From the 1980s onwards, that world was broken apart. Automation, global competition, deindustrialisation and political choices stripped away much of Nottingham’s manufacturing base. Jobs disappeared at John Player, Raleigh and across Nottinghamshire’s coalfields. Nottingham, internationally famous for lace, no longer makes a single trim. Secure industrial work was replaced by a fragmented economy of services, retail, hospitality, logistics, call centres, universities, councils and healthcare.

That shift changed Nottingham politically as well as economically. When a city loses its industrial employers, trade-union strength and independent working-class organisation, it becomes more dependent on the institutions that remain. Today the NHS, universities, councils, social care and public-sector bodies are among the city’s biggest employers. Together they employ 36 per cent of the population, and on average 30 per cent of working-age people are economically inactive. Thousands of people are therefore dependent for employment or state subsidy on the same organisations implicated in repeated and catastrophic failures.

That is why institutional failure in Nottingham has such a particular character. Many now depend on the council for housing, on the NHS for care, on universities for work, and on public bodies for contracts, grants or professional status. In that kind of city, criticism carries risk. People know who has power, who signs things off, and who can make you unemployable or invisible.

At the same time, Nottingham remains a low-wage city, with too many people in insecure, part-time or poorly paid work. A large student population and a service-heavy economy can hide working poverty. Behind the language of regeneration and growth are families juggling rent, bills, childcare, transport and debt. For many residents, the city’s economy has not delivered dignity or stability.

A low-wage, institutionally dependent city is easier to manage than it is for residents to challenge. If you rely on the same small civic world for your job, housing, research funding, charity grant or professional standing, dissent becomes harder. The result is not always open censorship. More often it is silence, caution and self-protection.

This is the soil in which Nottingham’s political monoculture has grown. Deindustrialisation weakened independent working-class power; low wages weakened independence; and the growth of public-sector dependency increased the reach of local state institutions. Many people inside those institutions work hard and care deeply. But the structure matters. When too much economic, political and moral authority sits in too few hands, failure is more easily hidden and less easily challenged.

A political cabal

Nottingham has been dominated by the Labour Party for decades. This isn’t to say that one party alone explains every failure, nor that every councillor, official or public servant is personally responsible for every scandal. The problem is that long-term political dominance can produce a closed culture, with councillors, MPs, public bodies, charities, boards and civic organisations becoming difficult to question from the outside. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an argument against a political monoculture, looking at what happens when power circulates within the same networks for too long.

I know the constituency of Nottingham East well. I lived on the St Ann’s council estate for 23 years and carried out long-term academic research there, beginning with my PhD at the University of Nottingham and continuing into Getting By. From that position, I watched local politics operate not as an open contest of ideas, but as a managed system of loyalty, selection and control.

Labour has controlled Nottingham City Council continuously since 1991 and holds the city’s parliamentary seats. Nottingham is also part of the East Midlands Combined County Authority, now led by a Labour mayor. This does not automatically make the city corrupt or incompetent. But uninterrupted dominance changes the atmosphere of local politics. Opposition becomes weaker, internal scrutiny becomes riskier and the same names, networks and assumptions begin to circulate through the civic system.

When one party governs for more than three decades, it can start to confuse the city with itself. The party machine, the council, the voluntary sector, local boards, public bodies and parliamentary offices become intertwined. People who want influence, employment, funding or political advancement learn which loyalties matter, which criticisms are tolerated and which questions are best left unasked.

This is what I mean by a political cabal. It’s not a gathering in a secret room or a single plot. It’s a form of closed power characterised by informal understandings, patronage, safe-seat management, public appointments, factional loyalties and a civic class often more accountable to itself than to residents. When a political culture becomes a machine, people learn what not to say. Over time, that produces institutional blindness: the refusal to see what is plainly in front of you.

Nottingham East demonstrates the problem clearly because it is such a safe Labour seat. Since 1992, the constituency has only returned Labour MPs. Its mix of students, public-sector workers, private renters and working-class communities makes it electorally secure. Safe seats can produce complacency. They can become prizes within party politics, places where selection matters more than persuasion.

The 2010 selection in Nottingham East mattered for that reason. When John Heppell announced his retirement close to the General Election, there was little time for a full local process. The national party intervened and Chris Leslie was selected. At the time, I was researching local politics in St Ann’s and following a working-class woman from the estate who had been elected as a Labour councillor. What I saw was a political culture where loyalty to council leadership and factional balance mattered deeply. The understanding, as I saw it, was that the MP would look to Westminster while the city was left largely to the council leadership.

I see little evidence that the structure has changed over the past 15 or so years. When Chris Leslie left Labour, the next selection again reflected national party management more than any local democratic contest. Nadia Whittome was selected from an all-woman, BAME shortlist; Neghat Khan, now leader of the council, was also on that list. This is not a personal criticism of these individuals. It is that Nottingham East, like the wider city, has remained politically safe while the city has moved from scandal to scandal. When Nottingham needed fierce local scrutiny, too much political energy appeared to be directed elsewhere.

This matters because political safety can become a civic danger. If elected representatives know they are unlikely to lose power, and if public bodies know scrutiny will remain muted or internalised, then failure becomes easier to absorb. Apologies are made, reviews are commissioned, reports are published and the same networks survive. Residents are then asked to trust the very systems that have repeatedly failed them.

The deaths of Grace, Barnaby and Ian demand more than sympathy. They demand honesty. They demand a willingness to ask why so many agencies failed, why families had to fight so hard for answers, and why Nottingham’s institutions have so often been embroiled in scandal.

If Nottingham is to recover, it must begin by telling the truth about itself. It must stop hiding behind civic branding, party loyalty, safe seats and unchallenged local power and bureaucratic language. It must put families and residents at the centre of public life. And it must accept that accountability is not an attack on the city – it is the only way to save it.