At 11.32pm on 12 December 2019, the Labour-held constituency of Blyth Valley gained national fame when it narrowly voted in the general election for a Conservative MP for the first time ever. As the first brick of the “Red Wall” to fall that night , the result was celebrated as a famous victory for Boris Johnson’s populist “levelling-up” version of Conservatism.
The shock was all the greater because Blyth, a former coal-mining and shipbuilding area 14 miles north of Newcastle on the Northumbrian coast, was a traditional stronghold of organised labour and the Labour Party. As a similar pattern repeated itself across the North, pundits speculated about how far English politics was turning permanently upside down, with part of the white working class – as with Donald Trump’s supporters in the US – abandoning old loyalties and turning to the populist right. This switch in allegiances will almost certainly be reversed on 4 July , but the reasons why it happened are not going away.
Asked why Labour was routed four and a half years ago, Ian Lavery, a veteran MP and trade union leader who is now the Labour candidate for Blyth and Ashington, says: “Brexit was the cause. It is that simple. People were taken in by Boris Johnson’s promises that he was a huge friend of the working class.
They felt their lives were shit, so they believed him.” Poor, left behind and ignored Backing for Brexit in Blyth and elsewhere in the North East was a symptom of a deeper anger at b.
