After losing in the north and Midlands to the Tories in 2019, the party has to prove its mettle in local elections on 6 May
The Calderdale council ward of Illingworth and Mixenden is perched high on the hilly outskirts of Halifax, from where residents can look down on the town and west across some magnificent Pennines scenery. “You could say it is a classic Red Wall ward,” says councillor Adam Wilkinson, who is co-ordinating the Labour party’s local election campaigning in the area. “It’s predominantly white working class, and in the 2019 general election, there was a significant swing to the Tories. You only reconnect by being visible and out there, so we are getting to as many doors here as we can.”
Along with Stuart Cairney, the local Labour candidate, Wilkinson is doing a morning’s canvassing on a cold, windy Good Friday. A list of addresses has identified potential Labour sympathisers, and Wilkinson’s first door-knock yields two certain votes for Cairney. “A good start,” he says. A little further on though, they run into some turbulence. “You’ll not be getting my vote while that Holly Lynch is our MP,” says Andrew Platt bluntly. Lynch has been the Halifax MP since 2015. A majority of the town voted Leave but she supported Remain and then backed a second referendum in the parliamentary deadlock that followed. In 2019, Platt, traditionally a Labour supporter, voted for Boris Johnson. “I voted Tory last time and will do this time,” he says. “Holly Lynch was entitled to her opinion but what about her constituents? They voted to leave and she ignored them. There’s a lot of people around here who feel the same. As for Starmer, I don’t trust him.”
