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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Mark Brown North of England correspondent

‘Nobody can fix the country’: voters in former Blair town sceptical of change

Four men sit around a table in a social club
Alan Webb (facing camera) and friends at the Phoenix club in Newton Aycliffe. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

“He kept on saying, ‘My dad was a toolmaker and we were on the breadline,’” says Alan Webb, a retired toolmaker, laughing. “I mean, come on. I was a toolmaker and I wasn’t on the breadline.” Webb, 75, is having fun at the expense of Keir Starmer, who told voters about growing up in a pebbledash semi, the family having its phone cut off and, surely a few too many times, that “my dad was a toolmaker and my mum was a nurse”.

“He kept on saying it as if he was poor,” Webb says. “I was a toolmaker and I actually earned some good money up here.”

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