Echoes of Trump across the pond: Blue-collar Labour voters feel abandoned by party elite

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WAKEFIELD, United Kingdom A former mining town adapting to life after coal. Blue-collar voters who feel taken for granted by privileged politicians. A #DrainTheSwamp hashtag cropping up on social media.

The location may be Wakefield, in Labour’s northern England heartland, but the issues Imran Ahmad Khan hears about on doorsteps as he campaigns to become the city’s first Conservative MP in almost 90 years will be familiar to voters in Pennsylvania’s coal country who supported President Trump in 2016.

Just as Democrats lost their traditional base by focusing on issues that did not help families struggling to find work, so, too, the dominant Labour Party has lost its connection in Wakefield, said Khan.

“The rank and file, the body of the political movements, have been taken for granted and have said they aren’t having it anymore,” he said during a break from knocking on doors and shaking hands. “In a not dissimilar way, through the lens of Brexit, the good people of Wakefield and Yorkshire and the northeast and the west Midlands realize they have been taken for granted.”

Brexit is shaping the political landscape in this cathedral city. Wakefield voted almost 2-to-1 in favor of leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum.

Yet the constituency is represented by an ardent Remainer. Mary Creagh, its Labour MP since 2005, has voted repeatedly in Parliament against bills that would have secured Brexit.

Jeremy Corbyn, her party leader, is committed to holding a second referendum rather than respecting the first.

As a result, her previous 2,100 vote-winning margin is vulnerable if enough Brexit-supporting Labour voters are prepared to set aside generations of loyalty born in mines, textile factories, union meetings, and working men’s clubs.

Iit makes the city and surrounding former pit towns something of a bellwether. If Prime Minister Boris Johnson can pick up the seat in the Dec. 12 election, then he is certain of a sizable majority.

To win, Khan needs voters such as Keith Paterson, a retired timber salesman.

“My dad were a miner,” he said in a broad Yorkshire accent as he supped alone on a pint of lager at the Alverthorpe Working Men’s Club. “I’ve always voted Labour …”

His voice tailed off as he considered the enormity of voting Conservative, a party he once hated for its hostile attitude toward unions and miners.

Paterson, 67, grew up in a house about 400 yards from Park Hill colliery, where his father worked from the age of 14. It closed down in the mid-’80s.

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Keith Pearson says he is ready to vote Conservative for the first time

Since then, new homes and new jobs have changed the economy. Alverthorpe, just outside Wakefield, has more of a dormitory feel now, he said. Young people commute each morning to Leeds to work in service industries.

But it is not economics that motivated his switch.

“I don’t like Corbyn. He’s not a man you can trust,” he said. “Like Mary Creagh. She’s remain. These politicians don’t seem to listen to the 60% or so here that voted to leave.”

Despite the sense that Wakefield’s Brexit divide and distrust of Corbyn’s leftward shift reflect the national dilemma, some very local difficulties remain for Khan.

He had not planned on campaigning in Wakefield, his childhood home. But a vacancy opened at the last minute when the selected candidate was accused of racism over old social media posts.

Khan’s rag-tag band of friends and relatives have built a campaign from scratch but know they faces a Labour machine honed over decades of dominance.

But that breeds arrogance, he noted. Constituents, he said, offered stories of patronizing encounters during the Brexit campaign.

“They were being told they were stupid. These are people who have voted Labour all their lives, the sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of miners, and were being lectured on Brexit by people brought up from London.”

Khan is no Trump, but he pointed out that he is also no career politician. Instead, he is a counterterrorism expert who jokes that his experience in Somalia and Afghanistan gives him what’s needed to build bridges between warring parties in the Brexit battle.

Darkness had descended by the time he hit the streets again with James Cleverly, Conservative Party chairman, one of the party big guns trying to get Khan over the finish line.

Together, they knocked on Duncan Spokes’s door in Osset, a middle-class neighborhood that went overwhelmingly for Brexit.

The 52-year-old procurement manager did not need any convincing, explaining how Labour’s lurch to the left and its London-centric view had turned him off from the party of his father and grandfather. For the first time in his life, he was ready to vote Conservative.

“A lot of traditional Labour voters feel disconnected,” he said. “Jeremy Corbyn in London sees things one way, while we see things differently up here. His brand of socialism doesn’t resonate.”

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