It’d be nice to get a clear out and start again”, says John Varey.
“I think a lot of people are losing grip with the Labour Party”, the 59-year-old tells The Independent at his florist’s, Blossoms, in Bradford city centre.
“But they don’t do themselves any favours”, Varey adds, before offering a theory about the modern-day Labour Party and those it appeals to.
“See, where they get the vote from is the people that are in the areas where it’s a green belt, and the nice houses and the thatched roofs,” he says.
Labour can trace its roots back to this West Yorkshire city, to when it was a thriving mill town, booming in the wake of the industrial revolution.
Driving along Leeds Road into the centre of Bradford, a mural illustrating the city’s vital role in Britain’s political history stands out.
Painted on the side of the city’s Playhouse theatre in 1993, the mural marks the centenary of the establishment of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) on that site, following mass textile worker strikes.
The ILP merged into the Labour Party in 1900, swiftly becoming a parliamentary force built on the ideas of Bradford’s working classes. Whether the party remains true to that history will go some way to determining how it performs in cities like this across England in local elections on Thursday.
Varey certainly won’t be casting his vote for Keir Starmer’s party, and polls suggest many of his fellow Bradford residents won’t be either.
Bradford Council, which covers the city as well as villages and towns which surround it, has been controlled by Labour since 2014 – but that could be about to change.
Currently, 46 of its 90 councillors are from the Labour Party, 14 are Tory, 10 Green and 15 are independent, nine of whom sit as the Bradford Independent group.
Latest figures from PollCheck suggest that Labour could lose 33 councillors, while Nigel Farage’s Reform UK could gain 17 and the Green Party could add 12, leaving them the biggest party in a council without overall control.
Asked who he might vote for on Thursday, Varey won’t be drawn: “I don’t want to say, to be honest.”
What is clear, though, is that he is unhappy about the state of this city, which has had its fair share of struggles, driven by job losses in the wake of deindustrialisation.
The architectural grandeur of Victorian Bradford remains, but, according to Varey, the 19th-century buildings are now a sideshow on streets which lack a variety of shops and are punctuated by empty units.
“There’s nothing to entice people into the city centre because they don’t want to get their nails done, they don’t want to go to a bargain basement”, he says. “Give people a reason to come into the city centre.”
Bradford’s fall from its industrial highs is mentioned by many in this city.
Outside the grade I-listed Wool Exchange, now a Waterstones branch, retired bricklayer John Wilkinson, 87, tells The Independent that Bradford has never recovered from deindustrialisation.
“This was the textile city of the world”, he says. “The Wool Exchange there, where they used to do all the dealing. Where did it go?
“It’s all gone to China, Iran – it’s gone all over the world. It’s gone to pot.
“You could stand in the centre of Bradford and just turn in a circle, and all you saw were chimneys and more chimneys.
“That’s how many mills were here. And all these places here were thriving.”
Calling himself a “true blue” Conservative, Wilkinson believes that one woman could fix the city’s fortunes.
“Mrs Thatcher, she’d sort them out”, he says. “The lady, she should have been made Queen.”
Wilkinson will, perhaps unsurprisingly, be voting Conservative on Thursday, but he was tempted to switch his vote for the first time – to Farage’s Reform.
Whether it’s Labour or Conservative, it’s the same. We are beholden to London
Marina Chapman
“He was good, Farage. But now I’m getting a bit weary about what he’s going to do and what he isn’t going to do.
“He’s like the others – changing his mind, changing his mind, changing his mind.”
Either way, like Varey, he wants change at Bradford City Hall. “It wants a fresh council,” Wilkinson says. “Somebody with some push.”
Others are less convinced that a new administration could solve Bradford’s problems, however.
Prithpal Singh, 60, runs ice cream shop ICreams in the city centre and believes his job is only getting tougher amid problems seen up and down the country.
“At one time, believe it or not, people from Leeds used to come to Bradford”, he tells The Independent. “Bradford used to be booming at one point. But now it’s just changed.
“I think it’s got a lot of challenges like any other city in England”, he adds, mentioning anti-social behaviour and a lack of public transport options.
That combines to make a lack of footfall in the city centre the biggest challenge, according to Singh, who says it is increasingly harder to find business.
“This is probably one of the busiest places, but there are three businesses for sale on that street. One of them has been there for 35 years. So that just says a lot.”
Singh has voted Labour in the past, but has still not made up his mind who he will vote for this time, questioning whether it will make a difference when councils have been through years of funding cuts and are operating on smaller budgets.
“What can they do if there’s only a certain amount of money to play with?” he asks. “What are they going to be able to do?”
That view is shared by Marina Chapman, 78, who moved to Bradford from Colombia with her cousin Doris Tindale, 72, in the 1970s.
“It’s a difficult job for the council”, she says. “Every government, whether it changes, it’s still the same mechanism behind it.
“Whether it’s Labour or Conservative, it’s the same. We are beholden to London.”
