Why would the English working class consider voting Labour again?

It’s lovely to see the former geographical entity Lindsey back in the headlines, a fleeting visit from a ghost from the past. Lindsey was one of the three subdivisions of the great county of Lincolnshire, if you remember, along with landlocked Kesteven and dank, flat, blustery Holland. It was abolished in 1974, simply swept away — the bit in the news became part of something called Humberside, but with a Doncaster postcode, neither one thing nor the other.

Ghosts from the past: I swear, on my evening news this week, I saw at Lindsey a picket standing on a picket line beside a brazier in the swirling snow, shouting things at scabs — all things which one imagined had been made illegal by the end of the 1970s, except for the scabs of course. Then there was the language of the picket interviewed: he referred to the gastarbeiten, the foreigners taken on by the oil company Total and to whom the pickets strenuously objected, as ‘Eyeties and Portuguese’. I haven’t heard anyone being called an Eyetie for 30 years either. You could feel the union man groping for a derogatory phrase for the Portuguese but the trouble is that back in the 1970s we didn’t feel the need to call the Portuguese anything, we just ignored them. So he had to call them ‘Portuguese’ which I daresay he thought damning enough by itself.

Total’s Lindsey oil refinery is situated next to a town called North Killingholme, which is a few miles from the important deep-water port of Immingham beside the Humber. There was a sympathy strike outside the old ICI Wilton chemical plant on Teesside, more pickets and braziers, and also at Grangemouth in Scotland. These are not very pretty places, to be honest. That plant in Teesside for example, was once the site of the biggest chemical works in Europe and just two miles from what was formerly the biggest steelworks in Europe.