I grew up in close-knit former mining villages in East Durham—places not unlike Seaham, a town I know well. For years, I was a regular at the Seaham Food Festival, which takes place again this weekend.
Where I’m from, solidarity mattered. People stuck together and looked out for each other. These were the kinds of communities that built the early labour movement—not an abstract, academic socialism, but something practical and grounded in everyday life.
The Price of Solidarity
That sense of solidarity came with costs. These communities could be socially conservative, inward-looking, and quick to police behaviour. People knew their place and watched their step. The worst sin was getting ideas above your station—something I was regularly guilty of.
They were patriotic, too. But it wasn’t the performative patriotism of giant poppies and flag-waving. This was a patriotism shaped by experience—by the men who went to war, not just in 1945, but to Northern Ireland and other forgotten fronts. Defending the community was a core virtue.
When Solidarity Turns Inward
These same places, not long ago, elected Reform UK councillors. The positive solidarity that once bound communities to the labour movement curdled into a negative solidarity: not about helping each other, but about keeping others out. A defensive, exclusionary mindset has taken hold, one that polices boundaries and behaviours ever more tightly.
Immigration and multiculturalism challenge these societies—not because they’re inherently racist, but because they’re deeply conservative and rooted in a homogeneity that’s no longer sustainable.
A Brief History of Seaham
Seaham is, in many ways, a lovely place. But it is an end-of-the-line town, with all the baggage that brings. Until the mid-19th century, its only real claim to fame was the marriage of Byron to a local landowner’s daughter—a union that produced Ada Lovelace, the mathematician who helped invent computing.
Then came coal. The Marquess of Londonderry, who owned large mining interests (many pits in East Durham were colloquially called “the Derry”), built Seaham Harbour to ship coal from his mines. The town grew around it.
But when the mines declined, the harbour declined too. When the last pits closed, the town was hit hard. People moved away in search of work.
Who Left, Who Stayed
The Blair years brought some improvements, and Seaham today is in far better shape than it was when the pits closed. But that progress came with a price. New opportunities—university, jobs in bigger cities—mostly required young people to leave. And most never came back.
As locals moved away, small numbers of immigrants arrived to fill gaps in the labour market—working as GPs, starting businesses. Change arrived quietly but steadily.
A Town in Decline
Like many coastal towns, Seaham faces deep-rooted health and economic issues. Mental health problems are widespread. Roughly half of adults are overweight. Life expectancy is not just low—it’s falling.
Educational attainment lags behind the national average. Only a small proportion of young people go on to higher education. And employment levels are startlingly low: just 7,500 people in work out of a population of 22,000. Of those, only around 6,000 work full-time. There are roughly two non-workers for every one worker.
A Dangerous Imbalance
When the welfare state was built, there were more than three workers for every non-worker. Most of those non-workers were women raising children, and they took relatively little out of the system.
Today, that ratio has collapsed to two workers per non-worker, most of whom are drawing some form of benefit. We now borrow heavily each year just to fund pensions and welfare. In towns like Seaham, the situation is starker still: taxes paid in other parts of the country—mainly London and the South East—fund local services and benefits.
This Isn’t Just About Seaham
I’m not picking on Seaham. The truth is, this story could be told about most of the North East. Only Durham and Newcastle have enough working taxpayers to support their local populations. Sunderland isn’t far off. The rest? Still dependent on the state. With the exception of a few enclaves like Darras Hall, most of the region is in the same boat.
Only Northern Ireland, its economy hollowed out by decades of conflict, is more reliant on government spending.
The Growing Burden
As fewer workers support more non-workers, taxes go up and benefits get squeezed—except for pensions, which continue to rise above inflation, shifting money from workers to retirees. That’s why both the outgoing Conservative government encouraged mass immigration, and why the incoming Labour Government are obsessed about getting people back to work.
Seaham may not like it, but without outside money and people, it cannot sustain itself.
Who Voted for Reform—and Why?
This year, Seaham voted Reform UK across the board. Many people have lost faith in the system. Their share of national wealth is shrinking. The social hierarchies that once gave them identity and status are fraying.
They feel outcompeted—by graduates, by immigrants, by women, by LGBT people. It’s not a stretch to see why. Seaham, like much of the North East, was built by working-class white men doing dirty, dangerous, difficult jobs that commanded respect and a good pension. Those jobs are gone—not stolen by immigrants, but eliminated by automation and economic change.
What remains is a void—traditions lost, identity unmoored. Even popular culture no longer reflects them.
They’ve disappeared from the nation’s imagination.
The System Will Only Speed Up
The government’s plans for economic transformation—green energy, high-tech investment, automation—will accelerate these trends. Not reverse them.
Faced with change, people respond in two ways. The poorest disengage: they stop voting, stop paying attention. Those slightly better off—often retired—channel their energy into a new kind of politics, one fuelled by social media and nostalgia.
Reform as a Reaction
The Brexit vote mapped neatly onto areas with declining life expectancy. The rise of Reform UK is no different. Their support doesn’t come from the very poorest. It’s not deprivation that drives it—it’s the fear of decline. Many Reform voters are more Hyacinth Bucket than Andy Capp.
They want to smash the system, not build a new one—as long as their pensions stay protected and the triple lock holds. Reform appeals to them not as a movement of the poor, but as a petty bourgeois reaction—a worldview that sees society as a zero-sum game, with everyone scrabbling for a slice of a shrinking pie.
A Town Caught in a Trap
People like me—voters who believe in social solidarity—understand that most government welfare spending goes where it’s needed. Yes, there are scroungers. But they’re a minority, and we trust the system to deal with them.
But in a town like Seaham, where government support is the lifeblood of the local economy, and where the worldview has become zero-sum, it’s easy to resent every penny spent on someone else. Especially when that someone doesn’t look like you, talk like you, or live like you.
Seaham isn’t broken, and it isn’t beyond hope. But it can’t go back to what it was, and it can’t survive by closing in on itself. Without work, without people, without change, there’s no future here—just managed decline and angry nostalgia. That’s not solidarity. It’s surrender.
https://www.essex.ac.uk/centres-and-institutes/coastal-communities
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.26.25330335v1