CAMPAIGN TRAIL:Anger over job losses in the north of England may be shifting old voting allegiances in favour of the Liberal Democrats
THE REDCAR and District Working Men’s Club has been a part of life for generations of steelworkers. But now, like the surrounding High Street with its charity shops and boarded-up businesses, both the club and its patrons have seen better days.
“Redcar is a very faint shadow of its former self,” sighed Denis Green, who, like many other men in this Teesside town, gives his occupation as former steelworker.
“Two-thirds of people here are out of work and a good half of them have no chance of getting a job unless they up sticks and leave.”
In recent decades, Redcar, where locals once revelled in the nickname “Smoggies” and every schoolchild knew that Sydney Harbour Bridge and New York’s World Trade Center were built with Teesside iron and steel, has found itself pummelled by global economic forces beyond its control. As heavy industry moved elsewhere, the number of manufacturing jobs in Teesside shrivelled by some 100,000.
The blast furnace at steel slab maker Corus TCP, which dominates the skyline at one end of Redcar’s seafront, was mothballed in February. Since then, 1,000 workers have been made redundant and as many contractor jobs have gone. The plant’s future remains uncertain – closure would cost 4,000 jobs.
“We were badly let down by the government,” said Green, a lifelong Labour supporter who now plans to vote Lib Dem.
“There’s an enormous sense of betrayal.”
Standing behind the counter at his Frying Times chip shop on the other side of town, Gary Calvert said the trickle-down effect has been devastating. “Around 80 per cent of people in this estate worked at Corus,” he said. “It has taken the heart out of the community. There’s a lot of anger out there. People think the government could have done much more to bail them out – they did it for the banks after all.”
Redcar is considered a Labour heartland – its MPs have included former Northern Ireland secretary Mo Mowlam – but there are signs that may change.
The neon orange campaign poster for Ian Swales, the constituency’s Lib Dem candidate, can be seen in the windows of countless private homes.
“Allegiances are shifting and I think that is a result of the area being in decline even before the Corus situation,” said Swales, in between canvassing shoppers.
He tells the story of a woman who found herself competing with 488 applicants for a cleaning job at a local supermarket. “There’s a feeling that we’ve been taken for granted and neglected.”
Labour’s Vera Baird won Redcar by 12,116 votes in 2005. She talks of Teesside’s potential reinvention as the centre of a “second, green, industrial revolution”. The dream is of new industries using the infrastructure of old with many of the skills from the steel industry transferred with retraining. How successful Labour has been in articulating that vision to disaffected Teessiders is another matter.
The Lib Dems, whose share of the Redcar vote rose from 12.6 per cent in 2001 to 20.2 per cent in 2005, have scented blood.
Vince Cable, the party’s deputy leader and shadow chancellor, visited Redcar earlier this month to meet laid-off Corus workers.
“Steelmaking can come back on Teesside but we have to have someone willing to support the industry, invest in it and believe in it,” he told them.
“For the first time in a long time, Labour has realised it should not be complacent,” said Dave Cocks, who, as Corus’s technical manager, oversaw the shuttering of its mighty blast furnace.
If Redcar’s fealty to Labour wobbles, no one believes it will be to the benefit of the Tories. Locals rolled their eyes when they noticed that “Teesside” had been misspelled in the local Conservative candidate’s campaign literature.
David Cameron only served to deepen the region’s longstanding wariness of Tory intentions when he heralded how far a Conservative government would go to cut public spending and declared that “the size of the state” in the northeast had become too big.
The Tories have also been battling Labour claims that a £60 million (€69 million) recovery package for Teesside, set up to help the area recover from the mothballing of Corus, could be threatened if they win next week’s election.
Back at the Working Men’s Club, one septuagenarian former steelworker recalls with some bitterness Redcar’s past glories.
“In those days you voted Labour because you were a working man,” he said. “But all has changed now.”