General election: Recovery euphoria leaves Bury North underwhelmed

Five years ago, Jason Willett, a Lancashire furniture store owner, voted Conservative, helping the party capture a swing seat in northwest England and propelling David Cameron to power.

But at next week's UK general election, Mr Willett is planning to vote for the rival Labour party to register his frustration at an economic recovery he has been told about repeatedly but still does not feel.

"It hasn't fed up to the north - not properly," says Mr Willett, 45, sitting in a showroom cluttered with couches but few customers.

His switch says much about why the Conservatives are at risk of losing Mr Willett's constituency of Bury North - and possibly much more. The seat, which takes in much of the working class town just outside Manchester, has been a bellwether since it was created in 1983.

It abandoned the Conservatives to join Tony Blair's Labour landslide in 1997 and then flipped back in 2010 amid public outrage over an expenses scandal that landed the incumbent Labour MP in prison.

Mr Cameron has made the current contest a referendum on the economy. With shirt sleeves rolled up, the prime minister has cast himself as an impassioned champion of small business. He reminds voters at every turn of the revival he has presided over since a devastating financial crisis in 2008 and tells them it would be dangerous now to entrust it to Ed Miliband, the Labour leader.

The UK economy is 4 per cent larger than it was before the crisis, and has outperformed many continental European counterparts still mired in the euro crisis.

But the Conservatives' inability to expand their support beyond about a third of the electorate - much the same as Labour - suggests their message is not resonating as hoped. Many voters seem to view the recovery as shaky, or reserved for the wealthy.

"We don't see any recovery whatsoever," says Darla Green, who sells fabric in the sprawling Bury Market, a magnet for coach loads of older shoppers that features endless stalls of clothing, hardware goods, old records and the city's famed black pudding. "It needs a big kick up the bottom."

Data released this week appeared to support that view, showing the economy grew just 0.3 per cent in the first three months of 2015 - half the level of the previous quarter.

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At the local Conservative party headquarters, across the street and above a fish and chip shop, David Nuttall, the current MP, acknowledges the economy is not roaring as it was in the pre-crisis years. However, he believes voters understand that Mr Cameron inherited "a complete mess" from the Labour administration.

"The business owners I speak to, broadly speaking, are more confident about the future," he says.

"We do not need to keep reminding people of the basic truth: the economy - while it's recovering - is not something we should take for granted."

Bury North offers a mixed picture. Its terraced housing and rusted textile mills attest to Lancashire's industrial past. The constituency also takes in pockets of picturesque countryside and affluent villages with residents who commute to work in nearby Manchester.

At 6.4 per cent, Bury's unemployment rate is below that of many of the surrounding areas, but above the British average of 5.6 per cent. There are signs of economic prosperity, including a shining £350m shopping centre.

The unease felt elsewhere in the UK, not least about the future of the National Health Service, is also evident.

Andrew Roberts, managing director of Pennine Telecom, a local telecoms equipment group, feels grounds for optimism. "We are seeing shoots of growth," he says. "We are seeing more and more people making inquiries and placing orders."

His own life story neatly captures the sort of personal prosperity and upward mobility that both parties say they are keen to foster. He left school to join Pennine in 1978 as an apprentice engineer, and rose through the ranks until eventually taking it over in a management buyout in 2003. The company now boasts 65 employees and about £12m in sales.

He commends Mr Cameron's crisis management, saying: "The borrowing was out of hand [under Labour] and we just had to rein it in."

But he has no qualms about handing power back to Labour. If anything, Mr Roberts argues, it may be time to "release the purse strings" to boost the fledgling recovery.

In the postcard village of Ramsbottom, Mr Willett sounds more frustrated - so much so that he has written to Mr Nuttall to complain.

He bought the 110-year-old Isherwoods Fine Furniture in 2004 with the help of a government loan, but business has been sluggish and he has struggled to find a bank to lend him the money to buy the building that houses his showroom.

A recent trip to London offered a jarring reminder of the UK economy's diverging paths. "It's a different world," he marvelled. "You can just smell the wealth oozing out."

As far as he can judge, neither party has proposed anything that would really help his business. With his daughter heading to university, what ultimately swung him to Labour was Mr Miliband's promise to cut tuition fees pushed up by the coalition.

"I was always under the impression that you worked hard and you got the dividends," he said. "I don't think that's the case any more."

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