Three women are vying for one of Labour’s safest seats in a byelection that will test Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal in his party’s heartlands.
The favourite to be selected to fight Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough for Labour is Gill Furniss, a local councillor whose husband, Harry Harpham, was the MP until his death from cancer last month aged 61.
Also in the running are a local beautician and a junior doctor from Islington North – which happens to be Corbyn’s constituency. The trio were picked from a mixed longlist of five men and women by Labour’s national executive committee on Monday.
Local party members will decide on Thursday evening who will contest the election, which is likely to be delayed until 5 May to coincide with local elections in Sheffield.
Harpham, a former miner, was elected to parliament for the first time last May, with a majority of 13,807 (56.6% of the vote), with Ukip trailing in second with 22.1%. He succeeded former home secretary David Blunkett, who stepped down ahead of the general election.
The constituency contains Page Hall, where trouble flared in 2014 between the more established Pakistani and Yemeni community and newcomers of Slovak Roma origin. The area was recently the subject of a Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall series, Keeping Up With the Khans, made by the same production company behind the controversial Benefits Street.
Blunkett was accused of stoking tension in the area after telling the Roma community they had to make more of an effort to fit in with British culture: “We have got to change the behaviour and the culture of the incoming community, the Roma community, because there’s going to be an explosion otherwise. We all know that,” he told BBC Sheffield.
Furniss, who has been a councillor since 1999, is the daughter of a Sheffield steel worker and has spent her career in public service in the city. She stood for Labour in Sheffield Hallam in 2001 but came third to the Liberal Democrats and Tories, one term before Nick Clegg won the seat.
She voted for Andy Burnham in the Labour leadership election but insists she is “behind Jeremy Corbyn 100%”.
She said: “It’s interesting how many people we’re hearing on the doorstep saying that they really like Jeremy’s straight-talking politics, people who perhaps had stopped voting Labour because they thought politicians were all the same”.
But she has yet to meet a Tory voter wooed over to Labour because of the new leader, she conceded, saying: “Sheffield is not a Tory city.”
Jayne Lim, a junior doctor and health economist from London, is being billed as the “Corbyn candidate” after she posted a series of pro-Corbyn tweets, including a selfie with the leader at a Chinese Labour dinner. It is a label she does not wholeheartedly embrace. “It’s very divisive. I don’t think this idea of putting people in camps helps anybody,” she said.
Perhaps aware that her London background is likely to be a hindrance in what is expected to be a race fought largely on local issues, Lim is keen to stress that her mother trained as an accountant in the Steel City, and that she has been visiting Sheffield since she was a child. She is pro Europe but refused to say whether she supported Corbyn’s stance against the renewal of Trident, the nuclear deterrent.
Also on the ballot on Thursday is local beautician and councillor Jayne Dunn, who runs a salon in the Broomhill area of the city centre offering facials, manicures and waxing.
A councillor since 2012, Dunn is a single mother who tells voters that she knows what it’s like to be down and out, having been made homeless when her son, Tom, was little. Tom now works in Yvette Cooper’s office in parliament. Unsurprisingly, Dunn supported her son’s boss in the Labour leadership election.
About 600 party members are eligible to vote on Thursday, according to a party spokesman. Only full members who joined at least six months ago can take part in the selection, ruling out those who paid £3 to join before the leadership election that Corbyn won.
