On a freezing day under a leaden sky, I stand on a street corner in Newcastle-under-Lyme, a bleak industrial city in northern England. It is also a parliamentary constituency – one of the traditionally safe Labor seats won by the Conservatives when, in 2019, Boris Johnson attacked the culturally conservative working class in the North with a promise to “get Brexit done”.
More than 40 seats fell – what Labor called the “red wall” – giving Johnson the largest Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher. The closest Australian comparison is John Howard's defeat of Labor in western Sydney in 1996.
Adam Gaughey, Labor candidate for Newcastle-under-Lyme, left, on the campaign trail with Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy.
Only Johnson, with his remarkable ability to connect with working-class Englishmen, could have won over the Tories' red wall – which is one reason I think they were angry to get rid of him. Winning back these seats is key to Labour's path to government.
At the moment, this looks very difficult to overcome: the latest opinion polls show Labor leading by 27 points. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose approval rating is just 20 per cent and whose net approval rating is -46, is twice as unpopular as Johnson at his lowest levels. Based on these numbers, every Red Wall seat would return to Labour's side, winning an overwhelming parliamentary majority.
Newcastle-under-Lyme's origins go back to the Middle Ages: last year, it celebrated the 850th anniversary of its founding under the royal charter granted by the Plantagenets of Henry II in 1173. It has sent a representative to Westminster since the rudimentary House of Commons first appeared. From the mists of the Middle Ages.
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Today it is typical of the bleak northern cities, with its dilapidated main streets, crumbling infrastructure, rundown public facilities, and general air of neglect. English journalist Sebastian Payne, in his classic book about the 2019 election, described these places as “broken Labor strongholds.” These communities, which bore the brunt of Thatcher's closure of the coal industry in the 1980s, later failed under the Conservative and Labor governments to match the relative prosperity of the South. Finally, alienated by what Labor had become under the Trotskyist clown Jeremy Corbyn, and pinning their hopes on Brexit, in 2019 they bought what Boris was selling.
But now Boris is gone. Labor has got its act together under the leadership of the Honorable Sir Keir Starmer KC. Sunak's government appears to be in an irreversible death spiral. Homes here don't have balconies, and people probably don't have baseball bats, but you get the picture. Traditional Labor voters, charmed by Johnson's unique appeal and patriotic rhetoric, have had a once-in-a-lifetime connection with the Conservatives 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 coal-mining region of Silverdale. Cook was in office for only fifteen months on the eve of World War I, as leader of the “Commonwealth Liberal Party” – the first official use of the word “Liberal” in the party's name. He later served as High Commissioner in London. Disappointingly, the only recognition of the city's only Prime Minister was a plaque in a montage on a memorial to the coal mining industry.
