‘Nobody can fix the country’: voters in former Blair town sceptical of change

Let down by broken Tory promises of levelling up, some in Newton Aycliffe and across north-east turned to Reform

He kept on saying, My dad was a toolmaker and we were on the breadline,'" says Alan Webb, a retired toolmaker, laughing. I mean, come on. I was a toolmaker and I wasn't on the breadline." Webb, 75, is having fun at the expense of Keir Starmer, who told voters about growing up in a pebbledash semi, the family having its phone cut off and, surely a few too many times, that my dad was a toolmaker and my mum was a nurse".

He kept on saying it as if he was poor," Webb says. I was a toolmaker and I actually earned some good money up here."