The Reuters-reported Vauxhall Luton plant closure, announced on 26 November 2024, did not merely end 1,600 jobs. It ended something harder to quantify: the belief, held by working people across Luton for more than a century, that if you worked hard and stayed loyal, the institutions around you would hold.
They did not hold. And now those people are voting Reform.
How the Vauxhall Luton plant closure was made
The story arrives in three ugly chapters. First, Stellantis’s then-chief executive visits the plant early in 2023 and tells workers they must halve manufacturing costs to compete with labour in Turkey. ‘Good luck,’ he says, and leaves. Workers and managers collaborate, absorb considerable personal sacrifice, and get close. It makes no difference.
In late November 2024, Stellantis announces the profitable Luton plant will close anyway. Only Ellesmere Port survives. According to the Guardian, more than 1,100 direct Vauxhall jobs were immediately at risk, with unions estimating the total could exceed 2,000 including auxiliary staff. The ripple into supply chains was worse. Former plant boss Mark Noble told the BBC that between 1,500 and 2,000 supplier jobs were endangered, attributing part of the plant’s vulnerability to Brexit: both UK plants exported 80% of their output, making tariff confusion uniquely damaging. A separate estimate cited by WSWS put supply-chain losses across the Bedfordshire region as high as 5,000. Noble’s figure and the WSWS estimate cannot both be right; the gap probably reflects different definitions of the affected supply base.
Then came the third chapter. On the Friday afternoon in March when the last white van came off the line, workers were handed a commemorative brochure and a medal made of scrap metal.
That detail tells you everything about how much Stellantis valued the relationship.
What the Unite report reveals about where ex-workers land
A few months after the closure, Unite the Union published an internal report on lessons from the shutdown. It is not comfortable reading, particularly for Labour. A year after closure, 30% of ex-Vauxhall workers were still unemployed. Of those surveyed this spring, fewer than 10% backed Labour. More than 50% supported Nigel Farage.
Those numbers represent a near-total collapse of a political relationship that was once the bedrock of industrial Britain.
It is easy, in Westminster, to analyse this as cultural or demographic. But the men sitting in that Luton hotel bar are not animated by culture-war grievances. They are animated by the specific, sequential failure of every institution they paid into. The company took their working lives and departed. The union, for all its energy, could not stop the closure. And the Labour government they voted for stood largely powerless: Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, who appeared before the Business and Trade Committee on the very day the closure was announced, later wrote to a Luton MP that Stellantis had been ‘unwilling to engage in any discussions’ despite ‘repeated offers’ from his department. Luton lost its car plant under Blair. It lost its van plant under Starmer.
Malik Mahmood cleaned at the factory for 26 years. After the closure he applied for between 50 and 60 jobs by his own count and found no takers. He went on jobseeker’s allowance: £84 a week, and interrogations at the job centre about what he had tried. He eventually found a warehouse position, but he now earns £1,000 a month less than he did 18 months ago and depends on a friend for a lift to work. Gerald Shalvey gave the company 34 years. Mohammed Hussain, who had just bought a house with a substantial mortgage when the closure came, was still out of work more than a year later.
These are not outliers. The Unite report makes clear that even those ex-workers who found re-employment have seen their incomes fall sharply. Getting laid off during a cost-of-living crisis is expensive. These men are cutting back on heating and groceries and relying on family.
It is worth remembering what Vauxhall once was. At its peak in 1971 the company directly employed 37,000 people in Britain, the great majority in Luton. It arrived not long after the death of Queen Victoria, helped build the town’s physical and economic fabric, and provided the kind of stable, skilled, pensionable employment that allowed working-class families to buy houses and plan futures. Paul Geary, whose family connection to the plant runs four generations deep, describes the closure as leaving a ‘vacuum’: economically, socially and politically. That vacuum, he says, is where the far right steps in.
Gary Reay puts it more bluntly: ‘The system of capitalism is dying because people are seeing it’s not worked.’
I am not sure capitalism is dying. But the version of it that told workers their loyalty would be rewarded clearly is. When the next general election comes, the shape of its replacement will depend on whether any mainstream party has a credible answer to that. At the moment, only one politician is offering one, and he is not in a mainstream party.
