The Best of Times: The Worst of Times

Welcome to Stoke-on-Trent, February 2017.  Suddenly, it seems, the eyes of the world are on my adopted home town again and not for the reasons some of us might have hoped.  At the same time as the campaign to gain the accolade City of Culture 2021 is swinging into action, so is a bitter by-election battle, with the reprehensible UKIP attempting to parachute their newish leader, Paul Nuttall, into Parliament via the protest votes of disgruntled voters in Stoke Central.  With the kind of irony that's almost typical of anything linked to Stoke-on-Trent politics, the by-election only comes about because the seat's former Labour MP, celebrity historian Tristram Hunt, is vacating it to take up the role of director of the V&A, suggesting there's not enough culture hereabouts to satisfy his tastes. 

Much has been made by Labour's opponents that it's not just a prestigious but a lucrative role, although surely it's disingenuous to suggest that someone with Hunt's interests, background and (probably) enviable financial security would have done it for the money.  I haven't always had a great deal of time for his particular style of soft left, let's-not-upset-the-Daily-Mail politics but, frankly, good luck to the lad.  The odds are that one of the three Stoke seats will vanish with the next set of boundary changes anyway, so parachuting out when there's such an exciting opportunity is a 'no-brainer'.  Anyone trying to make anti-Corbyn capital from it (yes you, BBC Radio 4 News!) was, to quote The Last Leg, being a dick. 

Anyway, the upshot from all this is that, instead of being weighed up as a potential City of Culture, Stoke-on-Trent is now being branded "Brexit Central", a small-minded city suspicious of outsiders and resistant to change.  In case anyone from outside the area wonders what kind of a place this is, there's a tendency to trot out an unhelpful reminder of the bad old days when there were nine BNP councillors in the council chamber.  Media coverage reinforces that with sound-bites of market traders backing Trump, or parochial locals claiming to be unaware that a by-election is even happening.  The reaction of any arts professionals viewing is more likely to be to #binthebid rather than #backthebid. 

Those disconnected voices are, perhaps, those of the very people any City of Culture programme most needs to reach.  It's going to be a challenge to do so, however, especially if they do end up electing a UKIP MP likely to dismiss any such proposal as a pipe-dream of the "liberal metropolitan elite."

And, if you're reading this blog, "liberal metropolitan elite" probably includes you.