LAURA PIDCOCK has sore feet. She’s fresh from a doorstep canvassing session when I interview her — and it’s her third session of the day.

North West Durham, where Pidcock was recently selected as Labour’s candidate for the general election, is nominally a safe Labour seat. Pat Glass, the previous MP, had a majority of 10,056 votes over her nearest rival.

But Pidcock, a charity worker and trade union activist armed with a master’s degree in disaster management, is not taking a single vote for granted. Making the case for Labour following Brexit, internal party strife and Theresa May’s surprise general election announcement has been “tough,” she says. But that hasn’t knocked her determination.

“I’ve never been prouder than knocking on doors with the manifesto we’ve got. One thing that has been different, is that under Brown and Miliband, people were saying: ‘You’re all the same, you couldn’t put a fag paper between you and the Tories.’ This time I’ve never heard that once.”

Politics has never been far away from Pidcock, who was hailed as one of just a few leftwingers among Labour’s crop of candidates in winnable seats. The daughter of a social worker and a Citizen’s Advice Bureau manager, she grew up in Northumberland, and has lived in north-east England for all but a few of her 29 years.

“My family aren’t political Establishment in any sense of the word,” she tells me. “My mam grew up in deeply poverty-stricken conditions.

“Growing up, I noticed a lot of poverty around me. People being punished by the system.”

Though her family were “never rich” and her parents “had spells of unemployment,” Pidcock says she felt more fortunate than classmates at school. “I could never stand it when teachers told people off,” she says. “I felt that they were imposing power. I got in quite a lot of battles, but for all the right reasons.”

After school, Pidcock worked on an HIV awareness campaign — first in Birmingham, and then, for six months, in Nigeria. After a degree at Manchester Metropolitan University — thoroughout which she worked as a mental health support worker — she moved back to the north-east and began a job with Show Racism the Red Card. She spent eight years at the organisation, an educational charity which harnesses high-profile footballers as anti-racism role models.

“I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours hearing about what people are scared of,” she says. “I worked with people interested in and attracted to far right groups. It was always about insecurity about the future, and a romanticised notion of the past, and feelings of being taken over.

“Their feelings are real, and it’s true that communities had been forgotten.” But Pidcock helped people channel their anger towards the system, rather than the “migrant down the street,” she says.

Pidcock’s work at Show Racism the Red Card has given her a preparation that would probably be beneficial to many Labour candidates, fighting a general election in a country still divided by the Brexit vote. A majority of voters in North West Durham voted to leave the EU, and Pidcock believes it’s vital that’s respected.

“The people that I represent, I don’t think, ever felt they got anything out of the EU,” she says. “It’s true we were a net beneficiary in the north-east, but what the EU didn’t do is transform people’s lives.”

She says arguing that the EU helped fund cultural projects such as the Baltic gallery in Gateshead would have little resonance in the towns of her constituency. “So what? They don’t go and visit those places.”

Labour must make its line clear, she says.

“I certainly won’t be calling for a second referendum. The only message people would get is that democracy isn’t worth anything. I think that the Labour Party needs to say that we need to come out as quickly as possible, but it has to be a Brexit that protects workers’ rights. The hard right doesn’t want to leave the EU to benefit our people.”

Still, she says, it’s a “really difficult message to sell to people” on the doorstep, especially when they say they believe Theresa May would be stronger in negotiations.

“What I’m saying is: ‘Stronger for who’?”

It was not in the European Union but in her trade union, Unite, where Pidcock found her “political home.” As a workplace rep at Show Racism the Red Card, she became a key figure in the union’s youth structures and campaigned across Britain for better rights and in support of workers in dispute.

Pidcock speaks emotionally about a key realisation she experienced through her work in the labour movement.

“You always imagine the people who were involved in the poll tax riots, the miners’ strike, you always expect they were braver people, in more difficult times,” she says. “You realise, with your brothers and sisters in the trade union movement, the struggle is the same and that strength exists in every single person.”

The unions also brought her into the Labour Party — but at a time when unions were sidelined far more than under the current party leadership. Is she pleased with this shift?

“I think the process that has happened in last few years has been very, very necessary — a necessary transition, away from Blairism,” she says.

“It’s been very draining, it’s diverted our attention from real enemies and it’s been frustrating — but very necessary.

“It’s very hard to be living through it, in a former mining community who could potentially be represented by a Tory who loves Thatcher, that’s heartbreaking.” She quickly adds: “I don’t think that will be happen, but it will be tight.”

Even if Labour is defeated, she can’t see a full reversal of the Corbyn phenomenon.

“I don’t think you can take the energy of the last two years and for that to disappear,” she says. “Our confidence [would] be knocked, our physical energy will be depleted, but the agenda won’t go away.”

That’s not to say she’s predicting a wipeout. “Being really realistic, I don’t think it’s as dramatic as everyone’s making out,” she smiles.
But she describes the choice facing her constituency as “chalk and cheese.” Her Tory opponent Sally-Ann Hunt is a councillor in East Sussex and a “corporate finance adviser.”

“The people of North West Durham really have a choice — between a hard-right-as-they-come Tory, and me,” Pidcock says.