Labour’s Grip Loosens In English Coal Towns

KIRKBY-IN-ASHFIELD, England — The red brick houses in this town have long stood as part of the “red wall” in British politics, the gritty stronghold of coal and factory towns in the Midlands and north of England that voted reliably for the Labour Party.

So when Natalie Fleet, the Labour candidate for Parliament, knocked on the first of those doors recently, and was told by the woman who answered, Donna Savage, that she was thinking of voting for the Conservatives in the December 12 election, it was a sign of how much British politics has changed.

“I want to get Brexit done,” Ms. Savage, a 43-year-old teacher and lifelong Labour voter, told Ms. Fleet, echoing a phrase frequently used by the Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson. Plus, Ms. Savage added, “I don’t want Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister,” referring to the leftist Labour leader, who is deeply unpopular in this part of the country.

Mr. Johnson has promised to take Britain out of the European Union swiftly. He hopes to use that message to attract and convert fedup voters in this district, which voted by more than 70 percent to leave the European Union in 2016.

That frustration, combined with a fraying social fabric and long-term corrosion in economic opportunity, has created a volatile atmosphere in Ashfield: anti-immigrant, distrustful of the political elite and receptive to populist appeals from the right.

“It’s like the country is turning upside down,” said Lee Anderson, 52, a Labour Party exile and onetime coal miner who is the Conservative Party’s candidate in Ashfield. “As bizarre as it seems, Boris and Donald Trump connect with working-class voters. People like plain English.”

The Conservatives, Mr. Anderson argues, better embody the traditional values that people in Ashfield want to preserve. Without the coal mines and factories, he said, the Labour Party no longer has a “captive audience of useful idiots” for its outmoded policies.

Still, Mr. Anderson does not have a good answer for how Mr. Johnson will reconcile the policies that drive his Brexit campaign with the yearning in the Midlands for a return to the kind of traditional industrial economy that powered the country in the 1960s.

“There are still some people who won’t forget — can’t forget — that the Conservatives shut the pits,” Jon Ball, the head of content at the local newspaper, The Mansfield and Ashfield Chad, said of the coal mines. “But there are many other people who have moved on.”

Mr. Anderson is neck-and-neck with the independent candidate, Jason Zadrozny. Mr. Zadrozny

Some voters who back Brexit shift to the Conservatives.

presents himself as a pragmatic public servant who will get things done without being tied to the orthodoxy of either major party.

“People were crying out for something different, and I guess we’re a conduit for that,” Mr. Zadrozny said. “I’m offering the one thing they really want from Conservatives, which is Brexit, but without the rabid, right-wing Tory bit.”

But Mr. Zadrozny has discovered the limits of being an anti-politician. Theresa Woodland, 60, a retired hairdresser, told him that however much she appreciated his work for the district, she was going to vote for the Labour Party.

“If I vote for you, I think Boris will get in,” she told him. “If Labour gets in, I think Ashfield will benefit.”