Labour pins its hopes on antipathy to Tory-backed plans to downgrade maternity unit to retain seat it has held for 80 years

Even the most committed Labour campaigners in the once safe seat of Copeland admit there is one topic of conversation that comes up more often than most: the leader.

“Corbyn is a real barrier. Comes up every fifth or sixth contact I’ve made,” said one downcast Labour canvasser after rapping on doors in west Cumbria ahead of next Thursday’s byelection. “Those who voted Labour in the general election in 2015 who mention Corbyn in the main aren’t voting at all.”

This is a worry, given the slim 2,564 majority bequeathed the party by Jamie Reed, an outspoken Corbyn critic who quit to take a job at the local Sellafield nuclear decommissioning plant, saying he could do more good for the community there than in Westminster.

“I’ve voted Labour all my life but I can’t see myself doing so this time,” said Andrew Morgan, 48, who has worked at Sellafield since he was 16. “I just don’t think Jeremy Corbyn is the right person to lead the party and I don’t think he will ever get the party into government.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labour’s candidate in the Copeland byelection is Gillian Troughton. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Labour’s big problem is whether voters in Copeland believe Corbyn supports nuclear power. The party leader has insisted he was right behind Sellafield, the nuclear decommissioning site that is the constituency’s biggest employer, as well as Moorside, a multibillion-pound nuclear power plant which the government insists will be built next door despite huge financial problems engulfing the major backer, Toshiba. But there are doubts.

An avalanche of leaflets from the Conservative party reminds voters of a speech Corbyn gave in 2011, in which he declared through a megaphone: “I say NO nuclear power, decommission the stations we’ve got.”

If Labour wins, all sides privately agree it will be largely down to Tory-backed plans to downgrade the maternity unit at the new West Cumberland hospital, which only opened in October 2015. “I’m not a betting man, but if it weren’t for that hospital I’d bet on us winning it,” said one Tory MP, who has been on the stump in Copeland. The Labour canvasser concurred: “The hospital issue has real cut-through,” he said.

Though the Labour vote has not totally collapsed, the party should worry that it can no longer rely on voting habits being passed down the genepool in heartlands such as Copeland, which has been Labour for more than 80 years.

“The younger generation aren’t sticking with Labour. They’ve never experienced extreme poverty,” said a 78-year-old former shop assistant in a cafe in Cleator Moor, a working class village where the Labour campaign has its headquarters. Like many standing by Labour, she said she was doing so with no particular passion but simply because her family had a long history of voting red.

Labour can also expect to lose some votes to the Liberal Democrats. Some 38% of the constituency voted to remain in the EU in last year’s referendum and Tim Farron’s party has been most vocal in opposing Brexit.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Campaigning for the byelection in Whitehaven town centre. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Louise Robson, who runs an electrical shop in Whitehaven town centre, said she would face a real dilemma in the polling booth next Thursday, deciding between Tory and Labour. “Most of the family relies on Sellafield and Jeremy Corbyn is definitely anti-nuclear. But I have daughters who want babies so we need a proper maternity unit,” she said.

“All four of my children were born at West Cumberland. If you need an emergency c-section you don’t want to be put in an ambulance to travel 40 miles to Carlisle.”

The Conservative candidate, Trudy Harrison, a regeneration officer who only joined the party last year, is in a bit of a bind. She too gave birth to four children at the hospital and opposes plans to downgrade the maternity unit. But she cannot pledge to reverse them, only to promise a government-backed review of recruitment problems facing the constituency’s three hospitals.

Labour is so keen to campaign on the single issue of the NHS that it has severely limited media access to its candidate, Gillian Troughton, a local councillor and volunteer ambulance driver who trained as a doctor several decades ago but gave up her medical career to raise two children. Last week, she made an appearance on Channel 4 news stonewalling political reporter Michael Crick when he ambushed her outside her office, having failed to secure an interview in the conventional way.

After much wrangling, the Guardian was granted 11 minutes with her in the Morrisons cafe in Whitehaven, in which she turned almost every question into a treatise about how the Tories could not be trusted with the NHS. Five times she said: “I am not going to give the Tories a green light to strip away our NHS services.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sellafield nuclear plant near Whitehaven. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

Asked if it was not a problem that her party leader had been an outspoken opponent of the industry which pays the mortgages of thousands of her prospective constituents, she said: “What is important is that Labour will campaign to make sure we get investment in this area in the infrastructure we need, both at Sellafield and the new build at Moorside. In me they can see they have a local advocate who is 100% behind the NH [sic] … the nuclear industry, no ifs, no buts.”

Reminded that before being selected as Labour’s candidate she had not only voted for Owen Smith as leader but also retweeted articles such as “Corbyn’s past will destroy Labour’s future” and “Jeremy Corbyn literally makes no sense”, she said it was all part of living in a democracy. “We are a democratic party and everyone has a vote and Jeremy is the leader,” she said. “This election is not about leadership of the party, it’s about investment in west Cumbria – or lack of investment by the Tories.”

No politician who visits Copeland can leave unaware of the severe infrastructure problems facing the constituency, whether they’ve struggled to get a mobile phone signal or on the internet, or come overnight to find the A66 main access road still closed while repairs from flooding more than a year ago are carried out.

On Whitehaven’s Woodhouse estate, which is among the most deprived wards in the county, mechanic Russell Burns said he thought Labour would lose the byelection “because Jeremy Corbyn isn’t strong enough”.

He said he was switching to Ukip, adding: “I think they’ve got better ideas.”

He said: “We seem to be forgotten about up here, anywhere north of Liverpool or Manchester. Everybody seems to forget we exist. And what have we got here? All people know is Sellafield and Derrick Bird [a local taxi driver who killed 12 people in a gun rampage in 2010].”

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He is voting for Fiona Mills, an NHS accountant (“Not a bean counter!” she tells prospective voters) who believes she has made headway in Woodhouse, as well as other former Labour strongholds. “We are taking more votes from Labour than the Conservatives,” she insisted. But with party resources concentrated further south on getting the Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, elected in Stoke, she is up against a Tory party which has deployed everyone from the prime minister down to join its campaign.

Though publicly Labour insists it can hold Copeland, behind the scenes senior figures are more pessimistic and fear a narrow Conservative victory – the first time a party in power would win a byelection since the Tories took Mitcham and Morden, London, in 1982. “The big story is that a totally fucked NHS can’t and won’t save Labour,” said one who is well plugged into the byelection campaign. “That should be put in neon lights.”