Constituency profile: St Helens North from the ground
The words weren’t coming. I’d also run out of biscuits.
It was a rare confluence of events that led me at three o’clock in the afternoon to walk “up” town (as we say in these parts). I very rarely walk up town and especially not at three o’clock when it is busy because the schools are coming out. Yet I did just that on Tuesday, through the bawling kids and bawling mothers. And that’s how I came to spot the Conservative candidate for St Helens North. I was surprised he wasn’t bawling too.
He’d just emerged from the railway ticket office and he looked so lonely. That’s all I can really say about a young man, a hundred and sixty miles from home, trying to smile as a scruffy northerner with a Movember beard trudged towards him. I must have stared at him for too long. I tried to smile back. It’s not something we do much around here. The perpetual scowl like the new beard and customary scruffiness is defensive.
That same night Sky News mentioned St Helens as part of the “red wall” of Labour seats stretching across the North West. Apparently, the Conservatives have targeted it as a weakness. That’s not my sense and I’d be surprised if it was theirs because if you want to know what politics means in this constituency, then look no further than their candidate heading for the next train out of town. His Twitter account was dominated by Harlow news until he was picked to fight St Helens North. I wonder about the progress he’s making. He seems to be spending more time canvassing in neighbouring Warrington South where the Conservatives do at least stand a chance of winning.
St Helens is deep red Labour heartland but there’s a lot to unwrap in that overused cliché. The first thing to unpack is how the two main parties treat us with almost equal contempt.
We’ve certainly voted Labour since 1983 when the constituency was formed but the older constituency around here was that of Newton. The town of Newton-le-Willows goes back to the Domesday Book (22 households in 1086) but the constituency only as far back as 1559 when, apparently, it was a “rotten borough”, being in the gift of the local landholder. Our history is suitably rich with MPs who were either distant aristocrats or belonged to powerful local families: Trafford, Pilkington (of the famous glassworks), and then the Legh family, the first of whom appeared in 1660 and whose descendants were still representing us in the late nineteenth century. The last non-Labour MP was in 1931 when Reginald Essenhigh won for the Conservatives. The seat then turned Labour, with Frederick Lee standing and winning from 1950, succeeded by John Evans in 1970.
Evans would eventually become a life peer, known as Baron Evans of Parkside, after the location of the local colliery. We had coal and we had railways, sitting as we do on the world’s first intercity railway between Liverpool and Manchester and above the Crombouke Seam. The first person to be killed by a train died on the outskirts of town. That was also an MP, William Huskisson of Liverpool. He was struck by Stephenson’s famous Rocket, coincidentally at Parkside. Not quite a tragedy but still a very dark day: we would much later give the world Rick Astley.
The seat, then, has pretty much always been a gift, either of rich landowners or the Labour party, whose vote rarely dips below 50%. It makes us one of those seats the Electoral Reform Society complained about, last week, when they revealed that “14 million voters” live in “one-party fiefdoms”. The Tories view us like the SAS view the Welsh Hills. They send their young Turks up here to test their mettle. They arrive at the beginning of election season, head into St Helens to have a photo taken next to the town hall where there’s a sign that says “Welcome to St Helens”. Their quality tailoring gives them away. In a deeply working-class constituency, nothing screams “outsider” quite like a Barbour jacket. If the Tories were ever serious about winning here, they’d get the basics right in matters of clothes and accent. Think Johnny Vegas and you’d have a strong sense of St Helens North.
In fairness, Labour are often no better. When Shaun Woodward defected from the Tories in 1999, Labour parachuted him into in the next-door constituency of St Helens South. How can you not be cynical? He won in 2001 with under 50% of the vote. The sitting MP and current candidate, Marie Rimmer, was a 30-year councillor and won in 2017 with nearly 70%. These things sometimes matter.
The current MP for St Helens North is Conor McGinn, a long-time Labour party worker from Northern Ireland before he too landed here. Wikipedia says he now lives locally. I’ve seen him once in my life and, full disclosure, his office helped my family out once. Beyond that I can offer no opinion.
The Lib Dems, meanwhile, have a reputation for deserving votes at local elections but not at the general. It’s borne out by the figures. They came fourth in 2017 but in the local elections were the second party, taking four seats to the Tory party’s three. Labour won 37.
There might be some demographics out there that can tell you more about the area than a lifelong resident can. Maybe next week will be different. There are parts I don’t know; new estates filled with young thrusters doing Google’s work, for all I know. But places like Newton and St Helens on a Saturday are what they’ve always been: towns with no bookshops, too many tattoo parlours, and with more than their share of people broken by hard lives. Some are ex-miners still suffering white finger or black lung. It is certainly different to the Warrington South constituency where Tories and Labour have an equal fight for an affluent belt, where George Harrison bought a bungalow for his parents after he made it as a Beatle. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was written there.
It is estimated that some 58% of St Helens voters opted for Brexit. Will that make a difference? I can only explain why the Brexit voters I know voted for Brexit and that was austerity and immigration. There was also an excitement about the Referendum that I haven’t witnessed since that night of 23 June 2016 when the polling station was crowded. I’d never seen it crowded. I doubt I’ll see it as crowded again. For many it was the first and last time they voted.
Brexit might yet shape the story next week but in St Helens it’s hard to believe that the politics will be any different to how they’ve been in living memory. And “living memory” really is important. Indifference to politics runs high. Only the big events of the past century loom large in the collective imagination. Many of us remember the coal strikes, the strikes around Eddie Shah’s print works in Warrington. I also remember the day the father of the new Speaker, now Baron Hoyle but then Doug Hoyle, climbed on the back of my Dad’s Land Rover to give a speech to striking nurses. He got so angry his nails made a hole in the canvas roof. It leaked for years.
Politics still means the politics of struggle here. Margaret Thatcher took the coal and then “Care in the Community” took Winwick Hospital, the big mental health hospital that was a big employer (my father worked there). We also saw the closure of the Vulcan Foundry which had been building locomotives since 1832. Cameron’s austerity robbed us of our further education college. In contrast, Tony Blair gave us a new community hospital, which many locals tend to thank him for rather than blather on about Iraq.
Politics, if you haven’t guessed, is very transactional.
Boris Johnson is gambling on Brexit driving people to the polling stations but those polling stations are in community centres that have been struggling to stay open, in schools that are crumbling, and other civic buildings that are fewer in number. Northern Trains are running a service so bad (and expensive) it’s over a year since I’ve made the 20-minute trip into Manchester or Liverpool. The mood of commuters who work in the cities seems close to riot.
It’s not, then, all about Brexit and very little of it has to do with Westminster. A lot of it also has to do with deeply entrenched biases, rooted in the irrational weeds of class, as well as the North/South divide. And I should have said as much to the Tory candidate as I walked past him on Tuesday. I should have at least smiled. My mind, however, was on biscuits and getting home. There’s already ice on the ground. That too might be a factor. It’s one thing we can all probably agree on. December is a stupid time to hold an election.