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Voters in one part of northern England are casting ballots tomorrow. There's a special election that could ultimately choose the country's next prime minister. NPR's Lauren Frayer takes us on a journey to Wigan, almost a century after the writer George Orwell wrote about conditions of the working class there.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (Reading) The train bore me away through the monstrous scenery of slag heaps, chimneys, piled scrap iron.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: That's a BBC actor reading part of the 1937 book "The Road To Wigan Pier," in which George Orwell journeys into northern England's coal country. The actual Wigan Pier is not a seaside jetty. It's a coal silo with troughs that dangle out over the Leeds Liverpool Canal. Coal would be loaded onto barges during the Industrial Revolution. But today, there are tents, a overturned grocery cart, piles of clothes. And it's raining. This area wasn't always down and out.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Britain needs coal.
FRAYER: Wigan's coal fueled 19th century industry, the British Empire, and made local laborers proud and prosperous. People came from all over to work in the mines, including Maureen O'Bern's ancestors from Ireland.
MAUREEN O'BERN: My dad was a miner. We voted Labour. Everybody voted Labour.
FRAYER: They voted for the Labour Party of unions and workers. But the mines closed a generation ago, and the local economy has never recovered.
O'BERN: Wigan was left, really, without a major industry.
FRAYER: O'Bern is a town councilor.
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FRAYER: At her office, people are lining up with complaints - crime, drugs, cuts to welfare, long wait lists for public housing.
O'BERN: We want affordable housing. We want good hospitals. We want a decent wage.
FRAYER: Those are things O'Bern says she hoped Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour government would provide when it was elected two years ago, after 14 years of budget cuts and austerity under the Conservatives. She's an independent herself, but she's sympathetic to a new party that criticizes immigration.
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NIGEL FARAGE: It is an invasion, as these young men illegally break into our country.
FRAYER: Nigel Farage, head of the Reform UK Party, says immigrants are stretching the country's resources. Nearly 1 in 5 people in the U.K. is foreign-born. The vast majority are here legally, but thousands also enter each year without visas, crossing the English Channel on boats. All of the U.K.'s main political parties pledge to stop the boats. Farage calls for mass deportations. If an immigrant is in the news suspected of a crime, Farage often mobilizes protests...
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Stop the boats. Stop the boats. Stop the boats.
FRAYER: ...That sometimes morph into riots, even attacks on people of color.
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FRAYER: O'Bern says her constituents resent being called far-right or racist.
O'BERN: A lot of the white working class, especially the men, sometimes feel like they're being demonized for just wanting to preserve their ways, their culture. And they feel like other people are being put before them because they're seeing boatloads of young men arriving every day.
FRAYER: Now, there are very few immigrants in Wigan itself, and yet...
JIM MEEHAN: Stop the boats - you will hear that wherever you go because it's about the perception, isn't it? And social media, which is a source of people's information these days.
FRAYER: Local historian Jim Meehan walks past the shuttered old office of the Wigan Observer newspaper, past relics of a Victorian era when prosperity meant ornate public libraries, colleges, bathhouses.
MEEHAN: This used to be the entrance to the ladies' tearoom.
FRAYER: Meehan says there's a perception here that immigration dilutes England's culture.
MEEHAN: Nostalgia is a very powerful emotion, and politicians are tapping into that emotion.
FRAYER: All of this is the backdrop for a special election here that could decide this country's future.
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FRAYER: The mayor of nearby Manchester, Andy Burnham.
ANDY BURNHAM: You can...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Come on, Andy.
BURNHAM: Cheers, lad.
FRAYER: He's running for a vacant seat in Parliament representing the Makerfield district that includes parts of Wigan. He's polling neck and neck with a candidate from Farage's Reform Party named Rob Kenyon. Reform has swept municipal elections here. Burnham says his Labour Party can change that. He pledges to reverse.
BURNHAM: The deindustrialization. The draining away of economic, social and political power.
FRAYER: If Burnham wins, he wants to then challenge the deeply unpopular Starmer as Labour Party leader and as prime minister, and halt Reform's momentum nationally in towns like this that are the equivalent of the Rust Belt.
LEMN SISSAY: This is the heartland. It's where the working man is and the working woman is. It's where the factories were.
FRAYER: Lemn Sissay is a renowned British poet who grew up in Wigan. He marvels at all the attention his hometown is getting.
SISSAY: This is like a little village in upstate New York that nobody's ever mentioned (laughter) becoming national news. And this is a temperature gauge.
FRAYER: A gauge of how much working-class voters here may be able to change the course of British politics.
Lauren Frayer, NPR News in Wigan, England.
(SOUNDBITE OF HI-TEK AND JONELL SONG, "ROUND AND ROUND") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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