Yahoo News Bassetlaw General Election results as Labour's Jo White wins and Brendan Clarke-Smith loses Tory seat
Bassetlaw on the Nottinghamshire / Lincolnshire border has been won by the Labour Party with a majority of 18,476, putting a brick back in Labour’s 'red wall'.
Well connected political operative Jo White (Lab) beat the incumbent Brendan Clarke-Smith, a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.
The total number of votes for each candidate was:
Brendan Clarke-Smith (Con) : 12,708
Rachel Reeves (Grn) : 1,947
Helen Tamblyn-Saville (LibDem) : 1,996
Frank Ward (Ref) : 9,751
Joanne White (Labour) : 18,476
In 2019, the Conservatives won the seat with 55% of the vote to Labour's 28% which means there has been a swing to Labour. Ms White is married to the former Bassetlaw MP John Mann who held the seat from 2001 until 2019, and who now sits in the House of Lords.
Bassetlaw was once a fortress seat in Labour’s Red Wall, where the history of voting Labour dates back to the 1920s – only to be broken in 2019 with Brendan Clarke-Smith’s Conservative victory.
Since 2019 another interpretation is that it is a bellwether seat, and was number 151 on Labour’s list of targets.
Bassetlaw was also a strong Brexit-supporting seat with over two thirds of voters voting to leave the EU in the June 2016 referendum.
The new MP Jo White has served as deputy leader on Bassetlaw District Council with Rushcliffe candidate James Naish as leader and is considered by some to be a smooth political operator.
She has had strong connections in the Labour Party since the 1990s and once counted amongst her close friends the late New-Labour insider Derek Draper, husband of TV presenter Kate Garraway.
The constituency has two medium-sized towns: Worksop, home to 44,000 people and the smaller Retford with 23,000 people.
Bassetlaw’s largest town, Worksop was the home to high street retailer Wilko which collapsed leaving thousands of people unemployed last year: with Jo White seeming to turn the bankruptcy to Labour’s advantage by staying close to the employees’ trade unions to support the shopworkers through Bassetlaw council, and demanding fair redundancy terms, whilst incumbent MP Brendan Clark-Smith organised a job fair.
Ms White has also been adept at turning the threatened closure of Retford’s railway ticket office to her advantage by campaigning for it to stay open, a campaign that was ultimately won.
