Battleground Yorkshire: Seaside towns show the limitations of Levelling Up

The more important seats when assessing the size of Labour’s presumed majority are those on the coast, which have backed the winning party at every election in the last four decades.

The Conservatives currently hold two-thirds of these seats, as did Labour in 1997.

Bridlington and the Wolds, formerly East Yorkshire, is at the outermost edge of Sir Keir Starmer’s range at the next election, with pollsters suggesting everything from a small Labour majority to a single-digit Conservative one.

Previous research by the Onward think tanks have suggested that seaside neighbourhoods are more likely to have income deprivation, with the seasonal economy relying on temporary and insecure work.

In Bridlington on the tail end of a bank holiday weekend at the start of the season, the seafront is heaving with families and older people enjoying the sunshine.

The rides are packed, with dodgems blaring out 1997’s “Sex on the Beach” to the assembled parents with small children.

The arcades are similarly full, with traditional 2p slots alongside claw machines that now contain plush toy versions of energy drinks alongside the bears and dogs.

Souvenir shops now sell vapes alongside sticks of rock, as the country’s seaside towns continue to exist, not quite at the cutting edge of life in the UK.

Set back from the seafront, it is a different story, with the area largely deserted.

When the stalls on the seafront are closed, there’s little for the town’s teenagers to do, with several winding their way through the backstreets on bikes and e-scooters with the smell of weed in the air.

“I think in terms of Bridlington and Hornsea, they suffer from many of the same problems that our coastal communities do across the UK,” says Charlie Dewhirst, the Tory candidate for the seat.

“Gone are the days of the Victorian seaside town and Bridlington has pockets of very severe deprivation and some very serious issues with health inequalities as well.

“If you speak to people on the doorstep in those towns, access to health services, community health services in particular, is probably their number one priority.”

Steve White, 71, who runs a crazy golf business in the town who has lived in Bridlington all his life says that it has got more run down.

“The town centre is run down, the seafront is wonderful. That’s how it is but every seaside town in the country is the same.

“We’ve had a good Easter apart from when it rains. Plenty of people are coming. When the season is over everything dies again.

“I’ve got a gift shop in town and over the winter it just dies. If it wasn’t for the internet we’d close it.”

Mr White says that he is “Labour through and through” in what is a “Tory town”.

He said that a lot of people locally are either not going to vote, because they can’t bring themselves to vote for Labour, or make the change to Sir Keir Starmer’s party.

One retired couple, who have lived in the area for 20 years, said that they would not be voting for the first time in their voting lives.

“They’re not giving me anything to vote for. If somebody said that they were helping the young, then I would,” they said.

“Everybody that we know doesn’t know who to vote for either. I don’t mind Labour or Tory but nobody’s doing anything. They’re all pathetic.”

Levelling Up is often viewed as an attempt to help post-industrial heartlands of the North recover from decades of neglect.

Labour’s own iteration of the policy in tying it to a green energy revolution looks to do something similar.

Coastal communities that are based on tourism rather than industry pose a different problem for both Labour and the Conservatives campaigning here at the next election, as the solutions to the problems they face are not as simple as investment in industry to create jobs.

Though the insecure work for much of the seat is an issue in itself for young people looking for quality work near where they grew up, rather than being forced to leave to look for better employment, there is a large chunk that won’t be working at all.

The future of old people in the UK is tied with that of young people. A local economy cannot survive without younger people in work, with the Government requiring taxes on working people to pay for retirement incomes.

Some 30 per cent of this seat are over the age of 65 according to the last census, with that number only set to rise with an ageing population.

Professor Sir Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, warned in his annual report last year that the UK faces an ageing crisis in rural, largely coastal areas.

Areas like Bridlington or Scarborough are set to age “rapidly and predictably” while young people flock to wealthy cities nearby.

"We've really got to get serious about the areas of the country where ageing is happening very fast, and we've got to do it now,” he said at the time.

Housing is once again a key part of this issue, with the existing buildings in areas with high numbers of older people unsuitable for them.

These houses are built for young families, not for older people who may be living alone or have mobility issues.

“We have far less dedicated housing for older people in this country than most other comparable countries do,” says Age UK’s Caroline Abrahams.

What this seat represents in many ways, regardless of which party wins it, is that there are some long-term, complicated, and heavily entrenched issues that do not look to be solved any time soon.

Just as our edition of Barnsley South showed the limitations of Levelling Up in its current guise, Bridlington and the Wolds shows its limitations for the future.

There are no easy fixes to the question of looking after an increasingly elderly population, or revitalising an economy that was established before commercial air travel.

What the main parties will need to do to fix these problems may be far more radical, and expensive, than the public will be willing to stomach.