How support for Labour drained away

Barnsley: BNP gains with ‘protest vote against establishment’

It is “collier’s Monday” at the Collingwood pub in Bolton-on-Dearne near Barnsley . The bar is packed but none of those drinking Yorkshire bitter and munching black pudding in this former pit village are miners. The pits they worked in closed in the 1980s but some traditions, such as a Monday afternoon pint, when shifts swapped over, live on. Others, such as voting Labour, are dying.

The British National party polled 17 per cent in the neighbourhood, with Labour hitting a historic low of 25 per cent in what for decades has been an impregnable party redoubt.

“It was a protest vote against the establishment,” said Wayne, 52, a BNP voter and former National Union of Mineworkers official. “I am not a racist. I have never voted for anyone other than Labour in my life but it has abandoned us.”

Once Labour stalwarts, the group of more than a dozen men had a litany of complaints about the state of Britain. Immigrants allowed bosses to drive down wages, undermine unions and were first in line for housing and health benefits.

Landlady June Peel is a BNP supporter and the pub was daubed with a swastika before the election. She wanted to keep it to shame the vandals, but the council came and painted it over. The police would have been more interested if a mosque had been damaged, the drinkers said.

Martin, an electrician, said: “I voted Ukip as a protest vote. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for the BNP because I think there are a lot of bigots in it.”

Most said they would switch back to Labour at the general election to keep out the hated Conservatives. Paul, a construction worker who was a schoolboy during the bitter year-long miners’ strike, said: “Mrs Thatcher killed this community.”

That community is changing. Just 20 years ago the whole village was connected with mining. Now people work in call centres and distribution parks built on the flat landscaped sites that were once tips, living in new starter homes on neat estates. Zimbabwean refugees have been rehoused in once tight-knit communities such as nearby Goldthorpe, creating tension.

The only Africans in Bolton are Kenyan. Jacob, the local Methodist minister, and his family have lived in the area for eight years. “People are friendly here, we have had no problems,” he said. His three children had gone through school without encountering racism. “I take weddings and baptisms and there are 100 people in church.”

He said immigrants should integrate into local culture but opposed the BNP’s repatriation policy. He added: “I became a Christian because British missionaries came to my village. I am here because there is a shortage of priests. If they sent me home there would be no vicar here.”

Brighton: Greens’ leap to first place fails to surprise most voters

Long a Tory-supporting bastion, Brighton, which fell to Labour in 1997, exemplified Tony Blair’s ability to attract the middle classes as no other Labour leader had done .

But the days of ascendency for the governing party have disappeared like mist on Brighton beach. Less than one in 20 residents here voted for the Labour party last week.

Browsing the boutiques of the edgy North Laine area on Monday afternoon, few of the trendy patrons were surprised by the disclosure that the Green party had jumped to first place with nearly a third of the vote. Debate, however, raged as to whether their performance represented a strengthening of environmental concerns among locals – or a mere protest against an unpopular government.

Luke Jefford, a 36-year-old graphic designer who knocked on doors for Labour during their 1997 campaign, voted for them again in 2005, but deserted to the Greens last Thursday, is typical of those who feel the party has betrayed its values.

“I was dyed in the wool Labour for many years,” he said. “Down at the town hall in ’97, I remember shouting from the top windows when [Michael] Portillo was voted out. But now there’s a lack of direction.”

A gleeful Paul Steedman, the party’s general election campaign director who is based in Brighton, said the Brighton Pavilion constituency was now the party’s “number one” target for the first Green member of the Commons.

But across town, Simon Burgess, first-time Labour parliamentary candidate for Brighton Kemp Town, put what positive gloss he could on the figures.

“There was actually an awful lot of sympathy for Brown on the doorstep,” he said. Of the supporters the party lost, he said: “Some of them will come back to us”.