Politicians ignore the North at their peril

Proud but impoverished bastions of Leave are ripe for the picking, if only the Tories showed any interest

The deputy Labour leader Tom Watson’s support for a second referendum is brazen. He is, after all, the MP for the thumpingly pro-leave seat West Bromwich East (“when he can be bothered to visit”, as a local Tory activist put it to me).

Perhaps Mr Watson calculates that the Government’s calamitous Brexit performance means he can get away with making a mockery of his voters despite his mediocre 7,700 majority. Which hits on a curious paradox emerging in modern politics. While we live in combative times, with Remainers and Brexiteers lobbing insults at each other on loop, the biggest potential battlegrounds of the next election – aspiring working-class marginals across the North and the Midlands – are curiously neglected.

These forgotten towns, from Hartlepool to Halifax, are bruised by austerity, but big on self-betterment and fiercely pro-brexit. Hungry for local renewal and prickly about their already diminished identities, they respond to tough talk about crime and immigration and leaders with entrepreneurial energy. Despite being “traditional Left” areas, they are steadily falling to the Tories.

Tom Watson’s patch should be on Labour’s danger list. The other week, I was in one of West Bromwich East’s poorest neighbourhoods. To describe it as hell is not hyperbole: children pull at their molars so that “mum can use tooth fairy money for bread” in the church food bank. Alcoholics drink on the local funeral directors’ doorstep as a declaration of intent.

Struggling residents are bracing themselves for the roll-out of universal credit, which is already beset with payment delays. But despite it all, they do not see austerity as the root of all problems. “It hasn’t helped”, is the phrase I heard again and again. People are far angrier that no politician shows any aspiration for their town – a place where skilled men once forged steel springs like giant snakes in family-run factories, and “gameness” – never conceding defeat – was the most revered of qualities. There is also rising irritation at Labourites hiding behind the excuse of Tory cuts for their inactivity.

You’d think Labour would be anxious to cling on to such places. Instead, they are burning their final scraps of local credibility on the pyre of the anti-brexit Corbynista cult. The hard Left are consumed by a crazed vendetta against “moderate” Labour MPS, like Ian Austin in Dudley North, who is so jittery about his 22-vote majority that he has reportedly ditched official Labour leaflets for campaigning purposes. Meanwhile Labour also risks splitting the Leftwing vote in marginals like Barrow-infurness (majority just 209 votes), where Labour MP John Woodcock turned independent in July, following a venomous showdown with militant hardliners in his party.

Yet the Tories show no energy for making inroads. Maybe Theresa May is conscious that she lacks answers to the most pressing questions in these areas. Chequers is dead. Her Cabinet is split over austerity. She is seriously wobbling on immigration.

She might redeem herself slightly with a compelling regeneration plan. This doesn’t mean New Labourish dystopias with out-of-town call centres and shiny waterfronts. Nor visions – like Osborne’s “devolution revolution” – that look better on the policy wonk’s whiteboard than they sound out loud.

Instead, the Tories must think “bottom up”. Entrepreneurs are filling gap-toothed high streets with community-run art galleries, and cajoling landlords into cutting rents for pop-up cafés. Why doesn’t the Government help them by slashing business rates? Examples of worldclass innovation are breaking out in such places against the odds – from tech incubators in Wakefield’s derelict NHS clinics to Derby’s new data analytics hub. Where is the buzz about building on all this? Or replicating such successes in struggling places like West Bromwich?

The Right needs to offer real democracy as well as big dreams. Desires to “take back control” do not dissolve at the Port of Dover. We can already hear the first rumbles of a regional revolt against Westminster’s indifference to life beyond the M25. City mayors in the North are pushing for greater local control over spending and skills development after leaving the EU. After Theresa May’s botched Brexit, it’s the least she can do.