In a series of reports from the frontline, Uncut looks at what’s happening on the ground. Kevin Meagher visited Weaver Vale, a seat Labour needs to win to form a government

Tidy stone walls and trimmed high hedges in glorious summer colours frame the journey on the road in to Weaver Vale. Interspersed are rows of pretty terraces with brightly-painted doors and big, detached properties with spacious gardens. Every now and then there are hand-written signs hung over gates or staked in the ground advertising ‘New Cheshire Potatoes’ from local farms.

Then the lettering above an old road sign brings it home: ‘Vale Royal Borough’. The previous name for this part of Cheshire, before the old county and district councils were scrapped to create two new unitaries a decade ago.

Cheshire is not ‘the North’ as many would recognise it. A collection of attractive and often very prosperous market towns and villages set in lush farmland and countryside. It is a beautiful part of the country and far more affluent than Greater Manchester to its north and Merseyside to its west, serving as a hinterland for the well-heeled who work in either.

But the county also has odd bits of heavy industry like the giant Ineos chemicals site that seems to take an eternity to pass driving along the M56. And there are still reliable urban redoubts for Labour. Towns like Warrington and Runcorn and Widnes remain safe bets.

Weaver Vale is an amalgam of these two Cheshires, incorporating the smart market towns of Frodsham and Northwich as well as the eastern part of Runcorn. Labour has always had a decent base in Cheshire and held this seat easily enough between 1997 and 2010. Even in 2015, the Conservative majority here was only 806.

I’m here to meet Labour’s candidate, Mike Amesbury, a recent veteran of Andy Burnham’s successful mayoral campaign and a former adviser to Shadow Education Secretary, Angela Rayner.

Along with some committed local activists, he is spearheading a genuine grassroots effort to retake the seat and his Facebook feed shows large clusters of activists out with him every day. Without the same number of volunteers, the Tories are spending money on newspaper wraparounds. Although Labour will be outspent in seats like this, Amesbury is clear he will not be outworked.

The key issue here is turnout. Labour has the votes, with Mike Hall holding the seat for Labour until 2010. As I drive around the seat, I can see Labour posters dotted around but there is little sense that Conservative incumbent, Graham Evans, has much resonance locally. It feels like Weaver Vale it is there for the taking.

The doorstep issues are a mixture of the familiar national themes and the hyper-local. The smart Helsby High School that I see on the drive in has just been hit with a £700,000 funding cut. The nearby Countess of Chester Hospital is facing a downgrading of its services and voters repeatedly tell Amesbury it’s a ‘nightmare’ trying to get an appointment with a GP.

The prospect of fracking companies gaining licenses to drill is also a genuine concern here. One of the biggest bones of contention, though, remains the bridge toll for crossing the River Mersey. Despite Tory promises to scrap the charge, they have never got around to it.

On the campaign trail, Amesbury is getting a positive response. He came across a young first time voter who had set up a Facebook group with her friends to discuss the election. Seventy of them had joined it. She was enthused by Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s offer on restoring the educational maintenance allowance and abolishing university tuition fees.

At least with the young, the message is getting through. ‘Young people have been the target of cuts for longer,’ Amesbury points out. ‘They should now be the target for investment.’ This emphasis on galvanising young people was a successful theme from Burnham’s Greater Manchester campaign. Amesbury hopes it will play well here too.

Beneath the headlines of the national opinion polls, it is clear this election is about micro-trends. In 2015, UKIP took 9.7 per cent of the vote here – some 4,500 votes. With no candidate standing this time, will their votes transfer straight to the Tories?

On the way out of our interview, a young woman approaches Amesbury who is sporting a Labour rosette. Lauren is planning to vote Labour and is delighted to meeting the candidate. She works in a clerical role in the NHS and is concerned about budget cuts and tells of her struggles in trying to get a deposit together to buy a house. Again, she is enthusiastic about Labour – genuinely so.

Whatever the result here, its clear Labour still has skin in the game in seats like Weaver Vale and there is certainly something to build on in the medium term. For now, though, Mike Amesbury is working flat out to change its destiny in the short term.

‘Idealism’s never a bad thing is it?’ he says.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Uncut

Tags: Campaign frontline, Cheshire, General election 2017, Kevin Meagher, Mike Amesbury, Weaver Vale

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