Come with me on my daily walk with my baby around Grangetown, Cardiff. At the bottom of Clare Road, heading south from Riverside, we pass a former night shelter (abandoned for five years now) obscured by mountains of rubbish dumped into its rotting shell. Further up the road, I recently passed a house in which the entire frontage, directly facing onto the street, had collapsed around the lounge window, so that the whole living room was exposed to the elements. Inside were a mattress on the floor, some mugs, and other paraphernalia. Someone had previously stuck plywood over the whole, but it had been ripped off. Today we pass it again, and there is police tape around it — the house has been torched, someone presumably having thrown an incendiary through the open hole.
A little further up Clare Road, we cross and take the slight turn on to Corporation Road, walking past a Tesco which now resembles a high security prison, all Plexiglass and staff with body cameras (part of an attempt — like the Dutch girl with her finger in the dam — to stop the epidemic of shoplifting). Every day there is some flashpoint, some form of aggression and drama as staff intervene to try to stop an addict from stealing. British retail workers, most of them on minimum wage, are facing an upsurge of abuse and violence caused by the shoplifting plague. Recent USDAW stats show that 77 percent of retail staff have been verbally abused, over half have been threatened, and 10 percent have actually been assaulted.
Further up Corporation Road, game citizens have been trying to valiantly hold back the flood of litter, but even the children’s play areas are choked with rubbish. When I take my son there, I can’t let him crawl about, because the floor is covered in fake nails, cigarettes, balloons, and discarded empty packets of cocaine. On a recent litter pick we collected forty bags of rubbish in a small park. This is a Sisyphean ordeal: clean up a tiny sliver of the neighbourhood every Saturday, and by the end of the week it’s back to how it was. Despite this, most days there is an old lady who doggedly wanders the streets with her pink bag and picker, doing her best to clean up her community. The belated reality of Cameron’s Big Society: pensioners doing the work that councils refuse to.
The whole of Cardiff is stinking. Everyone knows it, and everyone complains about it. It’s become part of life. Despite repeated criticisms from auditors about the recycling and waste management, the council genuinely doesn’t seem to give a shit about the state of the place. When you do get a response to an email, the contempt is palpable: essentially, leave us alone; or some haughty letter (‘we all have a responsibility to sort out our litter’) passing the buck to the residents. And yet, every evening before bin day, the bins are placed out perfectly by diligent residents. It’s not the residents who have made successive cuts to waste management budgets, meaning fewer crews and later collections; it’s not residents who have closed recycling centres and introduced hefty charges for the collection of bulky waste; and it’s not residents who’ve allowed houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) to spring up everywhere.
HMOs are a pox on the area — vectors for antisocial behaviour, serious crime, and fly-tipping. Between 2019 and 2024, there were over 11,500 complaints about rogue landlords in Cardiff; in response, the council recorded 286 offences but made no prosecutions. Across the UK in the same time frame, there were half a million complaints about landlords and housing conditions, yet local authorities took just 1,285 landlords to court. Over a hundred local authorities prosecuted no landlords at all.
The abandoned bookies at the end of our street is a case study for the enduring validity of ‘broken windows’ theory — a magnet for fly-tipping and drug dealing. Despite the acute housing crisis (nearly 10,000 people remain on the waiting list), most streets contain abandoned houses or buildings, absentee owners just letting them rot. There are about 1,500 abandoned residential buildings across the city, with the council again either unwilling or unable to do anything about them. Cardiff, Bridgend, and the Vale of Glamorgan recently ‘rationalised’ their environmental health function to one provider, Shared Regulatory Services Wales, to whom I report the multiple abandoned buildings. But the reports seem to go into a vortex, never to be seen or heard of again.
When I change my son’s nappy back in our bedroom, I can look down on the constant, open drug dealing going on in the alley opposite my house. Rough sleepers from the nearby homeless shelters recently migrated to the alleys around our house and started injecting in broad daylight in front of the abandoned bookies, leaving needles lying around. I’ve recently witnessed two serious assaults in my street in broad daylight, right in front of the children who play in the street. The police have seemingly abandoned the area: gormless police community support officers who look about 10 years old amble aimlessly up and down the Taff, seemingly deliberately ignoring the crime hotspots.
Britain is decaying. At the local level, its physical infrastructure is decaying. At the macro level, its political system is decaying — a decadent, useless, corrupt political class and system rotting in front of us. But perhaps most damaging of all, its social cohesion and sense of mutual trust are decaying. The ties that bind us are unravelling, as the institutions which sustained community have collapsed.
At the national level, the UK’s broken political economy is a petri dish for right populism. But the dramatic rise of Reform UK in recent years is at least partially the result of the failure of the ‘local state’. People make sense of the world and engage with politics in the first instance through their immediate local community. But, recently, local government has been caught in a perfect storm.
Fifteen years of austerity have brutally slashed local authority budgets, leading some councils to the verge of bankruptcy. In response to the austerity of the 2010s, Labour-led councils became increasingly entrepreneurial, selling off precious community assets — libraries, land, historic buildings — to developers, or else privatising key services to save money. Parks and green spaces have been enclosed, amenities that were once free are now run for profit, and community hubs have disappeared. Such moves have since become routine, not just painful short-term necessities. City councils and local authorities have been colonised by careerist briefcase-toting Labour ghouls in thrall to developer cartels, who funnel more and more public funds towards high-rise buildings and commercial office space.
The new profit-seeking model has melded with local government’s long-standing culture of anti-democratic managerialism, locking out citizens from the decision-making processes. Deals are done behind closed doors. ‘Consultations’ are launched, and then ignored. You want to keep your park/trees/sports club? Thanks for your responses, but tough shit. This is how people experience the state and democracy — the state can do nothing for you; it will ignore your concerns. But of course it can still fine you for driving in a bus lane, it can still find money for chief executive bonuses, and it can still bend over backwards for property developers.
Faith in the political system is at a record low, and this alienation is driven by the local and the everyday just as much as by grand developments at the macro level. When I discuss fly-tipping and antisocial behaviour with my neighbours, the consensus is that the council doesn’t care — no one cares. Unsurprisingly, people have given up on voting: in our recent local by-election, the turnout was 20 percent. This is replicated in every part of the UK: turnout in local elections is obscenely low, and it is lowest in the poorest places.
Across the UK, people are bubbling with rage. They are angry at the fly-tipping, angry at the open criminality, angry that the high streets are being casually turned into fronts for organised crime, angry at the useless councils, angry at the police. On a range of sociological measures, the UK is a deeply unhappy place, and no wonder. Being around poverty, litter, crime, and decay is incredibly stressful — it impacts mental health, and it makes people feel helpless.
Despair is palpable. But despair can be a dangerous and hard emotion: it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to collectivism but, rather, to resentment, which can be potent weapon for a far right reemerging from decay as predictably as bindweed pushing through concrete.
Across Europe, political geographers have started to note the spatial element of right populism, and how the far right is increasingly adopting the hyperlocal tactic of embedding itself in neighbourhoods — effectively seizing on the failures of local government to politicise local, material failings, which then become symbolic of broader national decline.
Unchecked decay allows the Right to advance its chauvinist agenda, which is often articulated as a defence of local place and community. Decay allows the articulation of nostalgia for a time when things were clean, when crime wasn’t as rife, when people had manners and respect, when the community was nice. Issues like litter and fly-tipping are increasingly racialised and explained by way of the ‘culture’ of immigrants, rather than by way of cuts to local services or the promotion of slum landlordism by successive governments.
Yet this has always been the case. Daniel Trilling’s 2012 study of the BNP, Bloody Nasty People, outlines how their growth in the East End of London was driven by a focus on hyperlocal issues like littering and housing shortages — and today’s far right is following this playbook. Examples abound. Despite being the party of small landlords, Reform has promised to clamp down on HMOs. Nigel Farage has called for tougher sentences for fly-tippers; Robert Jenrick has made a viral video accosting fare jumpers. Right-wing activists have started filming themselves scrubbing graffiti off the tube — an activity now spreading across the UK. Crush Crime, Dominic Cummings’s new campaign, is helping to speedrun the national discourse on law and order to the Right, gleefully highlighting examples of justice system failures and the endemic nature of antisocial behaviour.
This is the ironic one-two of austerity: successive Tory governments cut local authorities to the bone, such that they cannot provide services; then the people who either made or cheered on the cuts make political hay from pointing out the resulting incompetence, presenting themselves as saviours rising against a useless liberal establishment.
Morgan McSweeney — the mastermind behind Keir Starmer’s premiership — allegedly cut his teeth in Barking in the 2010 by-election by heading off the BNP through focusing on bread-and-butter issues and concerns about civic decay, thereby recognising that people were right to be angry about councils that were letting them down. Yet it is hard to see how this experience has informed Starmer’s tenure, other than by way of a ludicrous announcement about using drones to catch fly-tippers. Starmer’s hapless government has been easily outmaneuvered on these issues by Reform.
There are lessons here for any new left formation. First, there is an urgent need to confront and take seriously uncomfortable issues such as crime and antisocial behaviour. These are above all class issues, which primarily impact on the poorest. Talking about crime makes many on the Left uncomfortable. Yet such issues are too important to be left to the Right to dominate. We must do better than advancing ultra-left slogans. We must develop a vocabulary and arguments that deal with these thorny problems from a socialist perspective.
The geographer Anthony Ince has compellingly argued that a ‘deterritorialised left’, which pays no attention to everyday, banal, and material issues, is doomed to lose. While trade unions focus on the workplace, and what passes for much of the contemporary left focuses on social issues and foreign policy, there is an obvious gap here that might be filled by attention to community work. Any future left movement must break decisively with labourism’s focus on Parliament and electoralism as the sites of political power. ‘Activism’ has to mean more than door knocking, speeches, and A to B marches. The entire political culture of British socialism has to change.
Socialists must be actually rooted in communities, and they must concern themselves with material, ‘boring’ local issues. They should heed historic examples like that of the communist Phil Piratin in the East End of London, who concerned himself first of all with local issues: pushing for housing, demanding better standards, and fighting evictions. It was ultimately this work which allowed communists and socialists to build a base in these London communities, from which they built a political culture capable of physically resisting fascism. The class consciousness and solidarity evident in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 did not spontaneously emerge but was slowly built over many years by this work. We can build it again.