The Calderdale council ward of Illingworth and Mixenden is perched high on the hilly outskirts of Halifax, from where residents can look down on the town and west across some magnificent Pennines scenery. “You could say it is a classic Red Wall ward,” says councillor Adam Wilkinson, who is co-ordinating the Labour party’s local election campaigning in the area. “It’s predominantly white working class, and in the 2019 general election, there was a significant swing to the Tories. You only reconnect by being visible and out there, so we are getting to as many doors here as we can.” Along with Stuart Cairney, the local Labour candidate, Wilkinson is doing a morning’s canvassing on a cold, windy Good Friday. A list of addresses has identified potential Labour sympathisers, and Wilkinson’s first door-knock yields two certain votes for Cairney. “A good start,” he says. A little further on though, they run into some turbulence. “You’ll not be getting my vote while that Holly Lynch is our MP,” says Andrew Platt bluntly. Lynch has been the Halifax MP since 2015. A majority of the town voted Leave but she supported Remain and then backed a second referendum in the parliamentary deadlock that followed. In 2019, Platt, traditionally a Labour supporter, voted for Boris Johnson. “I voted Tory last time and will do this time,” he says. “Holly Lynch was entitled to her opinion but what about her constituents? They voted to leave and she ignored them. There’s a lot of people around here who feel the same. As for Starmer, I don’t trust him.” It is a doorstep exchange that goes to the heart of the Labour party’s anxieties and neuroses in the north, as a crucial electoral test on 6 May looms. Any round of local elections is a significant moment in the political cycle. But this spring sees a bumper set of polls, brimming with implications for Britain’s future. There will be elections to Holyrood in Scotland, the Welsh Senedd and 13 mayoral races, including London, Manchester and for the first time, West Yorkshire. A vital byelection will take place in Hartlepool. The votes will also offer a broad snapshot of opinion on Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic and Sir Keir Starmer’s first year as Labour leader. The stakes are huge, and for Labour they are biggest of all in the heartland communities which defected to the Conservatives in 2019, handing the party its worst defeat since 1935. Labour held on to Halifax, although Lynch’s majority was halved to 2,569.
But according to a poll for Channel 4 published last week, in the 45 Red Wall seats taken by the Tories from Labour two years ago, the Conservatives have regained the lead they lost in the late autumn at the height of Covid’s second wave. Nationally, as Johnson now enjoys a vaccine bounce, Labour trails the Conservatives by up to 10 points. If the party cannot significantly restore its fortunes in Yorkshire, Lancashire and the north-east, the next general election will begin to look like a hopeless cause. The trouble for Wilkinson, and the Labour party as whole, is that no one really knows the extent to which the disastrous “Brexit election” of 2019 was a one-off, or how many Leave-voting former Labour supporters like Platt can be persuaded to come back to the fold. “The two big factors in places like this were the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit,” says Wilkinson. “But the truth is there have also been more long-term issues with Labour’s white working-class base, going back 20 years or so maybe. A lot seem to be coming back. But it just can’t be taken for granted. For some it’s not enough to say there’s new leadership. One person I was speaking with was asking what does Keir Starmer stand for? Why’s he abstaining on everything all the time?” The party’s old coalitions, he says, need to be built all over again. “This is the challenge for Labour. Here in Illingworth, for example, Corbyn was very unpopular. But in Hebden Bridge [a more middle-class community in the Upper Calder Valley] they loved him. And it was the same in Park Ward, which has a large Asian population.” In this landscape of political uncertainty, one new reality is clearly here to stay: whereas people in Illingworth and Mixenden would once have been reluctant to admit that they voted Conservative, or were thinking of doing so, the sense of embarrassment has gone. “It’s like, you’ve done it once,” says Cairney, “so it’s not such a scary thought any more. That’s a bit worrying.” Amid the alarming polls and a growing sense of disquiet over his leadership, Starmer has made it a priority to head north. On Wednesday he visited Sheffield before joining the Batley and Spen Labour MP, Tracy Brabin, in Leeds. Brabin, the former Coronation Street star, is Labour’s candidate to be the first mayor of the West Yorkshire region. Labour’s subject of the day was law and order, as Starmer vowed to make criminal justice central to its campaign. Speaking in Sheffield, he laid out his law enforcement credentials, calling for more police resources and recalling his role as director of public prosecutions: “I was responsible,” he said, “with the police and prosecutors, for enforcing criminal justice. I know what a difference it makes to our communities, so we, the Labour party, are saying we’ve got to take this much more seriously.” The reward was a front-page headline in the Yorkshire Post reading: “‘Ridiculous’ to call Tories party of law and order, says Starmer”. The tough-on-crime approach may touch some of the right buttons among the more socially conservative voters Labour has lost touch with. Labour’s other main campaign themes – NHS pay and a pro-business message – are also designed to reassure. But experienced local observers have no doubts about the scale of the wider task facing him and the party.
Hugh Goulbourne, a lawyer who has lived in Huddersfield for 10 years, lost out to Brabin in the race to be Labour’s mayoral candidate. He says: “I studied some maps before running, and in 1997, 2001 and 2005, West Yorkshire was simply Labour. Now it’s not that far from being 50% Conservative. That’s a pretty big change. I think everyone in Labour around here, after the experience of 2019, knows that no assumptions can be made about anything any more.” Goulbourne believes that the year of Covid has meant Starmer remains a relatively unknown quantity. “I’m not sure everyone is even aware we have a new leadership of the party,” he says. “Keir is only 12 months in, and all of those months have been in the shadow of the pandemic. It’s like starting a marathon, but the beginning of the race is conducted in complete darkness.” In any case, he adds, the Red Wall will not be rebuilt by one man based in London. “It’s not all about the ‘great leader’. He’s a long way away. We have to get across our own message up here in regions like West Yorkshire.” The key, Goulbourne says, lies in mapping a new economic identity for the patchwork of former mill towns that criss-cross the Pennines. The smaller towns have not seen the kind of vibrant regeneration that has taken place in cities such as Leeds and Manchester. “One of the challenges for the new mayor of West Yorkshire will be, how do you continue to increase the growth and prosperity in Leeds, but also ensure other areas get their own opportunities?” If Brabin wins the mayoralty, she will almost certainly join Andy Burnham, up for re-election in Manchester, and Dan Jarvis, in Sheffield, as part of a Labour triumvirate in England’s north. “That triangle could be significant in giving a platform,” says Goulbourne. “We will then need to start showing, through our metro mayors, that we can deliver and that we are willing to be a bit more radical in what we are doing for places. The Conservatives’ ‘levelling-up’ agenda is too centralised, too focused on infrastructure and will come with cuts to local services. We can offer more. The green growth agenda offers huge opportunities. In West Yorkshire, successful institutions, like Huddersfield University, can develop further as R&D [research and development] hubs for green innovation, and we need to find a way to reach the towns without universities, places like Batley and Keighley.
“There are opportunities for a mayor to say are we going to double down and really invest and put ourselves at the forefront of a new future for places with proud, illustrious pasts. It’s in the blood of people over generations, this memory of the past. They will not be happy with their towns just becoming dormitory towns in years to come, however good new transport links into the cities might be.” Whatever the outcome in May, it seems likely that the days when Labour could count on tribal loyalty in the Midlands and the north have gone. According to the pollster Deborah Mattinson, author of Beyond the Red Wall, a newly calculating approach is emerging after the recent seismic disruption. “These places and regions were taken for granted and excluded from political discourse for such a long time,” says Mattinson. “Voters within them are a bit more transactional about their votes now.” For West Yorkshire’s new Tory MPs, in seats such as Wakefield, Keighley and Dewsbury, that will mean pressure to deliver tangible results quickly. “There are high expectations of the ‘levelling up’ agenda.” says Mattinson. “‘Levelling up’ is not how ordinary people speak about it but they are expectant. They feel that promises have been made to them, they are expecting their place to get better and it’s going to be a big ask. Can Boris Johnson deliver? Who knows, but notwithstanding the vaccine bounce, he will be judged on the future not on the past and that’s a real opportunity for Starmer.”
Back in Illingworth and Mixenden, Gordon Northing, a retired art teacher, appears cautiously willing to give Labour another chance. Like Platt, Northing voted Leave and felt let down by Labour after the referendum. “I still have my suspicions that they might make overtures back to Europe,” he says. “I wish Starmer would be much more clear cut and make it clear that we are out. He’s doing all right. He’s better than Corbyn, but Labour need to get back to their issues, like basic fairness and the privatisation of healthcare, which is definitely happening.” Having assured a doubtful Northing that the matter of Brexit is settled, Labour’s canvassers move further along Low Moor Road, which offers a majestic view of Halifax’s old mills. For the moment Labour controls Calderdale council, to which Cairney hopes to be elected. But the politics are on a knife edge. A swing to the Tories would leave it under no overall control. Restrictions caused by the pandemic mean that a low turnout is likely, traditionally a disadvantage for Labour. Wilkinson admits that unknown political territory is being mapped out in the coming poll. “It’s been baffling to us how many members of the white working class find Boris Johnson appealing,” he says. “Lots of people seem willing to overlook the government’s pandemic mistakes. There’s almost no point in raising the death toll or the fact there’s been the worst recession in the G7. Labour seems to have gained no political capital at all from that.” One month away from the first big test of the Starmer era, all bets are off, after an extraordinary period of politics and the worst public-health crisis for a century. But it seems certain that Labour’s traumatic reckoning in the Red Wall seats of England is far from over. • This article was amended on 6 April 2021 to reflect the fact that Goulbourne finished third among those shortlisted to be Labour’s mayoral candidate for West Yorkshire.