Beyond the flags: grief, polarisation and the work of repair

The North East (NE) of England today feels on edge and unsettled. Across city centres and town squares, flags are being raised. Protests and counter protests gather outside hotels, and tensions about migration and identity surface week after week. These are the outward expressions of much deeper wounds: decades of deindustrialisation, years of chronic underinvestment, the fraying of the social bonds that kept communities together: together these disorienting changes have shifted not only the physical but also the social and emotional landscapes of communities across the region.

We also see significant political volatility today in the NE, which is the prompt for this comment. We do not think the ‘rise of the far right’ in the region—a framing we return to later in this comment—can be understood without locating it within this longer history of economic abandonment and shifts in working-class identity.

We find ourselves in a moment that is both an emergency, and something that requires a deeper, long-term response. There is certainly immediate work that is needed to shore up economic security and to address the worrying cultural tensions that are building. But just as important and urgent is the deeper work. If we don’t address that now, we foresee a near future of continued and escalating polarisation, violence and unrest. This is not the work of curtailing particular political parties in the here and now, it is about disrupting the harmful patterns that are being amplified by contemporary debates online and offline: divisive stories of separation and scarcity that pit communities against one another rather than seeking out our common humanity.

This deeper work needs to explicitly address the harms as they manifest: outwardly, as hostility, division and outright racism, and inwardly as despair, fear and alienation. Each dimension needs acknowledgement and attention. Tackling these challenges will require skilled work, attending to the grief of what has been lost and harmed, healing the damage created by divisive narratives and policy choices, and the gentle offering of inclusive hope rooted in a proud region’s history.

JRF’s role is not to lead this work itself. But this position cannot be a veiled excuse to stay silent: as we explore in this comment, silence is part of the very problem that needs addressing. So we must play our part, and do that vocally: to publicly nurture what is already present—the seeds of repair already embedded in community life, in local culture, and in the determined leaders who continue, often against the odds, to build spaces of connection and hope.

Some reflections on the process of writing this comment

Three points before we begin. 

First, while we are writing specifically about the North East, the themes and issues here are not unique, even if they unfold differently elsewhere. And we also appreciate that there will be different experiences within the North East, it is not a homogenous place. This is not a comprehensive account, or an academic comment; instead, it is our attempt to capture and describe what we are seeing, and to propose some possible ways forward, based on those observations and the many conversations we’ve been part of across the region. We offer our own perspectives: Victoria’s lived experience growing up and leading JRF’s work in the region, and Sophia’s experiences shaping major programmes of work to build regenerative and just futures across the UK.

Second, we have centred our attention on what is happening for the white working-class communities that are the demographic majority in this part of the country. The comment’s focus on this is in no way to underplay or minimise the fear and the devastation being felt today by racially minoritised communities. The silencing and denial about the role of racism in recent events is both harmful, and dangerous.

We have thought hard about working-class identity and how this has traditionally been associated with being white, an overly narrow view that risks obscuring the identities and experiences of racially minoritised working-class communities. Powerful concepts of whiteness and ‘othering’—fuelled by a divisive online environment—have encouraged resentment to be directed sideways towards neighbours and newcomers, rather than upwards to the systems that created the conditions of poverty and rising inequality for everyone in the first place.

We hope that in this context we are offering perspectives that invite understanding, curiosity, solidarity, and that begin to lay the groundwork for a shared agenda for change—while resisting the urge to shame, silence or simplify the incredibly complex terrain that we are covering. But this is not easy work to do, and we come to this work with humility, knowing we will have got some things wrong. We welcome feedback and comments in that spirit.

Third, a comment on our position in the landscape. We’re writing from inside a philanthropic organisation with a deep commitment to our home city of York, and this region. And as an organisation whose wealth comes primarily from investments in global markets, we must recognise that we are part of the extractive economic system, and arguably the entangled and professionalised political system, that this comment describes. So, in our response to the rising confidence and bullishness of nativist and populist agendas, we must not reinforce a sense that we are part of a distant liberal elite, looking down our noses at those who express views that are different to ours.

A recognition that we must be part of communities—rather than distant observers or an arms-length funder—has shaped our regional programme in the North East. We see the widening disconnect between communities and traditional centres of power as one of the defining challenges of our time. That is why our regional team at JRF is rooted in place: living and working here, building trust, and standing alongside communities as they take the lead in shaping their own futures. By being embedded in the region, we're working to share power. We are able to listen more deeply, and to support communities on their own terms, rather than imposing solutions from above.

This is about bringing humility and respect to the question of ‘what is ours to do’. It is not our job to lead the efforts to move towards repair and healing described at the end of this comment—that needs to be done by those who live in the region. However, we believe we have a responsibility to use our voice and power to explain why we are supporting and nurturing the kind of work laid out here. We have talked in this comment about the dangers of staying silent: it’s our job to face into this too, and to be willing to enter difficult, contentious territory about the intersection of race, class and poverty. Our mission requires it.

Finally, this comment draws upon the conversations we have been privileged to hold with people working in communities across the North East. We do not share their identities here because that was not the basis on which these conversations were held. We are grateful to them—not only for their tireless work to build better futures for the communities in which they are working, but also for their candour, their vulnerability, and their courage in naming what is often really difficult to say aloud.

Decades of harm

Drive through the towns and cities of the North East of England, and you’ll notice the flags everywhere—Union Jacks, St. George’s crosses, fluttering from lampposts, pinned wonkily to pub windows, draped over garden fences. Depending on who you ask, they are proud symbols of belonging or clear warnings of exclusion. Each week brings a new round of demonstrations outside hotels housing migrants and asylum seekers. Chants and slogans echo around the streets, answered sometimes by counter-protests, sometimes by silence.

These are the surface ripples of something that goes much deeper: decades of harms inflicted, from which communities have not yet recovered. The collapse of coal mining, shipbuilding, and steel tore away not only jobs but people’s (particularly men’s) proud identities as workers and as bread-winners. What has emerged instead is a fraying of bonds and a loss of certainty. Trauma and alienation have seeped in, driving feelings of hopelessness and fatalism.

In the North East today, there are troubling signs that this kind of community harm is slipping into self-harm too. The statistics speak of high suicide rates, high levels of addiction, and whole neighbourhoods written off in a toxic language of deprivation and left-behindness. Lived experience of the region points to anger, grief, confusion and exhaustion—things that might not appear in ONS’s datasets, but that are so very present in the places where we are working.

Silence and anger

One community leader we spoke to has been signed off work with stress. Burnout, they tell us. “It’s been awful not hearing from people,” they admitted, “more stressful than talking about it. It doesn’t make it go away, it just makes you feel like no one cares”. They described a recent meeting where no one mentioned the riots, the hostility, the unease that hung over the room. “The silence is deafening, and I’d rather people said something than were scared of making things worse—they can’t get much worse.”

Silence has come up again and again in our conversations. People describe how racist language goes unchecked—whether on social media, or in everyday life—and how that silence has the effect of normalising it. Following the riots of summer 2024, many told us of a reluctance among public officials and local leaders to name the violence for what it was: racist. 

Instead, the civil unrest was labelled as ‘anti-establishment’. This label erased the obvious racial targeting of violence. In Hartlepool for example, it was the mosques, the Polish, African and Halal shops—businesses that served diverse communities—that bore the brunt of the damage. Branding this kind of overt racism as ‘anti-establishment’ flattens and minimises the account of what happened, meaning the grief and trauma of racialised minority groups is simply not seen or acknowledged. Solidarity cannot possibly grow from denial.

Across communities, people are feeling unheard and unseen. In white communities, poorly explained changes, such as the dropping of long-standing school traditions like Christian nativity plays, are experienced by some as a kind of censorship, fuelling nostalgia and patterns of othering. The same dynamic is present for Muslim communities: we heard a story of an Eid celebration being relabelled as a ‘cultural event’, leaving people feeling as though they were not permitted to share their faith openly, to belong fully in their own town.

There is an undertone of anger, fear, and frustration across the region. A leader of colour, who has lived and worked in the North East for years told us, “If I was white, I would have rioted”. They continued, “People have hard lives and have been let down for decades”. Their words carry both compassion and warning: without serious engagement and action, the anger will keep finding release in destructive ways.

The truth is rarely simple. Some of what we’re seeing is undoubtedly a nostalgic yearning for the perceived safety of the past; some is racially motivated xenophobia. And some of the rioters might not even have had a clear reason: as Tim Newburn from LSE notes, not all rioting is primarily focused on bringing about social and political change. We have certainly heard from people who said they simply got caught up in the excitement of it all: the adrenaline rush and joy of acting together. What makes this moment so dangerous is our struggle to name and hold all these truths at once. How do we label racism plainly and clearly for what it is, while also making space for the grief and disorientation that change brings?

And here, there is an awkward silence that reinforces a sense of isolation for those already under enormous strain. Noting how uncomfortable they already felt talking about these dynamics, one community leader observed, “It feels like the voices opposing all this are very quiet, like they don’t know how to respond”. People are scared to speak out; scared to say the wrong thing. We are lacking the necessary social vocabulary and the practices of handling conflict in dialogue to be able to speak across difference.

This really matters. “We are one racist incident away from more riots” said one local leader with conviction. They told us how, just the night before, a local MP’s office had been the subject of an arson attack; the previous week, the windows had been smashed in on two separate nights. Across the region, we are hearing accounts of a rise in overtly racist attacks and slurs.

So this silence is far more than awkward: it is corrosive and dangerous. Unless there is honest engagement, and more spaces for conversations to happen across difference, the anger will keep breaking out in destructive ways. The silence will become a vortex, waiting to be filled instead by populist politics that fuel stories of blame and division. We need to find ways of speaking honestly together, bridging differences in ways that build solidarity and heal fractures.

Looking back to understand now

To understand this atmosphere, we have to look back to our past. A century and a half ago, the North East was the engine room of the Industrial Revolution. Coal hewed in this region, carried by ships built on these shores, and sailed across the world under the Empire’s flag. The North East shaped global history, driving the expansion of the Empire’s colonial reach. This is a story of ‘progress’ in the way it is often told. But it is also one of dominance and exploitation, where colonialism and empire extracted wealth to uphold systems of racial and economic inequality.

This unvarnished truth, rather than a nostalgia for a rose-tinted past, is the foundation we need to start from when talking about race, class, and the deep layers of inequality we see within the region (and the UK) today.

There’s a temptation to romanticise the past, missing the hard truth: for generations, power and wealth have been concentrated at the top, often leaving working people with little more than stories and scraps.

Darren McGarvey

In its heyday, the Durham Miners’ Association was a powerful grassroots movement, with miners from villages across the County representing their views and driving community-led change within a Pitmen’s Parliament in the heart of Durham. Miners held remarkable collective bargaining power—securing the highest wages of any working-class group in the world, which went on to fund a strong network of education, artistic, sporting and political associations across the former coalfield.

But, over time, deindustrialisation stripped away the jobs, security and social fabric that many communities had. Mining and shipbuilding may have offered a sense of belonging, pride and collective power, but what was already a tough life became even harder as incomes dwindled. Today, that sense of loss has become inter-generational. A manager running a suicide prevention service told us “people are angry about things that happened before they were even born”. Trauma, like pride, can be inherited.

Government after government has spoken of ‘levelling up’, but underinvestment has remained the only real constant since the 1980s. The years of New Labour deepened the divides: the North/South gap widened, and so too did inequalities in the North East. Newcastle attracted investment and renewal, while former mining and coastal towns like Horden and Hartlepool lagged behind. Since 2010, Conservative austerity policies bit hard and deep into towns and villages across the North East. Housing stock has deteriorated, schools and hospitals have thinned out, and local opportunities for young people have shrunk.

Meanwhile national housing policies have resettled families and placed asylum seekers into the cheap terraces of towns like Hartlepool and Middlesbrough. The intention was bureaucratic efficiency—to cut housing costs in London. But the effect was something else. Families with multiple and complex needs were placed in communities already under strain, without adequate support systems in place. This has led to rising resentment in white working-class communities that already felt overlooked and abandoned.

Shifting power and the break with Labour

In places like County Durham, Labour was once tantamount to a religion, with class and political identity fused and difficult to separate. Voting Labour was not a choice but a certainty, passed down like a family heirloom from generation to generation. It’s no wonder the BNP tried to win seats with the slogan ‘We’re the Labour party your granddad voted for’. Durham City Council was the first Labour council in England, and it remained so for 100 years.

That strong loyalty has gradually ebbed away, mirroring wider shifts in both the labour movement and the Labour Party itself. Locals describe this change as a ‘hollowing out’ of community power that began in the 1950s. This was accelerated by the expansion of university places in the 1990s and 2000s. Many young people left their home towns to study, often not returning; those who did came back with different views and ambitions. The ‘we’ of the close-knit villages of the region began to seem less certain and clear-cut.

Today, mistrust towards mainstream politics is palpable. People talk about the ‘educated elite’ with suspicion, even disdain. Climate change policies are dismissed as irrelevant luxuries; science itself is sometimes seen as the language of people far removed from everyday struggles. Resentment deepens when Labour politicians try to brand themselves as ‘working class’ to win support, while living lives far removed from those trying to make ends meet. The result is a growing feeling that politicians, Labour included, are speaking from inside a system that no longer sees the people it claims to represent.

From where we stand, we see progressive responses to these fractures as uncertain, at times even paralysed. This hesitation and reticence makes the ‘failure of the left’ just as much part of this story as the ‘rise of the populist right’. The left has allowed itself to calcify into a liberal elite that prioritises winning, professionalism, competency and control over connection, solidarity and belonging. Its obvious discomfort with how to grapple with questions of class and how they intersect with race is a major failure. We see it clearly in the North East, but the pattern stretches across the UK. This is the backdrop against which polarisation is hardening, and contributes to the reasons that people feel abandoned by politics.

The populist script, algorithms and anger

The Brexit referendum was the most obvious turning point in the recent story of the region - although disillusionment was clearly visible long before. Back in 2002, Hartlepool elected its football mascot, H’Angus the Monkey, as mayor. It was a moment of satire, for sure—but also protest: a signal that many felt unheard and overlooked by the political establishment. Fast forward to 2016 and Middlesbrough recorded one of the highest Leave votes in the country at 66%. For many, it wasn’t about Brussels so much as Westminster. “People making decisions about a place they’ve never been to” is how one local leader put it. The slogan “Take Back Control” wasn’t abstract: it was a visceral feeling, put into 3 simple words.

Some we spoke to made the point that the high Brexit vote in the North East was not simply about fear or hostility. It was about hope. The Leave campaign presented a compelling vision—credible or not—of something better. In a region where communities have repeatedly been promised change but seen little delivered, choosing any action which opposes things remaining as they are can feel like a rational response. “It’s a vote for ‘anything but what we are currently experiencing’”, one community leader told us.

Yet leaving the EU didn’t ease frustrations. If anything, it opened up space for fresh grievances. And into that space stepped Reform UK, offering a language of ‘common sense’, and candidates drawn from relatable local figures. A former boxer as the Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire: a perfect symbol of toughness, grit, and recognisability. And a deliberate contrast to Keir Starmer, often caricatured as a technocrat from North London who cannot speak to, let alone for, working-class Northerners. The North East’s political scene could be set for another significant shake up next May with 4 elections being held across Tyne and Wear which could see Reform gaining further ground, setting the course of the region’s politics for years to come.

This autumn marks a troubling new chapter as Advance UK, a right-wing party led by Ben Habib and backed by Tommy Robinson, is set to launch in Newcastle this weekend (with some bumps in the road as a Council-run hotel cancelled the venue for the launch this week). Newcastle as a choice of location was not in any way accidental. The North East, once treated as Labour’s reliable fortress, is now seen as open ground.

Populist movements thrive on clarity. Their language is simple, and their targets are clear. Migrants, elites, distant institutions: all can be blamed. Stuart Hall has described “authoritarian populism” as the art of making grievances sound like common sense. In the North East today, you can hear that script playing out on high streets, in pubs, at demonstrations. “We’re just saying what everyone thinks” is a refrain. It feels true enough to stick.

It is always easier to blame the people we can see—the migrants, the neighbours who live or look differently—than it is to face into the harder truth: that the forces shaping our lives are abstract, complex and deeply entrenched. We live with an economic system that extracts value from communities, holds marginalised people down, and channels wealth upwards. Part of the anger we are hearing in the North East seems to be bound up with the betrayal of promises made by modernity: that if you work hard, you’ll get ahead. Growing numbers of people believe ‘the system is rigged’: people feel cheated not only by government policies, but by the very rules of the game.

We lack the language for this rage against the machine. And once again, this becomes racialised, with whiteness offering a sense of belonging to some, while making those outside of it the targets of blame.

Online platforms amplify these patterns, rewarding outrage and encouraging division. Here are powerful spaces where misinformation flourishes. Simple villains and easy answers dominate. Algorithms stoke anger and fear, locking us into cycles where we start to doubt what change is possible. These are the beliefs that spill over onto the streets of the region, sometimes poisoning the shared public spaces we have.

The manipulation of grief

While it might be anger that manifests most clearly, at the heart of so many North East communities is a kind of unspoken grief. It is a grief that comes from loss of pride, of identity and of belonging. It shapes how people see themselves and how they make sense of the world around them. This grief is undoubtedly racialised, drawing on the sense that whiteness once drew privilege and status, which is now under threat. This sentiment is seized upon by the populist right agenda, who turn it into fuel for resentment and anger, and weaponise it to drive division where solidarity might otherwise grow.

Amahra Spence captures this picture with absolute clarity. She shows how the grief of poor and working-class communities is being deliberately redirected away from the systems that created it, and against those who are themselves marginalised—migrants, Black people, queer people. We are told stories that separate ‘class’ from ‘race’, as if one can be understood distinctly from the other. Narratives of ‘left behind white towns’ play out in one space, while conversations about racial inequality play out in another, even though the lived experience of these dynamics are inseparable. This fragmentation serves only the interests of the right, and of capital, because it obscures the truth: that the same forces drive inequality for all marginalised groups, even if the effects of that are uneven and racialised.

Imogen Tyler (Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University and member of JRF’s stigma group) describes what we are seeing in the NE as a process of ‘othering’.  Scarcity and inequality transform neighbours into competitors, rather than allies. Economic hardship and cultural fears become intertwined, creating an atmosphere where a flag can feel like both a protective shield and a harmful weapon.

There could be another way through this. Activist Malkia Devich Cyril speaks of ‘radical grievance’: the collective act of transforming grief into a demand for justice. This is a politics that refuses to scapegoat, and instead insists on solidarity across struggles. The North East has long traditions to draw on here: miners’ banners carried in the name of solidarity, adorned with slogans in the spirit of collective liberation.

Amahra reminds us that “this is not about ‘saving’ white people. It is about refusing to let fascism monopolise grief. It is about refusing to cede the terrain of belonging, ritual and story to the far right. It is about course correcting and memory work that is rooted in truth without romanticising or rewriting history. It is about building infrastructures—unions, movements, civic and social infrastructures, cultural projects—that can hold the complexity of race and class together, and orient the pain of change toward justice.”

Healing justice, and the work of repair

Facing such entrenched systems, it can be difficult to know how to respond. But what if looking back could help us to chart some pathways forward, as well as understanding the conditions that led us to today? It’s important to be clear: the story of the North East is not solely one of division. The region also has a rich history of solidarity rooted in collective struggle and liberation. Every corner we turn reveals acts of resilience, care, and creativity. We see these as the essential ingredients of how to respond to the division and pain of today. We are going to need to dial them up significantly, if we are to avoid participating in or reinforcing narratives of division and polarisation.

In this final section, we offer some thoughts about how wealthy, independent funders like JRF should respond to everything we’ve described in this comment. We propose 3 routes towards the possibility of response and repair: 3 areas that we think should be better resourced and amplified. As with the rest of this comment, we’re basing our thoughts on many conversations with communities and leaders in the region over the last 18 months. We have written these comments with the North East in mind, but we think what we suggest here may be relevant also for the many other areas of the country experiencing racial and class-based tensions in these confusing times between worlds.

There are 3 simple, grounding principles that inform our thinking, and reflect the consensus of all the conversations we’ve had to inform this comment:

• This is deep work concerned with identities, stories and trust. But it needs to be done urgently. Of course, more resources are needed for the crisis work of building community resilience. But this deep work is just as pressing, unless we want to sleepwalk into a near future of division and conflict.
• Efforts to do this deep work need to happen at a scale and pace we’ve not seen before. That means taking some risks and accepting that some things won’t turn out as planned. It means ensuring there are spaces to learn together and be honest about what is and isn’t working, to enable rapid pivots.
• This work must be led by local people, unless we want to risk reinforcing the damaging dynamics of the last 4 decades. There may be wounds in the region, but that does not mean we apply a deficit model. This is a region full of activists and leaders, deeply rooted in community and history, who want to make a difference to where they and their families live.

Building a solidarity economy

100 years ago, Redhills (the ‘pitmen’s parliament’) was a vanguard of a newly confident and aspirational working class, built from miners’ dues, and connected to a global network of solidarity organisations. It developed an early model of participatory democracy, based on 200 miners’ lodges coming together in a thriving solidarity economy, to build a better future for County Durham’s communities.

Redhills embodies a powerful, inspiring heritage that lives on, not only in the beautiful refurbished parliament building, but also in the annual Miners Gala, attended by 200,000 people. As it reopened, the Redhills team set out their intent in this short film. They are seeking to grow that solidarity economy once more, based on community-led democratic decision making and focusing efforts on housing, energy and social care. Redhills is offering a counterweight to a damaging nativist narrative of nostalgia: instead it is choosing to tell the story of a proud history of communities looking out for each other, taking inspiration from the collective values of the miners’ banners: ‘the past we inherit, the future we build’.

JRF is already supporting Redhills as a critical anchor organisation in the region, providing them with grounding funding to build and develop a solidarity economy programme, drawing on lessons from initiatives around the world such as Co-operation Jackson and the Ujima Fund. Over time, Redhills is hoping to build a Solidarity Fund, designed to resource and nurture community-led projects that generate real wealth and sustainable jobs for places, such as the initiatives on community-owned energy and community-run housing. Funds like these are exactly where philanthropy should be putting its resources—either investing their endowments or committing programme budgets—in order to grow community wealth and invest in regenerative and just futures.

Investing in healing justice

Healing justice is a political and therapeutic framework that recognises how oppression, trauma (individual, structural, intergenerational), systemic violence, exclusion and marginalisation deeply affect bodies, minds, relationships and communities. Its practitioners do not believe that healing can be separated from justice. They see care not as a luxury but as a necessity to sustain resistance and flourishing. Healing Justice London describes this work as a way to ‘interrupt and intervene in interpersonal, structural, and intergenerational violence for the sake of just and health-filled futures’.

We see a need for work that is designed by and for the region, equipping grassroots and institutional leaders with the skills needed to navigate the complex challenges of these times. Healing justice work addresses the deep impacts of trauma, violence, oppression, and marginalisation on communities.

We can imagine a programme of healing justice, designed by and for the region, comprising of:

• Community programmes: spaces for healing, learning, dealing with grief and anger.
• Structural interventions: identifying and advocating for change in health, care and housing systems.
• Sustaining grassroots movements: training and equipping leaders with the skills and support to navigate these complex territories.

Through our partnerships with Lumos, Healing Justice and Larger Us, JRF is already resourcing experimental work in communities that focuses on training and skills development in some of these critical zones: responding to perceived threats and defusing ‘fight-flight-freeze’ states, bridging divides through curious conversation, and navigating experiences of loss. This work is critical to helping people find ways to reach across divides, to seek out the ‘larger us’. We will continue to share the findings of this work as it unfolds.

Reconnecting people with pride, possibility, and hope

There is a task to correct the myths and lies of public narratives about who is responsible for what people are experiencing in the North East currently. It is not asylum seekers in Hartlepool hotels. It is not the neighbour’s daughter who left home to get a degree. We could look instead towards decades of policy choices that hollowed out towns and treated the North East as an afterthought. Perhaps we need to map patterns of ownership and wealth holding in the region to illuminate how assets are being leached out of communities towards shareholders and global corporations. Part of building a story rooted in pride and possibility depends on a more accurate account of where we find ourselves today.

Through our partnership with People’s Economy—‘Sea Change’—we are training everyday folk as community researchers, to understand what ‘wealth’ means to them. As they learn together, they’re exploring how our economic system currently operates to sustain poverty, inequality, and the climate crisis. Later stages of the programme will use imagination as a tool, inviting people to look towards the wide horizons of this beautiful part of the coastline, to picture and start building fairer futures for Hartlepool.

Beyond specific initiatives like this, and inspired by Ruth Taylor’s work, we also think there’s more to do to back efforts by regional storytellers to develop alternative stories of pride and Englishness that centre interdependency and collective care. The seeds of these stories already exist in the powerful banners and music of the miners’ unions. We could cultivate a network of alternative media creators; and we could invest in efforts to rebuild social fabric that’s been lost—using a community development and movement-building approach to engage football clubs, boxing clubs, and other sites of masculine identity in particular.

There are also stories of pride, resilience, and hope to amplify. Fiona Hill, former foreign policy advisor to 3 US presidents, speaks of the ‘resilience and grit’ that comes from being born in the North East, and of the importance of telling stories not just of the past, but of the present and future. “The North East is the home of the Industrial Revolution—literally the engines of prosperity. 200 years ago, it was at the forefront of innovation, and there is still great potential for innovation today.”

Finally, we wonder what it might mean to resource a network of ‘hope activists’ across the region: festival producers, artists, alternative media producers—a network of practitioners who are seeking to create moments of joy and possibility that reclaim public space. We have already experimented in this zone with the Seeds of Hope work, and with the Here is Hope festival in York. We think there is further to go here.

Moving beyond binary thinking

Engaging with the grief and anger of white working-class communities that this comment has described is not the same as endorsing racist beliefs and behaviours. But we need to recognise that this grief and anger co-exist with racism and harm, and that all these experiences emanate from the same source: an extractive, exploitative capitalist system rooted in colonial practice and domination.

Navigating this territory requires organisations like ours to ‘skill up’: to hone a highly developed set of capacities to navigate complex dynamics without collapsing into binary thinking. It is about us having a starting point that accepts that, in many of the crises we are experiencing today, there is not 1 right answer, 1 way to be; the task is not to ‘win the argument’, but instead to find a path towards new ways of living and relating to one another that reflect our interdependence. That might not translate so easily into a headline, or a ‘win’ for our side. But if those are the things we chase then we risk being part of the problem ourselves.

With all this in mind, we are committed to continuing to use our own platform to amplify a diversity of voices, and to model our commitment to intersectionality and plurality. This piece you are reading now will be followed by others, drawing on different perspectives across the region. We must recognise that in times of uncertainty, our task is not to manufacture a false sense of comforting certainty, but rather to make sense of complexity together. That will require openness, curiosity and humility.

Talking past the silence

The North East is not simply turning to the right. It is grieving: grieving its lost industries, as well as lost identities and lost certainties. The things we have described here: flags, protests, and critically silence—are all symptoms of that grief. Populism has found fertile soil here because it offers clarity, a comforting hug where life feels so confusing. It offers nostalgic pride over shame. It promises a renewed sense of belonging after decades of alienation.

But this region is more than a cautionary tale of what happens when places are abandoned. It is also a place where new stories are being written, against all the odds. We see also the emergence of stories of pride reclaimed, with hope and solidarity woven in. There are tentative possible futures, imagined together. The task here is to help those stories to be heard, and to nurture more of them, rather than letting them be drowned out by a toxic roar of anger.

Bayo Akomolafe writes, “the times are urgent; so slow down”. That feels so true here. The work ahead is pressing, but it must not be rushed. It is the careful work of repair, of addressing grief, and of listening and talking past the awkward silences. Organisations like ours cannot lead this work, but we can tend to it by cultivating different soil, and supporting those leaders who are already there, and already holding the trust of their neighbours.