'We're like the land that time forgot': De-industrialisation and Economic Reconstruction in Barnsley

Abstract

This thesis explores the de-industrialisation and re-industrialisation of Barnsley, a former coalmining town in South Yorkshire. Using a qualitative and multi-method approach, it combines different strands of research to build a longitudinal narrative of economic, social and political change to explore the destruction of working-class agency. Developing Flinders and Buller’s notion of ‘depoliticisation’, it demonstrates how political elites forcibly ostracised British workers and their institutions from decision making-processes. This framework is developed through archival research and interviews with coalfields residents and policy-makers, which contextualises political elites’ role in provoking and micromanaging the 1984/85 miners’ dispute to break the power of organised labour. This reveals de-industrialisation not as an inevitability, but a calculated ‘enforced destruction’ by political elites. The thesis utilises Gramsci’s ‘interregnum’ to describe conditions in which the social and civic tapestry of communities crumble into the void left by industrial destruction. The economic and social interregnum enables an appreciation of economic reconstruction and regeneration as longer-term processes that are underpinned by political dispossession and voicelessness in both workplace and community settings. Much of this narrative sheds light on the key affective drivers fuelling the political ruptures that shook Western political systems: Brexit, Trump and the fall of the ‘Red Wall’. But it also poses questions about the future prospects of work and labour agency in industries that are now a prevalent feature of coalfield communities, such as warehousing and logistics, where trade unions struggle to organise an increasingly precarious workforce, and where many jobs are now vulnerable to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. It offers an understanding of the present political juncture, by developing a theoretical framework that is historically sensitive, but looks to what the future might hold for industrial Britain.

Date of Award	27 Mar 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	David Moon (Supervisor) & Aurelien Mondon (Supervisor)