Battleground Yorkshire: Rural seats like Thirsk don’t have the appetite for huge change

Harrogate is now too “up itself” she says, with people across the countryside realising that they can actually get down to London in two and a half hours.

"Thirk’s small c conservative, with farming and racing folk,” she says.

“I'd be surprised if it was ever anything other than Conservative, the farmers won't vote green as they'll make them do things they don't want to."

Thirsk, though only just one part of the massive seat, is doing well, as are many market towns in North Yorkshire.

The town centre is heaving on a Tuesday morning, with the swathe of independent shops in stark contrast to many other highstreets in the country.

Locals are chatting merilly, discussing their plans or talking about local horses that ran in the Cheltenham races.

Tourism comes through, in large part, due to the connection with James Herroit, the popular author who worked as a young vet in Thirsk, with his work spawning the popular television series All Creatures Great and Small.

The shops, boasting three art galleries and framers on the same street and a sculpture garden show that the effect of austerity and the pandemic did not ravage some parts of the country quite as heavily as others.

Part of this is down to the uniquely slow pace of life and pace of change in places like this.

“This comes to the very heart of what the left and the right of politics is actually about,” says Jonathan Roberts from the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), who is a Thirsk lad.

“You need the left as sometimes things need to change, and you need the right because sometimes things need to stay exactly the same.

“Rural folk tend to be more Conservative because they tend to be more conservative because they tend to prefer a slower pace of change. Their heritage and their community and their way of life is fragile.

“While this doesn’t mean things should stay the same forever, as we should never treat the countryside as a museum. People in the countryside are quite rightly suspicious of those who do want dramatic change.

“There’s a practical element for the Labour Party in rural areas which is that they tend to be quite absent from the countryside. They have limited resources and have spent their time and their money on where they traditionally picked up support, but that might be changing now.”

The opposition of progress and conservation is best seen through the lens of housing at this election, with Labour’s backing of “the builders, not the blockers” ringing alarm bells for many who think there needs to be only a modest increase in local housing supply.

Mr Roberts, from the village of Sowerby, just outside Thirsk, said that it was “unrecognisable” from the village that he grew up in, with thousands more homes “plonked” on farmers fields, with similar things happening across the constituency in places such as Kirkbymoorside.

There is a disconnect, based perhaps on a general rural Yorkshire scepticism and mistrust of Southerners and city-dwellers from “that there London”, between building homes to keep a community going and growing, and housing the people that want to move there.

Usually it is only local residents who are plainspeaking enough to make the argument, but many people in seats like Thirsk think that the area is for them, and tourists can visit.

As the late-great Jake Thackray said of his beloved Dales:

“We don’t mind trippers and scouts and ramblers.

They can come and stand in the rain all day.

They give us money and beer and a right good belly laugh,

Then they go away.”

Labour is alive to this. And despite the message from the national party being rather dismissive of the green belt, local MPs where housing is a concern are a bit more guarded.

Thirsk and Malton’s some 200,000 hectares is only 0.4 per cent green belt, but for many it is a by-word for “green spaces” or “my nice view”.

“There needs to be more supply, but there needs to be a better quality of supply and a greater proportion of it needs to be affordable,” says Lisa Barnes, Labour’s candidate.

“Young people trying to get on the property ladder is difficult enough without the only homes available in the constituency that they want to live in being completely out of their reach.

Thisk and Malton is in the top 10 for average house prices in Yorkshire, more than double that of Bradford.

Ms Barnes says that she wants to see more people having the choice to move to places like Thirsk, but “not at the expense of the green belt”.

“There are plenty of brownfield sites, plenty of disused sites that could be put over to housing. I will always fight to protect the green belt and protect the environment.”

A recurring issue across Yorkshire’s constituencies when talking about housing is that we are seeing a reduction in public services as populations increase, rather than local amenities growing to meet the demand.

One woman in Thirsk said that she was not aware of any full-time GPs in the area.

Despite the need for some change, and frustrations with the Conservatives, this is no marginal seat.

A 25,000 vote majority is both large and conservative. The local MP, Kevin Hollinrake, newly-promoted by Rishi Sunak to become a business minister, is largely popular locally, from the butcher’s shop to the pubs around.

Winning here for Labour requires so many things to go right. It requires Reform to make inroads to a level the UKIP did not achieve. It requires Labour to make people comfortable with the pace of change that they’re offering. But most importantly it requires the core voting base of the Conservatives to send a devastating message to the UK’s foremost party of government.

It is a big ask for Labour to win here, but on election night, as we get to 5am, when the seat was last declared, if you see it turn red then the Tories are spent as an electoral force for the next decade.