The script is simple, and repeated on doorstep after doorstep.

“I’m from the local Labour party, and we’re out canvassing about the EU referendum. Have you thought about how you’re going to vote?” says a local activist. There’s then a slightly awkward pause, followed by the same reply, again and again: that the person inside is either minded to vote to leave the EU or has long since decided to do so.

Occasionally, you get little more. “That’s what I’m doing, and that’s all I’m saying,” offers one man. But from time to time, doors open, and out comes molten political fury. One woman strides out of her front door, takes a few steps and then lets rip. “We want to be British,” she says. “We want our government to run our country, not someone we’ve not elected in another bloody country. And that’s it. I want my country back. I’m scared for my country. Scared.”

Watching all this is Ruth Smeeth, the 36-year-old MP for Stoke-on-Trent North and until recently the director of the anti-racist campaign group Hope Not Hate. When it comes to the national remain campaign, she says the “messaging isn’t working for my constituents, which is why we’re doing our own thing”.

On a balmy Thursday evening in the suburb of Kidsgrove, she and 20 or so party members are making the case for EU membership based on a very local theme: the survival of what remains of the area’s famous pottery industry. They have a leaflet headlined Protect our Pots, and an array of arguments: “There are over 7,000 ceramics jobs in Stoke-on-Trent … every other pot made in Stoke-on-Trent is sold within the EU … Leaving the single market would cost our city millions and hit your family hard.”

The trouble is, with the exception of one woman who loudly frets about what Brexit might mean for the national economy, everyone we meet is seemingly fixated on different stuff: immigration, obviously, but also their grievances about the decline of their area over two or three decades.

No one – literally, no one – mentions Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Michael Gove, Jeremy Corbyn or Nigel Farage. But what have registered are the arguments from the leave side – and, for that matter, the rightwing media - that may well be highly questionable, but are also primary-coloured enough to fuse with a long-held and deep resentment.

We all know the drill: that if the UK leaves, there might be more money for the NHS, fewer arrivals from eastern Europe, less chance of outsiders being granted special favours (the myth of luxurious council houses for immigrants, and all that) and some sense of Britain back to its supposed best.

Labour students canvass in Stoke. Photograph: John Domokos/The Guardian

This, Smeeth tells us, is “the strongest Labour area in my constituency”, and yet she faces a huge battle. “It’s really tough,” she says. “This is our core vote. If we’re going to make such a stand on this issue – which I think we’ve got to do – then we’ve really got to take these people with us. The leave campaign are appealing to people’s base concerns and it’s getting through.” When she describes the approach she’s taking as brave, she cuts straight to the sense of a political job so difficult that it might prove impossible.

Clearly, the outcome of the referendum is anyone’s guess. One should always be wary of what psychologists call availability bias, whereby the people who shout the loudest stick in one’s mind. People talk about voting to leave with a loud sense of deep conviction and pained grievance, which is easy to portray; the comparatively few remain supporters we find here, by contrast, are full of qualifications and hesitancy.

But some things are clear. Beyond all the speculation about the result and the immediate future of the Conservative party, there is a deeper theme here. Tangled up in the mixture of panic and sudden resolve that is now gripping the Labour party and the rising sense that its voters hold the key to whether the UK leaves or stays put, there is a big story that has been bubbling away for more than a few years: Labour’s estrangement from whole swaths of its old electoral base, and the sense that the vote on 23 June might turn that political problem critical.

On one side of a widening divide is a Labour party whose membership is increasingly middle class and metropolitan, and enthusiastic about diversity – qualities which run from Blairities to Corbynistas, and which the massed entry of the latter may have made even more dominant.

Gates at the site of the old Royal Doulton factory. Photograph: John Domokos/The Guardian

On the other are millions of people, often resident in post-industrial towns and cities, who are much less enthusiastic about a globalised world, and – needless to say – full of angst and anger about post-2004 immigration.



Smeeth talks in general terms about all this, but it’s pretty clear what she means. “I don’t think anyone knows what politics is going to look like after the referendum, either on the left or the right … This is going to have unforeseen consequences for the political establishment, whatever happens. As we saw in Scotland.”

In Stoke, the 2011 census put the number of people born outside the UK at 20,714 – about 8% of the total population, as against 22% in Birmingham, just down the M6. Just under 2% of the city’s people come from EU countries other than Britain and Ireland, as against 3.7% in England as a whole. But numbers only get you so far. People here talk about the iniquities of the job market focused on the distribution centres that nudge the nearby motorway, whose shift patterns and wage rates often combine to exclude local people, and favour new, younger arrivals.

In just about all the towns and suburbs that make up this sprawling city, such as Burslem, Tunstall, Longton, Cobridge, there is a vivid sense of good times lost, dramatised by the endless array of grand Victorian buildings – real beauties, which in a more prosperous place would have long since been done up – lying empty and forlorn. And there’s also a story of shifting politics: back in 2006, Stoke was one of the places where Labour began to lose votes to the British National party – and last year, the party lost control of the city council to a coalition split between the Tories, Ukip and a grouping called the City Independents.

A Dudson employee. Photograph: John Domokos/The Guardian

The morning after her canvassing, Smeeth takes us to the Stoke factory run by Dudson, a family-owned ceramics firm that has been going for more than 200 years, and now supplies its wares to such big-name clients as Virgin Atlantic and the Disney Corporation.

Predictably enough, the firm’s chief executive, Max Dudson, is strongly in favour of Britain staying in the EU, and fearful about what might happen if it left. But his workforce is apparently somewhere else entirely: once again, either leaning towards the leave side or staunchly supporting it. “I’ve always voted, but nothing ever gets done,” says one woman, as she briefly stops hand-decorating a pile of plates. “I just think I’ll go with everyone else and vote out. Everything’s outsourced abroad now. Nothing’s done in England.”

Near the Madina mosque on Waterloo Road, the opinions of men leaving Friday prayers seem to point in a similar direction. Once they’ve clocked our video camera, a car full of twenty-somethings briefly stops, and they tell us they’re backing remain – thanks, they say, to a friend’s recent success in fighting a deportation case via the European court of human rights (which is, in fact, a Council of Europe rather than an EU body). But as in Kidsgrove, everyone else we speak to is either leaning towards or definitely voting leave.

“I think it’d be better for Britain to leave,” says one man, who says he thinks this part of Stoke has no prospects, and admits to confusion over the arguments for in and out, but says his gut feeling is clear. “For me, there’s a lot of issues, in terms of immigration, and having control over your destiny.” A pause. “A lot of people are coming in, especially from eastern European countries.”

And where did his family originally come from? “Bangladesh. But those numbers are different from what’s coming in at the moment. Uncontrolled and controlled immigration are two different things.”

Men outside the mosque in Stoke. Photograph: John Domokos/The Guardian

The next day is Saturday. At 10am in the Potteries Shopping Centre, the two sides of the argument set up stalls near a wrought iron clock tower, mere feet apart. The Grassroots Out campaigning comes largely from local Ukip members, including Tariq Mahmood, a barrister and local 2015 parliamentary candidate who left the Labour party in 2014 over its stance on Europe.

Labour is represented by the Stoke Central MP and former shadow education minister, Tristram Hunt. His arrival here before the last election was held up as proof of his party’s distance from its voters, but he has since used his experiences in Stoke to repeatedly point out the growing problems Labour has in large parts of England.

Pacing the streets in between Boots, Costa Coffee and Greggs for two hours, he offers leaflets to passing shoppers, before concluding that the balance of opinion is split 70:30 in favour of leave. So what does he think is going on? “There’s a question of anti-politics. And there’s a question of … Well, if Europe embodies distant, cosmopolitan, liberal, globalisation arguments, and actually, many people in traditionally Labour communities have felt that globalisation and free movement of capital and labour haven’t served them well, making the case for Europe is harder.”

Leave and remain campaigners in central Stoke. Photograph: John Domokos/The Guardian

So quite apart from what Brexit would mean, is he worried about where Labour now finds itself? “I am worried. Like the Scottish referendum, I’m worried about the aftermath.” He looks pained. “I’m worried about whether there’ll be more splintering of the vote.”