Inside the forgotten ‘capital of Brexit’ – where Boris Johnson’s unkept promises have left voters feeling betrayed

IIt’s a dreary, cold weekday afternoon in Hanley, one of the six towns that make up Stoke-on-Trent in the Midlands.

On the main street, the calm, almost sleepy atmosphere is suddenly disrupted when two masked young men ride their electric motorcycle past empty shops and a boarded-up 18th-century church.

A few customers look up. Many continue walking undisturbed.

It is the gateway to Hanley, the place billed as the center of a resurgent Stoke-on-Trent, but an area that even city leaders now admit has so far failed to work.

Seven years ago, a report found that more than a quarter of stores were empty. Today the large Poundland, Greggs bakery and numerous card and phone shops cannot hide the closed units dotted around the town.

A closure sign dated August 2018 is on display at the former Sports Direct.

“Why would anyone want to come to Hanley?” said Matt Bradbury, director of Armstrong Health and Herbal. he asks. Located between a mini market and a nail salon, the family-owned business was founded in 1906 and is said to be the oldest business in the city.

Mr Bradbury says that just 10 years ago shelves of herbal medicines and health supplements stood among the now-closed Debenhams and Marks and Spencer, and the town attracted shoppers from afar with the allure of its lively nightlife.

“Now when you go down the street you can see the lack of support for small businesses,” he says.

Hope for a revival in fortunes came in the form of: An ambitious plan A 2,600-capacity arena, along with homes and dining venues, will be built at Etruscan Square, at the boarded-up former bus station in Hanley town centre, supported by £20 million as part of the government’s post-Brexit Leveling up plan.

This seemed a fair reward for the city that voted overwhelmingly for Brexit and then expelled a Labor MP from the Stoke-on-Trent Central constituency for the first time in the 2019 general election; because the Red Wall had collapsed in the face of Boris Johnson’s promise to complete Brexit and leave the EU.

But after Labor regained control of the council in 2023, plans for an arena were dropped due to affordability. In May, BBC reported Of the £56 million of Level Up money awarded to Stoke in 2021, more than £31 million was found to remain unspent.

Etruscan Square plan forms part of wider master plan announced this yearThis also includes addressing empty shops, revitalizing disused historic buildings and transforming a nearby leisure centre. The target date for the project, which will transform the city center into “a more vibrant, connected and inviting place,” is 2050.

Danny Flynn, former chief executive of the YMCA North Staffordshire, who retired in April after more than 40 years in the voluntary sector in Stoke, says it is no wonder people in the town are so disappointed.

“People don’t believe it anymore; they call it ‘bullshit,’” he says. “Promises have been made many times about regeneration at Stoke and they have not materialised.

“People feel left behind. Forty, 50 years of decline in Stoke is so palpable, how else would you feel? If you’ve seen your city in such poor shape then you’re going to feel pretty annoyed.”

Once at the heart of the industrial revolution, Stoke continues to suffer successive shocks, from the closure of coal mines and steelworks to the decline of the pottery industry; but the city’s tourism website still promotes its “World Ceramics Capital” status.

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that 21 per cent of working-age adults will be neither employed nor looking for work in 2023. In the city’s six towns, 6.1 percent are claiming unemployment benefits; This is almost twice the national average.

Against this backdrop, the EU referendum ended a decade ago with promises of more money for services such as the NHS and tighter border controls. When the vote was held in 2016 almost 70 per cent of people supported Leave.

The then Ukip leader Paul Nuttall, who failed to win a by-election in Stoke-on-Trent Central a year later, described the city as the “Brexit capital of the country”.

When the city appeared to support Mr Johnson’s mandate to sign a withdrawal agreement, he further piled his support on breaking with the EU; He voted for Tory candidate Jo Gideon, who is a relative stranger to the area and moved from his home in Kent, nearly 200 miles away, to take the constituency seat.

Miss Gideon, ironically one of the Remnants herself, says: Independent The result was one of the biggest shocks of the 2019 elections. He was selected as the Conservative Party candidate just 10 weeks before the election and was tasked with distributing 55,000 leaflets in his constituency.

She initially did it on her own and lost double the weight in the process, with an SOS call to a WhatsApp group of House of Lords members showing earls and baronesses arriving to aid her cause in a “quite surreal” way.

“The night of the election, I went from complete obscurity to the 6 o’clock news on the BBC,” he says.

His victory came as the Red Wall of traditional Labor seats were lost to the Conservatives.

“In 2015, there was a movement away from voting the same way your grandfather did,” he says. “People are becoming more aware of the political situation and Brexit has moved people away from the universal vote for Labour, which culminated in the referendum.”

He adds that traditional Labor supporters also dislike Jeremy Corbyn and are impressed by Mr Johnson’s appeal.

In Stoke, a lack of investment or “industrial renaissance” had left voters feeling left behind.

He says: “The way the Brexit dialogue played out, people felt it was because of money going to Europe and us having control over our own politics, and so it was directly related to the economic downturn and the feeling of not getting what they were supposed to.”

When she took her seat, Ms Gideon said she and three other Tory MPs elected from Stoke had achieved the highest Level Up deal in the country. His biggest achievement was clearing a massive industrial waste site containing thousands of tonnes of flammable material that could have turned Stoke into Beirut (a reference to the 2020 explosion that killed more than 200 people).

The city even hosted an unusual “away trip” for Boris Johnson’s cabinet in 2022; ministers appeared to want to remind voters in the “Red Wall” areas that the government was focused on “fixing” the country.

But in 2024, Ms Gideon’s seat returned to Labor.

Participation decreased by almost 10 percent compared to 2019.

“We’re leveling Stoke-on-Trent,” read a faded sign in Hanley, where damaged black shingles border the seven-acre Etruscan Square.

Opposite, on a corner, on a road called Parliament Street, is a dilapidated pub. Fenced off for security reasons, people still manage to write graffiti on the black windows and doors of Franky’s Bar.

One person wrote: “Jacob Rees-Mogg. Scum of the establishment.”

Shoppers passing by don’t seem to have much interest in politics or developments in Etruscan Square.

“What’s the point of talking about it,” says a man named Paul, standing under the Stanley Matthews statue downtown. “We have lives to go on, no one to support us.”

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