Dispatches from the Potteries #1: Disorganised Abandonment and Declinism

Welcome to a new series from me, thinking about the city I live in, the people who make it what it is, the challenges it confronts, and its relationship to the wider country and world.

When I leave my house and walk down the bottom of my road, there sits an abandoned wasteland, shrouded in overgrown weeds, well over twice the height of an average human being. If you look closely enough on a bright day, you can spot the skeletons of the old pottery infrastructure this new wildlife has claimed as its own. Once the site of a succession of potbanks and then a company, Century Oils, this abandoned wasteland sits across from the remaining oil refinery site, owned for several decades by Fuchs Lubritech. The walk I do almost every other day, sandwiched between this oil refinery and an abandoned, potentially oil-contaminated wasteland, is a searing reminder of what has become of contemporary Britain. The Fuchs site, opposite the wasteland, caters to a smaller workforce, almost exclusively from outside the area, providing the residents of the area with the added benefit that we also live in a very loud blast zone. As of 6th May 2025, the remaining oil refinery across the road from the wasteland is under voluntary closure, the board voting to liquidate the site.

This is an area that has undergone wave after wave of deindustrialisation. The closure of the potbanks, like the transformation of Shelton Bar, the steelworks that were once at the top of the road, into one of Margaret Thatcher’s Garden Festivals and then a retail park, speak to different waves of worker obsolescence. The global wave of manufacturing overcapacity which successively undermined the British industrial economy, decreasing the share of workers employed in steel, mining and mills, can still be felt today in a place like Stoke-on-Trent, and devastatingly so on my estate. In the decades since this wasteland has existed, there has been plenty of time for literally anything to occur on this land. Instead, this possibly oil-contaminated wasteland has become a part junkyard, part encampment for the area’s vulnerable drug users and homeless. The potential purchase of the land, secured some five years ago by renewables investment firm Bluefield Sandbach, was thrown up in the air last year when the Forestry Commission demanded the developers plant 410 trees on the site. Bluefield Sandbach, who offered up a measly 25 percent of “affordable housing” with absolutely no guarantee of social rents, has been locked into a protracted legal stalemate.

Named a “Grot Spot” by local newspaper The Sentinel, the two-up, two-down estate which surrounds Portland Street and Century Street is subjected to a level of classed and racialised vilification which mirrors the treatment of the ghettos of the United States and the banlieues of suburban Paris. One of the most multicultural areas in the city, the estate has by any metric been abandoned. Whilst under half of its residents are owner-occupiers and mortgage holders, most rent privately or through social housing. Purposefully shut off from the centre of Hanley on whose edges it sits - a place where the police and the Business Improvement District can siphon off homelessness and drug use that would otherwise occur in the city centre - dilapidated housing, HMOs (house in multiple occupation), vacant buildings, high rates of unemployment and widespread gig economy work all proliferate. Initially proffered by late Labour grandee John Prescott as a site for the Pathfinder scheme, an effort to clear the nation’s postindustrial “sink estates” of their undeserving poor, local resident organising and the area’s Heritage status ultimately prevented this sordid outcome. Instead, Stoke-on-Trent City Council sought to engineer the area’s population by other means, creating the £1 house scheme to attract young, professional Stokies who had left the city to come back, in the hope that they would bring their skills and trade to regenerate and gentrify the area. Although some people took this scheme up, embraced the estate and made it their own, others left and the scheme ultimately failed on its own terms.

For the City Council, a fundamental problem confronts the ambition to gentrify estates like Portland Street. People are broke. The average wage in Stoke is £21,000-a-year, twelve grand less than in Manchester, thirteen less than in Birmingham, and a whopping twenty-six less than in London. You simply cannot fill what urban geographer Neil Smith called “the rent gap”, if people cannot afford to pay higher rents or higher house prices.

Municipalities, hemmed in by Thatcherism’s disempowerment of local government, teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, spending vast sums on care, schools and social services. Absent the will or strategy to escape Thatcher’s restrictions on the ability of councils to democratically raise revenue, local government is more often than not a site for presiding over magnified forms of abandonment. One of the options that appeal to rightwing Labour Council groups consists of totally accepting neoliberal constraints and embracing the possibility of courting wealthier populations through property development and gentrification. But it is challenging to redevelop and fill in the rent gap when you have none of the requirements that facilitated such processes in the country’s large citadels. Simply put, Stoke-on-Trent does not have the infrastructure. The scrapping of the HS2 high-speed rail line beyond Birmingham put a severe dampener on existing attempts to create a gentrified core of better-paid professionals coming and going between Birmingham, Manchester and the new Capital & Centric Goods Yard development behind Stoke rail station, disengaged from the broader cultural and social fabric of the city. The recent announcement that the same firm may be appointed to regenerate the former Spode factory just minutes away from the station epitomises the heightened grasp for a gentrification strategy among municipal elites, potentially reproducing Capital & Centric’s social cleansing of the arts community from Manchester’s Crusader Mill in our city. But when it comes to the perpetual song-and-dance about what the council will do with so much of the derelict brownfield land across the city, stasis prevails because few residents can afford to live in hollow luxury apartments or spend shedloads of money in shopping malls.

The problem outlined here which confronts so many postindustrial towns and cities is pivotal to grasping what I understand as one critical aspect of the disorganised abandonment nexus. There is no doubt that estates like mine are in many ways classic exemplars of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organised abandonment”: lifeworlds purposefully destroyed by elites, exposing wholesale populations to the prospect of “premature death”. But something deeper has occurred too, as the constraints imposed upon municipal power reflect the impossibility of a rational collective ruling class strategy at the national level.

The common claim that “nothing works anymore” speaks to this sense of abandonment amongst the general population, a sharp realisation that Britain is a country in severe decline. But whilst this notion of decline is undoubtedly real, felt in the ballooning hospital waiting lists, the buses that don’t run on time, and the school buildings crumbling before your children’s eyes, it also speaks to the accumulation of a set of distinct structural processes conditioning the prospects of British capitalism and those it governs over.

For starters, the composition of the people who govern us has changed. It is not remarked upon enough but this centuries-old political institution, forever seen as the natural party of order, the Tory Party, as well as demolishing their support base, have now ceased behaving as the political instrument through which the interests of Britain’s capitalist elites are best represented. This is in no small part because the interests of individual capitalists are by no means always uniform. Capitalists – for whom “competition becomes a fight among hostile brothers”, as Karl Marx once put it – have different and often competing interests. For capitalism to survive, particularly in the form of a nation-state, a “collective capitalist” is required to put the interests of capitalism as a whole above those of the individual profiteer. The neoliberal era eroded the party’s capacity to manage capitalism. While Margaret Thatcher broke the labour movement, reformed the welfare state and reconstituted class rule in the interests of finance, real estate and the FTSE 100, she eroded the associational cultures on which her party relied and stoked transformations within the capitalist class itself.

The national capitalism of post-imperial Britain gave way to globalised capitalism, the elite of which is far less internally coherent, lacks forms of collective association, and is much more international. If a concern of state managers has always been that capitalists alone are incapable of a long-term view, this is even truer for rentiers and financial capitalists, whose day-to-day activities consist of what Duncan Thomas describes as “fomenting in constant, chaotic change” such as “mergers, downsizing, the immediate maximisation of shareholder value, takeovers, and restructures”. The 2019 revelation that the lion’s share of donors to the Conservative party came from finance – £18m of this from just five hedge-fund backers – only adds to this story of ruling class short-termism. This has had dramatic ramifications for the capacity of the state to manage.

As the late Neil Davidson has detailed, the elected political wing of state managers has become increasingly depoliticised – such as Gordon Brown’s granting independence to the unelected Bank of England – alongside the unelected, non-political wing of the government becoming increasingly politicised. Over time, the corporate takeover of the civil service throughout the neoliberal period has gone hand-in-hand with the diminishing gap between the two major parties, enabling the state bureaucracy to furnish itself as an extension of the party in power. These dynamics have implications for the relationship between the state and its subjects. Whilst the depoliticisation of the electorate and atrophying of civil society were facts of life before 2008, this was not the case throughout the 2010s. The Scottish independence and Brexit referenda, Corbynism and the rise of Reform all typify a world that this out-of-touch caste of professional politicians is ill-equipped to deal with. The Tory party – and Labour for that matter – can claim vanishingly few cadres able to ride out this crisis, let alone escape stagnation by reinventing capitalism. The decline of the labour movement as a deep-rooted force capable of exerting its power on the state and employers has removed from British capitalism a key social regulator capable of imposing limits on capital’s unabashed commodification of all that exists.

Yet, the problem lies deeper than this. The disastrous impacts of austerity, typified in the 40 percent drop in central government grants for local municipalities, have produced a form of inadequate statecraft, heavily reliant on discipline and punishment, incapable of reproducing humans, society or even amenable conditions for capital accumulation. As the Financial Times reported in an assessment over fourteen years of Conservative rule, half of all children in large families live in poverty; home-ownership rates have declined for all ages; capital spending on education has more than halved since 2010; household disposable income and average earnings has tailed off from postwar trends; deaths have risen sharply as a result of diabetes and heart disease; council funding has failed to match inflation with spending per capital declining by 18 percent; in-work poverty has risen from 29 percent to 42 percent; and a record number of 18-24 year olds list housing as a top three concern. Underlying this, infrastructure has been increasingly sold off to parasitic rentiers in hock to their shareholders and uninterested in making good services for the people. Ultimately, the majority of the population live increasingly unhealthier, lonelier and poorer lives. The direction of travel of early twentieth-century statecraft, where local government was one of the arenas in which social reformers, planners and labour movement representatives would improve the health, well-being and productive powers of the population through policy initiative is no more. Instead, disempowered local councils sway on the brink of bankruptcy with a swelling health and social care bill accompanying limited powers to raise money and less buck for your bang from the national state, administrating abandonment or dispossession by courting wealthier populations via property development and gentrification. For substantial parts of the population, it’s managed decline or on yer bike.

Taken together these developments begin to build a picture of why the ruling class are, in James C Scott’s words, incapable of “seeing like a state”. Torn between their international character, the state’s much-reduced ability to manage and their inability to escape the short-term thinking of financiers, rentiers or real estate moguls, a divided, internally incoherent ruling class has forsaken any role as a rational actor. This reality is communicated by opportunist politicians and pundits as declinism, a story which anxiously and enthusiastically grasps the nation’s diminishing status through a racialised panic over social breakdown, crime, and ultimately, migration. Enoch Powell’s prediction that the River Tiber will be “foaming with much blood” has become a dangerously common structure through which many obsess over the country’s problems.

Keir Starmer may agreeably rub the civil service up the wrong way with his claim that they have presided over a “tepid bath of managed decline”, but many are more than aware that slashing benefits, imposing renewed forms of austerity, ripping up regulations and opening up the country to big developers will not solve the issues we face. The Labour leader, one of the most unpopular and embarrassing in the party’s history, fuels the story of declinism perfected by the New Right and honed by Nigel Farage and his band of merry racists. Enoch Powell may have lost the battle in his day, but he won the war. The terms of British culture, as stated by politicians and pundits alike, are to read the country’s race to the bottom through the racialised nexus of crime, white marginalisation and what Farage laments as “the population explosion… devaluing British lives.” Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s forceful point, that “what Enoch Powell says today, the Tories say tomorrow, and Labour legislates on the day after” is the world we live in today. Starmerism, like its Conservative predecessors, creates the zero-sum circus in which an ascendant Faragism can dominate British politics. Reform now poll as high as 30 percent and its leader will likely be the kingmaker at the next election.

In Stoke right now, it is difficult not to feel encircled. Reform have gained a majority on neighbouring Staffordshire County Council, transforming a council which governs over 876,000 people into a laboratory for budget cuts, gutting Send (special educational needs and disabilities provision) departments, and dropping Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies. In the ward next door to me, Reform candidate Luke Shenton has won the Birches Head and Northwood council by-election, accumulating more votes than all the other candidates combined. The fact that it is slightly less multicultural than where I live in Etruria and Hanley, with a higher rate of owner-occupation, does not make the sense of encirclement feel any less disconcerting. Nor does the fact that at the top of the ward lies the Masjid Salahuddin, which became a key target and battleground for last year’s islamophobic pogroms, and raises the possibility of an interplay between fascist street violence and the inflammation of the Reform vote.

The story of declinism which Farage narrates so compellingly to his growing pool of supporters, a tale older than my grandparents, should urge us into constructing our own account of why life is so shit. Painting a different picture of our lives since the commencement of Thatcherism requires a new language and for me the framework of disorganised abandonment has become critical. The breakdown of the Thatcherite social contract portends a rupture in how states and classes remake and manage those they dominate. The reality of cheapened, super-exploited work, political disenfranchisement, the enclosure of proletarian lifeworlds, the privatisation of space, and the burden of social reproduction being forced onto private individuals has exacerbated the misery of everyday life for the majority since the seventies. But this catastrophe has exploded when confronted with a state no longer capable of filling the gaps, exorbitant rentiers unwilling to guarantee functioning services, a society no longer able to reproduce or look after the sick and disabled, and a creaking neoliberal settlement based on low interest rates, cheap housing and easy access to credit no longer able to fulfil its side of the bargain. In a country like Britain, disorganised abandonment is precisely the terms upon which neoliberalism’s breakdown has been realised and central to the story we should be telling against elite declinism.

There are innumerable reasons to be miserable, but there are of course resources of hope. My city gave street fascism a bruising last summer, our Palestine solidarity movement has been one of the biggest, most diverse social movements in the city’s history, and on my estate, the local community arts group, the Portland Inn Project, create spaces for local working class kids from all over the world to live, breath and take ownership over where they call home.

Stoke is a city loaded with charm, full of good people trying to change lives for the better, perpetually abandoned and repelled by their rulers. To create for this city and places like it, a notion of The Good Life realisable for everyone, we need the social institutions, the democratic cultural life and the political ideas to make it happen. But to beat the Faragist right, we also need a compelling story that people can feel and pay witness to. You cannot build a social majority without one.