Paulette Hamilton can barely leave her campaign headquarters on Erdington high street without being approached for a chat. “I want Boris Johnson out. I don’t like him,” young mum Sabrina Simmonds tells her. Another supporter, Dave, takes a poster to display in his window, while a third wants to complain about the dilapidated state of the street. Hamilton, who has lived nearby for 35 years, agrees: “You can always tell when an area’s going down, when it starts to get filled – not with the big name shops, but with your pawnbrokers, your bookies, your gambling slot machines. A former nurse, mother of five and local councillor, Hamilton is Labour’s candidate in Thursday’s byelection, which was triggered by the sudden death of the area’s longstanding MP Jack Dromeyin January. Labour held this seat in 2019 with a slim majority of 3,601, and party insiders say they expect it to be high on the Tories’ attack list for the next general election. Yet less than a year on from the humiliating loss of the Hartlepool byelection, which raised the prospect of the Conservatives continuing to make advances into Labour territory, Keir Starmer’s party is confident of holding on here. Starmer has visited several times, as have much of the party’s frontbench, including the deputy leader, Angela Rayner, and shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves. “When Sir Keir Starmer came and walked down the high street, that was phenomenal – people couldn’t believe he was here,” Hamilton says. Labour is buoyed by the shift in the polls since Partygate began to damage the Tories’ popularity, and in particular by signs that voters are starting to trust them more on the economy.
A recent Ipsos poll showed Labour still six points behind on the question of which party should be trusted to grow Britain’s economy, but 17 points ahead when it came to tackling the rising cost of living. Hamilton says that’s the first thing most voters want to raise. “The uplift with the electric, gas, with the inflation rate, with the 1.25 percentage point national insurance increase – that has been one of the massive issues in this area, and it’s bubbling,” she says In Erdington, Labour has a clear policy offer: a cut in VAT on fuel bills, plus means-tested help for the poorest households funded by a windfall tax on the energy giants. Hamilton says she has been able to contrast that with Rishi Sunak’s promise of a £200 loan, to be paid back from future energy bills, plus a council tax rebate. The proportion of people claiming unemployment benefits in Birmingham Erdington is twice the national average, and 31% of children are growing up in poverty against 19% for the UK as a whole. Hamilton says voluntary groups are stepping in. “Even though people say it’s a poor area, the community spirit and what people are doingis absolutely phenomenal,” she says. Gerard Goshawk from Erdington food bank saysit has handed out more than 13,000 parcels of provisions, many to families with children, in the current financial year, even before much of the energy price rise has taken hold – and with worse to come in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “It’s shocking. We have got busier in the pandemic and we’re busier now because of the concerns – well, the reality – of the impact of the cost of living. And just the impact of the universal credit system. People that are in debt to the government, or that have been sanctioned for all sorts of reasons,” he explains.
While the prime minister’s lockdown-busting antics aren’t high on voters’ list of concerns, Hamilton says they do come up. “People who voted Conservative in 2019 are embarrassed, because what he’s done is literally said one thing and done another, and people feel as if he’s broken their trust.” The shadow work and pensions secretary, Jon Ashworth, who visited Erdington to campaign last Wednesday, says he feels the state of the economy and Johnson’s character have become closely entwined. “They don’t trust him, they don’t believe him – they don’t think he’s got the abilities to grip the real issues facing the country. It all reinforces a sense that he’s not up to it,” he says, adding, “I think it’s quite a significant time, politically.” Since Ashworth’s visit, the headlines have been filled with Russia’s devastating invasion of Ukraine. Robert Hayward, the Conservative peer and pollster, says such events tend to benefit the incumbent government electorally: “There’s no question that foreign affairs will have an impact, but it will be a small impact in my view.” He says it has also helped Starmer’s party that they have been able to turn the conversation from Covid – or before that, Brexit – on to “bread and butter issues, where the Labour party is getting getting traction”. It is unclear whether that opportunity will now be curtailed by events in Ukraine. Alison Farrell, behind the counter in Farrell’s Caribbean grocers on Erdington high street, votes Conservative but has no sympathy for Johnson. “It would have been much easier if he’d just told the truth in the first place. Honesty is the best policy,” she says. “All this he’s doing to make people go back to liking him – it doesn’t work like that.” She does “think he needs to go,” she says – but in a warning of how much work remains for Starmer’s party, adds, “not to say, put in Labour.”