When I saw Welsh Secretary Jo Stevens speaking in her soft voice about “mental health support” for the steelworkers in Port Talbot, I felt physically sick. Just six months ago, Tata Steel shut down Port Talbot’s last two blast furnaces as part of a so-called green transition, resulting in thousands of job losses and the effective end of traditional steelmaking in the town. In her video, Stevens explained that “wellbeing” is essential for “getting back to work.” It was pitched as a compassionate gesture, but to me and I suspect many others from communities like mine, it was obvious what it was: Nearly $4 million pledged to provide the educated middle class with respectable occupations aimed at containing the rabble.
“This is what managed decline looks like in the therapeutic age.”
I am from the industrial working class. The men in my family were coal miners going back generations. We were proud people; we kept the lights on. The women in my family worked in textile factories. I did too, for a decade after leaving school at 16 with no qualifications. Those communities weren’t perfect, and factory work wasn’t easy, but people provided for each other. They had purpose. They had pride. And they knew the importance of stable and skilled work. It is the difference between living a life with dignity, with a shared sense of identity and community, and the life of the lumpen—precarious, constantly hustling, trying to make enough to pay the rent, living and existing between low pay and no pay with no faint hope that this changes for your children.
Since the late 1980s, we have watched the lights go out. The coal mines closed, not because Britain no longer needed coal, but because we chose to import it from the USA, Australia, Russia, and South Africa. The textile factories and steelworks closed as manufacturing moved offshore to stay “globally competitive.” No government in the past 40 years be they Labour or Tory has offered a national economic plan that includes us. The North, the Midlands, the coasts, and Wales have been left to rot as politicians invested in the service economy, the cities, and in the financialization of the economy.
And now, they offer us counseling.
Working-class people have watched their communities sink into managed decline. They’ve seen their living standards sink, and their children’s futures disappear. Well-paid, skilled work has been replaced with warehousing, app jobs in the gig economy, and care work—all filtered through an agency. It is reminiscent of the dock workers in the last century, having to wait at the gate of the docks and fight each other for a day’s work. It is humiliating. It plunges people into levels of poverty not seen since the 19th century. It makes people afraid, angry, and divided.
Thousands of steelworkers have lost their jobs in Port Talbot. The promised green jobs haven’t materialized. And the government’s answer is to train union reps in suicide prevention, offer therapy for children in schools, and fund Men’s Sheds and “She Sheds”—community hubs for the newly unemployed to drink tea, craft, and talk about their feelings. The message couldn’t be clearer: You’re not unemployed because of political decisions or economic betrayal. You’re just unwell.
This is what managed decline looks like in the therapeutic age. Instead of jobs, we get wellbeing seminars. Instead of industrial policy, we get “community projects.” It is cruel, and it is patronizing. It reframes structural devastation as an individual problem, to be solved by coping and talking—preferably to a well-paid professional.
But for many of us, there is no “recovery” therapeutic or otherwise. For many of us, this loss of purpose, dignity, and stability is permanent. We are not grieving a single layoff, but the slow collapse of a whole way of life. It is a way of life that politicians like Jo Stevens can pretend is easily replaced with middle-class do-gooders running drama workshops or hosting symposiums on toxic masculinity.
These communities have been disregarded and demeaned for forty years. Keeping one class on its knees so there is interesting work for the middle class adds insult to injury. They offer therapy, not dignity. They offer coping, not a future. That isn’t support. It’s containment.