Even if it is about to rain, the damage has been done — with Britain’s arable harvest set to fall to a record low. No wonder the country’s most famous farmer, Jeremy Clarkson, has changed his mind on climate change. Wildfires offer a visceral intensity that other expressions of extreme weather do not. A hosepipe ban might be frustrating, but it isn’t potentially fatal (except for your much-loved begonias). In the South, an ongoing blaze in the New Forest has hammered local businesses, killed a great many ground-nesting birds, and is set to shut down the A31 for a fortnight. That’d kill businesses across the south if it extended to the bank holiday. 

And while that fire was largely unnoticed by the rest of the country, what really grabbed people’s attention was the blaze that engulfed whole streets in Stourbridge, razing almost 40 homes. Well, that and the national emergency alert sent to millions of phones warning of a “very high risk of wildfires nationally”. A major fire, which could kill many people, looked entirely plausible. Contributing to that heightened sense of panic was the fact that that two separate trains — both in the south of England — were derailed, with 20 people injured in one. While neither incident is yet to be attributed to the weather, high temperatures seem the most likely explanation. 

Water shortages, fires, critical infrastructure starting to buckle: it’s like a checklist for the early stages of climate-induced breakdown. Gradually, and then all at once, it has become clear we aren’t prepared for the world now coming into view. Least of all our politicians.

The politics of climate, for obvious reasons, dovetails with that of energy. In spite of their loathing for one another, deep greens and climate-skeptic capitalists agree on one thing: energy abundance cannot exist in a world without fossil fuels. In the short term, we can’t have both decarbonization while using more energy than ever. Thus, at the same time that Burnham is expected to respond to unprecedented heat and drought, others are saying he must grant licenses to the Jackdaw and Rosebank sites in the North Sea. The electorate wants competing things too: to respond to climate change — a recent YouGov poll showed 74% of the public care about the issue — but for that response to have a minimal impact on daily life.

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In the long term, energy abundance and decarbonization could go hand-in-hand — certainly if you include nuclear energy and hydrogen — but even an optimist such as myself will acknowledge a rapid transition will inevitably include delays, gaffes and mistakes.

Burnham has to navigate all this, not least because here — perhaps uniquely — Reform and the Greens believe they can snatch votes away from him. Until recently, both Zack Polanski and Nigel Farage have been playing national politics on easy mode, given that with Keir Starmer, they were up against the very archetype of a machine politician. But Burnham is a far more able opponent: a specialist in parasocial relations and political guerrilla warfare. Nonetheless, on climate issues, when it come to the Greens, and on energy and the cost of living with Reform, Labour still appears unsteady. The Prime Minister’s tactics-first approach won’t suffice. 

And the stakes are high. A key pillar of Burnham’s political project is to remove the Greens as a threat and make his party the electoral default for progressives once more. Should he fail, Reform would have a decent chance of winning a Westminster majority — a prospect that, owing to an embarrassing summer for Farage and his party, is currently underpriced. We should not forget that the reason Labour put forward Burnham for the Makerfield seat, where he won his fateful byelection, is that the Greens’ Hannah Spencer had won the Gorton and Denton by-election in February — from which Burnham had been barred from standing. A huge part of our now PM’s pitch was his ability to win back Green voters — a task that became existential for Labour after May’s local elections. 

And yet, however canny Burnham might be — and no matter how far his approval ratings diverge from Polanski’s — further climate-related disruption could see the Greens bounce back. It’s even possible that the party could scale new heights if the issue were to continue to grow in salience: something which does not seem unlikely as another heatwave is predicted for September. While Polanski has successfully expanded his party’s political offer beyond the environment and social justice, championing Gaza and the cost of living crisis, climate remains its bread and butter. At the start of August, after all, Polanski declared that climate change is the biggest threat to the UK since the Second World War. Naturally, his critics responded with rolled eyes and snorts, but even if you don’t think such rhetoric matches the reality, there are people who do. And it’s those people — some of whom voted Labour in 2024 — that Polanski wants to reach. 

Perhaps next time, borrowing from the social media-friendly tactics of the PM, Polanski will make a similar assertion, only in front of a smoldering woodland, or a fire-ravaged Dunwich Heath. And when the floods inevitably come in the winter, perhaps he’ll make like Farage and don a Barbour and Hunter wellies. Climate change — and the attendant increasingly chaotic weather patterns — means the Greens will remain a national political force. That undermines a central plank of Burnhamism: that Labour can re-hegemonize the Left vote. 

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The intensity of this summer’s weather also presents problems for Farage. Certainly, he’ll find it increasingly difficult to present “environmental issues” as a fringe obsession when Britain is literally burning. “This is just the weather now,” is how an electrician I recently spoke to put it, fresh from installing his own air-con. Farage’s outriders know there’s little upside in demonizing such people, even if the puritanical Greens may equally struggle to win over a public increasingly enthusiastic for the joys of air conditioning. 

And as the weather changes, views on climate change will do too. Right now, Farage disputes the science, and Badenoch rejects Net Zero, but there could soon come a time when both feel they have no choice but to explore other emission-reduction policies, from electric cars to nuclear power stations. In any case, don’t be surprised if figures from both Reform and the Tories start to lean into conservation issues: a kind of Countryfile centrism where Reform wax lyrical about painted lady butterflies, and domestic food supply chains, as a stand-in for fossil-fuel emissions. Equally, expect the conversation around North Sea drilling to focus on granting a license to the Jackdaw site, rather than Rosebank, which is larger. Calls to open fracking sites, or re-open coal mines, could also abate. 

Meanwhile, if things keep getting hotter, the next general election could be preceded by a catastrophic weather event. Imagine having to fight for votes with parts of the country beset by flame and drought. 

Burnham is likable, and is perhaps the most normal prime minister in living memory, something discernible from his encyclopedic knowledge of Bristol City football club. His t-shirted, everyman bonhomie makes people feel good about themselves, an invaluable commodity for a politician. But can he also deliver strategic thinking on energy security and climate change? In a moment of great disruption, football-coach charm won’t be sufficient. In the long Nineties, politicians could get by on charisma and effective media management. But that moment has gone, and isn’t coming back. 

The docks today are eerily still, with boarded-up Victorian and Edwardian buildings, chain-link fences, and the occasional vessel, up out of the water, waiting to be serviced, dismantled, or quietly abandoned. There is a memorial garden to lost trawlers, with rusted anchors instead of gravestones. I have the nameplates of one Grimsby trawler, the Nimrod, found burned out on a beach, on the wall of my house. All along the shorelines south of the Humber, fragments of a once-great industry wash up after northeasterlies — bits of boat or quay timbers, sections of net, lifebelts, lobster pots.

This town was founded on fish. According to a 13th-century epic, it was fathered by a Danish fisherman called Grim, who saved the infant son of Denmark’s legitimate king instead of obeying orders to drown him. Not that such mythmaking feels relevant to many Grimbarians today. For most of the town’s history, any fish caught locally was for local consumption, although it has been a busy port since at least the 11th century. The simultaneous 1848 arrivals of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, and the East Lincolnshire Railway, changed everything. Fresh fish, from the apparently endless stocks of the North Sea, could now be carried quickly aboard 40-wagon “Fish Specials” to the bottomless markets of the South. Grimbarians perfected the technique of preserving fish in ice, at first brought from Norway, until the Grimsby Ice Factory was established in 1900. Long the world’s largest, it produced up to 1,200 tons of ice daily, until it ceased production in 1990. The Factory survives, still with much of its machinery, the unique but crumbling centrepiece of the network of surviving dockside streets known as the “Kasbah”.

A century ago, Grimsby was frantic with fishing. Over 160 trawlers might unload their catches in a single day, with boats moored two deep along quay walls. Between a third and half of all residents were directly employed in the industry, everyone connected to it in some way. Fishermen from as far away as the Thames and even Devon relocated up here. (Between 1841 and 1901, the town’s population grew from 3,700 to 75,000.) They prospected the wide and unpolluted German Ocean as far as Greenland, almost imperial in their ambitions. A vastly expensive, Italianate-style, 309-feet-tall Dock Tower was opened by Prince Albert in 1854, evidence of the trawling industry’s importance to the Empire. The Tower still stands: a striking seamark and symbol of vanished might.

Trawling is one of the most dangerous occupations on earth. A few years ago, the Marine and Coastguard Agency reported that UK fishermen were six times more likely to die at work than those in any other profession. Apart from falling overboard, dangers include being injured by nets, ropes, and occasionally even the quarry, with “sea cats” (Atlantic wolffish) able to inflict nasty bites. Deckhands are not even well paid, with average salaries of under £16,000, although they often get a share in any profits.

All this would have been even worse in Grimsby’s glory days. In the 19th century, apprentices as young as 13 endured desperately hardscrabble lives aboard stinking smacks, sometimes brutally or incompetently captained. The bulwarks were only two feet six inches high, and inexperienced hands could easily be swept overboard, even in moderate seas. A list of losses between 1878 and 1882 shows 169 causes of accidental death, ranging from “Lost during heavy gale” to “Fell asleep whilst holding light when net was being drawn in” and “Fell overboard when larking in rigging”.

Many apprentices deserted, and if recaptured, frequently chose imprisonment over returning to sea. That Grimsby was particularly problematic is suggested by the levels of incarceration in comparison with other fishing ports. In 1889, the town locked up 123 apprentices, and Hull 15 — and other fishing ports, such as Brixham or Lowestoft, almost none. In 1873, shocked national newspapers reported on groups of returned apprentices being marched through the centre of Grimsby, chained together. As the Grimsby Herald repined: “Respectable people said they would be glad if Grimsby could be erased from the map of England. If they knew as much about the treatment of some of these lads… they would feel surprised that the judgement of Heaven did not fall upon us.”

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But some boys prospered, and eventually became wealthy skippers and owners. Substantial Victorian and Edwardian villas in Grimsby’s suburbs still testify to some men’s discipline and ambition. In 1882, James Plastow, originally from the Hackney poorhouse, told a Board of Trade inquiry that within five years of coming to Grimsby he had managed to save enough to buy several smacks. He told the doubtless gratified inquiry board, “I believe every lad in the fishing trade has the same chance of a successful life as I have had, provided he saves his money instead of spending it.”

Needless to say, the majority of young men were not so sensible. Enter the “three day millionaires”, with large amounts of money to spend after particularly prosperous voyages. Acutely conscious of the danger of their employment, they played even harder than they worked. Their antics afflicted Grimsby with public drunkenness, high crime rates, and excessive venereal disease, all exacerbated by the borough’s notorious misgovernment.

Grimsby has many of these same problems today, but without the prosperity. A recent film set in the town, Three Day Millionaire, centres on three young trawlermen who decide to carry out a major robbery. Like many popular depictions of Grimsby, it shows the town as a sinkhole of crime and dangerous desperation. (See also Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2016 action-comedy Grimsby, in which Cohen played a feckless football hooligan, as well as the end-scene of 2006’s This is England, in which the disillusioned young skinhead protagonist, played by Grimsby-born Thomas Turgoose, casts a St George’s flag into the sea.) These depictions are overdone, yet not wholly misplaced.

If 19th-century Grimsby had its troubles, the 21st-century town arguably has even more, with an especially bad reputation for sexual assault and violence. Grimsby is Lincolnshire’s most dangerous major town, and one of the ten most dangerous major towns in Britain, with an overall crime rate of 134 crimes per 1,000 people, 78% higher than the rest of Lincolnshire. This is blamed on many things, from bad education to a lack of youth clubs, to the even more nebulous “lack of discipline”. Locals’ attitudes are unsentimental; in a 2019 Grimsby Telegraph poll, an overwhelming majority of respondents favoured solutions to youth crime such as “Bring back borstal”. Causes are doubtless complex, but the removal of community spirit, and sailorly solidarity, cannot have helped.

The town’s fate has always been tied to its fish. The country’s insatiable demand, plus the ever-greater efficiency of 20th-century fishing, had inevitable effects. Cod stocks close to the coast dwindled sharply after the Fifties. Once the town’s trawlermen would have been able to fish off Iceland and Norway instead, but from the late Forties onwards they were faced with increasing resistance from local fishing interests. Between the Fifties and the Seventies, British trawlers were increasingly excluded from these territories, with three long-running “Cod Wars” — a combination of international legal cases, high politics (Henry Kissinger declined to support the British, because the US needed Iceland’s military bases), and angry confrontations on the high seas — trawlers cutting others’ nets, and even ramming each other, while naval vessels manoeuvred nearby.

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Then came the EEC’s fisheries policy, to which the UK became subject after 1973. It was in many ways misguided. British fishermen resented suddenly having to share fishing grounds as close as 12 miles offshore with trawlers from other EU countries — sometimes more advanced super-trawlers, or ones using illegal small-meshed nets, which scooped up fry with the adult fish. Ted Heath was widely seen to have given away too much to foreign fishing interests. This launched a “narrative of betrayal…that fishing was considered expendable,” Barrie Deas of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations reflected in 2018. “It tied us into this absolutely atrocious deal — a top-down, unsympathetic system.”

The Common Fisheries Policy introduced in 1983 was supposed to safeguard stocks, but too often, its effects was even more overfishing of key species like cod and haddock, and the counterintuitive dumping overboard of huge quantities of perfectly edible side-catches of other species, because they had been caught outside CFP-designated catching seasons.

By the end of the Eighties, Grimsby’s fishing had almost gone.

Eventually, and grudgingly, Brussels offered substantial subsidies for British fishing — over €243 million between 2014 and 2020. But it was too little too late: the sum could neither revive the industry, nor compensate emotionally. At the apex in 1891, there were 861 Grimsby-registered trawlers. As of December 2022, there were seven, only four of which operate from the port, each of those ten metres or under, fishing for shellfish, which are not subject to quotas. EU-registered trawlers extract around eight times more fish (by value) from UK waters than British boats do from EU waters.

Grimsby’s strong pro-Brexit showing in 2016 was propelled by such bitter economic facts, but also by nostalgia for departed pride and brave heydays. Fishing today makes up just 0.1% of the British economy, but when a flotilla of 30 trawlers sailed up the Thames in June 2016 to fly the flag for Brexit, they carried as cargo not just Nigel Farage, but the hopes and dreams of multiple seaside towns. As one retired fisherman said sadly in 2020, “You’d got guys in a cake factory — perfectly brilliant skippers sticking cherries on cakes. Where does your pride go with that?”

Now that the UK has decoupled from Europe, is there hope for Grimsby? Brexit does offer the theoretical opportunity to revive the fishing industry, and to manage fish-stocks better, at least while they remain within the UK’s 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. Last December, the UK reached a six-species quota agreement with the EU and Norway, in a deal the Government claims will add £190 million to the UK industry. But foreign-owned trawlers still operate within the UK’s not yet exclusive Economic Zone Any vessels that break any new agreements may get away with it, as the UK has only 12 fishery protection vessels to patrol an area three times the size of the UK’s land-area.

Even if there were a resurgence in British-owned boats, Grimsby may be too far gone — its last few large vessels now operate out of elsewhere, its workforce is mostly retired, its skillset largely dispersed, its attitudes altered. Industry veterans often live in straitened circumstances, sometimes suffering long-term ill-health, including a high incidence of asbestos disease from long onboard exposure. At least 1,000 have depended on the Grimsby branch of the Fishermen’s Mission, which helps “retired or shipwrecked” fishermen. Their example hardly encourages young Grimbarians to work on trawlers.

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But the tradition is not quite dead. Although no Grimsby-registered trawlers land white fish at the port today, the Fish Market is still busy selling creatures caught predominantly off north-east Scotland, Iceland, the Faroes and Norway. The fish arrives in the evening, to be graded and sorted overnight before the Market opens at 6am the following morning. Sellers and buyers bid on pallet-loads of fish packed into 50kg boxes, and the whole auction (normally around 125 tons of fish) can be over within an hour. Frozen fish is also sold, originating from as far away as Russia, India and China. Although some of the fish is trucked off west along the A180, much is still sold to local processors, and through fish and chip shops, stalls at markets, and vans delivering door-to-door across Lincolnshire and beyond.

The smell of the past still sometimes literally fills the air, courtesy of surviving factories making fish-fingers, preparing shellfish and smoking all kinds of things that swim. Grimsby is the UK’s premier seafood processing centre, with more than 50 factories adding around £2 billion annually to the economy. (The European Commission, ironically, granted “Grimsby Traditional Smoked Fish” Protected Geographical Indication in 2009.) Brexit seems to be making some firms consider pulling out, but the Government is taking up some of the slack, for example in November giving a local cold storage facility a £5 million injection.

Fish processing is monotonous and unglamorous but it is also nationally important. One Grimsby firm alone, Young’s, provides around 40% of the fish eaten in the United Kingdom.

The switch from exporting to importing and processing is emblematic of modern Britain, but it seems especially sad here, in this town with a vanished raison d’être — this town that has worked so hard, endured so much, and made such a contribution to national life. Back at the disconsolate docks, on a gull-grey December’s afternoon, it is impossible not to regret the departure of an epic fleet.

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