Harry Harpham, who died on 4 February, had a tragically short period representing Sheffield constituency of Brightside and Hillsborough. He was widely respected and liked in Sheffield, a city he cherished as the place where he got an education and served as a councillor, and part of a dwindling band of Labour members of parliament who have been miners at the coal face. His constituency was essentially the successor to Sheffield Brightside, with some elements transferred to it in 2010 from the Central constituency and the abolished Hillsborough seat; the cumbersome name is a gesture towards the long history of Hillsborough as a constituency name. Brightside will always be associated with its MP from 1987 until 2015, the Sheffield city council leader turned cabinet minister David Blunkett, who grew up in Firth Park in the seat.

Brightside’s MPs have tended to be working-class trade unionists. Before Harpham and Blunkett there was Joan Maynard, National Executive Committee member and agricultural workers’ trade unionist known as ‘Stalin’s Granny’ for her links to the Communist party and her general sunny demeanour. She gained the seat in October 1974 from Eddie Griffiths (a rare middle-class interruption), who had held it in a byelection in 1968 when most other Labour seats were falling but was deselected for, among other things, carousing with the Ipswich Tory MP Ernle Money. Brightside’s hostility to the Conservative party still runs deep – a Tory candidate has only topped 20 per cent of the vote once since 1970 (in 1979).

Seats do not come much more ‘core Labour’ than this one. Labour has held Brightside since 1922, with the exception only of the anti-Labour landslide of 1931 that produced an anomalous Conservative gain. Labour majorities have tended to be mountainous and have been over 13,000 even in the last two general elections. Hillsborough’s history until its abolition was the same, although the Alliance came close in the 1980s in that seat.

Sheffield is sharply divided between the industrial working-class east of the city and the more affluent, but increasingly student-dominated, west; Brightside is north-east Sheffield and firmly part of the working-class side of the city. The southern and western boundary of the seat runs roughly along the valley of the River Don, except the Hillsborough ward which is mostly west of the river. To the east it reaches the M1 just north of Junction 34, the impressive Tinsley viaduct from which motorists could once see the blast furnaces of the steelworks but which now commands a vista over the Meadowhall shopping complex. The other main landmarks are the football stadium in Hillsborough, and an Iron Age fort site on Wincobank Hill.

The constituency is a working-class stronghold, with only six others having a lower proportion of senior managers resident at the time of the 2011 census. It has the 15^th highest proportion of social renting households, high unemployment, a comparatively large number of people of working age without educational qualifications, and one of Britain’s highest rates of unemployed single-parent households. The working population is in low-paid post-industrial employment in health and social care and manual and routine work. The byelection will be an education in the politics of the white working poor and the jobless. Benefit cuts, sanctions and – in this area of council-rented whole houses – the bedroom tax will all be of concern. But so will education: Sheffield’s status as a higher education hotspot and Harry Harpham’s experience have fewer echoes than there should be. And while Sheffield is generally a harmonious city, the high British National party and United Kingdom Independence party votes in Brightside suggest that attitudes to immigration and political elites are hostile.

The core of the seat is composed of council-built estates such as Parson Cross, Southey and Shiregreen. Sheffield council was an early Labour gain and started a big building programme in the inter-war years; the estates are for the most part semi-detached working-class suburbs built over the area’s hilly landscape. Three wards – Southey, Firth Park, Shiregreen and Brightside – are part of this belt. There are some differences in social composition, but they are all mostly white (Southey in particular) and working class, with high levels of social renting (Firth Park most of all). The two other wards are Hillsborough, a mostly owner-occupied area of older terraced housing, and Burngreave where the constituency includes an inner city area just north of the city centre. Burngreave has most of the constituency’s ethnic minority population, including a Yemeni community with its origins among immigrant steelworkers.

Except in Hillsborough, turnout tends to be uniformly low. The Liberal Democrats have done well in the past in Sheffield council elections, but they never made much headway in Brightside. Four of the five wards in the seat have never voted for anyone but Labour since the wards were created in 2004, while Hillsborough went to the Liberal Democrats only at Labour’s lowest ebb in 2007 and 2008. In recent years Ukip has scored some impressive votes in the three estate wards (over 40 per cent in Shiregreen and Brightside in 2014) without winning. Before 2010, the BNP was capable of getting a vote share of over 20 per cent in these areas. Labour has dominated in Burngreave and has won well against divided opposition in Hillsborough. By 2015 Ukip had emerged as the only significant anti-Labour party in the seat, coming a clear second in every ward in the local elections and in the constituency in the general election.

Brightside and Hillsborough should therefore, like the other byelection so far in the parliament in Oldham West and Royton, be a contest fought between Labour and Ukip. The potential is there for a fair-sized swing to Ukip in a low-turnout byelection, given that the Labour’s lead over Ukip was only 17 per cent in the 2014 local elections, and the party’s support fell to 42.2 per cent in the 2008 local elections. But even a big swing like 10 per cent would still leave a substantial Labour majority in place. The party would probably do well to select a candidate in the mould of Blunkett and Harpham – being on the left or right matters less than having local roots and a sound grounding in common sense. Labour should be able to look on the Brightside of life in the byelection and future elections.

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Lewis Baston is a contributing editor to Progress and senior research fellow at Democratic Audit. He tweets @LewisBaston

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Photo: MadAdminSkillz