Beyond the flags - grief, polarisation and the work of repair

Decades of economic decline and broken communities have caused deep grief, anger, and rising polarisation in the North East. This pain is being redirected at migrants and neighbours instead of the systems that caused it, fueling division and far-right narratives. Repair needs honest listening, community-led healing, and policies that rebuild hope, solidarity, and economic security.

in our response to the rising confidence and bullishness of nativist and populist agendas, we must not reinforce a sense that we are part of a distant liberal elite, looking down our noses at those who express views that are different to ours.

We see the widening disconnect between communities and traditional centres of power as one of the defining challenges of our time. That is why our regional team at JRF is rooted in place: living and working here, building trust, and standing alongside communities as they take the lead in shaping their own futures.

This is about bringing humility and respect to the question of ‘what is ours to do’.

We have talked in this comment about the dangers of staying silent: it’s our job to face into this too, and to be willing to enter difficult, contentious territory about the intersection of race, class and poverty.

The collapse of coal mining, shipbuilding, and steel tore away not only jobs but people’s (particularly men’s) proud identities as workers and as bread-winners. What has emerged instead is a fraying of bonds and a loss of certainty. Trauma and alienation have seeped in, driving feelings of hopelessness and fatalism.

Across communities, people are feeling unheard and unseen. In white communities, poorly explained changes, such as the dropping of long-standing school traditions like Christian nativity plays, are experienced by some as a kind of censorship, fuelling nostalgia and patterns of othering.

“If I was white, I would have rioted”. They continued, “People have hard lives and have been let down for decades”. Their words carry both compassion and warning: without serious engagement and action, the anger will keep finding release in destructive ways.

This is a story of ‘progress’ in the way it is often told. But it is also one of dominance and exploitation, where colonialism and empire extracted wealth to uphold systems of racial and economic inequality. This unvarnished truth, rather than a nostalgia for a rose-tinted past, is the foundation we need to start from when talking about race, class, and the deep layers of inequality we see within the region (and the UK) today.

People talk about the ‘educated elite’ with suspicion, even disdain. Climate change policies are dismissed as irrelevant luxuries; science itself is sometimes seen as the language of people far removed from everyday struggles.

The left has allowed itself to calcify into a liberal elite that prioritises winning, professionalism, competency and control over connection, solidarity and belonging. Its obvious discomfort with how to grapple with questions of class and how they intersect with race is a major failure.

Stuart Hall has described “authoritarian populism” as the art of making grievances sound like common sense.

“We’re just saying what everyone thinks” is a refrain. It feels true enough to stick.

It is always easier to blame the people we can see—the migrants, the neighbours who live or look differently—than it is to face into the harder truth: that the forces shaping our lives are abstract, complex and deeply entrenched.

She shows how the grief of poor and working-class communities is being deliberately redirected away from the systems that created it, and against those who are themselves marginalised—migrants, Black people, queer people.

This fragmentation serves only the interests of the right, and of capital, because it obscures the truth: that the same forces drive inequality for all marginalised groups, even if the effects of that are uneven and racialised.

This is deep work concerned with identities, stories and trust. But it needs to be done urgently. Of course, more resources are needed for the crisis work of building community resilience. But this deep work is just as pressing, unless we want to sleepwalk into a near future of division and conflict.

Efforts to do this deep work need to happen at a scale and pace we’ve not seen before. That means taking some risks and accepting that some things won’t turn out as planned. It means ensuring there are spaces to learn together and be honest about what is and isn’t working, to enable rapid pivots.

This work must be led by local people, unless we want to risk reinforcing the damaging dynamics of the last 4 decades. There may be wounds in the region, but that does not mean we apply a deficit model. This is a region full of activists and leaders, deeply rooted in community and history, who want to make a difference to where they and their families live.

‘the past we inherit, the future we build’.

Healing justice is a political and therapeutic framework that recognises how oppression, trauma (individual, structural, intergenerational), systemic violence, exclusion and marginalisation deeply affect bodies, minds, relationships and communities.

They see care not as a luxury but as a necessity to sustain resistance and flourishing.

‘interrupt and intervene in interpersonal, structural, and intergenerational violence for the sake of just and health-filled futures’.

We can imagine a programme of healing justice, designed by and for the region, comprising of: • Community programmes: spaces for healing, learning, dealing with grief and anger. • Structural interventions: identifying and advocating for change in health, care and housing systems. • Sustaining grassroots movements: training and equipping leaders with the skills and support to navigate these complex territories.

training and skills development in some of these critical zones: responding to perceived threats and defusing ‘fight-flight-freeze’ states, bridging divides through curious conversation, and navigating experiences of loss.

There is a task to correct the myths and lies of public narratives about who is responsible for what people are experiencing in the North East currently.

look instead towards decades of policy choices that hollowed out towns and treated the North East as an afterthought.

Perhaps we need to map patterns of ownership and wealth holding in the region to illuminate how assets are being leached out of communities towards shareholders and global corporations.

there’s more to do to back efforts by regional storytellers to develop alternative stories of pride and Englishness that centre interdependency and collective care.

We could cultivate a network of alternative media creators; and we could invest in efforts to rebuild social fabric that’s been lost—using a community development and movement-building approach to engage football clubs, boxing clubs, and other sites of masculine identity in particular.

resource a network of ‘hope activists’ across the region: festival producers, artists, alternative media producers—a network of practitioners who are seeking to create moments of joy and possibility that reclaim public space.

all these experiences emanate from the same source: an extractive, exploitative capitalist system rooted in colonial practice and domination.

requires organisations like ours to ‘skill up’: to hone a highly developed set of capacities to navigate complex dynamics without collapsing into binary thinking.

the task is not to ‘win the argument’, but instead to find a path towards new ways of living and relating to one another that reflect our interdependence.

We must recognise that in times of uncertainty, our task is not to manufacture a false sense of comforting certainty, but rather to make sense of complexity together. That will require openness, curiosity and humility.

The North East is not simply turning to the right. It is grieving: grieving its lost industries, as well as lost identities and lost certainties.

The work ahead is pressing, but it must not be rushed. It is the careful work of repair, of addressing grief, and of listening and talking past the awkward silences. Organisations like ours cannot lead this work, but we can tend to it by cultivating different soil, and supporting those leaders who are already there, and already holding the trust of their neighbours.