Barnsley’s success is still no defence against populism

My son Luca is a film-maker and, last Thursday, as the local election was in full swing, he was filming with the Raytons in Barnsley. The Raytons are an independent band from Doncaster who, despite refusing to sign with a record label, have such a following particularly in their their native south Yorkshire that they recently sold out Wembley Arena (they organised coaches from Doncaster) and have topped the album charts.

If any local politician was looking for lessons in how to connect with what used to be called “the red wall” while maintaining a progressive stance, they could to worse than look at what the Raytons do.

Luca was filming in Barnsley for the Raytons Grassroots Foundation, which supports young people in sport, music and the arts. They were filming at the Base71 youth centre, a huge new facility full of the town’s young people, 50p entry and another 50p for a meal.

The town centre, he reported, was also buzzing and the newly rebuilt market and shopping centre were full of people in the sunshine. This from someone who is normally quite hard to impress.

It is a sign of our political times that even success, competence and commitment can be dressed up as failure and politicians being out of touch

There is therefore a certain irony that this was on the day that the Labour administration – which has run Barnsley for 50 years and has created all of this – was swept from power. Sir Steve Houghton, the country’s longest-serving council leader, held onto his seat by a mere 23 votes.

It is a sign of our political times that even success, competence and commitment can be dressed up as failure and politicians being out of touch. While the election was obviously fought on national issues, local Reform candidates had argued that too much money had been spent on the town centre, rather than on local people.

I have written about Barnsley before in this column. The headline of my previous piece might have been about Will Alsop’s Tuscan Hill Town and the halo of light that he suggested should be projected into the sky before objections by air traffic control. But the real story was of a council that had purchased the huge modernist complex of shops, market, multi-storey car park and office block known as the Metropolitan Centre which once dominated the town.

Having been let down by two sets of developers, who, according to director of regeneration David Shepherd, tried to “hoodwink” the council with a “commercialised model that was using viability as an excuse to justify sub-standard schemes”, the council decided to do the job itself. It borrowed the money, took the risk and completed the scheme.

The resulting project, called the Glasshouse, is one of the best town centre schemes in the country, completed at a time when the crisis on the high street was causing private investors to abandon town centres.

This was no gentrified regeneration scheme, the whole point was that it was done by and for the people of Barnsley

The scheme includes a new indoor market (Altrincham Market, but with greasy spoons), the Lightbox – a new library-come-community hub, a public square and new shops that have been filled despite the retail crisis. All of it was wildly unviable seen from the perspective of a private developer. But, as Shepherd told me when I interviewed him for our High Street book, the council saw it as “a scheme with a 300-year business plan”, and reasoned that, even if it made a small loss, it was good value for the number of jobs created and was “an investment in the future and the pride of the town”.

This was no gentrified regeneration scheme, the whole point was that it was done by and for the people of Barnsley. The people using the town centre, working in the new jobs, trading in the market and using the youth and community facilities are the people from those neighbourhoods that were targeted by Reform.

It has often been said that the crisis on the high street has played a huge role in creating disaffected, left-behind communities. The shuttered high street is a potent symbol of how a town has been bypassed and ignored. The response is to say that politicians are useless, in it for themselves and just don’t care.

None of this is true of Barnsley and, as the data we collected for the book shows, its town centre is doing well – certainly far better than comparable northern towns. But still it seems that the populist arguments work. Which I, for one, find depressing.