Patrick Christys has been in East Durham talking to locals about the challenges facing the North East and what needs to be done to revive the region.
Once the heart of industry, many communities now face “unemployment, brain drain, and the social impacts of deindustrialisation”.
Speaking to GB News, a resident called for urgent action to bring jobs back, rebuild local industry, and restore purpose and pride to their towns.
Pip Fallow, who wrote a book called Dragged Up Proper told The People’s Channel: “Employment is the biggest issue facing this area. one hundred per cent.
“It’s the lack of industry. We’ve got a ready workforce people trained through local colleges, with skills from the industrial days.
“But right now, there just aren’t enough jobs. On our campaign to try and bring industry back, we estimate about 156 people are chasing every engineering role coming out of college.
“We’ve got the workforce, but we don’t have the industry to support them. And what that does to people’s lives? They leave.
“We’re seeing a brain drain. People want better lives for their children than they had, but they can’t provide that here anymore.”
Patrick Christys speaks to locals about how to restore ‘the beating heart’ of the North-East
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GB NEWS
When asked what “re-industrialise” would look like in practice, Mr Fallows explained: “Like it used to look, if you read my book which is about my life, it’s a sort of memoir.
“I’ve gone from 40 years ago when we had a really happy community and where everybody had fulfillment and enjoyed working, and everybody had purpose in their lives.
“We’ve ended up in a situation where that just isn’t the case, we’ve got a lot of drug problems, substance abuse and alcoholism.
“A lot of my friends. I’m 60 this year, but a lot of my friends haven’t got this far. And a lot of them died in the 30s because of deindustrialisation.
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Patrick Christys spoke to locals in East Durham
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GB NEWS
“People always say, ‘oh, what about the environment if you’re really industrialised?’ I said, what about my environment?
“We need a government here, and we’ve never, ever been able to tick at the ballot box and have a government that would industrialise.
“We can chase Thatcher back and say, ‘oh, she shut the pits’. That’s a fact. We know all that, we’ve got the data in on that.
“The Labour Party were quite sympathetic in certain cases; locally, they would come and say, ‘our Labour Party is against this pit closure’ and everything.
“But we’ve never had anybody who stood up until now and said, ‘look, let’s, you know, pick for us at the ballot box and we’ll re-industrialise let the people around here make things’. That’s what they’re good at.”
For 74 years, the seat of Easington in East Durham has been a fortress for the Labour Party.
However it seems that the Red Wall heartland is on the verge of a seismic shift, with locals predicting a “95 per cent chance” of the seat flipping to Reform UK.
Last year, Reform secured a landslide victory in May, winning 65 seats across County Durham and taking control of the county council.
Louise Penders was elected on to Durham County Council as representative for Easington and Shotton in a by-election increasing the party’s majority. The by-election had been called when former Reform councillor John Bailey stepped down in June.