On 12th December, voters in the Vale Of Glamorgan will decide between Labour or Tory, Corbyn or Johnson. It’s a battle that defines this election and which could decide the future direction of the country for years to come. Here, we report from Barry, the large town hit by austerity at the heart of the constituency.
As we finish our conversation on a biting cold afternoon in Barry, Lauren seems surprised that someone has asked her so many questions about politics. “I’ve never had anyone think I knew about this stuff,” she says, shaking her head in shock.
It’s a strange response, because for the short time that we’ve been chatting – keeping her 5 year old son waiting as he occupies himself with a packet of crisps – Lauren has spoken with authority about the issues affecting people in her hometown.
“People are just getting fed up of just not getting anywhere,” she tells me. “Just getting pushed from pillar to post. There’s services available but they just push you around, they don’t actually deal with the problems and that’s what I found.”
Five months ago, Lauren, now in her late twenties, became officially homeless as a single mother with a young child. She was eventually moved into temporary accommodation but remembers the nightmare of getting this sorted out.
“I spent the first three weeks in the hostel just walking up down, here, round, all around Barry and just getting told completely contradicting things,” she says in such a way as to indicate that she’s finally found someone who believes her.
Her family were convinced she wasn’t understanding what the authorities were telling her so they came down themselves to see what was going on. “They heard it from themselves,” she says. “ Then they saw then what it was like.”
For Lauren, housing is a major issue. She’s heard that there’s 1200 available properties but 5000 people needing homes.
“I know myself, when I was looking to go into a hostel there wasn’t even spaces,” she says. “I know people that are getting paid to live in hotels at the moment because there’s not hostel spaces, so yeah it is a massive, massive issue.”
On the streets, you can see the effects that 9 years of Tory austerity have had on the town.
“It’s just run down, run down shops and stuff like that,” says Debbie Stokes, a teaching assistant who lives in Barry.
When she moved here 16 years ago, the place was ‘thriving’ but things have gotten markedly worse in the last ten years.
“There’s just a lack of jobs, lack of morale as well really, as a community,” she tells me. On her work in a nearby school, she says: “I definitely sees(is this just her accent?) the effects of cuts. I mean yeah, people being made redundant.”
Can things go on like this, I ask? “No,” comes the definitive response. “It needs to change… Communities and councils need to do something about it. There’s lack of provision for children, there’s lack of provisions for teenagers.” If more youth centres are closed, it’ll be “brutal, horrendous,” she says.
Debbie should be an obvious Labour voter in this election, but claims she’s still undecided between Labour and Tory, saying both have good things about them. When pressed, she confesses she doesn’t think she could vote for Boris Johnson given his past comments about the children of single mothers being ‘ignorant.’ Debbie raised her kids by herself. “It’s offensive” she says, her face visibly cross when I read out the quote.
But Debbie’s initial indecision may be typical of voters here, who have elected a Tory MP in the Vale of Glamorgan for the last four elections and who don’t share the widespread political distrust of the Conservative party found across much of Wales.
This time, however, things might be different. On top of the effects austerity have had on the town, this election has also been defined by how the incumbent Tory candidate has been accused of dishonesty and sexism.
He previously denied any knowledge that his former aide and Welsh Assembly candidate, Ross England, had deliberately collapsed a rape trial resulting in his accused friend not being charged. It later emerged, however, that Cairns did know about England’s involvement in the case but had not disclosed this information. When confronted by ITV reporters on the doorstep, he declined several times to apologise to the victim for the hurt and ordeal she has been through. He was sacked from his ministerial role as the Welsh Secretary but was allowed by the Tory party to stand as a candidate in the election.
Some of the fiercest criticism he has faced has come from women in his constituency. Charlotte Archibald is a local campaigner and with two other people helped organise Barry’s first ever Pride March in the town this Autumn. When she heard about Cairn’s behaviour in the England case she describes it as “a massive insult to survivors of rape and to vicitms of violence, especially violence committed by men.”
“This is not a priority for [the Conservatives], they do not care about this,” she goes on to say.
“I mean fundamentally, the more frequently this is happening the less likely anybody who is raped or has violence committed against them, the less likely they are to report that. There’s more chance that they feel that they are in some way to blame for what’s happened to them. That cannot be allowed to happen. We need to support suriviors of rape and abuse, we need to believe them.”
The election is still in its early stages, and Charlotte has organised a protest outside Cairn’s constituency office. In attendance on this wet and windy morning is also former Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood, who says that she is here to ‘take a stand’ and that “it’s unacceptable for Alun Cairns to go forward in this election.” Plaid are not standing in the constituency in this election as part of their ‘Remain Alliance’ and Charlotte says she’s not supporting anyone in particular in the campaign, only describing herself as a passionate Remainer.
On the same morning however, just up the road, a huge crowd gathers for the launch of Belinda Loveluck-Edwards’s campaign. The Labour candidate is promising to run a bottom-up campaign that will unseat Cairns on December 12th.
A campaigner and trade unionist, Bel, as she’s more often known, would be a more left wing Welsh Labour MP than many of her counterparts if she were elected. She now stands a real chance of doing just that.
Activists have targeted the Vale of Glamorgan constituency in sizeable numbers. A WhatsApp group for people carpooling from Cardiff has almost 100 members in it who are organising every day how to get to the Vale and start knocking on doors. On weekends, it’s been common for over 100 people to show up. This scale of activity, comprising of people from all walks of life, has been ignored by mainstream press despite being a remarkable story in itself.
On top of the door-to-door campaigning, phone canvassers have been meeting almost every evening of the campaign, sometimes in groups of over 20 people, ringing landlines and urging voters to back Labour. All in all it amounts to a ground campaign the scale of which Welsh politics has rarely seen. What may seem strange, given this, is how little involvement the highest figures in Welsh Labour have had in this operation. Far from looking like they desperately want to win – and delivering a left, radically reforming government to Westminster – the top echelons of Welsh Labour have seemed fairly relaxed about the outcome on Thursday.
This is in contrast to the mood on the ground, where many activists take the election incredibly seriously, and see this as a once in a lifetime opportunity to fundamentally change society for the better. Speak to many of those involved from the start, and they’ll say it’s been a tough campaign with a genuine mixed bag of responses. A lot will cite hostility to Corbyn as a prominent reason for voters saying they won’t back Labour. Interpretations about where this ultimately comes from vary, and it’s unclear how many people who say it are potential Labour voters anyway, but it’s a real barrier canvassers have had to overcome in the last 6 weeks.
Hostility to Corbyn is not unique to Wales, and it is hardly surprising given the highly personalised and negative coverage the Labour leader receives. A recent study showed that 75% of media coverage misrepresented him.
As the campaign has gone on however, and more people have been exposed to what his fans would say is the real Corbyn, opinions of the Labour leader have improved. The picture is still mixed, but there’s a greater confidence from those canvassing that the Vale of Glamorgan is in play. Most think it will be extremely tight at the very least.
A huge feature has been the number of undecided voters put off by politics completely and it’s these who might be swayed by face to face conversations and eventually decide the seat. I meet two young women who encapsulate this mood as they head home from their shift at a high street discount store. They are 21 and 23 years old, and they both say they don’t know how or if they’ll vote. When pressed, they say they probably will vote and one, who doesn’t give her name, says she can’t see herself voting Tory. “He’s just as dopey as the seven dwarfs,” she says of Boris Johnson.
It’s now the final weekend before polling and Jeremy Corbyn himself is due in Barry Island Sports and Social Club at around 10.00am. Like many of the rallies of this campaign, it is a ticketed event which is mainly for Labour party members. Only a couple of hundred can get in and it sells out within hours on Friday afternoon.
Despite this, a large crowd has gathered outside to see the Labour leader. One of these is Amy and her young son Kingsley. Amy is not an activist or a Labour member. Instead she lives around the corner and upon bringing Kingsley and his friend back from football training, suddenly found that there was nowhere to park. “I tried to explain what was happening to them both in the car you know. I said Jeremy Corbyn’s coming to Barry and you know as of next week hopefully he’ll be our next Prime Minister.” They went home and Amy asked Kingsley if he wanted to go and see what was going on. He said yes.
On supporting the Labour leader, Amy says he’s better than Boris Johnson and that she was devastated when Britain voted to leave the EU so a Tory Brexit is a particularly worrying prospect. She also raises the issue of the NHS and lack of health facilities in Barry, something which resonates with almost everyone here.
“I know the papers say, and the polls say, it’s going to be conservative,” she says, “but that’s no guarantee because the polls said we’d be Remain and we went out.” The predictions also jar with her own experience.
“All my friends are going to be voting Labour,” she tells me. “I don’t know one friend who’ll be voting conservative.”
Amy, a bank worker with a young child in large coastal town typical of many, is not the kind of Corbyn supporter who often appears in the media. But her admission that she can’t think of anyone in her social network who is voting Tory should be of real concern to the party.
So too should the prospect of a high youth turnout that will likely benefit Labour. One of these is Jake Harvey. He’s wandered up from his home nearby. “I’ve never voted for Labour” he says, “I’ve only ever voted for Plaid Cymru but they’re not standing in this constituency in this election so this is the only option really.”
Jake, 24, is a supporter of Welsh Independence and says he came along today “just to see what was going on.” He won’t be holding his nose to vote for Corbyn, however.
“I like him,” he says with confidence. “I think he’s honest, I like his policies.” He says the media attacks are “nonsense” and that it’s “one of the biggest smears in my lifetime politically and all they can find is that he’s spoken to Sinn Fein a couple of times… I think he’s a good man. I think he’s much more relatable than the Tory side of things.”
Austerity is a big issue Jake tells me. “There’s seven foodbanks now. We’re the 5th richest country in the world. That shouldn’t be the case. When you’ve got 10 years of a Tory government they’re responsible for that. There has to be an alternative and they’re the only one.”
Apart from a couple of friends whose parents own businesses, Mark says everyone he knows is voting Labour. These are encouraging signs for the party.
In the hall, pictured – below, Jeremy Corbyn declares that “Bel will be part of a Labour government with the huge task of transforming this country.”
If Labour can win in the Vale, which looks possible, they stand a chance of being able to drive the Tories from office. Speak to most people here, and they’ll often say that Labour winning the election is impossible. But when it comes to this constituency, the same people will say that the Tories are set to lose. The two things are apparently contradictory, yet they sit alongside each other in people’s heads.
A day before polling, I ask Charlotte – the campaigner who staged a protest outside Alun Cairns’ office – if she’s decided who to vote for. “I’m voting Labour!” comes the WhatsApp reply, although she’s keen to stress that the campaign is non-partisan.
On the street with Lauren and her young boy, I ask if she’s thought about how she might vote. She nervously asks if I’m a Conservative before saying “definitely Labour.”
She describes Corbyn as “a lovely, down to earth person” and says that: “You can see that he doesn’t have the airs and graces of importance to think he’s better than anyone. I think he will listen to the people and actually see from our point of view rather than the CEOs of companies, which I think is really important.”
There’s a boarded up pub opposite us. Homeless people have begun sleeping inside, a passing school worker called Tracy tells me. “Lack of funding, benefits and everything being cut,” she says when I ask why there are now rough sleepers in Barry.
If Labour do win here, or manage to form a government, nobody is under any illusions about the tasks ahead in places like Barry.
