On a freezing day beneath leaden skies, I am standing on a street corner in Newcastle-under-Lyme, a bleak industrial town in the north of England. It is also a parliamentary constituency – one of the traditionally safe Labour seats won by the Tories when, in 2019, Boris Johnson blitzed the culturally conservative working class north with the promise to “get Brexit done”.
More than 40 seats – Labour’s so-called “Red Wall” – fell, giving Johnson the largest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher. The closest Australian comparison is John Howard’s rout of Labor in western Sydney in 1996.
Adam Jogee, the Labour candidate for Newcastle-under-Lyme, left, on the campaign trail with the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy.
Only Johnson, with his remarkable ability to connect with working-class Englishmen, could have won the Red Wall for the Tories – which is one of the reasons I think they were mad to get rid of him. Winning back these seats is key to Labour’s path to government.
At the moment, it looks very hard to beat: the latest polls show Labour 27 points ahead. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, with an approval rating of just 20 per cent and net favourability of minus-46, is almost twice as unpopular as Johnson was at his lowest point. On those figures, every Red Wall seat would be back in the Labour column, and it would win a thumping parliamentary majority.
Newcastle-under-Lyme traces its origins to medieval times: last year, it celebrated the 850th anniversary of its incorporation by royal charter granted by the Plantagenet Henry II in 1173. It has sent a representative to Westminster since the primordial House of Commons first emerged from the mists of the Middle Ages.
Today, it is typical of the grim towns of the north, with its shabby high street, dilapidated infrastructure, rundown public amenities and general air of neglect. The English journalist Sebastian Payne, in his classic book on the 2019 election, described these places as “Labour’s broken heartlands”. These communities, having borne the brunt of Thatcher’s closure of the coal industry in the 1980s, subsequently failed under both Conservative and Labour governments to match the relative prosperity of the south. Finally, alienated by what the Labour Party had become under the clownish Trotskyite Jeremy Corbyn, and pinning their hopes on Brexit, in 2019 they bought what Boris was selling.
But now Boris is gone. Labour has got its act together under the respectable Sir Keir Starmer KC. Sunak’s government is in a seemingly irreversible death-spiral. Houses here don’t have verandas, and people probably don’t own baseball bats, but you get the picture. Traditional Labour voters, charmed by Johnson’s idiosyncratic appeal and patriotic rhetoric, had a once-in-a-lifetime fling with the Tories and are ready to return to their natural political home.
Newcastle-under-Lyme has an interesting Australian connection. Joseph Cook, our sixth prime minister, was born here, in the coalmining district of Silverdale. Cook was in office for only 15 months on the eve of World War I, as leader of the “Commonwealth Liberal Party” – the first official use of “Liberal” in a party name. He later served as high commissioner in London. Disappointingly, the sole recognition of the town’s only prime minister is a plaque among a montage on a memorial to the coalmining industry.
Meet my friend, the UK Labour candidate seeing Red amid Tory death spiral
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11.02.2024
On a freezing day beneath leaden skies, I am standing on a street corner in Newcastle-under-Lyme, a bleak industrial town in the north of England. It is also a parliamentary constituency – one of the traditionally safe Labour seats won by the Tories when, in 2019, Boris Johnson blitzed the culturally conservative working class north with the promise to “get Brexit done”.
More than 40 seats – Labour’s so-called “Red Wall” – fell, giving Johnson the largest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher. The closest Australian comparison is John Howard’s rout of Labor in western Sydney in 1996.
Adam Jogee, the Labour candidate for Newcastle-under-Lyme, left, on the campaign trail with the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy.
Only Johnson, with his remarkable ability to connect with working-class Englishmen, could have........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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