Will Labour win in Stoke? On the road in the Potteries

“Political tourist” Paul Nuttall of Ukip

is taking on an uninspiring Labour

campaign (with a Remainer

candidate) in an area where 69 per cent voted Leave.

“I’ve voted Labour all my life. My dad would say, ‘if you vote Conservative, don’t think about coming back home!’” Pauline Shanton chuckles, over an afternoon half with two friends in The Albion. “You weren’t allowed to vote for anything different from your family,” one nods. “It was always Labour.”
Jazzy muzak and the burble of fruit machines float through the spacious pub on the corner of Old Hall Street in Hanley, one of six towns that make up Stoke-on-Trent. Pauline, 68, who has lived in the Staffordshire city all her life, will be voting for a new MP on 23 February.
A by-election was triggered in the Stoke-on-Trent Central constituency – which has been Labour since its creation in 1950 – by the MP Tristram Hunt standing down in mid-January to run the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. “He’s a posh git, isn’t he?” Pauline grins.
She will be breaking her life-long Labour allegiance and voting for Ukip’s candidate and party leader, Paul Nuttall. “Because of bloody immigration,” she tells me. “I don’t want to sound racist, but people are coming into this country and nobody else has the guts to say that this is the reason the NHS is in a state.”
Now retired, Pauline worked in the Doulton pottery factory for most of her life. Stoke’s towns are known as the Potteries, as historically they were at the heart of the ceramic industry. The Doulton factory closed in 2002. Most of the other big pottery factories also closed or shrank, reducing a 70,000-worker strong industry to the mere thousands. “You could leave one factory, and find another job the next day,” recalls Pauline. “Now the [coal] pits are closed, the steelworks have gone, along with the pottery. That’s the bloody Conservatives for you.”
Pottery and industrial pride may be central to Stoke’s history, but the city’s modern identity hangs in the balance. Memories of Tory government attacks on manufacturing make the Conservatives unpopular among the chiefly urban, white working-class population.
But Labour isn’t faring so well either. It has shed 14,000 parliamentary votes since 1997. Hunt was elected by merely 19 per cent of constituents, in a seat with the lowest turnout (49.9 per cent) in the 2015 general election. And its leader doesn’t help matters. “I wouldn’t vote Labour now,” Pauline shakes her head. “That Jeremy Corbyn is an arsehole. He wants to let them all in. If he got in, he would let them all in!”