Gazing up at his old family home, recalls growing up in the early Seventies when dawn would bring a trickle, then a flood, of miners from the back doors of their red-brick terraces and into the shared alley leading to New Hucknall Colliery.
Hearing his father Paul leave their modest house, the youngster would scramble bleary-eyed to his bedroom window to wave goodbye as his old man joined the tide of workers marching past outdoor coal bins overflowing with free fuel.
“Watching my dad go off to the pit taught me, that’s what men do,” Anderson tells the Daily Express as he surveys the three-bedroom home. “They get up at the crack of dawn to go to work and do an incredibly difficult job to pay the rent, put food on the table and clothes on your back. And when you got to 15-17, you knew that’s what you were going to do too.”
And so it was that aged 18 Anderson followed his father down the mine, while his sisters Lisa and Paula went with their mother Jenny to the local clothing factory – because that’s what generations of British working-class folk did.
“It might not seem like an aspiration to go to work in a coal mine, but I knew that’s where I needed to go if I wanted money,” he says.
Lee Anderson MP in Ashfield with the Express’s Zak Garner-Purkis (Image: Pete Jenkins)
Anderson, who left the mine a year later after it closed, is not an overly emotive man, yet it’s clear the memory touches something deep inside. But, on this frosty January morning nearly five decades later, the only worker we see making his way down the alley in the Nottinghamshire town of Sutton-in-Ashfield is a local drug dealer, sucking on a vape.
The colliery and heavy industry that used to employ all those miners is long gone and the broken doors of the remaining coal bins have been filled with soiled clothing and broken children’s toys for as long as some people can remember.
“It’s gone from being a load of coal miners and factory workers to drug dealers and doleys,” says Anderson ruefully.
Anderson, 58, must be one of the UK’s most controversial politicians, having represented three different parties. He is certainly the most straight-talking.
He views this sorry scene not just as a former miner and local lad, but as the area’s elected representative having from the to Reform UK last year. This, in contrast to many politicians, makes the consequences of the decline of a constituency in the heartland of industrial Britain “personal”.
Powered by this journey from “pit to Parliament” and an uncompromising willingness to speak his mind, Anderson has fast become one of Britain’s most recognisable political figures.
Last summer, the people of Sutton-In-Ashfield endorsed him for a , this time for ’s disruptive political party. This, in an area where the Labour Party used to place cabinet ministers, was a serious vindication of Anderson’s popularity, given his previous elections as a Conservative Party MP and former Labour councillor in 2015.
He believes the transformation of this quiet part of Nottinghamshire into a Reform UK stronghold is part of the biggest shift in British politics in over a century, so the Express spent a morning with Anderson to find out if he’s right.
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Miners ‘were used’
The miners’ strike of 1984 put Nottinghamshire at the centre of a national dispute (Image: Getty)
Nottinghamshire was a flashpoint of the 1984 national miners’ strike when a majority of the local workers broke with the rest of the country by choosing to go down the pits rather than join the picket lines.
His dad, now 80 and still living in Ashfield, was one of a few who joined Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Miners (NUM) in refusing to work. He was a firm believer in the worker’s solidarity so Anderson’s formative years were spent listening to left-wing leaders like the NUM boss, Dennis Skinner and Tony Benn.
But standing on the industrial units that have replaced the huge shafts of the colliery where he first worked, Anderson sees the battle between the Conservative government and Scargill’s union very differently now.
“If you believed what they were saying; Maggie [Thatcher] and the were evil, we’d got to fight back and bring a government down,” he says.
“But I think the miners were being used as useful idiots and Arthur Scargill, who we idolised, was just in a battle between him and Maggie. It was egos, he really wanted to beat her and used decent men like my dad to get his own way. It wasn’t right.”
He points out that, in Ashfield, an entire generation has grown up and had their own children since the mines closed, the tradition of unemployment continually passed on.
Watching the struggles of these families during a decade spent working at the Citizens Advice Bureau, while Tony Blair’s government was in power, Anderson’s political compass started to shift to the right.
“It was there that I saw poverty and the causes of poverty,” he says. “The Labour Party created a lot of that with tax credits that made people dependent on benefits but offered no solutions. I would see families coming in with debt, housing and benefit problems. Then 10 years later I would see the kids come with the same problems.”
‘These are the “far right racists”’
Reform Party MP Lee Anderson attempts to distract a dog (Image: Getty Images)
Anderson knows that, when he heads back to Nottinghamshire from Westminster on a Thursday night, he’ll be greeted with some blunt reviews of his performance that week in Parliament from the regulars at his local pub, aptly named The Doghouse.
He starts every Friday morning in his constituency with a visit to a group of old ladies having tea at the covered market in the town centre. Walking through the shopping centre, the Ashfield MP is stopped by a childhood friend, keen to tell him about some cheap pints then bumps into his mother, Jenny, already relaying the concerns of the earlier pensioners.
“This is what is classed as economically inactive,” he quips when we finally reach the cafe, a joke that generates both hearty laughs and gentle scaldings about “how much tax” the women have paid. Today, the main complaint is anti-social behaviour by youngsters at an old people’s home. “You tell them off, and they just look at you and laugh,” one of the group tells Anderson. “I’ll look into it,” he replies, and you believe him.
As we tour the market, Anderson is obviously in his element, bantering with a bookseller one minute and offering a concerned ear to an irritated constituent the next.
Stood beside retired factory workers with steaming mugs of tea and men in Mansfield Town football tops, Anderson couldn’t be further from the Westminster bubble and you get the impression that’s exactly why he comes here regularly.
He believes the white working-class people in old industrial areas, like Nottinghamshire, have been ignored and demonised by those in power for far too long. Their shift to the right in the past two elections, he thinks, is because they are “fed up” of being taken for granted or branded “racist” for concerns over immigration.
“These are the ‘far-right racists’,” he tells the Express disgustedly when we’re back in the car. “You know, people on minimum wage who have seen and digested massive changes. They’ve gone from being traditional Labour voters to first-time Tory voters in 2019 to voting for me and Reform.
“It was incredible,” he continues, gesturing to a long row of old coal-board houses. “They all had Vote Reform posters outside.”
Anderson only planned to stand for two terms as a Member of Parliament but has changed his mind since joining ’s party.
He explains: “Now I think I might stand again because I feel like I’m part of something. In the last Parliament I didn’t feel part of anything and I just felt like voting fodder. You turn up, go to the voting lobby and do as you’re told.
“I don’t want to be that person. I want my country to be a good country. I want to sort things out and leave our country in a better state than when I arrived.”
‘I want my country back’
Lee Anderson in his constituency (Image: Pete Jenkins)
Anderson might claim to have been told what to do by party bosses, but his reputation is as someone unafraid to defy orders. Since being elected as a Labour Party councillor for the area a decade ago, he has regularly attracted controversy.
He first made headlines in 2018 for hiring a digger and placing concrete blocks to stop travellers from illegally setting up camp in a local car park, which resulted in his suspension by Labour. A few months later, he caused another storm by defecting to the and accusing Labour of being “taken over by the hard left”.
It was an audacious move that paid off big time because, a year later, swept into power by turning the ‘Red Wall’, including Sutton-In-Ashfield, blue.
Anderson became a Tory MP and the most obvious personification of this seismic shift in Britain’s political landscape. At Westminster, he attracted a level of publicity most first-time MPs could only dream of.
At one stage, he was going viral on a near-weekly basis, whether it was for refusing to watch the England football team during the 2021 European Championships over the players to telling migrants who didn’t want to live on the Bibby Stockholm to or with the food poverty campaigner Jack Monroe.
From the backbenches, he was able to build a public profile that far exceeded those passing through top positions in the ever-changing Tory leadership.
By 2023, was tapping Anderson for and almost immediately found himself caught in a media storm over comments from the ex-miner about supporting a return of capital punishment.
Anderson admits to being “mischievous” but believes much of the outrage stems from people removed from reality.
“The political establishment is just completely out of touch. I still see it every single day in Parliament, not just with the politicians, but with some of the journalists as well,” he says.
Now at Reform, the shackles, if they ever really hindered him, have been completely removed and he can lean into the message that first put him on the national agenda.
“I always say, ‘I want my country back’,” he explains. “And people go, ‘You racist bigot’, [But] what I want [is] my kids to go to schools and learn, not be told that there could be 25 different genders.
“I want to be able to ring a doctor up in the morning and get an appointment the same day. I want bobbies to walk the streets. I want rapists and murderers locked up for life and I don’t want illegal migrants being put up in four-star hotels. It’s not much, is it, really?”
As the Express prepares to leave Anderson gives a firm handshake and looks us in the eyes. “It’s nice that you could take time out to come to Ashfield and meet some real people in the real world,” he says.
“Now you can get back to the Westminster bubble and live a life of denial.”