Our constituency poll has awful news for Britain’s Tories

For a place that is often described as left behind, Teesside receives a lot of attention from politicians. The Evening Gazette, a local paper, tallied over ten visits by Boris Johnson between 2019 and 2022, when he was prime minister. His successor-but-one, Rishi Sunak, has pointed at potholes in nearby Darlington and opened a branch of the Treasury there. On June 1st Mr Sunak launched the Tories’ “battle bus” in Redcar, east of the river Tees.

One reason a region containing just 1% of Britain’s people gets so much notice is what happened in Hartlepool, a former shipbuilding town fallen on hard times, in May 2021. After the Labour mp suddenly resigned, the Conservative Party managed to snatch the seat—a rare case of a governing party doing better in a by-election than it had in the previous general election. Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s leader, considered resigning. That turned out to be the high-water mark for Tory fortunes.

A survey of voting intentions in Hartlepool for The Economist by WeThink, a pollster, suggests how far the party has slumped. Our poll of 448 voters puts Labour on 58%, Reform uk on 23% and the Tories on a mere 10% (see chart). Labour seems to have taken voters both from the Brexit Party, Reform uk’s forerunner, and from the Conservatives. If such an extreme Tory collapse seems unlikely, consider that in local elections in May the party won a seat in only one of the 12 wards it contested in the town.

Hartlepool returned a Labour mp in every election between the creation of the constituency in 1974 and the by-election of 2021. But the party’s support started to slip in the early 2000s as the Conservatives began to do better. Sacha Bedding, who runs the Wharton Trust, a local charity, says there were several “staging posts” that helped people along the path from red to blue. In 2002 they elected as mayor Stuart Drummond, an independent candidate best known for wearing a monkey suit as the mascot of Hartlepool United Football Club. In 2015 the anti-immigration uk Independence Party came second in the seat; a year later 70% voted to leave the eu.

Tory politicians understood that the people of Hartlepool and similar places in the northern “red wall” of former Labour seats felt little loyalty to their party. To keep their votes, the Tories would have to show that they could improve their towns. The way to do this quickly was to scatter money on public-works projects under the banner of “levelling up”. Hartlepool has been given cash from the Levelling Up Fund, the Future Towns Fund and a Town Deal. Jill Mortimer, the Conservative MP who won the by-election in 2021, boasts about them often.

But progress has been slow. Behind a hoarding that reads “Funded by UK Government”, a Wesleyan chapel that is to become a hotel is still covered in plastic wrapping. Work was set back after arsonists attacked the building, not for the first time. A 1960s shopping centre is to be revamped but not soon; a film-production “village” is yet to appear. Projects all over the country are delayed. In March Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee estimated that more than four-fifths of the schemes that won levelling-up funds in the first round would miss their deadlines.

Labour’s candidate, Jonathan Brash, is so confident in the political failure of the government’s signature domestic policy that he is running against it. “The thesis of levelling up is wrong,” he says. While the government spends money on making buildings “look nicer than they once did”, public services quietly deteriorate. Hartlepool’s hospital lost its accident-and-emergency department in 2011; the magistrates’ court shut in 2017. The town’s police custody suite (a polite term for cells) is open only occasionally. Mr Brash reckons that local people notice such changes more.

He was selected two years ago, giving him many months to knock on doors. And he has name recognition, as the son of a local doctor. Ms Mortimer, by contrast, has been a spectral presence. When not boasting about levelling-up projects, she touts her opposition to immigration. That may be popular. Like other parts of Teesside, Hartlepool has a lot of asylum-seekers: it ranks 19th out of 361 local authorities for the share of refugees as a proportion of its population. But people who loathe immigration are likely to vote for Reform uk.

Even if Hartlepool swings back to Labour on July 4th, it will probably not return to being the sort of town where votes for the party can be counted upon. Its residents seem discontented and cynical, eager to vote against whoever is in power. “Every vote in Hartlepool is a protest vote,” says Sam Lee, an independent candidate who took 10% of the vote in the by-election in 2021 and is running again. At the moment, the Conservative Party is the target. Next time the voters will probably have Labour in their sights.■