UK Election

Labour’s Happy Valley - the Yorkshire swing constituency that always picks an election winner

It is the setting of the BBC crime series and has a history of UFO sightings, but Calder Valley also has another claim to fame: an uncanny ability to align with government changes

A farmer walking his sheep along a country road in the moors above Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Mark Paul's face
Mark Paul in Todmorden
Fri Jun 28 2024 - 16:00

On the third Tuesday of each month, the Todmorden UFO Society meets above the Golden Lion pub near the centre of this West Yorkshire town nestled beneath the Pennine slopes of the Calder Valley.

Todmorden, known to locals as Tod, is an attractive, sturdy, bustling little place with an industrial past as a textiles hub and also a penchant for free thinking. Among alien-hunters it is also revered as Britain’s answer to Roswell, the New Mexico UFO capital.

Tod’s UFO heritage originates in the case of Alan Godfrey, a police constable who in 1980 reported an object spinning above the road. He blacked out for 30 minutes and was left with burnt shoes. Under hypnosis, he later claimed he was examined by small beings – aliens with a foot fetish. Zigmund Adamski, a miner, was also found dead on a coal heap in Tod in 1980, allegedly left there by aliens.

Its UFO history was referenced in Happy Valley, the hit BBC police crime drama series filmed in the area. Little old Tod also boasts two Nobel Prize winners, including John Cockroft, who split the atomic nucleus. The area’s extensive literary connections include the Brontë sisters – Wuthering Heights was set on nearby moors – while poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath are buried close by.

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Tod has one other claim to fame – the Calder Valley constituency of which it is part has swung with every change in UK government for more than 50 years. Next week, with the ruling Tories on course for a catastrophic defeat, this area looks set to become Labour’s Happy Valley once again.

Labour member David Wild: "Folks here have a basic understanding of when ‘this lot’ have got to be kicked out.” Photograph: Mark Paul

“There’s a lot of self-reliance around here,” said David Wild, a Labour-linked lobbyist and communications adviser originally from Tod. “People have got a realistic feel for what government can achieve. That’s the basic characterisation of this place; why it swings and is a bellwether. Folks here have a basic understanding of when ‘this lot’ have got to be kicked out.”

The last time Calder Valley didn’t vote with the winning party was 1970 when, as the constituency of Sowerby as it was then, it stuck with Labour while the country voted for the Tories under Ted Heath.

Labour councillor Josh Fenton-Glynn is odds-on to take Calder Valley next week at the fourth time of asking; he missed out by just 600 votes in 2017. The latest YouGov poll for the constituency puts Labour on 46.5 per cent versus 26.5 per cent for the Tories, whose candidate Vanessa Lee is defending the seat previously held by Craig Whittaker, a former Tory whip.

The Tories are stronger in the eastern rump of Calder Valley, in the towns of Brighouse and Elland closer to Huddersfield. Labour predominates in the western bloc in Tod and Hebden Bridge, although even here, there is still ambivalence towards Keir Starmer’s party. Local Hebden man James Bragg told The Irish Times he would back the Greens because Labour had drifted too far to the right.

“I remember celebrating with [local Labour MP who held the seat from 1997 to 2010] with Christine McCafferty when she first got in,” said Bragg. “But I just can’t back Labour now.”

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Wild said the Calder Valley area with its textiles past was different from Yorkshire’s old mining areas, influencing its political mindset. If a miner lost his job, he had little else. But in textiles areas workers could move from one factory to another.

Employment choice encouraged “a more radical, liberal tradition”, said Wild. Also, women rarely worked in mining towns but in textiles towns they did, so valley women were more independent.

“They’d have never called it feminism. But that stereotype of the strong, independent Yorkshire or Lancashire woman who tells her man to sling his hook if he isn’t shaping up – that’d be from around here,” he says. The old border between Yorkshire and Lancashire was the river that flows underneath Tod’s neoclassical town hall.

Although defeat beckons, Lee is campaigning hard. Her placards are visible on approach roads to all the valley’s eastern towns. Last week, she also engaged with Labour-leaning Tod voters over its lack of GP surgeries. Wild said there were always Conservative clubs even in these Labour areas. His father was chair of a local Labour club but also joined the Conservative club “because it had a good snooker table”.

But the challenges facing Lee and the Tories are obvious. One local voter last week messaged the Tory candidate to complain she had leafleted her house. “How dare you! I hate your party and am deeply upset that you have used my name and address,” the woman wrote. “TAKE MY NAME OFF ANY RECORDS YOU HAVE OF ME IMMEDIATELY.”

Labour member Wild, relaxing this week over a pint in the Top Brink Inn on the hills overlooking Tod, predicted Britain would vote out the Tories because the country “wants a rest, it wants to recover”.

“Let’s just take it steady for a bit. I reckon Labour’s next election poster should just be a cup of hot chocolate and a slogan – ‘Nothing bad’s going to happen for a bit’.”

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UK election