Liz Truss may struggle to retain red wall seat in deprived area where cost of living crisis is pressing issue
As a 30ft inflatable Boris Johnson bobbed above Hartlepool marina, the real prime minister addressed TV crews. It was May 2021, and for the first time in 54 years, the former Labour stronghold in north-east England had elected a Conservative MP. “I want to say a massive thank you to the people of Hartlepool for placing their confidence in us,” Johnson said.
Fourteen months later, he would find himself in Hartlepool again – this time for a farewell visit. It was “lovely” to have him back, the town’s MP, Jill Mortimer, said in a Facebook video. “We know how much he loves it here.”
For many in the town, the feeling was mutual. After lifetimes voting Labour, thousands of residents were enticed to switch their votes to Johnson’s Tories. Now he has gone, Liz Truss, who looks set to be announced as his successor this week, faces the task of keeping it that way.
Janet Holmes, a mother of six and retired NHS secretary, is among the swing voters she’ll be hoping to cling on to.
The 73-year-old, who lives by the sea in Seaton Carew, two miles from the town centre, doesn’t much like politics and avoids watching the news. Even so, Johnson broke through, capturing something in her imagination that made her feel optimistic for Britain’s future.
In the byelection in 2021, after voting Labour her entire life, Holmes switched her vote to Conservative. “I swung that way because we’re Brexiteers and we didn’t want anything to stop that from going through,” she says.
Now that Johnson has gone, she remembers him fondly. “I really feel sorry for Boris,” she says. “I just think that he has had a really hard time with Brexit and Covid. It wasn’t his fault.
All right, he might have made one or two mistakes – but we all do, don’t we? And I just don’t think they’ve been fair on him really. If it was anybody else they would have had the same problems.”
Truss hasn’t impressed her yet, and neither has her rival in the Conservative leadership race, Rishi Sunak. “I know there’s a man and a woman but not much more than that,” Holmes says.
However, based on her affection for Johnson, she thinks she’ll stick with the Conservatives in years to come. “I just want them to focus on the cost of living and keep Brexit going,” she says.
Among other Hartlepool voters, Truss is also yet to make a splash. “Not to sound ignorant, but I couldn’t even tell you what she looks like,” says Angela Defty, 58, who works in a sweet shop.
Painter and decorator Stephen Horner, 73, says he voted Tory in the last election because he was fed up with Labour. “Boris was a protest vote,” he says. “He was a bit of a clown at times. He’s done things and now he will live to regret it. I won’t be on the edge of my seat waiting for him to come back.”
Truss “has never really said anything” that’s stuck in his mind. But “it doesn’t matter who gets in anyway because they’ll do their own thing”, he says. Meanwhile, his electricity bill has rocketed. “I can’t see things getting any better.”
For David Moore, 61, the prime minister’s priority must be the NHS. “It’s terrible,” he says. “People have been waiting for ambulances for hours and hours and hours.”
He adds that Hartlepool “is a ghost town. It’s the electricity they can’t afford; the electricity and gas. There’s no future here for my grandkids.”
A seaport in the Tees Valley known for its historic ties to industry, Hartlepool is among the most deprived areas of the country. It boasts a scenic marina and is surrounded by beaches as postcard perfect as those in Cornwall.
But the high street is struggling, with many businesses boarded up.
Child poverty in the town – at about 37.8% in 2020 – is growing rapidly, one of the fastest rates in the country.
Natalie Frankland, 34, a co-founder of the Hartlepool Uniform Recycling Scheme, says demand has been “huge”. “So far in the space of five weeks we have helped more than 300 families providing them with uniforms,” she says.
Among those using the service are parents struggling to afford basic living costs. One mother of four, Frankland says, “broke down crying” after realising uniforms through the scheme would be free. “She was so relieved as she didn’t know how she was going to afford it.”
April Twidale, 35, a mother of one from West View, says Truss’s focus must be on the “financial situation”.
Truss is yet to give details of any plans to address the cost of living crisis. “For benefits and people working, the money isn’t going up but everything else is,” Twidale says.
Anthony Errington, 59, who has lived in Hartlepool all his life, agrees that the cost of living crisis must be a priority. Last week, he began using a food bank for the first time.
He was always a Labour voter but lost faith in the party after the closure of the local hospital. “With what the Conservatives were promising I thought, ‘I’ll give them a try,’” he says. Johnson, he says, will be remembered for three things: “helping people, the Ukraine war and telling porky pies”.
He doesn’t know much about Truss, and doesn’t really care.
“It doesn’t make much difference who they are,” he says. “As long as they start realising that they have to treat people fairly and stand up and tell the truth, it doesn’t bother me. The most important thing is honesty.”
Just when you’d have been forgiven for thinking politics might quieten down a bit…
The Welsh Labour government was for so long a case study in how the party could operate in power during its long years of opposition at Westminster.
And yet here we are less than a fortnight into a UK Labour government, and the Welsh Labour government is imploding.
So much for all that talk about bringing stability back to politics.
Last week Vaughan Gething was sharing smiles here not just with the new prime minister but the King too.
Now, he’s a goner, delivering Sir Keir Starmer a headache rather than a handshake.
When I was here in March covering Mr Gething’s victory, the seeds of his political demise were germinating before our eyes.
The donations row had already sprouted and his defeated opponent, Jeremy Miles, legged it from the venue without so much as any warm words about the victor on camera.
It was another sign of the cultivating anger, the political knotweed that would soon flourish and ensnare Vaughan Gething.
Along came the row about alleged leaking, a sacking, a confidence vote — and a first minister whose tenure up until today at least amounts to 2.4 times that of Liz Truss. Ouch.
Westminster has generated its fair share of turbulence in the last decade.
But it is far from unique as a source of turbulence in UK politics.
In February, Michelle O’Neill became first minister of Northern Ireland with Emma Little-Pengelly her deputy, after a long period without devolved government at Stormont.
In March, we had a new first minister of Wales, when Mark Drakeford stood down and Vaughan Gething took the job.
In April we had the resignation of the first minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf.
He was replaced the following month by John Swinney. June was the quiet month then. Just the small matter of a general election campaign.
And here we are in July, and Mr Gething is resigning.
So will begin another leadership race, a new government in Wales, a new first minister and a new team of senior Welsh ministers.
There will also be more arguments about Welsh Labour – its direction, its priorities, its capacity to govern effectively and its relationship with the UK party.
If you’re watching this in Downing Street, it’s the last thing you need.
Police recorded over 430,000 offences in those nations in 2023 – though retailers say underreporting means these figures are likely to represent only a fraction of the true number of incidents.
Michelle Whitehead, who works at a convenience store in Wolverhampton, said her shop had been “hit every day” by thieves.
People were stealing “absolutely anything” including “tins of spam, tins of corned beef, all the fresh meat”, Ms Whitehead told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme.
“They’re just coming in, getting their whole arm and sweeping the lot off the shelves,” she said. “The shelves were always empty.”
She said she believed “organised” criminal gangs, rather than individuals struggling with the cost of living, were behind the thefts in her shop.
The crackdown on “low-value” shoplifting “will help a lot of little shops,” Ms Whitehead said.
While retailers and shop workers have welcomed the anticipated proposals, a civil liberties group has raised concerns about criminalising people struggling to make ends meet and overburdening the prison system.
The new legal measures are expected to be announced as part of the King’s Speech on Wednesday, a key piece of the State Opening of Parliament that allows the government to outline its priorities over the coming months.
Before the general election, the Labour Party pledged to reverse what it described as the “shoplifter’s charter” – a piece of 2014 legislation that reduced the criminal punishment for “low-value shoplifting”.
Tom Holder, spokesperson for the British Retail Consortium (BRC), told BBC News the impact of the 2014 legislation has been to “deprioritise it in the eyes of police”.
“I think police would be less likely to turn up to what they see as low-level theft,” he said.
Shoplifting cost retailers £1.8 billion in the last year, which could impact prices, according to the BRC.
“Shoplifting harms everyone in that sense – those costs eventually get made up somewhere, whether it’s prices going up or other prices that can’t come down,” Mr Holder said.
Co-op campaigns and public affairs director Paul Gerrard said the supermarket chain had also recorded rising theft and violence against shop workers.
“There’s always been people who will steal to make ends meet. That’s not what is behind the rise we’ve seen,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday. “What’s behind that rise is individuals and gangs targeting large volumes of stock in stores for resale in illicit venues like pubs, clubs, markets, and out the back of cars.”
But Jodie Beck, policy and campaigns officer at civil liberties organisation Liberty, had concerns about theexpected proposals, saying there is “already a wide range of powers” the police can use to tackle shoplifting and anti-social behaviour levelled at retail staff.
Ms Beck said the “£200 threshold” would not just target criminal gangs but also “people who are pushed into the desperate situation of not paying for things” because they cannot afford to make ends meet.
She urged the government to avoid focusing on “criminal justice and policing solutions instead of doing the thoughtful work of looking at the root causes of crime, which we believe are related to poverty and inequality”.
Ms Beck alsoargued the additional legislation could serve to worsen the UK’s “enormous court backlog” and its “bursting prison system”.
Defence Secretary John Healey hailed the government’s defence review as the “first of its kind” and said it will “take a fresh look at the challenges we face”.
Mr Healey noted the “increasing instability and uncertainty” around the world, including the conflict in the Middle East and war in Ukraine, and said “threats are growing”.
The strategic defence review will consider the current state of the armed forces, the threats the UK faces and the capabilities needed to address them.
Sir Keir Starmer has previously said the review will set out a “roadmap” to the goal of spending 2.5% of national income on defence – a target he has made a “cast iron” commitment to but is yet to put a timeline on.
On Monday, the prime minister said the “root and branch review” of the armed forces would help prepare the UK for “a more dangerous and volatile world”.
The review will invite submissions from the military, veterans, MPs, the defence industry, the public, academics and the UK’s allies until the end of September and aims to deliver its findings in the first half of 2025.
“I promised the British people I would deliver the change needed to take our country forward, and I promised action not words,” Sir Keir said.
“That’s why one of my first acts since taking office is to launch our strategic defence review.
“We will make sure our hollowed out armed forces are bolstered and respected, that defence spending is responsibly increased, and that our country has the capabilities needed to ensure the UK’s resilience for the long term.”
The review will be overseen by Defence Secretary John Healey and headed by former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson along with former US presidential advisor Fiona Hill and former Joint Force Commander Gen Sir Richard Barrons.
The group will have their work cut out.
The global security threats facing the UK and its Western allies are more serious and more complex than at any time since the end of the Cold War in 1990.
They also coincide with what many commentators have said is a catastrophic running down of the UK’s armed forces to the point where the country is arguably no longer considered to be a Tier One military force.
In terms of the number of troops in its regular forces, the British Army is now at its smallest size since the time of the Napoleonic Wars two centuries ago.
Recruitment is failing to match retention, with many soldiers and officers complaining about neglected and substandard accommodation.
The Royal Navy, which has spent vast sums on its two centrepiece aircraft carriers, is in need of many more surface ships to fulfil its tasks around the globe.
Its ageing fleet of nuclear-armed Vanguard submarines, the cornerstone of the UK’s strategic defence and known as the Continuous At Sea Deterrent (CASD), is overdue for replacement by four Dreadnought class submarines and costs are mounting.
Commenting on the review, Mr Healey said: “Hollowed-out armed forces, procurement waste and neglected morale cannot continue.”
Too many UK commitments?
The defence and security threats facing the UK, Nato and its allies further afield are multiple.
They include a war raging on Europe’s eastern flank in Ukraine against Russia’s full-scale invasion. The UK, along with the EU and Nato, has opted to help defend Ukraine with multi-billion pound packages of weapons and aid, stopping short of committing combat troops.
The policy behind this is not entirely altruistic. European governments, especially those closest to Russia like Poland and the Baltic states, fear that if President Putin wins the war in Ukraine it will not be long before he rebuilds his army and invades them next.
Some of those countries are already busy beefing up their own defence spending closer to 3% or even 4% of GDP.
The challenge for Nato has been how to provide Ukraine with as much weaponry as it can, without provoking Russia into retaliating against a Nato state and risk triggering a third world war.
The Royal Navy has been in action recently in the Red Sea, where it has been operating alongside the US Navy in fending off attacks on shipping by the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
But the UK has also made naval commitments further afield in the South China Sea with the Aukus pact, comprising of Australia, UK and the US, aimed at containing Chinese expansion in the region.
Critics have questioned whether a financially-constrained UK can afford to make commitments like this on the other side of the world.
Closer to home in Europe, there is a growing threat from so-called “hybrid warfare” attacks, suspected of coming from Russia.
These are anonymous, unattributable attacks on undersea pipelines and telecoms cables on which Western nations depend.
As tensions increase with Moscow there are fears such actions will only increase and the UK cannot possibly hope to guard all of its coastline all of the time.
But while those nervous Nato partners living close to Russia’s borders are busy beefing up their defence spending closer to 3 or even 4% of GDP, the UK has so far declined to put a timetable on when it will raise its own defence spending to just 2.5%.
Opposition figures have criticised the government for refusing to say when defence spending will be increased.
Before his election defeat, former prime minister Rishi Sunak committed to reaching 2.5% by 2030.
Shadow defence secretary James Cartlidge previously said: “In a world that is more volatile and dangerous than at any time since the Cold War, Keir Starmer’s Labour government had a clear choice to match the Conservatives’ fully funded pledge to spend 2.5% of GDP on defence by 2030.
“By failing to do so, they’ve created huge uncertainty for our armed forces, at the worst possible time.”
