‘It’s not the old Labour we had’: Voters feel abandoned in red wall town eyed up by Nigel Farage

On a grey Tuesday morning, a handful of people are milling around the centre of St Helens.

It is market day but the town is quiet, with just a handful of locals making their way between the offerings of clothes, phone cases, flowers and fresh produce.

Among them is Janet Wylde, who has always called this corner of Merseyside home, but doesn’t mince her words when asked about how it has changed.

“It’s awful”, Janet tells The Independent in no uncertain terms.

She and her sister Sandra Hilton, 75, meet up in the town centre every week but they don’t claim to enjoy it.

“There’s no joy coming here – we look at the markets because there’s no shops”, she adds.

Now retired, the 79-year-old used to work in the head office of glass company Pilkington. Founded in 1826, it revolutionised production and, alongside coal mining and pharmaceuticals, powered St Helens’ growth as a thriving industrial town.

Pilkington is the only remaining large employer – itself now stripped back and a subsidiary of a Japanese firm.

Janet and Sandra believe the town centre, punctuated by empty units, takeaways and vape shops, is indicative of its struggles. It is a story seen in post-industrial towns across the North West.

As concise as her sister, Sandra describes the scenes around her as “horrendous”. They are in agreement that St Helens feels forgotten about, with Janet offering a reason why: “I think Liverpool gets the most money”, she says.

St Helens may be part of the Liverpool City Region, but this is not Liverpool. It is around 15 miles away from the city and you will not hear many Scouse accents here. Most prominently though, this is a rugby league town, with football very much secondary.

But what Liverpool and St Helens do share is a story of post-industrial decline.

While the port city’s docks endured a slump in the second half of the 20th century, coal and glass jobs left this part of Merseyside.

Whereas urban regeneration, culture and a thriving hospitality industry powered Liverpool’s recovery from the dark days of post-war deindustrialisation, there is a strong feeling here that they are still waiting for their turn.

Change is on the horizon, however. Much of the town centre is now a building site as work continues on wide-ranging upgrades – made up of a new market hall, a hotel, homes and shops – while a new £35m transport interchange is also being built nearby.

It might be the change that many in the town have been asking for, but it could have come too late.

Market trader Paul Donovan, 61, is not sold on the idea that a hotel will change its fortunes.

“It needs people”, he says. “And it needs more shops. Because all it’s got is a bakery, bookies and barbers.

“All the big boys have left, all the big shops have gone to the retail park. Each time the town has gone boom, onto the floor.”

St Helens will go to the polls next week to elect its borough council.

As an industrial town, its ties with the Labour party run deep. Other than a six year period of no overall control in the 2000s, it has always been run by Labour, which has 28 of its 48 councillors.

But there is growing feeling that this could be the first area in the red stronghold of Merseyside to fall for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

On a visit to nearby Southport in early April, Mr Farage told the BBC his party will give Labour a “run for their money” in elections on Merseyside, having last year enjoyed success in the wider region when it took control of Lancashire County Council.

“I don’t want to overly raise expectations, but what I will say is the map of local government will look very different after 7 May across the North West”, he said.

Speaking to the Daily Mail last week, Mr Farage mentioned the borough by name as he said that Reform could win in dissatisfied ‘red wall’ areas which did not even contemplate voting for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives when he swept parts of the north in 2019.

“Boris never got a sniff of winning Gateshead,” he said. “Or Barnsley, or Tameside or St Helens.

“This is going way beyond anything that remarkable Brexit election produced in 2019, and my view is that this switch is not a one-off… this is a fundamental shift away from the Labour Party.

The Labour mood on the ground in St Helens appears to be rather despondent – Reform poses a new threat, one which is not burdened with the baggage that the Conservative name carries here.

Latest figures from PollCheck suggest a huge swing to Reform would give it 25 councillors required to control the local authority, with Labour set to fall to nine.

A Merseyside Labour source tells The Independent that it is “inevitable” that Reform will control the council after next month’s elections.

“I think the best case scenario for Labour is that it’s the largest party but not a majority”, the insider adds.

“The worst-case scenario, which is much more likely, is that Reform win an outright majority.

“I think Reform will clean out the Labour party. I think they’ll clean out the Green party and take out most Labour councillors.”

There is no love lost for Labour among those who speak to The Independent in the centre of this town, which is the 29th-most-deprived local authority in the country.

The feeling is that the party they have always voted for no longer represents areas like this – a factor that Mr Farage will hope to take advantage of – and that nothing has changed while Labour has been in power.

Janet is just as withering about the Labour Party as she is about St Helens itself.

“We were always Labour”, she says. But asked if she will be voting for the party next month, she is clear.

“Definitely no – and don’t get me wound up on them. It’s not Labour. That’s a cover. It’s not the old Labour we had.”

Her sister Sandra asks: “What have they done? We’ve got family waiting for houses and they can’t get one.

“I’m sorry, but they put all the immigrants in the new houses and they’re still waiting.”

She is not the only person to raise concerns about immigration in this town, which at the last census saw 93.5 per cent of the local population say they were born in England.

It is high on the list of concerns for market trader Ray Watt, who travels to St Helens from Liverpool for work.

“The country can’t cope with it”, the 58 year old says. “The country can’t cope with that and Labour are just soft in my eyes.

Though Ray says he “probably wouldn’t vote for Reform”, he has a theory on why Labour has held power in towns like this for so long.

“I don’t even think some people think too much about it”, he says. “I think they’re on autopilot – well we’re working class so we’re Labour. We’re just Labour. Well, they’re f***ing useless.”

The Liverpool City Region’s Labour mayor Steve Rotheram believes that a Reform win in St Helens, a prospect he describes as a “big if”, would threaten the “trajectory” of regeneration projects his combined authority is working on in the town.

“That genuinely all has a question mark against it if you have somebody who doesn’t believe in the same things that Labour in St Helens does”, the mayor tells The Independent.

However, Mr Rotheram is concerned that noise in Westminster is distracting from his party’s local campaigning and a flurry of u-turns in government has meant its successes have not cut through.

“There’s definitely a feeling that the ‘own goals’, the number of U-turns that the party made, have reflected really badly on everything else,” he says.

The mayor adds: “I think the way in which we need to approach these elections is a hyper-local, a really granular level – knocking on every single door and explaining that it’s not currently an election for national issues. It’s who’s going to run your town hall.

“Once we break beyond the people who are not supporting the likes of Keir Starmer, when we get beyond that and explain the type of town hall that Labour are proposing, then we get a much fairer hearing.”

Labour face an uphill struggle to hold onto this town. Even if the mayor is right and the local elections will be fought on local issues, people in St Helens will need convincing that their loyalty to the party should remain.

Sitting on a bench in the town centre, Keith Twist, 68, is looking over the town centre and sums up the dilemma Labour faces.

“I vote Labour but I don’t think I’ll be doing so this time”, he says,

Asked why, Keith says: “Well, can you see what’s happening here?”