In a few weeks’ time, the country will go to the polls to vote in what is shaping up to be a seismic general election. After 14 years of rule, the Conservative government looks to be on the ropes. On 4 July, will the electorate land the knockout blow?
We take a closer look at two parts of the West Midlands ‒ rural Shropshire and the key Red Wall constituency of Stoke-on-Trent.
Shropshire
Shropshire has always been a conservative county, with both a small and large C. It’s a quiet county with beautiful landscape and is dominated by farming.
There are five constituencies; all bar one are held by Conservatives, a true blue profile that has been established over many years. Sir John Langford-Holt, for example, held his seat in Shrewsbury for 38 years, from 1945-1983.
A few election surprises
There have, however, been some rare surprises. In the 1997 general election, Shrewsbury and Atcham was snatched from the Conservatives by Labour’s Paul Marsden, with a healthy majority of 20,484.
In North Shropshire, the resignation of the Conservative incumbent Owen Patterson, for breaking parliamentary rules on lobbying, led to a by-election in 2021. Helen Morgan (LibDem) won with a relatively small but clear majority of 5,925. It will be interesting to see if the voters of North Shropshire will stick to their 2021 preference.
Telford is another one to watch this time. After a close Labour victory in 2010, the Conservatives returned in 2015 and 2017 with even smaller majorities, before landing a comfortable majority of 10,941 in 2019. But now, Conservative Lucy Allan is standing down and has also been suspended from the party for supporting the Reform UK candidate. Could Telford be a marginal seat in the wake of perceived failures of a Conservative government? If anywhere is going to wobble, it may well be this one.
The story remains much the same
Elsewhere in the county, the Conservatives seem likely to stay put. In the south, Ludlow has been represented since 2005 by farmer Philip Dunne, who is standing down. He lost a ministerial post in Theresa May’s 2018 reshuffle, possibly due to comments he made about the NHS bed crisis. A career parliamentarian, he is retiring and is leaving the job to a younger person.
The Wrekin is a safe Conservative seat with large majorities from 2010-2019. Conservative Mark Pritchard is standing again. He has served on 12 committees, one of which was Security and Intelligence, and he has also been linked to an arms manufacturer accused of bribery. While this may be a blemish on his reputation, it is perfectly possible that he will retain his seat. However, the Labour candidate in The Wrekin is the very interesting Roh Yakobi, an Afghan refugee who survived capture and torture by the Taliban as a child. Unsurprisingly, Yakobi’s story caught the attention of social media when his candidacy was announced. It should be a fascinating contest.
The county town of Shrewsbury has always been Conservative with only one hiatus in the Blair years. Daniel Kawczynski has held the seat since 2005. He too does not have an unblemished record – bullying parliamentary colleagues, Ukrainian refugees and far-right connections. Many hope that this long-standing MP might suffer a 1997 Portillo moment. If he does, Julia Buckley is likely to win the seat for Labour.
Stoke-on-Trent
Could Stoke-on-Trent be a brick in a new Red Wall?
In 2019 the unthinkable happened; Stoke-on-Trent elected three Conservative MPs for the first time in the city’s history. This was part of the collapse of the ‘Red Wall’ of seats across the North and the Midlands where, as the saying goes, they had until then not so much counted the Labour votes, as weighed them.
Stoke and all the other formerly safe Labour seats that fell like dominoes that night had chosen the ‘levelling up’ agenda sold to them by Boris Johnson over the decaffeinated socialism of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour.
Fast forward four and a bit years and following Rishi Sunak’s announcement made in the pouring rain outside Downing Street last week, the country faces another general election set to take place on 4 July.
Levelling up – a pipe dream?
Answering the question of how voters in Stoke-on-Trent will vote this time isn’t entirely straightforward.
The city has benefitted from several sizeable injections of funding, including a share of £400mn made available in March 2023. At the time the city council was still controlled by the Conservatives and then leader Abi Brown was frequently to be seen in the media promoting a narrative that ‘Stoke is on the up’.
Events have a habit of tripping up political boosterism. In May of that year, control switched to Labour and many of the projects that the levelling up cash was to fund were scrapped to balance the books.
The three city MPs, two of whom are looking nervously over their shoulder as election day looms, have played a prominent role in winning the funding and have had to do a careful dance around the fact that it has delivered comparatively little so far. They might point to the Goods Yard development next to Stoke station as evidence that, thanks to the largesse of a Conservative government, the city really is on the up.
But take a walk into Stoke, one of the six towns making up the city, and you will hear a very different story.
The high street is filled with empty shops, some of which have been renovated using levelling up funding, but still can’t find tenants. Its once-thriving indoor market is a shadow of its former self and there has been a noticeable rise in rough sleepers in the town.
Eavesdropping the conversations in the local Wetherspoons, you are likely to hear a narrative about how the city is ignored by a London-based political elite who neither understand nor care about the struggles faced by ordinary people.
Revert to the Red Wall?
There rests the problem for the Conservatives. After four years that has seen the world battered by the headwinds of the pandemic, a war in Ukraine, and soaring inflation, their hands have been tied when it comes to delivering on their promises to revive left-behind places like Stoke.
Add to this the fallout from Brexit, which people in Stoke voted for in record numbers, and a run of scandals that has at times bordered on slapstick, their chances of holding onto their 2019 gains look slim.
Voters who have tried something new and been disappointed may very well revert to what they know. There won’t be a return to the days when the Labour vote in Stoke was weighed instead of counted, but they should regain two of the three constituencies.
If that does come to pass then the onus will be on Keir Starmer’s Labour to deliver and to do so quickly, because if they don’t, the picture could easily change again.
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