Battleground Yorkshire: Marginal seats show the inevitability of politics

His majority now sits at around 6,000, but one which pollsters such as John Curtice feel will not be enough to resist a Labour wave later this year, as there is arguably no personal vote in the country that can defy the national sentiment on election day.

The West Yorkshire covers much of the northern outskirts of Bradford, with parts just touching the Yorkshire Dales and the rural areas it encompasses.

As such, the issues that voters see across this seat vary massively due to its variation.

“It's a mixture of national and local,” says Sir Philip Davies, the local Tory MP, when asked what issues voters are facing in his patch.

“In many respects, politics is getting more and more local, people are more concerned about what affects them on an everyday basis. That's been a trend, I think that's happened over quite some years.”

On specific concens, he says that it is “very difficult to see a pathway to the Conservatives winning the next election without sorting out immigration, both legal and illegal”.

“That is the one issue that is probably doing us the most damage politically, that people will mention more often than not on the doorstep or in emails to me.”

“Crime is another big issue,” says Sir Philip. “People are very concerned about crime. Sometimes it's the perception of crime that they see on the TV screens and in the papers, but also, it's the real life antisocial behaviour that people have to experience on a day to day basis, in town centres.

“I've just recently done a crime survey in my constituency, and the amount of people who reply back and talk about antisocial behaviour in the high street of their town, and nothing ever seems to be done.”

One of the biggest problems for a Conservative MP campaigning to hold their seat at the next election is that they agree with many of the issues that voters have, that the current levels of crime are too high, the immigration is too high, and that the cost of living is too much for many people.

It is incredibly difficult to campaign for change and improvement when you represent the party that has had the ability to change things for 14 years.

The weapon that many Conservatives still have to campaign against is to look at popular current examples of Labour in power, more often than not this involves local councils.

Bradford council, which also covers the seat, is not popular, even by the unpopular standards of local councils, with failures in children's services, budget deficits and cuts to local amenities due to, in part, the vast increase in costs that local authorities have been forced to take on.

“The great thing is for me, no matter how unpopular I am, I can always rely on Bradford council to be even more unpopular than me,” says Sir Philip.

The local focus which Sir Philip mentioned is key when looking at Levelling Up, a true locally-aimed policy which saw many Tory MPs thinking that their seats could become truly impregnable when voters see their areas improve and credit their MP for making it happen.

“When I used to work in Asda in customer service, we always talked about under-promising and over-delivering, and I think Levelling Up has been a great exercise in over-promising and under-delivering,” he says.

“I think that we left people with the impression that we could reverse 50 years of underinvestment in four years, and that by the next election every town in the north would look like London. It just doesn’t work like that.”

“As some point in 20 years time, there’ll be some fortunate MPs going around like Cheshire Cats, cutting ribbons saying “haven't I done brilliantly as the local MP” when they've actually done nothing, it was it was the decisions that were made during this parliament actually will have come to fruition.”

Hoping to be one of those “Cheshire Cats” is Anna Dixon, Labour’s candidate for the seat.

Under current polling, things are looking pretty good, with this year’s four MRP polling projections suggesting that Labour could win by anywhere between 11 and 27 points.

“There are a lot of people here who are in that central area of politics who have voted both Labour and Conservative at various times, so it is one of those bellwether for where national politics are,” says Ms Dixon.

This summer will be two years since she was selected as a candidate for the seat, and if the election is set to be held near the end of the year, it will have been a substantial slog.

“It's quite a big patch with quite a lot of different views, but one thing is consistent that people have seen the chaos of the Tories,” she says.

“I went through thinking that we were going to be having a snap election around the time that Liz Truss basically crashed the economy. I mean, what a farce.”

Her priorities in campaigning involve tapping into those concerns of voters, she says.

From the low trust in politics seen during the end of Boris Johnson’s tenure, to issues with GPs and the NHS, to crumbling school roofs where children were forced to learn in portacabins, there is no shortage of ammunition for Labour’s candidates in diverse seats like this.

Those are the things I hear and people are really ready for a general election, I think the country but particularly people here in Shipley, that's what they say to me, let's get on and start getting the country back on its feet again.

Just as for those Tory MPs defending their seats there is so much for them to have to explain to voters of why it happened and why it won’t happen again, Labour has so much to be able to point to after 14 years with so many changes of leadership and priorities.

Seats like Shipley, and the result later next year, throw into sharp relief the near inevitability of some elements of politics, and the seeming unassailability of Labour’s current poll lead.

When the country has made up its mind as decisively as it seems to have done, there are few areas that will stand up and disagree with that decision.