Labour loyalty starts to wear thin in Oldham

Labour's well of loyalty runs deep in the Pennine towns between Rochdale and Oldham East where Phil Woolas, the Home Office minister often tasked with immigration crises, is defending a 3,590 majority against resurgent Liberal Democrats. But it is wearing thin at the edges after Gordon Brown's gaffe, not to mention weariness and disillusion with 13 years of power, and very few local windows show the party's posters. "I'll still be voting for them – I think," says pensioner Anne Wheeler, hurrying home from the post office near the old Majestic and Cairo cotton mills, now part of the Ferranti engineering group. "But I've a lot of sympathy with that Mrs Duffy. She was only saying what plenty of us ordinary Labour voters think." Grumbles are rife up the hill towards Saddleworth, too, with small incidents fuelling discontent. A gutted terrace house, originally sold by the council to be done up but then sold on to a second buyer who has now gone bankrupt, is so dangerous that the council is having to take it back. Neighbours constantly keeping their children away are uncertain whom to blame. Oldham council is Lib Dem but Labour is defending its hold on power in the general election and so gets most of the stick. Brown's apparently disastrous encounter weighs less, however, than the sort of concerns over the economy and the level – rather than the principle – of immigration, which Gillian Duffy raised. Another customer at the post office, not herself a diehard, says: "It wasn't very nice, what he said, but they all do it, don't they? They all get frazzled and come out with these things. "My friends who are Labour people through and through aren't going to be affected by this one incident, not at all." The area's loyalty has survived much more abrupt figures – such as Hervey Rhodes, a former Labour MP who was also a textile millowner and so demanding that when he finally retired his employees presented him with a whip. Brown's gaffe is sidelined by such as Karen Gardiner, a pensioner on the Bengate estate in Milnrow, who is resolutely sticking with "her" party. "Always have, always will," she says. "It's in our family." Her daughter Deborah has exported the tradition as far as the Isle of Wight, where she won a council seat and stood for parliament, increasing Labour's share of the vote. "Brown? I think that really he's a lovely man but he finds it hard. Thank goodness for Sarah, she's his backbone," says Gardiner. Her red and yellow poster is staying firmly in place, as is John Wild's, four miles further into Oldham. "My feelings haven't changed at all," he says, checking the oncoming rain as he changes for his night shift as a maintenance electrician in a local engineering works. "This incident was unfortunate and the papers will harvest it and have their fun with it but it won't last the week. "I don't for a minute think that Gordon Brown meant those words. I think he just had the wrong image in his head when he settled down in his car to have a rest." Wild, like Gardiner, wants more discussion of the questions Duffy raised, saying that Labour has nothing to fear from talking straight and openly about immigration. "Yes, it's a subject which can bring out people's base qualities and that's distasteful, but Brown was right in his reply. "With the EU it's a balanced thing; there's as many going out as coming in. Every job issued to a foreign national has to have been advertised in the Jobcentre for a month. "Look, I live in a multicultural community, here in Oldham, and we've had our problems. But we're reconciled and we're getting on. Style won't win out over substance for ever. And if you want substance you want Gordon Brown."