On the face of it, Burnley should be one of the dullest contests in the general election. Keir Starmer’s party is sailing to victory in the Lancashire town described as Labour’s most winnable seat, according to the polls. One forecast has given Labour a 94% chance of winning. Another predicts a 1997-style majority, replacing another brick in its red wall. On this basis, Antony Higginbotham, Burnley’s first Conservative MP in a century, may as well bin the leaflets and head straight to the jobcentre.
And yet, a series of confounding factors – ranging from the Pennines to Palestine – mean Labour’s path to victory is far less straightforward than the polls suggest. One potentially significant moment in the battle for Burnley took place behind a veil of intrigue last Thursday night. It was a meeting of the town’s Muslim community leaders to choose the candidate they will back for the general election. The prize? As many as 11,000 votes that would mostly have gone to Labour. Only one of the eight prospective MPs was invited: Gordon Birtwistle, the avuncular 80-year-old Liberal Democrat. A well-known and longserving town councillor who represented Burnley for five years in parliament until 2015, Birtwistle addressed the room of about 300 people before formally winning the group’s backing.
The 50/1 outsider now believes he could win. “I think I can,” he said over a pot of tea in Mooch Cafe87 in the market town of Padiham, three miles west of Burnley. “Labour think it’s in the bag, they think they’ve walked it. I hope they carry on thinking they’ve walked it.”
Like in other parts of England, Labour has haemorrhaged support in Burnley over its stance on the Israel-Gaza war. In November, half of the town’s ruling Labour party – including its leader, Afrasiab Anwar – resigned in protest at Starmer’s refusal to back an immediate ceasefire. The 11 defections cast Labour back into council opposition and amounted to the biggest proportion of resignations over Gaza anywhere in England, according to Mike Makin-Waite, author of On Burnley Road, a book about the town’s turbulent history. Anwar said the strength of anti-Labour feeling in the Muslim community was possibly stronger now than it was eight months ago. “It’s as if we’ve been taken for granted within the party … and that’s completely immoral”. After lunchtime prayers at Shah Jalal Masjid, which serves the town’s Bangladeshi-heritage Muslims, worshippers raised a range of issues – the NHS, potholes, crime – but above all was the Middle East conflict. “At the moment in this current election Gaza will take a big precedent in how Muslims will vote, and not just Muslims,” said Mohammed Ali, 47, who said he had cancelled his Labour membership, making him one of about 70 local members to leave over Gaza. “There are issues like roads and hospitals but Gaza is the priority.” The last time Burnley elected a Conservative MP was in 1910, a few months before the death of King Charles’s great-great-grandfather King Edward VII, when the town was at the centre of the cotton world.
The Victorian mills that first brought growth to the town are now building its future: Newtown Mill is being turned into an expanded campus for the University of Central Lancashire while another will be turned into halls of accommodation. The council’s motto reads: “From mill town to university town.”
Away from the marketing spiel, Burnley has chronic challenges. It is the eighth most deprived council area in England, with an unemployment rate almost double the national average. GPs are buckling under the strain of caring for almost 2,000 patients each, one of the highest ratios in the north of England. Almost everyone in Burnley has a horror story about the Royal Blackburn hospital’s accident and emergency department, which has been overwhelmed with patients since Burnley’s A&E closed in 2007. Great strides have been made to address the issues that fuelled the riots that engulfed parts of Burnley in 2001. It seems remarkable that only 11 years ago, Nick Griffin’s far-right British National party was the second-largest group in the town hall after winning its first English council seat, in Burnley, in 2002. The BNP maintained an uninterrupted presence on the council until 2012. The Duke of York pub on the busy Colne Road was at the centre of those riots 23 years ago. It was firebombed and became the focal point of pitched battles between white and Asian gangs, which flared across the Pennines to Oldham and Bradford. Today, the Grade II-listed building has been renovated into modern flats, marketed at university students and workers for the fast-fashion brand Boohoo, Burnley’s biggest private sector employer. A Palestine flag hangs from the window of a flat opposite.
Jess Shaw, 30, moved into her £650-a-month two-bedroom flat last year and embraced the building’s history. She felt Burnley had been forgotten by national politics. Describing herself as a “Corbynite and very left-leaning”, the graphic design student said she would put aside some of her opinions about Starmer’s Labour and vote to kick the Tories out. Four miles west, in the semi-rural market town of Padiham, there was similar disillusionment with the main political parties. “I probably don’t want to vote for anybody but it’s important to exercise your right,” said Sue O’Rourke, 56, the owner of SoFloral florists. “We have a Conservative leader that is completely out of touch with the general public. How can he contemplate what it’s like not to be able to pay himself at the end of the month with the wage he has? And we have a Labour leader who is just against what the other one is for.”
Shaun McLaney, 35, owner of the Little Card Shop, said he was usually a Labour voter but had backed the Conservatives in 2017 for reasons he could not recall. This time he was certain of only one thing: “I definitely won’t be voting Tories – anybody but the Tories. “It’s just the way they’ve been running everything for the past 14 years. And now they want another five years to correct it.” In the Hapton Inn, a country pub in a Conservative-leaning rural village, the apathy was as strong as the glasses of “benny and hot” – a local delicacy comprising the French liqueur Bénédictine and hot water.
“I put all politicians in the same boat,” said the chef-proprietor, Lee Wright, as he served meals and sorted the weekly pub quiz. “They’re all as bad as one another and they’re not doing the country a service. They’re making a mockery of the people.” Four miles away, in the tightly packed terraces of Burnley Wood, William Harbour, 58, wore his refusal to vote as a badge of honour. “The country’s on its arse now but it’s not going to change – it’s gone too far,” he said. When Labour’s candidate, Oliver Ryan, knocked on his door last week, the 29-year-old told Harbour it was a two-horse race between Labour and the Conservatives, asking who he would back. “Farage,” came the reply.
Starmer has visited Burnley three times since Ryan, a councillor in nearby Tameside, Greater Manchester, was selected as its candidate two years ago. With one of the UK’s slimmest majorities – the Tories had a lead of only 1,352 votes in 2019 – the seat should be there for the taking. However, Higginbotham appears to remain popular among those who elected him five years ago. He does not give the impression of being a downbeat figure who is about to lose his job, dismissing a YouGov poll that slashed his share of the vote in half. “I don’t think it’s anywhere as near as bad as that,” he said. As well as the Gaza issue, the poll – which has Labour on course for a historic landslide – does not account for the boundary changes that brought two neighbouring wards, where half of the population identify as Muslim, into the constituency for the first time. Nor had it factored in the surprise surge in support for the Lib Dems.
Higginbotham said he “can’t see how” Labour could win if it lost as many as 11,000 votes to the Lib Dems, “unless they’ve built this massive electoral coalition”. “I genuinely think I’ve got a decent shot of winning,” he said. Ryan, meanwhile, believes Labour’s main challenge is avoiding complacency. The party was winning back Brexit voters who backed the Tories in 2019, he said. On Gaza, the response had been “quietly reassuring”, he said. “The biggest issue will be complacency and people thinking we’ve walked it.”