View from Ashfield: Lee Anderson doesn’t have any answers - he only has a finger to point

It’s not on its own. A decimated, largely white, working class former mining area, left with next to nothing after the pits closed. Abandoned. Forgotten. Its towns are heavy with poverty and resentment. Its high streets are run down, half empty. Crime, anti-social behaviour, alcohol abuse and drug use are daily blights.

It was Labour through and through. So much so that it was the sort of ‘safe seat’ that party high-fliers would be parachuted into – before Anderson ripped up the red rule book, Gloria De Piero was the MP, and before her Geoff Hoon.

In neighbouring Mansfield, the saying used to go that “you could stick a red rosette on a donkey and it would still get elected”. And the same applied to Ashfield. And for 100 years or so that was the case . . . until the wind changed.

Ben Bradley took Mansfield from Labour in the snap election of 2017 – with de Piero clinging on to Ashfield by the skin of her teeth against a no mark Tory candidate. 

Two years later, Bradley again took Mansfield with a massive majority and, perhaps sensing the inevitable, de Piero decided not to stand for Ashfield . . . leaving the door wide open for Anderson to sweep in.

Which he most definitely did. His was a pro-Brexit ticket, like so many others in Nottinghamshire and the now-crumbling Red Wall. But there was always something darker with Anderson, something more contrived and cynical.

While the relationship between the pro-Brexit stance with the simmering, passive racism that was a feature in many of these communities remained largely unstated, Anderson always had a knack of pointing a finger, of finding scapegoats for the state of Ashfield. And it wasn't the Tories. It was never the Tories.

Politics in Ashfield is also filthy, it has always been filthy in ways that I won't go into. Even when it was Labour run and Anderson was part of the Labour machine, it was still filthy.

It’s also complex. In local government, it is dominated by the Ashfield Independents – run by former Lib Dem politician Jason Zadrozny - they dominate Ashfield District Council and (as the Independent Alliance) are joint lead opposition with Labour on 15 seats each at the county council. Labour has not done well in Nottinghamshire in recent years.

Zadrozny also has his own Parliamentary ambitions – coming second to Anderson in 2019 and pushing Labour down to an embarrassing third place – meaning any future General Election will inevitably be a closely-fought three-way horse in the district.

Anderson was always a loose cannon. When still a Labour councillor, he once took it upon himself to place boulders over the entrance to a local beauty spot to deter travellers from parking up there – leading to his own council issuing him with a community protection notice. Then they fell out quite spectacularly over Brexit – leading to the inevitable split and his re-emergence as the Tory Parliamentary hopeful.

And since then, where do you start? Getting his mate to pose as a member of the public while on the election trail, and getting caught out by the BBC doing it. £30p Lee. The endless hatred and bile on his radio show.

Lee Anderson doesn’t have any answers. He only has a finger to point.

A few years back, we both sat on a discussion panel organised by the London School of Economics, discussing the financial and social impacts of Brexit on communities like Ashfield.

One delegate represented small rural businesses in North Nottinghamshire, and outlined the decimating impact small farms and market gardens would have without the prospect of seasonal labour shipped in from Eastern Europe.

Lee’s answer. We can just get students to do it in the Summer holidays. Problem solved.

In many ways, GB News was the worst thing that could have happened to him. He is, albeit misguided in my view, a conviction politician.

But GB News allowed him to believe his own hype; made him feel suddenly untouchable. Anderson has a vast amount of support, but he’s made the mistake of thinking that this national right wing hardcore is one and the same as his constituents. 

Talking to our readers, it’s still a mixed bag. There’s still a lot of love for him in Ashfield from a certain demographic. But there's also a lot of regret and disappointment. A lot of people feel sold out. A lot of people acknowledge that his rise was a knee-jerk to Brexit and with “that job done” they may be better served by an MP who works for them, rather than using his role as little more than a soapbox.

Will he cling on? Probably not as a Tory and certainly not as an independent . . . although I’d still fancy his chances above some of the chinless wonders who were bussed in to represent some of the surrounding constituencies. 

The jury is out, but my gut feeling is that he’ll ultimately take the Reform ticket. It’s not like he doesn’t have a history of jumping ship when the water starts to pour in.

Andy Done-Johnson is the deputy editor of NationalWorld's sister site the Mansfield and Ashfield Chad.