Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The love Labour’s losing

Could the party’s support dissolve in northern England and the Midlands as it has in Scotland?

Stoke-on-Trent is an unsettled place, figuratively and literally. The ground under the city is riddled with shafts from coal and ironstone mining. Some of its most beautiful buildings are propped up by metal supports to prevent subsidence and the council once worried that homes earmarked for demolition would instead demolish themselves, collapsing into the mines below. The ceramics industry has retreated, leaving a moonscape where pottery kilns used to fill the city with smoke and glow.

When I visited Stoke as a housing reporter in 2011, shortly after the demise of the housing market renewal programme, it was clear that the city felt abandoned by all politicians. There were families stranded, living in streets full of boarded-up homes that were one week due for demolition and the next left without a plan. Residents frowned angrily as they talked of what ‘they’ (the special pronoun reserved for people in power) were planning to do next with Stoke. When I returned three years later, Tristram Hunt, the local MP, was trying to chivvy ministers to get a move on with a deal for the area, hoping it would help the local economy. Now Hunt too is leaving and Stoke’s once-automatic loyalty to Labour is hanging by a thread. Support for Ukip is rising.

Like many English Labour MPs who campaigned for Remain last year, Hunt found that his voters were just not interested in his wisdom on Europe, let alone swayed by it. According to one analysis by Chris Hanretty of the University of East Anglia, 149 of Labour’s 232 constituencies voted to leave the European Union, ignoring the advice of the party’s MPs, who overwhelmingly campaigned for Britain to stay.

Labour is losing its heartlands, and there’s no clearer picture of this than in Stoke or in the Cumbrian district of Copeland, where another Labour MP, Jamie Reed, is also quitting Parliament mid-term to take a job elsewhere.

While neither Hunt nor Reed directly attacked their party’s leadership in their resignation letters, both have been outspoken critics of the direction Labour was taking.

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