In all the fevered commentary about how Labour might reconnect with its lost voters in England’s northern towns, one credible answer seems to have been hiding in plain sight. The latest symbolic red wall defeat to the Tories, in the Hartlepool byelection last month, overshadowed another result that might give the opposition party some cause for hope: Tracy Brabin, the former Coronation Street actor and shadow culture minister, was elected the inaugural metro mayor of newly “devolved” West Yorkshire. Brabin’s victory, with almost 60% of the vote, gives her strategic powers in a region with a population of 2.3 million. It also, she believes, establishes a new red “thread” across the Pennines – a link with fellow Labour metro mayors Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester, Steve Rotheram in the Liverpool city region and Dan Jarvis in South Yorkshire. If the past year has revealed one thing in the changing political landscape, it is that these regional figureheads, with their direct local mandate, can be a potent voice of opposition to Westminster government in a way that council leaders rarely are. The prime minister spent the first wave of Covid criminally avoiding consultation with local government, but the second being forced to listen, in particular to Burnham, Labour’s “northern leader”. Michael Heseltine, one political godfather of the metro mayors, told Brabin in a call after her victory that it was now her solemn political duty to “kick the government’s butt” in every possible way on behalf of the people of West Yorkshire. When I met her last week in Batley, 10 miles south of Leeds, it was clear she couldn’t wait to get started. We sat in the deserted cafe on the top floor of what was once one of the woollen mills that powered Batley’s growth in the Industrial Revolution and is now a shopping complex. Still in electioneering mode, in a resplendent red suit and Converse trainers, Brabin talked me though some of the 10 pledges of her successful campaign, among them 5,000 sustainable homes, 1,000 jobs for young people, a radical overhaul of bus provision and a new deal for the creative arts. Each of these promises is based on a lifetime of local knowledge. She grew up in Birstall, just up the road. When her father lost his job when she was four, the family moved into a council flat. Her mum and gran ran a cafe. She was the first in her family to go to university – to study drama at Loughborough. “All of the opportunities I had came from local governments providing secure social housing, great libraries – and free education,” she says. One of her priorities is to restore that ladder of aspiration by trying to reinvigorate left-behind towns such as Batley. Part of that, she believes, is “making sure that young people have the access to creative spaces where they can convene and share ideas, rehearse, have arguments”.
Walking around Batley and Birstall, you are confronted everywhere with the urgency of that task. Several of the grand Victorian civic buildings of the 19th century are boarded up or home to ad hoc discount shops. The police station is up for sale. The morning action on Batley high street is mostly confined to bookies and pound shops and no one seems to need to be anywhere very urgently. In Birstall, the central square is dominated by a statue of Joseph Priestley, the Enlightenment chemist credited with the discovery of oxygen. The square he looks down on now seems a place with the air sucked out of it. In the past five years as MP for Batley and Spen, Brabin has been a witness on the frontline of that decline, the consequence of decades of post-industrial underinvestment sharply exaggerated by the years of austerity and cuts to services. “My case work,” she says, “was predominantly people on benefits, people who’ve had few choices, or they’ve become ill, or they have a disabled child, or who’ve never been able to get the right housing.” The enormous frustration of that role as an opposition MP lay in the inability to offer more than piecemeal solutions. Now, as the head of 640 members of staff at the combined authority, and as police and crime commissioner, Brabin believes she can use that knowledge to start to effect broader change. * * * If it was her experiences that made Brabin Labour “through and through”, it was her friendship with the late Jo Cox, her tragic predecessor as MP in Batley and Spen, that was instrumental in her standing for parliament. Over her decades as an actor, she had done a lot of doorstep campaigning for councillors and when Cox was named as the prospective candidate for her local constituency, the pair became friends. “I can see her now, having cycled to meet me, swinging her bike helmet on her arm,” she says. The pair of them had both gone to Heckmondwike grammar school and they made an occasional double act, knocking on doors, joining forces to save the local library from closure. It was Cox who first asked Brabin if she had ever thought of a career in frontline politics. On 16 June 2016, Brabin’s sister called her with a troubling message. Their mother, who was part of a knitting circle that met in the basement community centre below Birstall library, had been locked in as “part of a siege”. It was only later that Brabin discovered that the “siege” had been the murder of her political friend outside the library. After the full horror of what had happened emerged, Brabin was encouraged to stand as Cox’s replacement in parliament, helped by the constituency team that had witnessed the killing. In a rare gesture of political solidarity, the other major parties did not field candidates. Brabin admits that in those first months the emotional burden of the circumstances of her election weighed very heavily on her. “Wherever I went, people would tell me I had big shoes to fill or would want to tell me their memory of Jo. That’s absolutely as it should be, but it really built on my impostor syndrome.” She recalls a particularly bad day, early on in parliament, when she confessed to Angela Rayner that in following Cox she “felt like the second wife after a much-loved first wife has died”. Rayner helped her to see that role differently: “Aren’t you more like the second baby after the first baby has died? You are here to help bring us together.” “I realised it was enough at that point,” she says, “just to be there as the MP, otherwise the far right would have won.” Still, it was only after she was elected in her own right in the snap election of 2017 that she gained confidence in her “own offer for my community”.
Her father died before she became an MP, but her mother is still going strong at 90. She’s proud of her daughter’s political achievements, but for her nothing could quite match Brabin’s starring role in the 1990s as Tricia Armstrong in Coronation Street. “To be honest, I think Mum would still much rather me be on the telly,” she says. “When you’re on Corrie, people drive past on the bus and point out your house and all that.” It is sobering to hear that the demons unleashed during the Brexit campaign, and which seemed at least part of the story of Cox’s killer, persisted even after that terrible event. “Certainly, during the time of the parliamentary Brexit votes, it was hell,” Brabin, who voted Remain, but accepted the result, recalls of the abuse she received. “I had to have police at my surgery and we were forced to have extra security, even though I felt it was important to appear as ‘free’ as I could be. I was hearing all that extreme language on the doorstep. ‘Tracy the traitor’ became a meme. It all brought out such hate and vitriol.” Her mother used to ask her: “Don’t you want to go back to acting?” She didn’t, not for a moment. And partly, she says, “because there was a level of horrible misogyny attached to the abuse that it just made me dig my heels in even harder. Because it was also directed to me as a woman.” That hostility took on a farcical cast when Brabin was embroiled in what became known as “shouldergate” at the beginning of last year. During a speech in parliament, the black dress Brabin was wearing slipped off her shoulder at the dispatch box, causing Piers Morgan to go off on a juvenile rant against the decline in standards of parliamentary dress. That brought a predictable shower of social media apoplexy down on Brabin. She responded with characteristic aplomb. “I can confirm I’m not a slag, hungover, a tart, about to breastfeed, a slapper, drunk, or just been banged over a wheelie bin,” she wrote on Twitter. “Who knew people could get so emotional over a shoulder?” She auctioned off her £35 Asos dress for charity, raising £20,000 pounds for the Girl Guides.
She can laugh at the absurdity of that row now, but is well aware too of the bullying contempt for politicians that it betrayed. “I think that feeling was whipped up by Boris Johnson during that period,” she says. “He was happy for the public to believe we were all derelict in our duty. What was a tactic in that campaign is now hard to restore.” That deliberate erosion of trust in Westminster politics is one explanation for Labour’s defeat in Hartlepool, she believes. “There was an annoyance probably that the [Labour] candidate was brought in without due process,” she says. And the hangover from Brexit played a part. People wanted to insist: “We told you once and you weren’t listening, we’re going to tell you again.” She knows all the arguments from rows about Brexit with her Leave-supporting mother and sister, who is a care nurse. The forthcoming byelection in Batley and Spen, set for 1 July and prompted by Brabin’s “promotion” to mayor, will no doubt reopen a lot of those wounds. On the day before we met, George Galloway, the eternal provocateur, announced outside the Dixxi Express takeaway in Batley high street that he would stand as an independent, intent on inflicting the kind of humiliating defeat on Labour that would remove Starmer from office. His speech was much more about Gaza than about West Riding, stirring simmering tensions by characterising the Labour leader as a “diehard Zionist” to his mostly Muslim audience. Batley was famous for its bed factories, he said, “but the politicians of Britain have been asleep on the job”.
He was careful in making that speech to insist that he was standing not against Kim Leadbeater, who has been chosen to fight the seat as the Labour candidate, but against the Labour leadership that had kicked him and Jeremy Corbyn out of the party. Leadbeater is Jo Cox’s sister. She has run the foundation named in her sister’s honour and coordinated the annual Great Get Together in her memory for the past five years. “I think George Galloway’s presence in the race makes everything a bit grubbier,” Brabin says of the announcement that threatens to erode an element of Labour’s majority of 3,500. “But I think Kim is an exceptional candidate. And I think we can get over the line.” After meeting Brabin I spoke to Leadbeater, who had been out campaigning in Batley. She insists that she “will do my level best not to be part of the circus” that Galloway threatens to bring. She was never a political animal before her sister’s death – she works as a fitness instructor – but having spoken to her at length before, I know her decision to stand would not have been taken lightly. She takes courage “from Jo” of course, but also she says from Brabin and “all women in politics. I’m in no doubt that it is a brave thing to do, to put yourself forward for public scrutiny,” she tells me. And particularly in this place at this time. “But you know, Jo always used to say to me, ‘If you don’t do it, who will?’ We all know just how toxic politics can be, at times, and to be honest, we are experiencing some of that already.” As Galloway’s presence shows, toxicity has been fuelled as much by internecine wars within the Labour party as beyond it. Brabin tries to rise above these divisions, taking for example a grown-up, conciliatory line in the row at Batley grammar school over the threats and protests against a teacher who referred to images of Muhammad in a lesson. Any idealism is mixed with pragmatism. When she worked part-time at Marxism Today to help support herself as an actor, it was in ad sales. She voted for Corbyn as leader. Then for Owen Smith when he challenged for the leadership. Then for Starmer (though she liked the idea of a female leader, in Rayner, she thought Starmer stood more chance in a general election). “I’ve been on a journey,” she says, with a laugh. “I remember leafleting a couple of years ago, outside school during the election. A young child wanted to take a leaflet – and the mum said, ‘Oh, don’t take that, Labour is the party for poor people.’ We have to be the party for everyone.”
There is an argument that suggests the metro mayors can help to rebuild the image of Labour as a force in the community, so damaged by councils that have been subjected to 40% cuts in their budgets, that with enhanced powers they can be both the “community’s champion – like Andy [Burnham]” and be effective in delivering the government’s “levelling-up” investment. The challenge will be to prevent the Tories taking credit for any success stories. In that effort, won’t Starmer always be problematic as a leader in representing a London constituency and speaking his kind of lawyerly language? “I think people see that Keir is clever, enormously competent and trustworthy, but actually, the public need to know more about his own story,” she says. “When he came to Batley and Spen on a visit, I introduced him. I said, look, Sir Keir Starmer sounds posh, but he’s not. His dad was a toolmaker. And his mum was a nurse. His story is my story,” she suggests (omitting the part played in each of their journeys by passing the 11-plus exam). “We had all the chances given to us because of Labour. And we took those chances.” * * * Brabin saw her future early. Her mother has a story of her aged five, asking: “When am I going to be famous?” She acted and directed her way through school and university before being reminded where she came from. “After university, I didn’t know anybody and had no money”, so an acting career seemed impossible. “I got a place at a drama school for a postgrad, but I was too scared to go to London. I didn’t know how to do it.” It was only when friends said “What on earth are you doing?” that she found the courage and headed down, “you know, with my knotted hanky on my head”. It took her five years of working in community theatre and theatre in education before she landed a job with David Jason in A Bit of a Do and everything changed. “Once you’ve done telly, then you can do more telly.” If anything, she believes, that path to a creative career has become more difficult. Much of her time in parliament was spent arguing for greater investment in creative industries and education and that will be a key part of her ideas to transform her region. Both of her daughters, in their 20s, are trying to forge careers in theatre and TV and her husband is a TV director, so she knows the effects of lockdown. “I foolishly put out a tweet saying if you’ve been affected by the closures in their creative industry, let me know. I had 4,000 emails that day. People had a year of work for them and their partners completely wiped out, people [were] selling their house to move back with their parents. Selling a car to buy food.”
She is outraged that the government has had so little to say about this part of the pandemic catastrophe. The fact is, she suggests, if they took account of the profound effect of “culture” on the health and wealth of local communities, “they wouldn’t allow the numbers of drama teachers to fall, music teachers to fall. There is a reason why people pay those eye-watering prices for education at Eton and part of it is because they have a drama studio or music studio. They understand the value of the enrichment and the confidence and the articulacy and the emotional intelligence and the resilience, all of those things they buy their kids. You don’t get it from six lessons on the ukulele, which is what a lot of schools are reduced to.” If she does one thing, she hopes to find ways to restore what she calls “that sort of northern artists’ pride” in her region. “And it’s something that I know that we can definitely bring back.” Alongside her acting career, Brabin wrote episodes for Heartbeat, Hollyoaks, Shameless and others. Before I met her, I wondered if she envisaged this new role as a final act in her career, but you don’t have to spend long with her to know that she sees it more as the opening night of a long run. It drives her mad when some men instinctively start to write women off in the workplace at 60, the birthday she celebrated recently. “The thing is, you have the crazy period of the menopause. But actually, you come out the other side, it’s incredibly liberating. You asked me at the start why I wanted to be mayor. Perhaps the most important reason was I looked around and all the mayors were men. I was thinking, ‘Where is the woman we can get behind?’” and then in Jo Cox style she thought: “Why not me?” When Brabin first got into parliament she was fond of wearing a necklace with a quote from Millicent Fawcett, the suffragist: “Courage calls to courage everywhere.” On the day we meet her chosen necklace reduces that sentiment to one word, in red: “mayor”.