Professor Linden West was born and brought up in Stoke and has studied the city’s communities. Ahead of the Stoke Central byelection, he asks how has his childhood home become prey to Ukip?

How could Ukip, and previously the BNP, threaten what seemed an impregnable Labour stronghold?

It’s happened because Stoke’s people feel abandoned by Labour – and the new Ukip people are taking their place, on the streets, the estates, dealing with day to day problems.

Most recently, they felt abandoned by Tristram Hunt, who left for the Victoria and Albert Museum when the going got tough. A decent enough man but an outsider parachuted into the constituency by New Labour to the continuing resentment of many.

But feelings of abandonment run deeper. People have felt abandoned by politics for many years, partly by New Labour’s shift to the right and its focus on marginal seats while places like Stoke were taken for granted. Locals have also felt abandoned, exposed and threatened by globalisation and rapid deindustrialisation.

People felt abandoned too by the 2010 Coalition Government as the Pathfinder housing regeneration programme, set up nine years earlier by the Labour Government was aborted. The scheme set out to regenerate parts of the Midlands and north of England. In Stoke whole areas were razed to the ground but little was done to redevelop them.

They felt abandoned by local as well as national government, as the city council imploded and austerity bit hard. There were efforts to regenerate, but the new politics of austerity undermined them.  In the mid-1990s the Labour Party held all 60 seats on the council. By 2008 the party had 23, while the BNP held 6 seats and looked set to form the majority on the council in the following elections.

Labour to an extent recovered while the BNP imploded but history may be repeating itself in the rise of Ukip, with no guarantee this time of a Labour recovery. The hurt and disarray may simply run too deep. Labour has in fact been in disarray for a long time and Stoke was subject to a special Governance Commission reporting in 2007.

The old party structures had fragmented, and there were accusations of corruption. There were fierce arguments in the Party over new style Mayors and the city lost its way.

Old-style Labour civic leaders – often autodidacts, schooled in the Workers Education Association (WEA), Trade Unions, co-operative societies and churches – were disappearing.   They helped build a confident municipalism, reaching back to before the 1^st World War.

They also lived on the estates and were people to turn to, close by, and there were structures in place to ensure that private troubles could be translated into a language of public deliberation and debate. Those structures have gone.

Over the six years of my study, from 2008-14, I listened to many stories of what happened to families when a pottery closed or a mine shut down. Of mental illness and of the Labour Party’s virtual disappearance, and how the BNP, and subsequently Ukip, took its place.

The BNP and then Ukip were on the streets, sorting out the druggies and the gangs. Taking care as councillors to deal with the gate needing repair, the leaking roof or the noisy neighbour. These new councillors often lived on the estate, and worked hard on local committees, chairing school governors, and joining in the fun of local carnivals.

Now a whole city yearns for a new politics of regeneration. There are many resources of hope in the city for the task: in the WEA, universities and health groups bringing working class women from different communities together to learn how to campaign against closing local public facilities like swimming baths.

There is the Lidice shall live campaign, launched by local miners in 1942 after the obliteration of the Czech mining town and its people, by the Nazis, in retaliation for the assignation of Reinhard Heydrich. The campaign was recently revived by local people, using art and local history as a vehicle for building solidarities across difference. In some schools, in older mining areas, children are taught of what their grandparents and great-grandparents did to help rebuild Lidice, which can be one step in rejuvenating the spirit of Stoke. Under this umbrella children and families are reminded of Dr Barnett Stross, a local GP, who led the campaign and became the MP for Stoke Central as well as a minister in the post-war Labour government. Stross is not a local name, and people learn afresh how his family were refugees from Polish pogroms.

Stross was an outsider, an immigrant, who cared for local people. He was my family’s GP. The Asylum seeker need not be a threat but can be a resource of hope. If Stoke feels abandoned, well past its sell by date, all of us should remember that this once proud city generated wealth for our whole society, and that we owe it, and similar communities, our time and collective resources to begin the work of sustained regeneration.

Linden West, Professor of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, was born and brought up in Stoke on Trent and his new book, Distress in the city, racism, fundamentalism and democratic education, (Trentham, 2016) is about the city’s decaying housing estates and struggling communities. How has his childhood home become prey to Ukip? And what can be done about it?