The overcrowded train from London to Nuneaton is delayed. “We are just waiting for the driver to turn up,” explains a guard through the microphone. There is wry laughter from the passengers, sitting and standing. They have been here before.
On arrival in Nuneaton, a town of about 90,000 people in the West Midlands, there is barely a sign of an impending election. Hours spent trudging past hundreds of homes reveal two campaign posters in windows: one for Labour, one for the Greens.
Yet Nuneaton has totemic significance in British politics. It is a bellwether constituency: the party that triumphs here has also won national power in every election but one since 1983. Former prime minister David Cameron said he knew the Tories would win in 2015 the moment he heard they had held Nuneaton. Like much of the West Midlands, Nuneaton backed Leave in the Brexit referendum and the Conservatives in 2019.
The West Midlands has had a particularly rough time since. Historically a manufacturing region, it has shed factory jobs even faster than the British average. Its poverty rate of 27 per cent is the UK’s highest. Last year’s canning of HS2, the planned high-speed train link between London, Birmingham and the north, sank spirits in Birmingham’s satellite ring.
It is hard to find people in the West Midlands who speak well about the Conservatives. It’s harder to find Conservative politicians here willing to speak at all. But the overwhelming impression on a visit to the region was how few voters seem invested in the Tory-Labour confrontation. To many, it feels like a sideshow beside their struggles.
Almost the only person in Nuneaton who looks fully engaged in the election is the Green candidate, Keith Kondakor. In cargo shorts, with purple striped socks and old green sneakers, he strides through the morning heat shoving leaflets through letterboxes. It is only 9.30am, but Labour have already preceded him. The local party is on a high after winning back Nuneaton and Bedworth council from the Tories in May’s local elections.
Kondakor issues grudging praise: “They are chucking money at the campaign, and they’ve got loads of volunteers. I’ve had personalised letters from Labour, my wife has.” Finding one of their leaflets lying on a doorstep, he slots it through the letterbox. “Putting it in for them,” he grumbles. Seeing another protruding from a letterbox, he remarks: “I’d shoot anyone who leafleted like that for me.”
By contrast, Kondakor can detect almost no scent of the local Conservatives, who won the Westminster seat in 2019 with 60.6 per cent of the vote, nearly 30 points ahead of Labour. “The Tories are broke,” he explains. “The MP has two members of staff and his wife going around with him, most of the time. They used to have gangs of 30. There’d be banners on any disused building. They used to be so rich. Now people have told me they haven’t had a single Tory leaflet.”
Kondakor cannot even find local Conservatives on social media. “I used to have a Tory troll who attacked me, put in official complaints about me. He’s now on Facebook voting for Reform. I almost miss being attacked by trolls. It used to give you something to argue about.” Local Tories did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
A handsome building in the town centre, with “Conservative Club” engraved on the facade, is a disused relic of a bygone era. The current Tory operation is in a rented house nearby. But last Monday, the front blind was down, and a ring at the doorbell produced only a faceless response from inside: “There is nobody available to talk to you.” Nuneaton’s Labour politicians did not reply either, perhaps avoiding anything that could jeopardise their expected victory.
Kondakor was born in Nuneaton and, in a typical trajectory, left when he was old enough. “We probably lose half our population at age 18,” he says. He is rare in having returned. The area has been short on jobs since its coal mining days ended: 20 collieries once operated around here, but the last closed in 2013. Nuneaton’s high street has since fallen silent, having successively lost Marks and Spencer, the Co-op and Debenhams. Of the few shoppers in the town centre, a high proportion are on mobility scooters.
A civil servant says that when his son was born here in George Eliot hospital (named after the local novelist), he registered the place of birth as “Warwickshire”, for the county. Nuneaton felt too low status, he admits.
Molly Hopper, a young Nuneatoner, says: “I don’t really like it. I’ve just lived here my entire life. We’ve lost things that would bring people to town. I feel the best thing the town has going for it is the train station, to get you elsewhere.” The quickest journey to London takes an hour, but is too expensive and unreliable for most people to commute. Nuneaton itself is car-dominated. A dual carriageway runs through the town centre.
The council had developed an ambitious project for regeneration, including a major cycle lane. But in an echo of the canning of HS2, the Conservatives, when they ran the council, cut £40mn from the plan in February, saying they had “saved the regeneration programme”.
Nuneaton’s biggest source of pride is its military tradition. Nearby Bedworth has a famed Armistice Day parade, and some Nepali Gurkhas have settled here. One recent morning two redcoated buglers performed on the steps of town hall to mark Armed Forces Week. The new Labour mayor in his gold chain of office posed with them until a photographer asked him: “Could we have one without you?”
Beneath Nuneaton’s visible social structures are the people at the bottom of the heap. In a warehouse, its location kept secret to prevent theft, Richard Fleming, project manager of the Nuneaton Foodbank, shows off his latest donations from supermarkets: cans of hot dogs, meatballs, tomato soup, spaghetti hoops and more. When the food bank started out in 2013, putting food on the pews of a church, Fleming thought: “This is just a short-term thing.” Now he runs four centres in Nuneaton, under the auspices of the Trussell Trust. At first, local politicians were embarrassed to be associated with a food bank, but now they are proud of it, says Fleming.
“We grew so big we had to invest in a van. We lost about 90 per cent of our volunteers during Covid, so we had to advertise again and get new people in.” Then demand surged with the cost of living crisis. “We’ve had a staggering amount of people in the last two years who are working families, with children, who can’t make ends meet.” The food bank now feeds 600 or 700 people a month, overwhelmingly, Fleming notes, white Britons.
He worries that his operation seems to have solidified into a permanent pillar of the local welfare state. He remarks that many of his clients need a food bank because “they can’t budget properly”. But he adds: “Why I do it: these people can’t help what families they were born into. They live chaotic lives. Their kids live chaotic lives. They have no routines.” Sometimes a former client will come in to say they have found work, and perhaps even donate food. “That’s really uplifting.”
Inside the food bank, remarks Fleming, neither clients nor volunteers talk politics. “But it’s there all the time, it’s the elephant in the room, it’s why we’re here.”
About 25 miles west from Nuneaton, in the formerly industrial Black Country, is Walsall. The manufacturing town, once known as Britain’s “leather goods capital”, gives a more upbeat first impression. Council posters in the train station advertise “Walsall’s £1.5bn programme of transformation”, funded by government “levelling up” money. Outside, the high street is filled with shoppers speaking African and Asian languages, Polish and English. A stunning church gazes down from the top of the street. There is not a single campaign poster visible in the town centre.
Locals emphasise Walsall’s community spirit. Sir David Nicholson, who was chief executive of NHS England and now runs the local NHS Trust, says of the Black Country: “One of its strengths is its sense of belonging.”
Walsall’s architecture speaks of a town that leans on public institutions rather than major businesses. The most majestic buildings are the town hall (from 1903), Manor Hospital and the Walsall Housing Group. Local institutions work together to tackle the town’s growing issues of poverty, says Fay Shanahan of whg.
The group, which manages social housing, has found itself stretching into areas that go way beyond being a landlord. It offers debt advice, and has an “ACEing asthma” team to identify homes susceptible to mould and damp that can worsen the condition. During the pandemic, whg set up a “kindness team” that rang thousands of tenants, trying to help people who were isolated or had mental health problems. The group aims never to evict any tenants for rent arrears.
Given the national mood, Walsall might seem ripe for a Labour takeover. Yet the Tories still have a shot at winning the new Walsall and Bloxwich constituency on July 4. The Conservatives won May’s council elections here, thanks partly to their leader Mike Bird, a veteran of local politics. But the party investigated Bird for racism.
Despite saying he had been “cleared 100 per cent”, he stood down a month ago, complaining: “I haven’t left the Conservative party, the party has left me and I am disappointed because the cause of the problem is still there and all they have done is move the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
As in Nuneaton, neither local Conservative nor Labour politicians replied to contact requests. Walsall Tories are lucky that there’s an even deeper rift among their Labour opponents. Aftab Nawaz, who led the Labour group in the local council, left the party last November with five other councillors to sit as independents, in protest against Labour’s toleration of Israeli attacks on Gaza. In his shabby office in the once palatial council building, Nawaz explains: “We’re just a little council in a small town, but everyone has got to do something.”
He says local Asians were happier under Jeremy Corbyn’s far-left leadership of Labour. “In ethnic communities he was like a superstar, because he was speaking their language, for a more humane foreign policy.” Then, when war in Gaza broke out on Sir Keir Starmer’s watch, “we had emails from the party saying you shouldn’t be attending protests or Palestinian solidarity things, be careful with who you share a platform”. Meanwhile, at the mosque or family gatherings, “the only thing people were talking about was what was happening in Palestine. One big thing is when you go home and your children say, ‘This is going on and your party is supporting this’.”
Nawaz reflects, in his Black Country accent: “My deputy is a Kashmiri Muslim like me. Both of us were obviously born here, as English as you can get. I now feel both parties have an issue with Muslims. They sometimes just see us as one bloc. If I said to you, ‘I have one person who represents all the Christian community in the town’, you’d tell me to grow up.” And yet, he says, both the Conservatives and Labour are inclined to believe that there is a local Hindu, Muslim or Sikh community with a single voice.
Though Nawaz’s candidacy will split the former Labour vote, he does not believe the Conservatives will win the seat. He says Tory councillors have told him, “People are happy to vote for us locally, but they don’t want to vote for Rishi Sunak.”
Once the polls close, Walsall’s volunteer-run community station Ambur Radio will cover the election in English multiple Asian languages.
How will the election result go down among Ambur’s listeners? Preeti Kular, station manager, replies: “We’re still going to be in a cost of living crisis. What spare money are we going to have at the end of the month? I think those will be people’s main issues here.”
This article was written by Walsall and Simon Kuper from The Financial Times and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplace by Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.