You see it before you even park the car. The boarded-up butcher, the old building society now a vape shop, the pub with the broken window boarded up and the same three regulars who’ve kept it alive since 2012. The takeaway is still there, though the chip portions are smaller now. Bus stop timetables are more a rumour than a plan. The town didn’t die all at once. It just quietly lost its pulse, bit by bit. The Tories call it “levelling up.” They talk about “left behind towns.”

But anyone who’s grown up in places like this knows that it wasn’t an accident, it was a choice. The slow draining away of jobs, buses, banks, hope. If this Labour government is serious about rebuilding Britain, it has to start here. Not just geographically, but morally – because this is where the country frayed first. And if you can’t put it back together here, you’re not going to be able to anywhere else.

A recent Blue Labour piece talked about a new covenant between Parliament and the people – a bond of mutual responsibility and shared nationhood. I don’t disagree.

But covenants don’t mean much if the people you’re talking to haven’t had a reason to believe you in years. Trust doesn’t come in the post with a manifesto.

It’s earned in the details – in whether you actually fix the streetlights, or whether you keep walking past them.

Take work. I didn’t grow up with the pit, but everyone older than me talks about it – the hum at shift change, the noise that meant wages, routines, purpose.

It’s gone now – flattened, overgrown, fenced off like it never mattered. The jobs that came after don’t come with pensions, don’t offer apprenticeships, and definitely don’t offer pride.

Reindustrialisation? Sounds good on a leaflet. But what people actually want is work that makes them feel useful, respected, part of something bigger. Not just another zero-hours contract packing boxes for some millionaire’s profits.

Then there’s energy. It’s not abstract here. It’s how cold your house gets when the bills shoot up. It’s whether you have to shut the back room because you can’t afford to heat the whole place. You want to talk about national security?

Try keeping a foundry open when electricity costs make it cheaper to move production to Poland.

We don’t need slogans – we need cheap, clean power that makes staying put feel possible.

And don’t get me started on public services. Try getting across Nottinghamshire after 7pm without a car – good luck. Try booking a dentist or speaking to a real person about your water bill.

Ask someone who actually runs the water company and they’ll probably just laugh. These things used to belong to us. They were part of everyday life – reliable, visible, ours. Somewhere along the line, they stopped being public and started being profit.

It’s the same story with tax. Most people around here don’t grumble about paying their share, they grumble when their share props up a system that lets landlords hoard property while nurses queue at food banks.

If you own twelve houses, you should be taxed like it. If you’re making money off land while people sleep in cars, you should be paying more than the lad pulling pints on minimum wage.

Fairness isn’t radical, it’s just common sense. Then there’s the harder stuff. The things people hesitate to say out loud because they worry how it’ll sound. Immigration changed the rhythm of a lot of places – sometimes slowly, sometimes seemingly overnight.

That change wasn’t always managed well, and when people asked questions or said they felt left out of the conversation, they were too often labelled backwards or worse. That didn’t just hurt, it hollowed something out.

Because let’s be clear: the people who came here to work hard, build lives, and contribute, they’re not the problem that the reactionary right will have you believe.

They’ve often faced the same poor housing, low wages and stretched public services as everyone else.

The real issue is a political system that made huge decisions without local consent, then refused to listen when people said they felt overwhelmed or ignored. We shouldn’t blame immigrants, we should blame a politics that stopped treating us like we matter.

We want to feel like change happens with us, not to us. Like we still have a voice in the places we call home.

Same with crime. You walk through the town centres and you can feel it – that edge, that weariness. Shops with plastic screens, the same faces hanging around every day.

Not all of it’s dangerous – but some of it is. And when people report things, nothing happens. If Labour wants to be taken seriously in “left behind towns”, it has to show up where things are fraying.

It has to prove that safety, respect and fairness aren’t just for the comfortable middle classes, they’re for everyone.

And above it all, power. Not as a slogan, but as a fact. The ability to decide what gets built, what gets funded, what gets listened to. Right now, it’s all too far away.

Mayors are a start. But real change? That looks like a town council with teeth. A budget that doesn’t need a bidding process. A government that trusts people to run their own patch.

There’s still pride in “left behind areas”. Still love. Still stubbornness in the best sense.

You see it in the volunteers at the youth club, the guy who keeps the rugby pitch cut, the girl who just opened a café because “someone had to.”

These communities aren’t broken. They’ve just been bruised, ignored, talked down to for too long. So if there’s a decade of renewal coming, let it start at the edges. In the post industrial towns.

In the places that stopped believing in politics because politics stopped believing in them. They don’t need a miracle. Just a government that sees them.