The tight race to win this week’s byelection in Tamworth shows “there really are no more no-go areas for the Labour party”, the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has said.
Speaking before the vote in the Staffordshire seat on Thursday, Reeves said the road to Downing Street for Keir Starmer ran through the West Midlands.
Labour has been boosted by internal polling putting it neck-and-neck with the Conservatives in what was considered a safe Tory seat. “We’re a changed party and Labour is back in the game,” Reeves claimed.
On the same day, the parties also face a three-way fight – with the Liberal Democrats – for Nadine Dorries’s seat in Mid Bedfordshire.
Tamworth was held by Labour after a huge byelection victory for the party in 1996, but Chris Pincher won it for the Conservatives in 2010 and almost doubled his majority to nearly 20,000 at the 2019 general election.
Pincher, a former deputy chief whip, announced he would quit this summer after he was suspended from parliament for groping two men at a private members’ club last year.
Tucking into a bacon baguette at the Roasters of Tamworth cafe, Reeves suggested that Brexit was no longer the potent electoral issue it had been when 67.5% of people in the constituency voted leave at the referendum.
“For most people, including locals here in Tamworth, they see the issue of Brexit as being settled now. We’re outside of the European Union and we’ve got to find our way in those new circumstances,” Reeves said. “But accepting Brexit does not mean believing that Boris Johnson’s deal was the best we can hope for … In a number of areas we know it’s not working.”
Labour activists noted that voters were “very warm” towards them and hoped many people who were undecided could end up backing Starmer’s party.
One said: “During the Corbyn years … people stayed in the party just to keep the faith. They didn’t like the direction it was going. But when push came to shove, and there were other viable options, they turned towards hope.”
Others said that while some voters were not convinced by the Conservatives any more, they were “still not convinced for us either”. Despite Pincher’s fall from grace, some voters were still prepared to give the Tories a second chance. “I don’t like Pincher, but I’d trust a different Tory MP to sort things out,” one resident said.
It would take a huge swing of 21.5 percentage points for Labour to win. “This is the Tories’ biggest [percentage] majority of all the byelection seats they’ve had to defend,” Reeves said, adding: “The Conservatives want people to think there’s no difference. ‘Politics is all pointless, I won’t ever see a difference.’ But we’ve got to persuade people otherwise.”
Some activists on the ground wondered whether the slogan “Labour is on your side” and the question “Do you feel better under the Tories?” could cut through in a constituency that has some of the wealthiest and poorest voters in the country.
In Little Aston, some houses are worth more than £7m, with high-tech CCTV cameras on huge front gates. Spital, is described as a “town of two worlds”.
Labour’s candidate, Sarah Edwards, who is up against the local councillor and former soldier Andrew Cooper for the Tories, said she had encountered many voters who felt apathetic but had been politicised by the crises and scandals of the Conservatives.
“People shouldn’t be made to feel that change is impossible. But people do feel dejected and frustrated, wondering, ‘Can politics even help any more, because I’ve seen none of that over the last 13 years?’” she said.
Edwards, a former NHS governor and union organiser for Unite in the West Midlands, said antisocial behaviour and the lack of cost of living support had been cropping up on the doorstep.
“There is nothing for younger people to do as well, no youth clubs or activities, so that adds to younger people’s frustration. There’s also the wider issue that crime isn’t being punished, the justice system isn’t functioning. There are 400 fewer police officers in Staffordshire and over the last 10 years we haven’t had a police station here,” she said.
Edwards has pledged to provide locals with a public-facing police desk for people to report crimes in person.
Born and raised in south Birmingham by her father, a teacher, and mother, a health-focused civil servant, the 35-year-old claims she would be able to deliver change as an MP after witnessing “people’s struggles and frustrations at work” while being unable to help with bigger issues like family or health.
• This article was amended on 15 October 2023. Due to an editing error, an earlier version quoted Rachel Reeves as saying “the silly issue of Brexit” rather than “they see the issue of Brexit”.
