“You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to stand up and be counted,” declared Dorothy Marsh, 83, as she lugged two huge shopping bags through Wigan town centre on Friday afternoon.
Having lived through the second world war, Marsh said she worried the Salisbury attack could trigger a new global conflict and that it merited a tough response from Britain.
“I think if the Russians are the only ones who produce it [the nerve agent used in the attack] then whether they did it accidentally or not, they did it,” Marsh said. “I don’t think you rush to judgment, but you’ve got to be heard. You can’t just let it go, because germ attacks are a very serious thing.”
After a week of intense debate in Westminster about the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and the government’s response, the opinion 200 miles north was just as mixed. While most believed the finger points at Russia, many were reluctant to unquestioningly accept the government line and backed Jeremy Corbyn.
Mark Irwin, 29, a music lecturer at Wigan and Leigh college, said he was suspicious of the prime minister. “It seems like the government have jumped on it – should we be doing that when it could cause world war three?” he said.
“I think it’s very logical the way Corbyn’s come across and he’s been slated for it. He’s just said: let’s look at the evidence. I don’t know whether I believe, or want to believe, that Russia are definitely to blame. I don’t know whether there’s a government agenda there – we don’t really know.”
Darting out into the Lancashire drizzle for lunch, Sarah Dalton, 30, a maths teacher, said: “It’s looking like it is Russia, but we should see the evidence. It’s probably about money or it’s possibly to cover other stuff up, but mainly because they’re going to benefit from it in some way or because the rich people benefit.”
Leo Gobbato, an Italian market trader selling coconut macaroons (one for £1 or three for £2.50), said there was a Latin phrase for May’s response to the incident: casus belli (an excuse for war). Gobbato said he was no fan of Corbyn – “He’s not down to earth” – but agreed with the Labour leader’s approach on Russia: “He said something like: why wouldn’t you give them a sample of the nerve agent? I agree with that – it would clarify many things. I agree with the doubt he puts on the thing.”
There was unequivocal backing for Corbyn from the town’s Momentum activists, who echoed his words about the “problematic” history of information-gathering by British intelligence agencies.
Mick Shaw, chair of the Wigan, Leigh and Makerfield Momentum group, said it was “reckless” to expel 23 Russian diplomats with “no proof” that Moscow was to blame.
Skripal and his daughter might have had a suicide pact, Shaw suggested, or the chemical could have come from the government’s defence lab Porton Down, which is near Salisbury: “I don’t believe it was a nerve agent, based solely on the fact that Porton Down is something like seven miles away. What do they produce? Nerve agents. I don’t think it takes a seriously clever person to work it out.”
Andy Moorhouse, a founder of the 40-strong local Momentum group, said the government should produce “unequivocal evidence” Russia was behind the attack: “Bearing in mind we’re dealing with the same people who said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and other things that were rather dubious, I think Corbyn’s been quite sensible.”
Moorhouse said he was deeply cynical of the “Blairite, Progress, neo-liberal rump” of more than 30 Labour backbenchers who signed an early day motion backing “unequivocally” May’s stance on Russia.
“These MPs are the usual suspects,” he said. “What’s the point in opposition? The opposition is there to hold the government to account and a check and balance.”
He said he was pleased Lisa Nandy, Wigan’s Labour MP, who resigned from Corbyn’s frontbench in 2016 and helped run Owen Smith’s failed leadership campaign, had not yet spoken on the issue.