Labour helped families like mine to thrive. I’m no longer sure it knows how, writes Shelagh Fogarty

And honestly, knowing St Helens as well as I do, I cannot say it surprised me in the slightest.

I worked there for years at Radio Merseyside. My first proper paid summer job was there too, in a Ladbrokes branch of all places. I have family members who worked there as police officers for years. I know the town’s warmth, humour and resilience. I also know its frustrations.

And St Helens is exactly the kind of place where people feel that, whoever has been in power over the last 40 years, life has not really improved for them. Not in a way they can feel day to day.

So when lifelong Labour voters turn to Reform, I do not think it is some great mystery. People feel ignored. They feel life is getting harder. And they no longer believe Labour understands them.

Angela Rayner seemed to acknowledge some of that after the local election results when she told the Communication Workers Union that people feel “the system is rigged against them” and that Labour “must be the party for working people”.

One phrase she used really struck me: “the common interest”.

Because politics now spends so much time segmenting people into groups, working class, middle class, graduates, non-graduates, red wall, blue wall, that we forget what Labour at its best actually stood for.

It stood for the common good.

I know that sounds old-fashioned now, but I do not think it is. In fact, I think its absence explains a lot of what is happening politically.

I was thinking about all this while looking at a photograph of my family taken in Liverpool in the late 1960s. I am tiny in it, sitting outside our rented house in Anfield with my six brothers and sisters. My dad has a cigarette dangling from his hand, far too close to my face, different times entirely, and my mum somehow looks immaculate despite raising seven children.

The photo is full of life. One brother pulling another’s hair, another messing around with playing cards, one trying to avoid the camera altogether. A proper family picture.

And what strikes me now is what that life represented.

My parents were Irish immigrants who came to Liverpool with absolutely nothing. My dad worked all the hours God sent. My mum worked endlessly too, mostly in ways women’s labour often was not counted then.

And somehow, on one ordinary wage, they managed to raise seven children without us ever feeling poor.

We had Christmas presents. We went back to Ireland every summer. We had parks, libraries, swimming baths and good local schools nearby. Two of us went to university. All seven of us went on to work and contribute in different ways.

That life was possible partly because postwar Labour politics had built systems that enabled ordinary families to thrive. The NHS. State education. Housing. Public amenities. The belief that your background should not determine your future.

And here is the uncomfortable truth: I do not think a family like mine could build that life now.

Not because parents today work less hard than mine did. Far from it. But because the basics have become so much harder. Housing costs alone make the comparison almost absurd.

That is Labour’s real problem.

Watching Keir Starmer after the election results, I kept thinking: where is the larger vision? What is the motivating force behind any of this? Competence matters, of course it does. Stability matters. But people also want to hear what kind of country you actually want to build.

Labour once had figures who could articulate that clearly. Attlee. Bevan. Even Blair, despite the arguments over Iraq. They made people believe politics could materially improve life for ordinary people.

Right now, voters are searching for conviction again. That is part of why Nigel Farage is cutting through.

Labour does not need to recreate Britain in 1967. The world has changed enormously, and rightly so. But it does need to rediscover the sense of purpose that once defined it.

Because if Labour can no longer persuade working families that it understands how difficult it has become to build a decent life, then places like St Helens will be forever out of reach.

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Listen to Shelagh Fogarty from 1-4pm Monday to Friday on the LBC app.

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