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New Statesman
3 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
The town that loathes Keir Starmer
A boat passes through the northern industrial town of Burnley. Photo by Lancashire Images /Alamy On the shop floor of Burnley's last mill, 28 looms are thrashing away with a dull roar. At modern machines all around this stone factory, workers are diligently constructing the product that turned this town from a backwater into a centre of global capitalism: one man examines a roll of fabric for flaws; behind a glass partition a group of young women are sewing; upstairs others map out new patterns on CAD software. Steven Eastwood, who has driven forklifts around Ashfield Mill for decades, remembers a time when his employer still had local competitors. Now, from a peak of 99,000 looms a little over a century ago, only the weaving machines in this room remain in commercial operation. As Burnley's traditional industry has faded so too has its connection to Labour, its traditional politics. After winning every election here from 1935, the party lost to the Liberal Democrats in 2010, and then the Conservatives in 2019, before narrowly taking back the seat at the last election. Eastwood has voted for Labour his entire life. He says he will continue to do so with an apologetic shrug, as if he can conceive of no possible alternative. But asked what its leader now stands for, he cannot say. Speaking to his aides in opposition, Sir Keir Starmer told them he wanted to be judged by a simple test: in five years time, could he look in the eyes of voters in towns such as Burnley and tell them that Labour had made a genuine difference to their lives? Almost one year after he entered office – according to residents of the town – he appears to be on track to fail. Sitting on a bench inside Charter Walk Shopping Centre, Janine, a supply teacher, is using her half term holiday to people watch on a quiet afternoon. Born locally into a 'very poor working class family' she has been living in Bonn for the last two decades. When she moved back to Burnley recently she was shocked at the area's decline. 'I came back to a society that I could not recognise behaviour wise, attitude wise,' she says. 'I love this town but it's so run down. Betting shops, charity shops, boarded up shops. It breaks my heart.' She estimates her quality of life was 10 times higher in Germany doing the same job. At one school at which she now teaches, 14 and 15-year-olds have the literacy levels of primary school children. At another, a charity had to buy Christmas presents for pupils because their parents could not afford any. 'That was not the case when I was last teaching in the UK,' she says. 'I couldn't believe it.' A former Labour voter, she cannot understand why, in her eyes, the government is determined to penalise those in need of help. 'They're taking the Winter Fuel Allowance away, taking farmers' inheritance from them, they have no plan on illegal immigration and public services are on the floor.' Janine is now convinced the party's core voters will abandon them for Reform. 'I never thought I would say I wouldn't vote Labour but at the last election I voted Green even though I knew they wouldn't win,' she adds. Paul, a bus driver nursing a hot drink nearby, insists he cannot begin to talk about Starmer because his opinions will be unprintable. 'The government is fucking too right wing,' he eventually says. 'They're fucking backwards bastards on everything.' They are targeting people who have worked 'all of their bastard life', he says. 'Even the Conservatives left the Winter Fuel Allowance alone – they knew not to touch the pensioners.' Until last year, Paul had always voted Labour. At the next election he will not turn out at all. 'I don't like Farage, he's too fascist,' he says. 'I don't trust any of them.' When I say that Starmer wants to be able to tell the people of Burnley he has made a genuine difference to their lives, Paul laughs. 'I don't think that whichever government has ever been in they've ever had an impact on my life. You work your arse off all your life and they screw you.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Manning the till in a British Heart Foundation shop on Burnley's high street, Amanda says that she also used to support Labour. Now, she believes the party is 'not doing such a good job' in office. 'They've not done what they said they were going to do. Their decisions have been bad,' she says. 'As a person Keir Starmer seems alright. As a politician he's not doing a good job.' Shops are closing in Burnley, but at least it's not as bad as nearby Nelson, another Lancashire mill town, which has now become a 'dump', she claims. 'The government always say they will give us money but we never see any of it, or they spend it on stupid stuff.' At the next election, Amanda plans to vote for the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. 'They seem to believe in their principles more. The Conservatives and Labour have been in power for so long. They always get in so they've become a bit more complacent.' Like many Burnley residents, Afrasiab Anwar was brought up on traditional Labour values. After moving away for university he came back to his hometown in 2002, a year after local race riots saw white men attack takeaways and Asians firebomb a pub. 'It wasn't a place I recognised,' he says now. In an attempt to improve the town, he began working for the local authority before winning election to represent Labour himself and then, in 2021, becoming the council leader. In November 2023, however, when Starmer failed to call for a Gaza ceasefire, he and 10 other Labour representatives quit the party. Anwar's Burnley Independent Group now runs the local authority in coalition with Lib Dem and Green councillors. [See also: Why is Birmingham leading Britain's child poverty spiral?] Sitting in his office within Burnley's grand town hall, he is contemptuous of the government he once wished to see elected. 'It's been a complete letdown in every aspect. There's been nothing for places like Burnley. There's been no additional investment,' he says. 'Traditional Labour voters, what are they getting? Working-class people, what are they getting out of this Labour government? The two child benefit cap, the winter fuel allowance. It's the complete opposite of what a Labour government stands for.' On the doorstep, Anwar claims, voters tell him they did not believe things could decline further after 14 years of austerity. Under Starmer's government, though, 'they think it's far worse'. Burnley has long struggled to manage an uneven transition from the days of King Cotton. In 2019, it was ranked as the eighth most deprived area in England. It has some of the highest rates of fuel poverty, health deprivation and child poverty in the country. At the same time, however, the town has become a centre of high tech manufacturing that has seen it touted as a model for northern revitalisation. Former mills have been turned into campuses for the University of Central Lancashire; local firms engineer ultra-lightweight parts for Airbus planes. Anwar is convinced the old ways of doing politics here are gone: Labour's ties to their core support are irreparably broken. 'People are much cleverer now,' he says. 'They vote for people who they think will represent them, who will be their voice and who are genuinely a part of the town, a part of the fabric of the place.' While Labour won Burnley at the last election, its vote share dropped. Having received the endorsement of Muslim community leaders, Lib Dem candidate and former MP Gordon Birtwistle shot up to second place. When I ask Anwar if he plans to challenge his old party at the next general election he insists he is focused on running the council for now. For many others in Burnley, Westminster simply has no relevance to their lives. Standing on the high street, Uwais, a young boxing trainer in a green shell suit, says he has no opinion of Starmer at all. He does not watch television. He does not follow the news. 'I don't think it makes much difference,' he says. 'There's still potholes and shit.' In any case, he insists, Burnley is great. He pivots to gesture at a ragged figure smoking on a nearby street corner. 'Look at that guy over there on spice: he's living his dream!' Luc Paul would vote but he has no ID. On a break from his shift at a children's toy shop, he tells me he is appalled at Starmer's volte-face on trans rights. In opposition, the prime minister said there was a 'desperate need' to introduce gender self-ID. Now, he does not believe that trans-women are women. 'I don't think he stands for anything. He only wants power so he can get money for himself,' Luc Paul says. 'The Greens, Lib Dems and the Scottish party have a lot more going for them.' Cradling his walking stick under his arm and smoking a rolled cigarette, Steven says he remains a Labour supporter but does not know anyone who could run the country now. 'The government aren't meeting the requirements,' he says. After being admitted to the Royal Blackburn Teaching Hospital recently for a routine operation (Burnley's A&E closed in 2007), his wife picked up an infection and became seriously unwell. He blames outsourced agency staff for messing up her care. Retired on health grounds himself, he says the government has not helped to improve his life to date. 'It's a case of surviving,' he adds glumly. What does Starmer stand for? Steven says he cannot put his finger on it. Perhaps the most positive assessment of the government available in Burnley is that it has simply not yet had time to get to grips with problems that long predate its election. Perhaps further decline is just to be expected. Perhaps Britain is headed inevitably in the same direction as Burnley's mills whichever party is elected. John, an older man standing alone by a handsome stone building, says that of course Starmer is going to make mistakes. 'They're miles better than the previous government,' he says. He plans to back Labour again at the next election. 'I don't think Starmer's doing a bad job,' he says. 'You've got to remember what they came into office to. You've got to bear in mind it's not going to turn around too quickly.' [See also: Reform UK's taproom revolutionaries] Related
The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Stimming Pool review – film-makers on the autistic spectrum dive ingeniously into the uncanny
Here is an engaging docufictional experiment, an investigation into autism co-created by a group of young artists on the spectrum called the Neurocultures Collective. The resulting film is ingenious, funny, intellectually curious – and pregnant with ideas. It is all about how autism shapes creativity and makes sense of the self, and it gives a new kind of access to the mysterious and the uncanny. One of the group is shown hosting a B-movie cult film club and also drawing a storyboard for his planned shlock-horror animation about zombies in the American civil war, a fragment of which we will see later. Another is apparently in a doctor's waiting room filling out a questionnaire designed to assess her possible autism, while a little girl opposite is reading a story about a border collie called Chess. (Another member of the group will later act out the part of Chess.) Having finished the questionnaire, she is asked by the doctor to watch videos while he tracks her eye movements; we then watch the same videos ourselves while onscreen graphics – red dots and lines – make jagged shapes across the action, in places where we maybe weren't looking. Other participants demonstrate their own choreography of ritualistic and repetitive movements: a part of intuitive role-play. The group's discussions about their creative projects, convened by artist and film-maker Steven Eastwood, are configured as a quasi-fictional event, interspersed by the creations themselves. The collective's members finally come together in an empty swimming pool, which becomes their own 'stimming pool', symbolising their collective innovation. It's an intriguing and atmospheric piece of work, and I'd like to see the individual film ideas expanded at feature length. The Stimming Pool is in UK cinemas from 28 March.
The Guardian
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It's supposed to be intense': inside the experimental film that ‘truly captures' autism
Do you know how many autistic people there are in the UK? The answer is an estimated 700,000. Yet until now, there has never been a single feature-length film directed by autistic people. Or at least not one that has secured a theatrical release in the UK and slots at festivals worldwide. The film is The Stimming Pool, an experimental feature shot over just 12 days that puts on screen the interests, passions and perspectives of its five young autistic creators. They worked alongside Steven Eastwood, professor of film practice at London's Queen Mary University, funded initially by the Wellcome Trust. 'We asked why autistic people are always required to explain or illustrate their experience,' says Eastwood. 'What about just having neurodivergent authors behind the cameras, doing the creativity?' Such an approach is in contrast to the Chris Packham-presented BBC two-parter Inside Our Autistic Minds from 2023, for which autistic people worked with TV producers to make short films that aimed to show their families how autism affected them. This wasn't what Georgia Kumari Bradburn, one of the directors of The Stimming Pool, wanted to do: 'It was never about us having a duty to explain who we are or what we are doing to other people. This is just the way we exist. It's a different way of existing.' Despite its multiple directors, The Stimming Pool is not an anthology film with distinct chapters, but an intricate collaboration. Characters recur and narratives bleed into one another. We see the directors sitting around a table discussing how to weave their themes together. No one is identified directly and there are no captions or commentary. The audience is left to make its own interpretations. The Stimming Pool challenges some of the familiar tropes of documentaries and dramas about autism. One of its directors is Sam Chown Ahern, who featured in the 2018 Channel 4 documentary Are You Autistic? Ahern is filmed in a waiting room. She spots a little girl, also waiting, and echoes her repetitive hand movements – the kind that autistic people call 'stims', or self-stimulatory behaviour. Ahern muses on the ambiguities of the language used in a questionnaire designed to diagnose autism, then we see her take part in eye-tracking research intended to analyse how autistic people perceive facial expressions. The red dots and lines from the researcher's screen leak into sequences that follow another autistic character, clearly exhausted by navigating the sensory overload and social demands of the world. Benjamin Brown, a lover of derelict buildings and dystopian movies, contributed surreal sequences shot in an abandoned factory in which white-coated scientists use arcane devices to measure human subjects. In a satirical twist, these subjects start to mock the scientists through mime. Robin Elliott-Knowles, meanwhile, brings his passion for history, schlock horror and anime to the mix. We meet him welcoming a friendly audience to his local community cinema in Hastings, introducing an apparently lost video nasty. It turns out to be scenes from an animated drama he has directed about a female Confederate-era soldier with a cat's face fighting zombies in a swamp – all based on his own artwork. Speaking over coffee at the BFI Southbank in London, alongside his fellow directors, Elliott-Knowles is delighted to recall the shoot: 'I directed the actress and the very nice guy who played the zombie. Interestingly, I always remembered to say 'Action' but never remembered to say 'Cut'! To guide their movements, I suggested they imagine a cork being pulled out of a bottle – the moment it is in and the moment after. I think it worked. They were great actors.' Recurring throughout the film is the Shapeshifter, a character created by another director, Georgia Bradburn. Played by Dre Spisto, a neurodivergent, non-binary performance artist, the Shapeshifter navigates busy streets, open-plan offices, crowded pubs and toilets while wearing noise-cancelling headphones. Once home and alone, Spisto performs what looks like an elaborately choreographed sequence of body movements across the floor and furniture, muttering repeated phrases. 'The original idea for the Shapeshifter,' says Bradburn, 'was someone who is constantly transforming in their body through stimming. They are transitioning from a public space to a private space – and when they get there, they can lift the burden of 'masking'. They can just move in whatever way they want. That's something I used to do.' It all adds up to a dense, elliptical film that rewards repeated viewing. Some reactions have been strong. 'A couple of weeks ago,' says Chown Ahern, 'we had a screening and a young woman came in and said, 'I'm autistic and I've travelled here on the tube and I was already overwhelmed.' It's supposed to be intense in certain ways. That is the purpose of it – which is probably why it requires a second viewing.' Although neurotypical myself, I have a profoundly autistic brother and take a keen interest in the condition's portrayal. So I felt it was important to show The Stimming Pool to autistic people for their perspective. One, a friend who didn't want to be named, complained bluntly: 'It was pretentious wank with an autism flavour. Not my thing at all. I don't really know what they were trying to do or convey. And I don't like stuff where I need someone to explain the meaning to me. The art should do that.' But Rosie King, another friend, was moved to tears. 'Absolutely beautiful,' said King, whose Ted Talk on her experience of autism has had 3.2m views. 'I don't think I've ever seen a film truly capture what it's like to be autistic like this before – the good and bad parts. My favourites were the stimming sequences though, especially the last one in the pool with the spinning camera. They felt almost like interpretive dance. It showed a real beauty in stimming that I've never seen in film before. I loved all the young people involved and the focus on their art. So often autism narratives wholly surround the condition's limitations with only a passing glance at autistic joy. Seeing this group come together and create beautiful things really touched me.' Eastwood adds: 'One thing we chatted about was this expectation with a film that you've got to make sense of it and solve the mystery. I think everyone in the group has a love of the avant garde: experimental films, art films.' But the fact that the group could discuss sophisticated genre films in their meetings does flag up the absence of non-verbal or minimally verbal autistic people in the process. Figures suggest that one in three autistic people also has a learning disability, while 25-30% are minimally or non-verbal. Apart from a brief scene filmed at the Project Artworks studios in Hastings, where we see the non-verbal artist Heidi Nice, who has multiple disabilities, being helped to fingerpaint, The Stimming Pool only features autistic people who are adept at language and autonomous. Eastwood is aware that the film doesn't include the significant proportion of the autism community who have more complex needs. 'When this project first ran,' he says, 'it was designed to include a range, including non-verbal people. The pandemic killed that because, for the best part of a year, we could only meet remotely. We planned to develop it as a London and Hastings project and do a lot of studio workshopping at Project Artworks, but that all went out the window. However, I don't think this project should have to represent all the experiences of autism. But we recognise that everyone in the film, apart from Heidi, is verbal.' Bradburn sees the film as simply a starting point. 'You cannot generalise autism for everyone,' he says. 'It would be impossible to make a film that encapsulates the entire experience, because it is so varied.' Eastwood echoes these points: 'We're asking why films about autism have to carry the responsibility of answering all those questions. This is not a film about autism – it's a film about autistic co-creation.' The Stimming Pool is screening throughout the UK from 28 March.
