As pundits pick over Labour’s election defeat, it seems at least some in the party have realized — far too late — what kind of people they were meant to stand up for. The collapse of the so-called red wall of postindustrial Labour strongholds across the north of England has brought this lack of representation into a sharp and terrible focus. Faced with the scale of this historic loss, there can be no question of winning these seats back with a simple change of leadership and a glossy rebrand.

These were Labour seats not only on identitarian grounds, but because they were once sites of class organization, built around workplaces where unions’ industrial strength showed workers the power of collective political action. As Aditya Chakrabortty recently wrote, the culture of Labourism was not only electoral, but nurtured by a huge infrastructure of assertive shop stewards, elected representatives in their own right who provided the organic link between the shop floor and corridors of power.

We have to recognize how much this culture has been undermined, not just in the 2019 election but over the course of decades. Even where unionized industries still exist today, such as in the shipyards of Barrow-in-Furness, many workers were convinced that they were despised by a distant and metropolitan Labour Party. When the Tory candidate wrote to each and every worker with the lie that Jeremy Corbyn wanted to decommission the yards, many of them believed it, despite receiving multiple letters to the contrary from their own trade union. “Even the union rep isn’t voting Labour” was a pattern repeated up and down the country.