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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Josh Halliday North of England editor

‘For 14 years it’s been despicable. Enough’s enough’: in the ‘red wall’, Tory support is crumbling

Dr Marie Tidball, with below shoulder-length blond hair and wearing a dress and cardigan pinned with a Labour rosette, stands looking serious on a path between lawns, on one of which Frank Huby, in a T-shirt and jeans, stands with his lawnmower, with houses behind them
Labour’s Marie Tidball spoke with Frank Huby, pictured, while canvassing in Silkstone, South Yorkshire, on Thursday. Photograph: Gary Calton/the Observer

It sounds odd to describe a well-to-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.

The village, centred around a 12th-century church four miles 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.

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