One of deindustrialization’s effects is rendering remaining industrial workers and their struggles invisible or anachronistic. That’s encapsulated in a metropolitan journalist sneering at the campaign to save a 163 year old railway works, a source of secure jobs in Glasgow.

This Gramsci passage reminded me of his fellow Italian, Alessandro Portelli, who argues for oral history as a method to include the lives and reflections of individual workers into historical writing. Oral testimonies counter ‘the proletariat’ monolith with named men and women.

Union membership has gone up for the second year running in the UK. The differences in density between regions and nations shows an interesting industrial legacy. Historic manufacturing and heavy industry centres still have the largest density.