General election 2019: Meet the ex-miners who are planning to vote Tory in Bolsover On the fifth leg of his election road trip, Dean Kirby meets the ex-miners in Derbyshire who are planning to vote Tory.

On a street in the former colliery town of Shirebrook, an ex-miner with ash-coloured hair and metal-rimmed glasses leans in as though he is about to unburden himself of a great secret that has been gnawing at his soul.

In a hurried breath, as though expecting to be struck down by lightning as soon as the words touch his lips, the 75-year-old pensioner finally comes out with it: “I’m going to vote Tory.”

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He sighs as though the confession has relieved a knot of tension somewhere deep inside his body, which once hated Margaret Thatcher with every sinew.

“I’m an ex-miner and worked at Warsop Main Colliery for nearly three decades. But I’ll be voting for the Tories in December because we need to get Brexit done,” he says.

“It will be a tough thing for me to do. I’ve been a member of the Labour party for donkeys’ years and it goes against my principles. It will go against the grain.”

The ex-miner’s refusal to give his name before he walks away is a sign that the men and women of this former mining town in the Labour heartland constituency of Bolsover have long memories.

The 1984-5 miners’ strike – the most bitter industrial dispute in British history – divided communities and turned workmates into enemies when, after months on the picket lines and with hungry families to feed, some broke ranks and returned to work.

“There’s still a lot of bad feeling here about the strike,” the ex-miner says in a parting glance before he slips away into the afternoon. “Some men worked and some didn’t. That caused a lot of bitterness. People have never forgotten. They’re still angry about it.”

It was once said that a Jack Russell could have been elected in Bolsover it if was wearing a red rosette.

Dennis Skinner, the 87-year-old “Beast of Bolsover” who was a miner at the Shirebrook pit, has served as the constituency’s MP for 50 years.

But Mr Skinner’s majority has slumped from 27,149 under Tony Blair’s New Labour surge of 1997 to 5,288 in 2017 and there are signs that the furore over Brexit is testing former miners’ party loyalties and working class ethos to breaking point.

“We’re a mining community and we were born to vote Labour,” says Wayne Kissane, a former miner who is one of a team of workmen erecting a Christmas tree in Shirebrook’s market square.

“But Labour have had it. We voted to leave Europe in the referendum and if Labour get in, we’ll never get out.

‘We were Labour people then’

“The first choice for me has to be the Conservatives,” the 59-year-old says quite openly. “I’ve been telling people, ‘I know you’ve always voted Labour, but you need to vote Conservative just to get Brexit done. If you don’t feel you can do that, then vote for the Brexit Party’.

“It wasn’t the Conservatives who shut the pits,” he adds. “It was Arthur Scargill who let us down by not having a national ballot. They were tough times for us. We had to come out and couldn’t go back.

“We were Labour people then, but now we are leaning to the Conservatives to get Brexit done and because of immigration.”

Mining has a long history in Shirebrook, where twin shafts were first dug in 1896 to a depth of 1,630ft. Two years later, the men went on strike in a dispute over pay that saw them threatened with eviction from the mining company’s houses.

The community survived typhoid outbreaks and an appalling infant mortality rate of 236 per one thousand births at the start of the twentieth century and, by the 1930s, mining families were spending their holidays together at a purpose built miners’ holiday camp in Skegness.

But old newsreel footage from the 1984-5 strike shows how deep the divisions had become when pickets threw bricks through the windscreen of van carrying miners returning to work.

Drive up the hill out of town today and you can see why the site of the old colliery is once again a source of tension.

After the pit closed in 1993, the 930-acre site was turned into a business park and half of it was given over to billionaire Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct. By 2016, figures suggest the firm’s warehouses were employing 3,500 agency workers – mainly from eastern Europe.

Anti-social elements

Hundreds of protesters marched on the site saying it was attracting “anti-social elements” from abroad. There were also claims of a clash of cultures in the town – with a local newspaper reporting that gangs of men were drinking on the streets and leaving women and pensioners feeling intimidated.

“People are annoyed because there has been an influx of people from Europe because of Sports Direct,” says Yvonne Chapman, 74, who is shopping in the market square. “We’ve seen the effects of immigration here. That’s why people want Brexit.”

“I come from a mining family,” she adds. “My dad and my granddad were miners. It goes back centuries. But I think we’re all voting Conservative now. I don’t even know the name of their candidate. I’ve never needed to know until now.”

Inside a working men’s club near the square, where a group of men are enjoying an afternoon pint, 65-year-old Pete Watson says he is sticking with Labour.

“We need to get Brexit done, but I’ve always voted Labour and it’s likely I’ll do so again. I worked at the pit. People say things, but they forget what happened in the past.”

‘Brexit is the dividing line’

Over at the Shirebrook Miners’ Welfare Club, which was refurbished with the help of EU funding, the secretary Alan Gascoyne is getting the bar ready for tonight’s Northern Soul music night.

In 1984, a bowling green hut at the rear of the building served as a soup kitchen. The wives’ action group was upstairs.

The former National Union of Mineworkers official, who is still relied upon to help former miners and their widows with accessing benefits and fuel allowances, says he feels sad to hear that some men and women in the town are preparing to vote Conservative.

“Brexit is the dividing line,” he says. “It’s a little England thing. Some of them thought the people at Sports Direct were taking their jobs, but they don’t realise they were employed by agencies. They are working people being shafted just like us.

“I’ve had futile arguments with people who say Brexit is the priority. I tell them that the NHS is the priority and, without workers from the EU, there would be no NHS.

“Labour have built three schools around here. Dennis Skinner is a great constituency MP. If you have a problem, he will sort it no questions asked. You can’t beat good representation and, if a Conservative gets in that will be gone.

“The Tories have always hated miners. Winston Churchill, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher all hated us and Boris Johnson is the same.”

Back in the market square, 76-year-old Douglas Steel has just stepped out of a cafe with his wife Connie. The pair met at a fairground in this square back in 1962. He is hobbling on crutches – a reminder of the back injury that finished his mining career at Shirebrook pit in 1987.

“I was born right there above the bank in 1944,” he says. “We had no electricity and I was born by gaslight. I joined the union when I was 15.

“During the miners’ strike, I had no choice but to go back to work. I needed to for the sake of my family. It was the bully boys from Doncaster who kept us out. They came down here and smashed people’s gates to make bonfires.“It makes you cry what’s happened to this town. It used to be together. But the town is shattered now.

“I’ve been voting Conservative for years and that’s what I’ll be doing again in December. They’re the only party that can run this country.”