Angling for perch and carp on the banks of the Bridgewater canal that flows through Runcorn in north-west England, John Caldwell has already decided which box he will be marking on his ballot paper on Thursday.
“I’m going to vote for Reform,” said the tattooed former soldier. “[Sir Keir] Starmer is worse than the Tories. They hit pensioners by taking away the winter fuel allowance and now they’re going to hit disabled people . . . while wasting billions of pounds on a war in Ukraine.”
Caldwell is far from alone in backing Nigel Farage’s rightwing populist party, which is set to advance in northern England on May 1 in local elections, mayoral contests and the first House of Commons by-election since the general election in July.
Reform is expected to take scores of council seats from the Conservatives, who enjoyed sweeping success the last time these areas were contested amid a Covid-19 “vaccine bounce”.
But in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, Reform is seeking to capitalise on a wave of voter hostility towards the government that has left it as the overwhelming bookmakers’ favourite to overturn Labour’s 14,700 majority from last July.
The by-election in the seat just south of Merseyside, which has an electorate of about 71,000, follows the resignation of former Labour MP Mike Amesbury after he was convicted of punching a constituent.
In a sign of Reform’s ambition, Farage has visited Runcorn three times in recent weeks, but the prime minister has not been seen.
Victory for the rightwing party — which has maintained strong polling despite unsavoury revelations about some candidates and a high-profile falling-out between Farage and former Reform MP Rupert Lowe — would send shockwaves through the parliamentary Labour party.
Most concerned will be MPs in the Red Wall stretch of working-class former Labour heartlands in the Midlands, Wales and northern England. They turned to Ukip and then the Tories after Brexit, but switched back to Labour last year.
Starmer has in recent months tried to shore up support in those constituencies by tacking to the right, including by cutting the overseas aid budget, curbing irregular migration and saying he no longer believes “trans women are women” after a Supreme Court ruling this month.
The pivots in a range of policy areas have sparked concerns from some urban MPs that Labour is taking leftwing graduates for granted.
In the party’s office at a local shopping centre, Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, said it would be “remarkable” to beat Labour in its 16th safest seat, cautioning that any win would come down to “a few hundred votes”.
“Labour had a massive, what I call a loveless, landslide [in July] and months later, they’ve completely screwed it up,” he added.
Farage’s party has campaigned against the government’s climate targets, on local deprivation and increasingly on immigration, focusing on concerns about a local hotel that has been used to house hundreds of migrants.
“It has become a dumping ground for illegal immigrants,” said Sarah Pochin, Reform’s by-election candidate. A former magistrate who used to work for Shell International, Pochin has bemoaned Runcorn’s low educational attainment, its lack of leisure facilities and its pockets of deprivation.
In turn, rival candidates have accused her of “talking down” the town and deterring potential investment.
Labour’s Karen Shore, a former deputy council leader, vowed to lead a “positive” campaign rather than “going down into the gutter”.
She said her priorities were boosting public services, regenerating the high street, improving transport links and increasing police officers’ presence.
Shore has also cited 6,000 potential new jobs in the “green energy cluster” through a state-backed carbon capture and storage project, HyNet.
Yet many former Labour voters expressed ire about recent cuts to welfare spending. Neil, who declined to give his surname, said he had voted for Starmer last year, but did not know who to back on Thursday.
“I am angry about Labour cutting the winter fuel allowance and then taking money from disabled people is a disgrace,” he said. “I don’t know whether to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat; the only party I won’t consider voting for is Reform.”
Shore conceded that she was “uncomfortable with the fact some disabled people are fearful”, while stressing that the benefits system was in need of a radical overhaul.
Despite being a rightwing party, Reform has tacked left on certain issues: it has called for the steel industry to be nationalised and pledged to reverse cuts to the winter fuel allowance.
Labour figures seem resigned to the loss of many supporters in Runcorn itself, but hope they can persuade former Green, Lib Dem and “soft Tory” voters in the more affluent villages and smaller towns elsewhere in the seat to vote tactically against Pochin.
“It’s going to be a very close race,” said one Labour activist. “We need to motivate Labour supporters . . . and we need to win over some former soft Tories and Lib Dems who are terrified of the prospect of having a Reform UK MP.”
But former Labour voters outside the taxi rank in Frodsham, the market town where Amesbury threw his punches, said they were hesitant to come out again in support of Shore.
Dan Jones, a local taxi driver, said he had always supported Labour but was shifting to Reform because Starmer had not done enough for working people. “He [Starmer] is a Tory pretending to be a Labour man,” he said.
Labour campaigners suggested former Tory voters were sympathetic to the message that the NHS would not be safe with Farage, who previously said he was “open” to the idea of an insurance-based health system.
Tactical voting could prove crucial. Two voters who usually backed the Greens in Helsby and Frodsham said they could back Labour next week to lock out Reform.
But tactical voting can cut both ways. Barry Howard, who works at a guitar shop in Runcorn, said he typically voted Tory but was switching to Reform. “No one here has a good word to say about Keir Starmer,” he said.
Jonathan Hinder, a new MP who belongs to the socially conservative Blue Labour caucus, said a strong showing from Reform in Runcorn and Helsby would add to pressure on Starmer to deliver results in areas that mattered to voters.
“I think the result will give pause for people who don’t take seriously some of the reasons why people are voting for Reform,” he said. “We are moving in the right direction but we need to deliver — and quickly.”
