Although it had been hanging in the balance, one of Labour’s biggest upsets was the loss of Don Valley, a seat held by Caroline Flint for the last 22 years.
The South Yorkshire constituency had been untouchable to other parties since 1922, but is in Doncaster, where 69% of people voted to leave the EU.
Flint has since blamed both Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity and Labour’s Brexit stance for the defeat in which the Conservative candidate, Nick Fletcher, won a majority of 3,630.
In Conisbrough, a hilly Doncaster town within Don Valley, residents who’d switched from red to blue seemed to agree, but were reluctant to be identified in a newspaper. One retired woman shopping on the high street, said:
I don’t see it as a vote for the
Conservatives, I see it as a vote for Brexit. It’s the first time I’ve done it. My dad was a miner, and his dad was a miner, and I’ve always voted Labour … I think if there had been another leader, I would have voted for them again.
Asked what it was in particular that she disliked about Corbyn, she replied: “There’s something about his mannerisms.”
A woman in her 70s who has always lived in the town said she only voted for the Conservative candidate “against Jeremy Corbyn”, but did not wish to be identified because she feared being berated in comments on social media.
I’m just hoping that [Johnson] is going to stand up to everything that Corbyn said, get us out of Europe and help this part of the country.
When asked what it was in particular that prompted her dislike for Corbyn, she said: “I don’t like his antisemitism.” But when asked if comments made by Boris Johnson about
black people and
Muslims had tainted her view of him, she replied: “I’ve never heard him say those things.”
