'Ask anyone here about the traffic... it's chock-a-bloc all times of the day'

The Labour contender in the battleground seat of Bolton West believes it is essential to rebuild the trust of voters in a ‘broken’ political system. It’s 37-year-old Phil Brickell’s first run at becoming an MP. Bolton born and bred, he currently represents the Baguley area on Manchester city council.

He is confronting the task of overturning a near-9,000 majority to unseat the sitting Conservative MP Chris Green in a seat which has traditionally been won by whichever party forms the new government. Coun Brickell's day job is working in NatWest’s financial services.

He was privately educated at Bolton School, but the son of a former paramedic is keen to emphasise that it was a subsidised place. He later obtained a law degree from the highly-rated Durham University and spent a year on an exchange placement at the University of Hanover in Germany.

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Coun Brickell has been involved in Labour Party for a decade and it's through this activism that he met his now wife. “I was motivated to stand because of a sense that places like Horwich, Westhoughton and Bolton have been left behind by a government which is more focused on pleasing its core outside of the north west,” he said.

“People who live in these towns across the constituency don’t have the opportunities they deserve to get on in life. When I talk to people on the doorstep they tell me they are really angry with politics and politicians, because they have had lots of pithy three or four-word slogans promised to them and they haven’t been delivered upon.

“When I tell people face-to-face that I am honest about dealing with