Inside the divided town where Reform is channelling Thatcher to win big
The i Paper visited Scunthorpe, where the right-wing party looks to be a serious contender in the race to be Greater Lincolnshire race
Andrea Jenkyns, the former Conservative MP, is wearing woollen protective equipment so thick that if she’s splashed by the liquid iron running at 1,500 degrees Celsius in the blast furnace, it will glance off her jacket as glass droplets.
Now running as Reform UK’s candidate for Greater Lincolnshire Mayor, Jenkyns is at the British Steel mills on the edge of Scunthorpe to add her voice to concerns about its future. With only two working furnaces it nowadays employs 3,000 people. Although still the biggest local employer, it once supported around thirty times as many workers.
While Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage in Westminster, have put migration at the top of their agenda, Jenkyns told The i Paper she would only “touch on” the issue during her campaign, focusing instead on creating a Lincolnshire skills board and an “industrial revolution” in the area.
“Labour voters are coming over to Reform,” she said, comparing the party’s appeal to former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher. It’s “a bit like Thatcher did – she pulled in both directions. Thatcher was the kind of leader we need in Britain at the moment.”

With Donald Trump winning in the US “what we will see in the West is a move away from the globalist agenda” and “more of a focus on your nation state and putting local people at the heart of your decisions,” Jenkyns said.
The mayoralty is a new post, part of the Government’s plans to devolve power to the regions, ranging across a huge area stretching from the Humber to the Wash, taking in historic Lincoln, plus Skegness and Grimsby on the coast.
The new mayor will have more power to make decisions locally, on transport, investment and housing for 1.2 million people. They will oversee an annual budget of £24m, along with an additional £20m for regeneration and £8m to build houses on brownfield sites, with further devolved powers coming down the track.
It’s an area crying out for investment. The steelworks are in discussion with government about keeping manufacturing in the UK, alongside securing investment to help them move to electric arc furnaces as part of wider decarbonisation plans.
“Lincolnshire struggles in terms of economic performance across a broad range of measures including employment and wages,” said Paul Swinney, director at the Centre for Cities think tank.
“Devolution offers the opportunity to improve that performance, but scope for seeing improvements is probably not going to be as great as in some of the devolved areas, like Greater Manchester, for example. It’s a rural area so its ability to attract high-skill, high-pay firms is more limited than the bigger cities.”
Reform made their big breakthrough in the area in last July’s general election, taking the formerly Tory seat of Boston and Skegness. Scunthorpe, with its declining fortune and rising number of incomers, is exactly the sort of place the party is convinced can be won over.
Scunthorpe town centre is largely empty of shoppers. The wind knocks over three standalone signs advertising nail bars. Plastic bags, leaves and beer cans twist together like water down a plughole. Nevertheless, it still boasts some big names including Boots, Vodafone and Hay’s Travel agency that have disappeared from other high streets.
Outside Greggs there is a metal statue of a steel worker and his wife on a bicycle dressed in clothes from the 1970s, when the plant was in its heyday. A sign on a lamppost exhorts residents to “Love Scunthorpe” and reminds them that under High Street Rule Number Four, “booze is banned”. Under the banner a teenage lad skids to a stop on his pushbike before tossing an empty can of Carling onto the ground.
At The Tavern pub, where a pint of John Smiths is £2.30, retired steelworker Paul Wilson is sitting at the bar. The 63-year-old used to be a Labour voter, but pro-Brexit, he voted Conservative in 2019 before switching to Reform at July’s general election.
“Labour are not the party of working-class people, they went somewhere else,” Wilson said. “Donald Trump winning is absolutely great; he calls a spade a spade. I think Reform will do well at the next election; they’ll build up.”
Scunthorpe is a “shithole,” he added. “People don’t like living here any more.”
Alec Gibson, 66, a retired electrician, has lived in Scunthorpe since 1962 and says the area has changed for the worse with shops shutting down and “potholes everywhere”.

“There’s a lot of foreigners in the town. They stay on their own. They all live in one place… I’m not racist at all, but people stick together. We’re just the same.”
Both claimed they would not visit the areas of Scunthorpe where migrants were living, in a sign of the deeper societal tensions over immigration that have become prevalent in parts of Britain.
Javed Khan is opening up his charity drop-in centre for young people with mental health problems, called Bismillah United, in a closed-down branch of Top Man. A sign for the changing rooms still dangles from the ceiling.

Khan, 62 was born in Pakistan, came to the UK in 1970 and lived in Sheffield, before settling in Scunthorpe for the last 30 years.
Asked if the community is integrated, he replied “no” but blamed all the mainstream political parties for stirring up tensions. “Racial tensions are all created,” he said, before turning his focus to the Reform UK leader. “Nigel Farage is a great salesman. I was a salesman, and I was told if there was a need, all well and good, but if there isn’t a need, create one.”
Vicky Plumtree, 47, is a youth work manager at Café Indie, a coffee and music house, where they offer barista training and confidence-building workshops for young people aged 13 and up, but also provide pensioners with a warm space to sit. She has voted Labour all her life including last July but is now questioning whether Sir Keir Starmer was the right choice: “If there was a general election tomorrow, I’m not sure I could bring myself to vote for him.”

When asked how she will vote in May’s mayoral election, she said: “I will not ever vote for Reform. She said she also would not be voting Conservative over cuts to youth services in the area.
Asked if the Labour candidate could win the mayoralty, Plumtree didn’t think so. “Just because of the national distaste at the minute with Labour, I think affiliating yourself with Labour is putting you on a bit of a back foot. I’m worried it’ll be Reform. I think it’s too early to expect people to go back to the Tories.”
Plumtree’s comments are reflective of the country’s highly divided electorate, with no party currently holding a significant lead in the polls.
Scunthorpe is very “communities within communities rather than a community,” she added. “We are a bit behind the times in terms of embracing multiculturalism but there are some really lovely people though and some really nice bits.”
Jason Lockwood, the Labour candidate, denied it is a two-horse race between the Conservatives and Reform. Lockwood, an entrepreneur and former chairman of Grimsby Town FC, says he is representing Labour out of loyalty to the party and its values. However, he’s also seeking to present himself as a political outsider as Starmer flails in the polls.
“The candidates in the other parties have been in the political system for years. It’s like arsonists pretending they want to run the fire brigade, they’ve created these problems,” he said. “I think the national polls are relatively close. I don’t think that’s representative what we’re seeing on the ground.”
At The Pink Pig Farm outside Scunthorpe, young mothers sip lattes at the café and browse the gift shop. Sally Jackson, 61, the manager, voted Labour at the general election but is now rueing her choice after changes to farmers’ inheritance tax, alongside a rise in business national insurance contributions and the increased cost of the minimum wage.

“We’ve been bashed over the head” by the Government she says.
Although she won’t be voting for Reform herself in May, she predicted the party would pick up support, as she believes Kemi Badenoch’s Tories are focusing too much on the south of the country.
“People are falling out of love with Labour and then it is a chance for the other parties – Reform in particular – to pick up some of those voters,” she said.
Standing for the Conservatives is Rob Waltham, currently leader of North Lincolnshire Council. He will be running a local campaign to boost skills, improve flood defences and stop the blight of pylons. On Reform, he argued that “other than on national issues, I’m not sure what they stand for” and that a vote for Jenkyns could end up splitting the vote and boosting Labour.
Back at the steel plant on the edge of Scunthorpe, in her PPE, visor and hard hat, Jenkyns sounded the same warning – a vote for the Tories would split the Reform vote, she noted. As May’s mayoral election gets closer, it’s an argument Lincolnshire’s voters will be hearing a lot more.