You can’t fight extremism without fixing the high street

Political trust is at a crisis point. In straitened economic times, politics feels increasingly zero-sum: for one group to gain, another must lose out. As the traditional bonds between mainstream parties and parts of the electorate weaken, and politics is convulsed by reactive, unpredictable outpourings from social media, it is the populist radical right which has most benefited.

There is, then, a sense of national political malaise, even crisis. However, this is not experienced equally or identically everywhere. Political distrust grows the further one gets from London.

In many places, high streets have become a visible symptom of decline as shops and pubs have closed, and post-2010 austerity measures cut a swathe through libraries, community hubs, and Sure Start centres. This came on top of the long legacy of Britain’s abrupt deindustrialisation and the progressive disempowerment of local government since the 1980s.

When people speak starkly about decline, they talk less about aggregate economic statistics than about their own daily grind and horizons, the feel of the place where they live, and their sense that they lack agency to change them. Yet local communities offer new, more hopeful possibilities. Research shows that people generally still feel positive about their neighbours and the community where they live.

The strength of the infrastructure underpinning our communities shapes the health of our politics. In a new IPPR discussion paper, sociologist Sacha Hilhorst shows the connection between the loss of community spaces and the increasing lure of radical right politics: as youth clubs close, community halls shut, and public spaces are privatised, people increasingly spend time alone and online, creating fertile ground for misinformation, division, and extremism.

These changes present new regulatory challenges but also reopen older questions about how to respond to fragmentation caused by rapid economic and social change. A century ago, the Mining Industry Act imposed a penny rate on coal companies to create a ‘Welfare Fund’ for building libraries, playing fields, and other vital community infrastructure. Hilhorst asks if, today, an equivalent fund levied from companies such as Amazon, whose warehouses and fulfilment centres have taken over from industrial employers of old, might help revive high streets and restore community spaces.

The Labour government is increasingly recognising the need for change felt in people’s immediate, daily lives. In March, the Deputy Prime Minister announced the government’s Plan for Neighbourhoods, with further resources allocated for community initiatives in the Chancellor’s spending review.

Such projects have a mixed record. Can government this time truly empower local people to act on their communities’ needs, while grappling with the parlous state of local government and Britain’s imbalanced economic geography?

The government has identified the problem, but restoring our tattered social contact is a major undertaking; a task that can be supported, but not directed, from Whitehall.

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Nick Garland is an Associate Fellow at IPPR and a historian of modern Britain.

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