'Politics is the youth centre that keeps its doors open’

Politics wasn’t spoken about in my house in the way I talk about it now. Politics was something that happened on the news, in the capital, somewhere far from the northern post-industrial town I lived in. But this didn’t mean politics wasn’t happening. It was felt: in supermarkets, job centres, foodbanks, the youth centre where my mum worked.

My mum worked for Connexions, a youth career guidance and support service. But it acted more as a one-stop shop for young people in need. Whether kids came through the doors looking for career options or because they’d been kicked out of their house and needed a room for the night, my mum would do her best to help.

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Westminster felt a long way from Rochdale, but when my mum lost her job and the kids lost a place to turn, politics was everywhere. It lived in our house in the arguments over money, it lived on the streets and the park benches late at night and it lived in the empty car parks and boarded-up buildings. Politics lived in the loss that had no name. This is what politicians don’t understand about politics. Fiscal rules, triple locks, chancellor’s boxes and market growth weren’t in the strained conversations I’d overhear from my bedroom. 

Years later I wrote a PhD on contemporary politics and taught critical theory and political philosophy at university. The way I spoke about politics changed. All of a sudden, the feelings that lay beneath the surface of the rows and the closed swimming baths and the queues at job centres were given a story.

It was a story of an economic system that had name: neoliberalism and the false promises of free market capitalism and trickle-down economics that would instead send wealth upwards under the guise of ‘there is no alternative’. But if you don’t know this story, if you haven’t been given the language, the confidence or the time to challenge an invisible system that slowly wages a war on its people, then that feeling of loss, humiliation and grievance has nowhere to go.

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Where we are currently seeing the rise of far-right politics across areas similar to where I grew up, often described as ‘left behind’ by the media, a lot of this loss has turned to resentment and rightfully so. The local council elections showed huge gains for Reform, but this should have come as no surprise.

Far-right politics is inherently about feeling. Robert Paxton, renowned political scientist and historian calls these “mobilizing passions” where this kind of politics is “an affair of the gut more than the brain, and a study… that treats only the thinkers, and the writers misses the most powerful impulses of all”.

The thing is, mobilising passions aren’t such a bad thing. They are also at the root of most great art, the driver of new philosophies and the heart of radical political change. When directed into the future, these mobilising passions shape our world in ways that have enriched humanity and surged us forward into progress.

But what happens when you shut down the universities, or when you make the space to create art only available to the already privileged? What happens when you tell young people that education is simple training to get a job, to create profit? What happens when you defund and destroy the places where people can come together and challenge the status quo, turn the feeling into language, into change?

This is the story of an economic system that has not only impoverished places like Rochdale through the degradation of the material conditions and access to basic services and necessities but has impoverished people’s sense of agency. Agency does not come simply from votes; it comes from the ability to make sense of the present. And without a grasp of the present, you cannot tell a compelling story about the future.

This is at the root of the disenchantment with the politics we see today and it is being weaponised by the far-right to only further disempower the kind of people who have endured this slow economic violence over the last 40 years of neoliberal rule. The truth is, if no one can tell a story about the future, someone will tell a story about the past. But unfortunately for the far-right, history does not move this way, and no matter how many times you promise to take back control, restore some sort of empire, make America great again, you can only learn from history. You cannot return to it.

History taught me that freedom expands when ordinary people come together to demand more of the world. Critical theory taught me that systems of power often endure because they appear natural, inevitable and beyond question. Shine a light on them, and they begin to lose their grip.

But growing up in Rochdale taught me something else. It taught me that politics is not what happens in Westminster. Politics is the youth centre that keeps its doors open. It is the neighbour who pops round for a brew. It’s the ‘let me carry that for you, love’. It is care, responsibility and solidarity.

For all the grand speeches about nations, borders and greatness, that is what politics has always meant to me. Not revenge. Not return. But the simple and radical idea that our lives are bound together, and that a better future begins when we act like it.

Dr Louisa Munch is an academic, writer and social media influencer who specialises in critical theory and far-right politics.

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