In an area full of critical marginals, Labour’s complacency lost the party the support of an anxious working class – and handed the seats to the Conservatives

William Cash, the Ukip candidate in Warwickshire North, was in no doubt: “The reason the Tories have won the key battleground of the Midlands is that Ukip came to their rescue. We rode into the flanks of the white working class and captured them. I had Tory workers coming up and hugging me.”

Warwickshire North was number one on Labour’s must-win list. The Tories had taken the seat in 2010 with a wafer-thin 54 majority. If it was to stand any hope of forming a government, Labour had to more than reverse that margin. As it was, Craig Tracey held it with an improved majority of almost 3,000.

In what was once Labour’s heartland, an area of the country littered with closed-down pits and villages founded on the mining industry, Ukip managed to gain 8,256 votes. It was a similar story in neighbouring Nuneaton, another vital marginal, where again the sitting Tory handsomely extended his narrow lead, and Ukip took 6,582 critical votes.

Nigel Farage had spoken of a “purple rash spreading across the body politic”, and in this corner of the Midlands that rash appeared to eat away at the core of what should have been Ed Miliband’s support.

“I warned a couple of years ago that we were complacent about Ukip,” says Michael Stanley, one of the few Labour councillors to survive the simultaneous Tory triumph in the local elections. “The feeling was that they would take votes from the Tories. But they definitely took Labour votes. We needed to attack Ukip and to do that we should have engaged with people on the issues that mattered to them.”

Baddesley is a former mining village. A modest but well-maintained collection of detached houses and tidy estates. In the Red Lion a group of men are standing at the bar discussing politics. All agree that a generation ago it was a hardline Labour neighbourhood. But the tribal allegiance has been truly broken.

“It grates at you no longer voting for your party because it no longer represents you,” says Martin Sweet, whose cousin is a Labour councillor. “I voted Ukip, almost as a protest.”

Sweet is a builder and says that wherever he travels in the country the issue he always hears mentioned by other builders is imported labour.

In the pub there are several references to Poles sending child benefit back to Poland and the UK sending foreign aid to India, which has its own space programme.

“My ears are fed up with hearing those ‘facts’,” says the landlord, Dave Bell. “I don’t even know if they’re true.”

In nearby Atherstone, James Bilson, who is paid at the minimum wage for making spokes, resents the fact that he earns the same money as “a coloured bloke who can’t speak English. They come along and take our jobs.”

There’s a lot of this kind of unthinking blaming of largely invisible, and mostly non-existent immigrants. Stanley thinks Labour did not do enough to tackle the myths popularised by Ukip.

“For a start, this area is 98% white. All this stuff about foreigners taking our jobs just isn’t true. Rumours were spread that Ocado was employing foreigners at lower wages. But they pay the same money to everyone who passes their test. They employed a couple of Romanians and suddenly people were talking about a Romanian invasion. We need to get out there and explain to people the truth.”

There is low unemployment in the area, says Stanley, and a strong sense of community, but what disappeared with the pits is a feeling of communal solidarity. Workers now feel, consciously or not, that they are competing in a market place and therefore their primary responsibility is to themselves and their families.

He doesn’t believe that Miliband was out of touch or too metropolitan, although he thinks the media did him no favours with the way he was portrayed. However in the Red Lion everyone, from teenagers to senior citizens, is agreed that he lacked personality.

“I stopped listening to him a long time ago,” says one customer, and the rest voice their agreement.

Like star quality in the film business, personality in politics is one of those traits that everyone recognises but few can define. But if it means anything, it is surely an ability to appeal to different groups of people, to transcend sectional concerns and inspire a sense of common ground, however small and provisional it may be.

Any Labour leader has to reach out to several distinct and sometimes antipathetic groups. At one extreme is the diverse and sui generis case of London, where the party actually made gains, and at the other the increasingly separate Scotland, where the party suffered a wipeout.

But somewhere in between is the English white working class, those tattooed, St George flag-waving members of the post-industrial hinterland – the sort of people that make Labour’s London-based leadership feel particularly uncomfortable.

It is not hard to find examples of the children of generations of Labour voters who no longer identify with a party that took their support for granted. Nor is it rare to find long-term Labour voters who have switched.

At the Grendon Working Men’s Club Keith Dennis says that he has witnessed a massive transformation in voting habits. “Twenty years ago everyone was Labour here. Now some of the older ones remain loyal but there’s a lot of disillusionment with the Labour party.”

He cites immigration as the issue he repeatedly hears brought up by members of the club. There is no pretending otherwise. Immigration does come up time and again in any political conversation in the streets and pubs. But it is like a catch-all formulation to cover the long fallout from the collapse of local industrial culture, bonds and traditions.

It certainly points to a degree of political alienation experienced by many of the voters of North Warwickshire when Cash, the son of a Tory knight, who is married to an aristocrat and lives in an Elizabethan moated manor house, can lay claim to representing the working class.

“I spent a lot of time in distribution centres where people are being paid £900 a month,” says Cash. “It’s the difference between working class proud and working class poor. We want to restore pride to local communities.”

But in truth there’s no shortage of pride in North Warwickshire and Ukip’s success feeds off something quite different – anxiety and insecurity.

That won’t be fully addressed until the locals rediscover an identity as strong as the one that was lost with the pits. But whatever that might be lies in the future, not the past which Ukip misleadingly plays on.

If the Labour party is ever going to win a general election, it needs to win back its lost voters in the Midlands. And to do that it must come up with a vision of the future that is relevant and plausible to the working class in places such as Baddesley and Grendon.

It cannot afford to turn away from them and allow Ukip to exploit the situation. A leader who naturally grasps working-class aspiration, as much as working-class exploitation, would help. Someone who can appeal to pride without playing on fear. Someone who can make the people of North Warwickshire start listening again.