Petty bureaucracy, both men furiously agreed, was stifling the resort's appeal.
"People came here because it was a magical place, but where have the donkey rides gone? Where are the ice-cream vendors?" asked Butcher, evoking a nostalgia for the town's glory days and reciting a mantra that Blackpool had long been ill-served by a Labourcontrolled council and - when the "red wall" crumbled in 2019 - a Conservative MP.
With recent polls putting Reform in third place nationally, Thursday's byelection could be a bellwether moment for gauging the electoral potency of the Brexit party's successor.
On the face of it, Labour's Chris Webb is the firm favourite to win the contest after a lobbying scandal led to the resignation of Scott Benton, the former Tory MP elected five years ago with a majority of 3,690.
Webb faces a Tory, David Jones, reduced to warning in election material that a vote for Reform "risks letting Labour in" - even if the resources being deployed by the would-be populist party are nothing like the manpower once commanded by its predecessors under Nigel Farage's leadership.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April 29, 2024-Ausgabe von The Guardian.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April 29, 2024-Ausgabe von The Guardian.
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