In the shadow of Bolton’s ornate Victorian town hall voters in Thursday’s local elections seemed broadly unenthusiastic about their electoral options.
The Conservative-run town has declined in recent times, said IT worker Michael Gill, despite benefiting more recently from central government regeneration cash.
“It feels like the town has gone downhill a bit,” said the 53-year-old of the seven years since he moved to Bolton, part of Greater Manchester in North West England.
“A lot of the shops that I used to use have been shut down. That has an effect on people’s psychology. It’s hard not to feel depressed about how things have changed.”
He would be voting Labour again, he said, but did not class himself as a huge “fan” of the party. Labour nationally “don’t seem tough enough right now”, he added. “They seem to be all over the place.”
On May 4, local elections across England will be used as a proxy by observers trying to gauge the next general election outcome.
In Bolton, two of the area’s three parliamentary seats are held by the Tories, one of them by just 378 votes. This week the Conservative party will be hoping, despite the difficulties it is suffering in national polls, to remain the largest group on the area’s council.
Labour, meanwhile, will be hoping to gain in the so-called Red Wall of such northern seats, which have drifted away from it in recent times.
As well as traditional council concerns such as bins and potholes, voters are weighing up who is to blame for the localised impact of national economic problems, be it the rising cost of living or the collapse of the high street.
Like Gill, teaching assistant Sarah Whiteley was also concerned about the general state of the town, and similarly unenthusiastic about her options, but had decided to give the Tories “another chance”.
“It’s true that Bolton has seen better days, but I have no confidence that Labour are the best people to make things better,” she said. “They promise the earth then borrow, borrow and spend, spend. I’m fed up with all politicians to be honest, but I think I’ll give the Conservatives another go.”
It is against this apathetic backdrop that local activists are slugging it out. Nevertheless, Conservative council leader Martyn Cox said he was allowing himself some optimism.
“For the first time since last May I’ve felt we have got a chance of winning the general election,” he said, pointing to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as an improvement on his immediate predecessors.
“What is really noticeable is there are very few previous Conservative voters who are saying they are going to vote Labour. They’re not switching.”
They are “a bit annoyed”, Cox added, and as a result are voting independent or “staying at home”, but “they’re not switching to Labour”.
“For the past few months I’ve been writing us off nationally, but I do think there’s a chance now.”
A second Conservative official agreed. “There’s not no one who says they’ll swing, but not very much,” he said, adding that often people were taking the view that “nobody could do any better”.
Nevertheless, he conceded, it was possible that in other areas the Tories were going to get more of a midterm “kicking” than in Bolton, as the town’s voters had been particularly disenchanted with the local Labour party for some years.
Labour officials and politicians admit privately that their own party has taken votes for granted in the area, culminating in a financial scandal that led to it losing overall control of the council in 2019.
Currently 25 of Bolton’s 60 councillors are Conservative, 19 from Labour with the remaining number a mixture of Lib Dems and independents.
That switch also took place against the backdrop of broader changing voting trends in the wake of the Brexit referendum. While Leave-leaning Bolton kicked out Labour, the reverse result had happened in nearby Remain-voting Trafford a year earlier, when the Conservatives lost control.
While Brexit is no longer at the forefront of the electorate’s minds, said Cox, his party still needed to retain the one-time Labour supporters it picked up with the referendum. “Brexit has given us a base and we’ve got to look after it,” he said.
One regional Labour official said that this year Trafford was again “going well” but “we’re not as optimistic about Bolton”.
Bolton has also seen a second political trend in the wake of the EU vote. A surge in hyperlocal independent parties has thrown the town’s traditional politics off-balance, resulting in a messy mix of small groups on the council.
That has often been at the expense of Labour, said the party’s candidate in Horwich South and Blackrod, George Butler.
“We have a lot of independent parties who will probably continue to prop up the Tories,” he said. “There’s only really Labour/independent fights, there’s not really any Tory/independent fights.”
However, Labour were feeling more positive in Bolton than they had done for the past “five or six years”, he added. Campaigners from both parties said that the visceral dislike of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had gone. Cox said it had been replaced by “indifference” to his replacement, Sir Keir Starmer.
“I haven’t had him come up on the doorstep one way or another,” said Butler of Starmer.
Roger Hayes, leader of the town hall’s Liberal Democrat group, said backlogs within the NHS were an issue on the doorstep. Scepticism about the amount of money being asked for by striking junior doctors “might turn things the other way”, he said. “But there’s a lot of sympathy for the nurses,” he added.
His party was likely to do “extremely well” in the south and west of England this week, he said, but “less well” in the Midlands and the North.
“I still think we’ll improve on the performance from previous years. I don’t think Labour have lost the toxicity they’ve had in Bolton. And the Tories have got more toxic.”