It is a source of great irritation to many in the Labour party that the political map of Greater Manchester is a sea of red polluted by one pesky blue patch in the south.
Trafford – the wealthiest of the 10 boroughs, home to more footballers and Coronation Street stars than all the other nine put together – has been controlled by the Conservatives since 2004 and Jeremy Corbyn is determined to win it back.
Last month he chose a leisure centre in Stretford Sports village, across the road from Old Trafford cricket ground, to kick off Labour’s local election campaign. And last year it was in EventCity, a soulless conference hall by the Trafford Centre shopping centre, that he launched the party’s general election campaign, flanked by Labour’s newly elected Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham.
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It was Burnham’s soaraway success in the inaugural mayoral elections that gave Labour hope that it could wrench Trafford back from the Tories. As the only candidate with any name recognition on the ballot, everyone knew he’d win overall – just not in Trafford, where the council leader, Sean Anstee, was standing.
Anstee’s bloodless face at the count told a different story. “Oh my god, Andy’s won Hale Central,” shrieked one Labour activist, referring to one of Trafford’s millionaire enclaves, which boasts a high street with four cosmetic surgery clinics and some of the best grammar schools in the country.
Kate Green is the Labour MP for Stretford and Urmston, which could be described as the “other” Trafford. It includes the poorer bit in the north, which begins in the terraces around Manchester United’s football ground, and takes in Flixton and Urmston, where residents are always complaining about traffic jams caused by the nearby Trafford Centre and the M60 ring road. Life expectancy in some streets is a decade less than in the leafy south of the borough.
Green senses Tory blood. “I’m absolutely confident that the Tories are on the back foot in this borough,” she says. “I’ve been knocking on doors week in, week out, ever since the general election last year and they are definitely on the run.” In her constituency, which has been Labour since its inception, sure. But in the posh bits?
Absolutely, she says: “There are some very wealthy parts of Trafford but let’s not forget Andy Burnham’s spectacular result in the mayoral election last year. He won many of those very wealthy wards hands down, ahead of the local candidate, Sean Anstee. So I think we can be confident that the Labour vote is broad as well as deep.”
Andrew Western, leader of the Labour group on Trafford council, is less bullish. “Yes, Andy Burnham won Hale Central, but that was a freak,” he says. He can’t predict the result: “Normally I’d say to you with some confidence, ‘this is what’s going to happen’. But the world’s gone mad. I don’t know what constitutes normal any more.”
The Labour party is concentrating its efforts on winning three key wards from the Tories, which would be enough to slide the council into no overall control. For the first time in history it thinks it’s got a decent shot at Davyhulme East, near to Trafford General, the hospital where Aneurin Bevan launched the NHS in 1948.
Local candidate Jayne Dillon is capitalising on changes at the hospital in her campaign. A former midwife who gave up work to look after her three children, two of whom have autism, she sympathises with residents unhappy that there is no longer a full A&E clinic. “My mum had to be blue-lighted in an ambulance across to Salford,” she tells voters. That’s just a five-mile journey, but factor in the shopping traffic and the perennially clogged motorway and it can take an hour.
Dillon has tapped into other local bugbears, such as opaque plans to turn a much-loved local leisure centre into houses and a base for a local basketball team without proper community consultation, and discontent over plans to build on the green belt in Flixton.
Labour also thinks it is in with a chance in upmarket Altrincham. This former market town is home to many lawyers and accountants who commute in on the tram or train to Manchester. Labour has only managed to hold it for a single term in the 1990s.
But the Conservatives are in trouble locally. Matthew Sephton, one of the three Tory councillors, was jailed this year for possession of child abuse images. And the well-regarded deputy council leader, Alex Williams, whose wife Lady Williams of Trafford ran the borough council between 2004 and 2009 (they fell in love in the council chamber), is retiring.
Step forward one of Labour’s more unusual candidates: Frenchman Stephane Savary, who stood for France’s social democratic Socialist party when he was just 20. A mortgage broker who is in the middle of converting to Judaism, he has been busy recently retweeting the antisemitic abuse he receives on Twitter.
He believes if Labour can win in well-heeled Trafford it can win a majority nationally: “It will show that we are winning the middle ground. If we win Trafford we can make an example of what a Labour government would be like.”
Trafford Labour has produced 100 pledges, including maintaining low council tax (under the Tories the area has had the lowest rates in Greater Manchester), banning plastic straws and cups in council buildings and raising the affordable housing requirement in new developments to 20%.
The Tories, meanwhile, are hammering the themes of grammar schools and low parking fees and slagging off Corbyn. The Greens are also in contention in Altrincham, to Labour’s chagrin.
Savary keeps things local on the doorstep. A promise to sort out parking madness extracts a promise from one 77-year-Tory voter to switch to Labour. “But only in the local elections. I don’t like Jeremy Corbyn,” says the retired accountant.
But if Savary’s canvas returns are accurate, he is in contention in Altrincham: last Thursday he had spoken to 2,150 residents and extracted promises to vote Labour from 1,096.
