FARAGE – BREXIT IS JUST THE BEGINNING:
WITHERING support for Labour in Dennis Skinner’s back yard could shatter Jeremy Corbyn’s dream of entering Downing Street.
The party has an epic challenge of holding some of the most pro-brexit parts of the country, while promising Remainers a second referendum.
Mr Corbyn’s chances of forming a government are truly in trouble if Labour is in peril in Bolsover, the political home of 87-year-old Mr Skinner.
The outspoken Left-winger, dubbed the Beast of Bolsover, saw his majority in the Derbyshire seat crash from 11,778 in 2015 to 5,288 in 2017.
In neighbouring Ashfield, the collapse is even more dramatic. Labour’s majority plummeted from 8,820 to just 441, 30 of its 35 district councillors are independents and their leader, Jason Zadrozny, wants to be the next MP.
There are fears that just as support for Labour has largely vaporised in Scotland, the party will also be ousted from former industrial heartlands in England and Wales.
Wrexham, Labour’s most marginal seat in Wales, is always among the first to declare on election night.
It has elected a Labour MP since 1935 and a Tory win could be the first sign a revolution is afoot.
In Bolsover, where more than seven out of 10 voters voted Leave in 2016, Mr Skinner hopes his Eurosceptic record will stand him in good stead.
He said: “My view on the EU hasn’t changed. I was against joining the Common Market decades ago and I voted to leave in the referendum.
“But what I won’t do is support a Tory deal that threatens jobs and leaves us all worse off.”
But not all Brexitbacking Labour activists have felt welcome in the party. Lee Anderson, who once worked for then-ashfield MP Gloria De Piero, said: “When I came out as this Brexiteer, the local Labour group just shunned me. It was like I was a leper.”
Today, the 52-year-old former miner is Ashfield’s Conservative candidate and says: “People have been telling me all week they are going to vote Conservative for the first time.”
He is scathing about Labour’s record on education and crime and livid at what he sees as a takeover of the party by the hard Left.
“We were always told, ‘Work hard, do your 11-plus, and then you’d go to grammar school and you won’t have to go down the pit’, he said. But the year I was due to take the 11-plus, the Labour Party stopped it.”
His Brexit Party rival is miner’s son Martin Daubney, an ex-editor of Loaded magazine and now an MEP.
He said: “There’s a political promiscuity and a volatility, the likes of which I have never seen in my entire life.” Ambition is at the heart of Tory Mark Fletcher’s vision for Bolsover. His mother died when he was 17 and he lived on his own, but went on to win a place at Cambridge.
The 34-year-old said: “Irrespective of background, schools need to have high standards. It’s particularly important when you’re from working class backgrounds to get access to a good school.”
Brexit Party rival Kevin Harper, a former policeman, says Nigel Farage’s party can unlock true regeneration.
“London and the South, [they] have had money all of the time,” he says. “And that is going to change.”
In Wrexham, “passionate Brexiteer” Tory candidate Sarah Atherton, 52, says the town is “ripe for change” and admires the “good morals and values” of veteran ex-labour MP Frank Field.
Mr Field quit the party in protest at anti-semitism and a “culture of intolerance, nastiness and intimidation”.
The Brexit Party’s Ian Berkeleyhurst thinks 20 of his party’s candidates could be elected, saying: “We are going to change politics.”
Labour’s candidate, Mary Wimbury, is sceptical about Labour Leave voters backing the Tories, saying: “I think a lot of things that drove the Leave vote were anger at Tory austerity and what was being done to the country.”
The fate of Britain could hinge on the decisions of voters in a cluster of constituencies once at the heart of the Industrial Revolution.
Britain’s biggest parties neglect these men and women at their peril.