'Enough is enough' In red wall, Tory support is crumbling

It sounds odd to describe a wellto-do village with neat privet hedges, freshly mown lawns and three cars on each driveway as a no-go area. Yet for almost three decades, the pretty parish of Silkstone, on the edge of the Pennines, was unwelcoming territory for Labour folk.

- Josh Halliday

The village, centred around a 12th-century church 6km outside Barnsley, was a bastion of Conservative blue surrounded by Labour red.

But last May, Silkstone elected its first Labour councillor in a generation.

A second followed a year later.

The electoral tremors from this little blue enclave may not have been felt in Westminster. But they help explain why Keir Starmer looks set to win a historic parliamentary majority on 4 July. Not only is Labour winning back supporters in the "red wall", but it is also breaking ground in areas it has not held for decades.

"When I said there were no no-go areas, this is what I meant," said Dr Marie Tidball, Labour's candidate for Penistone and Stocksbridge in South Yorkshire, marching around what she describes as "the safest Tory ward" in the region until recently.

The breakthrough in Silkstone came not just from Starmer moving his party to the centre ground of British politics. It was also, said Tidball, on the back of a ground campaign that started more than two years ago, when she was selected: "I've been out in the wind, rain, sun, snow. We very much haven't just been out when it's election time, and people appreciate that."

In 2019, this collection of former mining villages and market towns turned its back on Labour over Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn. Voters elected Miriam Cates as the first Conservative MP in South Yorkshire since 1992.

But the enthusiasm that helped Boris Johnson to his 80-strong majority has gone into reverse, with the Tories apparently retreating from serious campaigning in many of the "red wall" seats it captured in 2019.