A cigarette paper seat: how Crewe could hold key to election success

‘Workington man’ was named the symbol of a must-win constituency at the election, but there are many key battlegrounds. The Independent visits the Cheshire seat where just 48 votes decided the outcome in 2017 – and it could be just as tight again…

The city was once one of the planet’s biggest railways hubs (Getty)

A cigarette paper constituency is how taxi driver Brett Scott describes Crewe and Nantwich. As in: that’s all there is in it.

“Not that it interests me, pal,” the 53-year-old says. “They’re all the same, aren’t they? Tell you one thing, do another. I’ll never vote again after what’s gone on with Brexit.”

Ten minutes later, he is dropping me off at an ice cream van factory in Crewe which chancellor Sajid Javid is visiting. “Tell him to take some money off a pint,” Scott declares as we pull up. “Then I might vote.”

This seat is one of the tightest marginals and most crucial electoral battlegrounds anywhere in the UK.

Just 48 votes separated first from second place in 2017. It was so close between Tory incumbent Edward Timpson and Labour challenger Laura Smith that two recounts were ordered. Smith was only announced as the winner as 7am approached. People were already starting work by the time the former teacher left the Crewe Lifestyle Centre blinking into the morning with her new job.

“I’m dreading another night like that,” she tells me later. This time round, the mother-of-two adds, she needs some sleep because it’s her daughter’s nativity the next day: “No way I’m missing it, she’s a sheep.”

School plays notwithstanding, it is precisely because this seat is so tight that heavyweights like Javid – who declines to speak to media today – are being bussed into the patch.

Priti Patel and Matt Hancock have also come here for the Tories; Ian Lavery for Labour. Jeremy Corbyn himself arrived within days of the election being called.

“There’s never been a Labour government,” he told local activists at the marvellous Crosville Club, “without a Labour MP in Crewe and Nantwich”.

So, no pressure, then.

A five-minute walk from the Crosville, in the centre of shopping square in this Cheshire town of 71,000 people, there stands a pair of large gleaming train wheels on a brick plinth.

It is a piece of street art that celebrates the area’s industrial heritage. This was once one of the planet’s biggest railways hubs. Twenty thousand people were employed at Crew Works, a vast and sprawling site which, at its height, knocked out a newly-built locomotive every single week.

Now, that site employs less than 1,000 people; and this celebratory art is surrounded on all four sides by shuttered-up shops. The only outlets still open that look onto it are a tired WH Smiths and a Cash Converters.

“Says it all, doesn’t it?” shrugs Craig Hancock, 35, an assistant at the latter. “There’s nothing in Crewe anymore. It’s a nowhere town. I love the place but they’re letting it die.”

A quarter of all shops here are boarded up. Dozens were compulsory purchased several years ago ahead of a planned £48m regeneration – Cinema! Gym! Pizza Express! – that has been delayed so often few appear to believe it will ever happen. Promises that a HS2 hub station will also be built here – creating some 37,000 new jobs – are met with similar scepticism.

Shop assistant Craig Hancock and Nikki Williams (The Independent)

Nor is the high street the only sign of struggle.

Education cuts have been so savage that one school made headlines this summer when it asked parents to donate £30 to help cover expenses. Many parents are said to have responded by pointing out they had their own expenses to cover. Smith talks of getting into politics when, as a teacher, she saw a hungry pupil rescuing an apple core from a bin.

The local health service is in similar straits. Unions have said Leighton Hospital’s A&E is at “breaking point”, with figures showing 5 per cent of those attending for treatment in September were made to wait so long that they ended up walking out instead. That’s more than double the corresponding national figure.

Nantwich – the leafier and richer of the two towns; a place dotted with Tudor buildings and independent boutiques – may fare better but poverty still exists here: more than a quarter of all workers across the constituency are paid less than a real living wage.

All of which, received wisdom might suggest, makes this place ripe for an anti-government vote and a repeat Labour victory here.

Except, perhaps, for three factors – all regularly raised on the streets today.

Queensway, in Crewe town centre (The Independent)

The first is (but of course) Brexit. This constituency voted around 60 per cent in favour of leaving the EU, and many people appear to believe the Tories are better placed to deliver that.

The second is Jeremy Corbyn: “IRA sympathiser” is a term used more than once in a town with a large ex-serviceman population.

And the third? There appears to be an overwhelming scepticism about the ability of Labour to deliver on the sheer number of promises made during this campaign.

“Free broadband, four-day week, reduced train travel, the waspi women?” reels off Mick Cooper, as we talk close to those train wheels. “Who’s paying for it all? Who’s paying for these two billion trees he wants planting? They’re offering every man and his dog a free ride but there ain’t no such thing. It all needs to be paid for.”

He doesn’t believe it’s possible to fulfil those pledges? “Not without crippling the country,” the 60-year-old retired factory worker and long-time Labour voter replies. “Two or three weeks ago I liked what they were saying. Now? Too many promises to believe any of them.”

He will be voting Tory, if he votes at all.

It is a theme much repeated today. Offering free broadband particularly appears to be backfiring.

“If that money exists, give it to the NHS,” says Ben Grainger, an 18-year-old serving on a vaping stand in the town’s Market Shopping Centre. “I don’t need the government to pay so I can watch Netflix.”

Labour candidate Laura Smith (Reuters) (REUTERS)

It is perhaps for these reasons that polls are currently suggesting a narrow Tory victory here.

“Same as last time,” smiles Laura Smith. “The polls had us further back then and look what happened.”

We are sat in her Nissan Juke outside her town centre office. We’re not inside ostensibly because it’s too busy with volunteers although it may also have something to do with the fact that earlier, before I’d been introduced, one staffer called across the room about a BBC journalist who had emailed some request or other.

“Ignore him,” another aid called out. “Tory fucker.”

So: that’s the vibe.

Smith herself is unapologetically of the left. She is part of a group calling for the abolition of private schools and confiscation of their property, and at a Momentum event last year she demanded the country’s first general strike since 1926. She can be wonderfully honest about Westminster: a lot of MPs, she says, are in it for themselves.

Of those three key issues that keep coming up on the street, she supports a second Brexit referendum, says Labour’s policies are fully costed and gets on well with Jeremy Corbyn.

Why don’t people in Crewe seem to like him I ask.

Nothing, it turns out, to do with enabling antisemitism, liaising with terrorists or being entirely ambiguous about Britain leaving the EU. It’s all to do with the pesky media.

“I think it is three years of feeding that narrative,” says Smith, who was born and raised in Nantwich. “I think Jeremy is suggesting a change in the way things are going to be run – that redistribution of wealth and power – and of course, there’s a lot of people that don’t want to see that happen.”

The problem is, I suggest, right now, that appears to include a lot of people in Crewe and Nantwich. Would a different leader have helped?

“I’m really not interested in the personality thing,” the 34-year-old bats back. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve got a quarter of people living in work poverty, I’ve got people who are waiting 24 hours to be seen in A&E, every single school has had huge cuts so my priority is solely getting a different government.”

Conservative Kieran Mullan on the campaign trail with Sajid Javid (Kieran Mullan)

These are issues – along with Crewe’s boarded up shops – which also concern Kieran Mullan. He’s an A&E doctor and the Conservative candidate.

“These are challenges we’re struggling with all over the country and we are frustrated that there hasn’t been the progress that we want to see,” says the 35-year-old, who is originally from Birmingham but now lives in Crewe. “But ultimately any improvement is going to be driven by a growing economy.”

Quite why there has not been progress on these issues – see also: increased food banks, homelessness and library closures – during nine years of Conservative rule isn’t made entirely clear.

On Brexit, he’s a long-term Leaver, campaigned for exiting the EU during the 2016 referendum and says Boris Johnson’s so-called oven-ready deal is gaining traction on the doorstep. “As a country, I think we can stand on our own two feet,” he says. “We’re more than capable of making our own decisions on issues whether it be immigration, environmental policy or trading standards.”

For those who adamantly want to remain, on the other hand, there is Lib Dem Matthew Theobald.

The 51-year-old parish councillor and director of his own medical device business tells me he is providing the seat’s “only voice for those who believe in being at the heart of Europe and all the benefits that brings”.

But possibly he’s ploughing a difficult furrow. The yellows got just 2.4 per cent of the vote in 2017 – less than a dying Ukip. It’s a lot of ground to make up.

Either way, before I leave the constituency, I happen to pass once again those railway wheels on their brick plinth in Crewe town centre.

Most towns have something like this, of course, but it’s lovely all the same: a reminder of this area’s mighty past; a symbol that this cigarette paper seat can have a future just as great.