Bury North: ‘England is a total joke. We’re a laughing stock abroad’

In the foothills of the Pennines, the market town of Ramsbottom was busy with afternoon shoppers when news broke of a looming general election. Teacups clattered, eyes rolled and heads shook wearily in a town that voted 53% for leave in June 2016.

“My brother lives in Germany and they think England is a total joke. We’re a laughing stock abroad,” said Deb Metcalf, 52, after the lunchtime rush in the town’s bakery. Metcalf said she was fed up that Brexit had not been delivered and that some – including this area’s Labour MP, James Frith – were arguing for a second referendum. “It would be a massive slap in the country’s face. I know a lot of people are peed off with him because he’s gone against everyone’s wishes.”

In Alternative Arrangements, a flower shop down the road, 72-year-old Anne said Brexit was “making people depressed” and that a pre-Christmas poll would drive people up the wall. “In eight months’ time this will have taken as long as the first world war – that was on for four years and three months,” she said, clutching her shopping bags. “It’s quite frankly doing my head in.”

It is leave-voting Labour seats like Bury North that will be high on the Tories’ target list in the coming weeks. In a marginal seat that has swapped from blue to red twice in its 35-year history, Frith was elected two years ago with a majority of 4,375. Speaking after Labour’s backing for an election on Tuesday, Frith acknowledged it was not “top of everyone’s Christmas list” but that voters understood the parliamentary deadlock and that a national poll was “inevitable, sooner or later”.

Olchon Lang in his gallery; he believes voter turnout will be poor in a winter poll. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Frith said he was confident he would keep his seat if he won the backing of those who supported him in 2017, despite figures suggesting the Brexit party came out on top here in the European parliamentary elections in May.

In Plentiful, a shop selling plastic-free goods, Sharon Henley Hewitt, 64, said the country needed to focus on bigger things than another election, namely the climate emergency and overhauling the voting system. “It’s representative of the broken system we’re in that we need another general election at this time, but if it means we get rid of this current government then I think it’s great,” she said.

Olchon Lang, a gallery owner, said he was concerned about voter turnout in a winter poll, especially in this bitingly-cold and often-dark corner of the Pennine Moors. “It’s the wrong time of year to do it,” he said. “It’s going to be dark and quite a lot of our older people are going to struggle to get to polling stations. Possibly it will sway the electorate to the young people.”

Nonsense, said Elizabeth Benson, 69, and her husband Alan, 79. “Bring it on – that’s what I think. We will be voting for the Tories and we want out,” said Elizabeth. “It’s a disaster but I don’t think it’s Boris’s fault – it’s parliament. Whatever he tries to do they’re stopping him.”

Josh Halliday

Jamie Bourn: ‘I voted remain, but I think it’s time to leave’. Photograph: James Drew Turner/The Guardian

Chingford: ‘We’ll carry on going around in circles without an election’

For 33-year-old Jamie Bourn, who works in a homewares shop in Chingford, north-east London, an election can’t come quickly enough. “I think we’ll just carry on going around in circles like we are now if we don’t have an election,” he said on Tuesday afternoon, following the announcement that Labour would back a pre-Christmas poll.

“I voted remain – I thought we were getting along nicely in the EU – but I think it’s time to leave. That’s what everyone voted for. It’s not something I agree with, but it was a decision made by the majority of the public.”

Homes and Gardens, a few minutes from Chingford station, has seen a few heated debates about Brexit over the past three years, says Bourn, “but that hasn’t happened so much lately because people are fed up with it”.

The store is in the parliamentary constituency of Chingford and Woodford Green, which has been represented by the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith since 1992. It voted 50.1% to 49.9% to remain in the EU referendum and is relatively marginal. (Duncan Smith’s majority fell from 8,400 to 2,400 in the 2017 election.)

Bourn would probably vote Conservative in the forthcoming vote. “If I had to pick between Boris and Jeremy, it would definitely be Boris,” he said. “I won’t go into it too much, but some of the things [Corbyn] says and does don’t sit right with me.”

The opposition candidate in the seat is the economist Faiza Shaheen, who is seen as a rising star of the Labour left. Belinda Buckley, a speech and language therapist, said she would vote Labour, though she thought the party had failed to take a clear line on Brexit. “People are saying this is the time when [Duncan Smith] is most likely to be ousted. Great. Good riddance,” she said.

Overall, as a remain voter, Buckley is disheartened. “I think it’s extremely clever what [the Conservatives] are doing and I think Labour and the Lib Dems are so behind on being able to put forward a coherent argument that actually connects with people.”

Mortgage broker Dee Safer, 46, said that the uncertainty caused by the present situation had had a big impact on his business. “I just want [Brexit] done and out of the way,” he said.

Safer, who voted leave in the EU referendum, didn’t have strong opinions about Duncan Smith – “He’s all right. He came in and wanted to use my loo once” – but said he would back the Conservatives in the election, and expected them to win.

“I’d very surprised if they were calling a general election and weren’t confident they were going to win,” he said. “This area is full of old Tories, so I can’t see Labour winning here.”

Mary Jenkins, 87 – another Tory supporter who voted to leave the EU – said the debate around Brexit had been dragging on too long. “In the end it gets boring,” she said. “It has taken up a lot of my time because I live on my own and I put the TV on to see what’s on the news and you get hypnotised by it.”

Her message to politicians: “Get on with it before I kick the bucket.”

Frances Perraudin