Barnsley town centre has undergone an eye-catching transformation.
Since 2021, the Labour council has delivered a new youth centre, skate park, pedestrian bridge and shopping quarter, moved community health services to the high street and opened a new digital business hub.
Barnsley has also been designated the UK’s first “Tech Town”, to pioneer the use of AI, by the national government.
Yet Labour councillors are worried that, in local elections on May 7, all this will count for little.
The party is facing the twin threat of Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK and fury on the doorstep towards Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
“They just feel it’s a perfect storm,” said Andrew Harrod, editor of the Barnsley Chronicle, the area’s local paper, although “even the most cynical would have to recognise that, locally, there’s been quite a lot of good stuff gone on.”
The South Yorkshire borough stretches from wealthier market towns to the west, in the Pennine mountain range, to deprived former mining villages in the east.
In 2024, the most notorious episode in England’s anti-immigration riots occurred just over Barnsley’s eastern border: a mob tried to burn down a hotel in Manvers, Rotherham, with asylum seekers inside.
Barnsley voted 68 per cent for Brexit in 2016, but the council has been run by Labour since 1974, when the current local government map was drawn up. Leader Sir Steve Houghton this year marks his 30th year in charge.
By contrast, Reform has never had a councillor elected in the borough.
On May 7, due to boundary changes, all 63 of the council’s seats come up at once and Farage has made the seat a top target, fielding a full slate of candidates, most of whom have no local government experience.
In an indication of Reform’s confidence, Farage chose Barnsley as the location for what he called his “most important speech” of the local election campaign.
In Labour areas such as Barnsley and Sunderland, in the north-east, Labour was “literally crumbling in what it’s taken to be its heartlands in many cases since the end of World War One,” he said.
Reform’s promises to voters include freezing council tax, ending council “waste” and to “stop illegal migration”, similar pledges to last year.
“Barnsley is broken,” states the party’s campaign literature. “Reform will fix it.”
Hannah Kitching, the leader of Barnsley council’s 12-strong Liberal Democrat opposition, said Reform had “massively upped their game in the last 18 months”, especially compared with its “amateur operation” at a by-election in late 2024.
“This time is much more professional,” she added, pointing to both its leaflets and social media strategy.
One Barnsley voter, speaking shortly after Farage’s speech on Wednesday, encapsulated the party’s appeal.
“I think they’re straight talking,” said Lee Johnston. “I hope that I can believe that what they say they will do, whereas we’ve been let down in the past by other parties who’ve said a lot of things and basically done nothing.”
Electoral expert Greg Cook, former head of political strategy for the Labour Party, said past performance suggested that Reform was likely to take control of Barnsley in May.
Barnsley is an “archetypal” Reform target, he said. “Pretty much no professional commuters, it’s well off the major rail networks and not much ethnic diversity,” he added.
“They don’t need to knock on a lot of doors in Barnsley — they just need a lot of people on candidate papers.”
Nonetheless, voting levels can be so low that outcomes are hard to predict. Turnout in Dearne North, one of Reform’s target wards and part of a sprawling former mining community, was just 16.9 per cent at the last local election in 2024.
Many Barnsley voters this week dismissed the local elections out of hand. A man walking his dog in the pit village of Goldthorpe called voting a “waste of time”, including Reform, adding that all parties “promise everything”.
In the wealthier market town of Penistone, former local government officer Amanda Barnsley pointed to a Reform leaflet promising to cut crime.
“Half of what they’re offering isn’t in their gift,” she said. “Unfortunately, a lot of people won’t realise that.”
She argued that, if Barnsley started “flip-flopping” between different parties, regeneration would be much harder to do. “A lot of these things take time to deliver by the time you do the legwork.”
Labour faces multiple struggles. Colin, a small-business owner in one of Barnsley’s former pit villages, said that while he was inclined to vote Labour based on their work locally, he recognised that “people want change”.
The scrapping of the winter fuel allowance was “the worst thing Labour did”, he said, despite later making a U-turn. “People will remember that,” he said. “They’ll vote for anything just to prove a point.”
That support might not necessarily go to Reform, Colin added. Some people were becoming keen on Rupert Lowe, the former Reform MP who quit to set up Restore Britain.
In many streets around the Dearne, a sprawling former mining area to the east of Barnsley, lamp posts and gardens are lined with Union Jacks and St George’s crosses — symbols of a campaign last summer backed by Reform.
One young man, with two flags outside his house, said Lowe had his support, adding that Farage was “too busy trying to please everyone”.
The man, who declined to give his name, said he was on licence from prison for “saying something” at the Rotherham riots in the summer of 2024, two miles down the road.
One senior Labour figure said they could not predict how the local election would play out, but argued that after 30 years under the same leader there was a “deeper connection” with the electorate than in neighbouring Doncaster, where Reform last year overturned the party’s majority.
Barnsley represents a test for a Reform, too.
“If you were to identify the councils they have to win — on the back of last year’s performance — Barnsley would be in the top two,” said electoral expert Cook.
“Not winning outright control in Barnsley would be [a] disaster for them.”
Video reporting by Josh de la Mare
Source:
www.ft.com