joined back in April). There was widespread love for Declan almost everywhere we went. ‘I’ve heard good things about Declan,’ was a typical response. In one case we were told that people were ‘glad there was someone like Declan on the council to look after our kids’. A young, energetic, relentlessly hard-working advocate for local issues – and one with a beaming campaign endorsement from Si King of Hairy Bikers fame no less – Declan is the sort of Labour incumbent who should have walked re-election yesterday.

The fact that he didn’t – in the end Derwent and Pont Valley has been taken by three Reform candidates, one of whom appears to be currently studying down South at university in Bath – is a genuine civic tragedy for this part of County Durham, as well as a savage indictment of how the national Labour Party is spectacularly failing to appeal to voters in such places, just a few short months after its landslide-by-default last summer.

The Reform breakthrough in Durham and other (previously-known-as) Red Wall areas is also a sign of how voters across the periphery are now tending towards the populist right – as the saying goes – just to feel something. As we sat eating Greggs pasties in Declan’s house on a break from campaigning yesterday, a Reform campaign leaflet dropped ironically onto the doorstep. What struck me about its messaging (a three-way comparison of Labour, Tory and Reform programmes) was that none of these parties, Reform included, have any accessible, identifiable policies at all.

In the midst of this political vacuum – the culmination of a long-running collapse of the centre- and centre-right establishments in this country, along with the unravelling of the neoliberal economy globally – a slogan, rather than a policy per se, seems to have hit home yesterday. Despite its monocultural makeup and moorland location many miles from the sea, Reform’s ‘STOP THE BOATS’ was the phrase that rang out time and again on the doorstep in Derwent and Pont Valley.

In previous years, such sentiments – perhaps a perennial fixture of British life – have been regularly and successfully countered and rendered relatively insignificant by other, more substantive factors, from taxes and economic competence (on the Tory right) to defending public services and appealing to old union allegiances (on the Labour centre through to its soft and far lefts).

But we are now at the stage where both main parties have become so atrophied by internal ruction and managerial resistance to ideological renewal that neither any longer has anything meaningful to say to their core voters, let alone the electorate at large. In this context, ‘STOP THE BOATS’ is an open goal and pretty much all that is left.

There are some glimmers of hope amid the gloom of the Reform takeover of County Durham. One is that the new right-wing councillors are such an eccentric lot (to put it politely) that they seem highly unlikely to be able to navigate the mundanities of council work with anything like competence (Darren Grimes at an environment and sustainability committee meeting anyone?), or indeed maintain decent reputations in their local wards – let alone inspire the sort of popular affection which almost got Declan Mulholland over the line in Derwent and Pont Valley (his vote increased by around 50%), even in a context where his national party inspires a mixture of indifference and loathing in the electorate.

The wider reason to be optimistic – or perhaps grimly purposeful would be more accurate – is that we are now rapidly approaching a point of mainstream breakthrough for the populist right in Britain that should, in a sane world, force the Labour Party to rediscover some kind of soulfulness or at least substance as far as its basic political identity goes. While the Starmer era is clearly a total write-off – and aping Reform’s jingoism seems the most likely fate for the party in the short term – Labour can only persist in its current state of ideological unbeing for so long.

Life is long, and we are heading for an epochal battle with the far-right in which managerial platitudes like ‘Plan for Change’ will soon seem absurd even to those currently articulating them. In the coming war for the soul of this country, it is a renewed, youthful, pugnacious Left, and people like my friend Declan, who we will want at our side as we head into battle.