Why Britain’s Election Is All About Brexit
The U.K. election is looking tighter. How the northeast votes will be crucial.
Families play on the beach in front of the shuttered Teesside Steelworks in Redcar.
Photographer: Matthew Lloyd/BloombergOn a boarded-up window of a dilapidated former pub near the shuttered steelworks is a royal-blue poster with one word: Conservatives.
Less than a week away from an election in Britain, it looks like a battle flag planted behind enemy lines. This is northeast England, dyed red by the Labour Party for generations, and the idea of anything else in the region’s dejected post-industrial towns would have been unthinkable just a year ago. Then the decision to leave the European Union split the nation along different lines.