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Jobs and justice in North East Derbyshire
Labour's candidate for North East Derbyshire Chris Peace

WHEN Tory candidate Lee Rowley took the Labour constituency of North East Derbyshire on a 12.5 per cent swing in 2017, it shocked many in the political and media world.

Sitting less than 20 miles south of Sheffield, the constituency — which comprises Dronfield, Clay Cross and several small villages — was one where coal was once king.

Labour had represented the area since 1935, and it saw socialist rebellion in the early seventies, when left-wing Labour councillors led by David Skinner — brother of Dennis — refused to implement laws that would force councils to raise their rents to private sector levels.

The seat was lost by Natascha Engel, a Blair-era party apparatchik and close ally of Gordon Brown. After winning in 2005, she held on in 2010 and 2015, though the swing to the Tories in 2010 was 8.6 per cent — significantly higher than the East Midlands regional average of 6.7 per cent.

After losing the seat, where local hostility towards any possible fracking in the area is thriving, Engel became the government’s fracking tsar. She made the headlines for labelling anti-fracking campaigners “hysterical,” and gifted her resignation to the Daily Mail earlier this year — in an exclusive interview where she attacked the Tories for being too soft on environmentalists.

“Plenty were shocked” by Engel’s defeat, says Labour’s new candidate, Chris Peace. “But so many people didn’t vote because they just felt disconnected with politics and completely unsatisfied with politicians.”

As the daughter of a miner and a typist, Peace’s teenage experiences growing up in a Yorkshire mining town during the miners’ strike defined her socialist political outlook, which could not be further from the likes of Engel. “I remember miners saying that if they lost [the strike] then my generation and those after would lose as a result,” she said. “Isn’t that exactly what has happened?”

After working as a teacher, Peace retrained as a children’s rights lawyer, and joined Labour after the 2010 general election. She is known for her longstanding campaigning for justice for miners who were attacked by rioting police officers at the Battle of Orgreave in 1984, and was an outspoken campaigner as a Sheffield councillor.

I wonder what this change in candidate has meant for local voters. When knocking on the door, Peace is certainly given a fair share of time, and she is more often offered a cup of tea than told — in unprintable terms — to go away. On one new-build estate, two people tell me they had never heard from Labour on the doorstep before they saw Peace’s leaflets. In an older set of houses, one young worker in the fast food sector tells me he’ll decide whether he’ll vote for Peace on polling day.

The answer for Peace — and the local Labour Party — is connecting with people who have not been politically engaged with for a generation or longer. “Talking to residents and rebuilding a Labour presence on the ground has been our prime focus.

“When you talk to people, you hear time and time again how austerity has seriously changed people’s lives around here for the worse.”

Local Labour members are quick to articulate the desolation felt by locals who are subject to draconian benefits assessments, and how young people are trapped in low-paid work at local distribution centres. Everyone is concerned about NHS waiting lists and GP surgery closures — bus services and local infrastructure are crumbling.

So how can Labour heal the wounds of Thatcherism here? Peace demands jobs. “This is an ex-mining community, and many here have long memories of the calculated destruction of the mining community,” she tells me.

“The complaint isn’t the closure of the pits, but the robbing of the mining industry from the community, with no strategy to put anything in its place.”

Peace is insistent that the answer to the lack of local work is in the creation of skilled green jobs to kickstart the local economy, and not in the few jobs that would be created by fracking the nearby countryside. She sarcastically lauds Boris Johnson’s “timely” pause on fracking, but says that any sane government would permanently ban the practice.

History matters here, too. A local Labour member tells me that “not a single canvassing session goes by without the pits being brought up.”

Peace says that Labour’s pledge to end the “injustice” of 50 per cent of the surplus in the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme being siphoned back to the government. “It’s not just welcome, but it’ll change lives here.”

The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign’s role in pressuring a Labour commitment to a full public inquiry into the infamous police attack on pickets is a huge source of pride for her, and something that comes up positively with voters.

North East Derbyshire is one of the key marginals Labour must win to form a majority government. As the campaign enters into its mid-point, Labour campaigners feel buoyant about the potential for a resurgent Labour vote in the area with a real labour movement candidate.

Alongside many others, Peace is hopeful that the “vibrant, daring and practical” manifesto will cut through the vicious media spin against Labour, and that a mass activist campaign — coupled with a “Labour promise of hope and real change” can win through in the area.

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