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But, I think the numbers are on Labours side, and the Guardian link above seams to confirm this.
Its same position for my local Tory, she can ignore Labours increase of vote from 3000 to 18000 because she has a coalition for tories who's never vote labour and UKIPers.
They have to accept that they can't please all the people all the time.
HousecatHST-
I read that a while ago and tried to find the underlying report on the Best for Britain (obviously a pro-EU group) website but couldn't find it anywhere.
The methodology looked strange, for some reason they were comparing the number of Labour remainers to the Labour majority and I couldn't understand why. Surely the important comparison was whether the number of Labour leave voters (who may vote elsewhere) was smaller than the majority.
It uses the example of Don Valley:
Her constituency voted leave by 68.6%, but the Labour remain vote in 2017 was, at 10,371, substantially larger than her 5,169 majority.
Labour received ~25k votes in 2017, is it saying that ~ 15k were Labour leave voters? I can't understand how you go from those figures to the seat being safe if Labour do an about turn on Brexit. It would only take a swing of ~ 2,500 to switch from Labour to lose the seat.
aggi
Very few were Tory I'd suspect. There are a lot of long memories in these areas who remember the decimation of manufacturing and the pits and voting Tory is anathema to them.
Some would have been Labour who switched to UKIP. UKIP became the acceptable face of the Labour protest vote for those who would never vote Tory but felt that Labour had abandoned its working class roots.
Whether or not Labour is currently a viable party for a lot of these people is open to debate. Corbyn has struggled to win over a lot of them, things like this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-45634379 make people think that the focus isn't really on the things that matter to them. If an about face on Brexit is added to that then those voters will be going elsewhere.