Sarah Garcia de Bustos was born in Preston and grew up in Much Hoole. A former journalist, she has worked in education for twenty years. She is Deputy Chairman (Political) of Cheadle Conservatives and constituency officer for Manchester Withington.
Lancashire folk don’t make a fuss. We get on with it.
For anyone born in Preston, with the sweep of the Ribble Valley on one side and the towns of South Ribble on the other, this county instils a specific outlook on life. It is a landscape that blends natural beauty with a deep, unapologetic heritage; where the imposing silhouette of Pendle Hill looks down upon bustling high streets, quiet stone villages and multi-generational family farms.
Lancashire has its own rhythm. It has a particular grace, underpinned by pragmatism. Around here, we simply call it grit.
My own deep affection for this county, and my understanding of the values that define it, were shaped by my grandparents, Jack and Louie. Born in 1917 and 1920, they belonged to a generation that didn’t have the luxury of over-complicating things. They lived through the sharpest edges of the twentieth century: the hardships of the interwar years, the collective sacrifice of the Second World War, and the long, sparse era of post-war rebuilding.
They were not people who studied political theory or sought out abstract ideological debates. Instead, their worldview came from everyday Lancashire life. My grandad worked as a joiner, a trade requiring patience and a deep respect for building things that last. My grandma started her working life as a riveter, a role demanding precision, stamina and a commitment to reliability under pressure. Together, their hands helped shape the backbone of our county.
They understood the community solidarity of the Preston Guild; Grandma took me to watch some of the events in 1992 and told me all about Guilds past as I wolfed down a truffle cake from Greenhalgh’s on Orchard Street.
Their sense of humour and determination was played out against the soundtrack of George Formby, whose working-class warmth and quick-witted optimism capture the soul of the county. I can still sing most of his back catalogue, the result of blissful weekends watching films with them and learning all about what life was like in “their day”.
Their principles were simple, unshakeable, and self-evident: you work hard for what you have, you live within your means and you look out for your neighbours without waiting for a directive from someone else. They lived for the traditions that bonded communities together: Wakes week, when the mills shut down and half of Preston went to Blackpool; the chaotic joy of the Easter Monday egg rolling down the steep slopes of Avenham Park; and the Pram Race in Walmer Bridge. These traditions might look odd to an outsider, but they were the fabric of a self-reliant culture that knew how to work hard and come together when it mattered.
That spirit is still the heartbeat of Lancashire. You see it in the determination of small business owners, like Emerson’s Coffee Shop in Longridge or Grandad Jim’s Traditional Sweet Shoppe in Leyland, where they roll with the economic punches and keep going. You see it in our agricultural communities, where families work around the clock to balance modern demands with the ancient responsibility of keeping the nation fed.
This is why traditional conservative principles do not need to be heavily sold or repackaged in our part of the world. They are already part of everyday life here. Lancastrians do not look for grand, top-down bureaucratic interventions or hollow rhetoric. Their expectations are much more grounded: the freedom to innovate and grow a business, the infrastructure required to keep communities safely connected, and the reassurance that local heritage and green spaces will be treated with stewardship rather than sacrificed to arbitrary targets.
We should be honest, though. In 2024, Lancashire stopped trusting us. We lost seat after seat across the county, and plenty of people who had voted Conservative all their lives either stayed at home or went to Reform. They didn’t change their values. They decided we’d moved away from ours. The shopkeeper in Leyland watched business rates go up while footfall went down. The farmer in the Ribble Valley felt like an afterthought. The commuter stuck on a cancelled train out of Preston heard a lot of promises about levelling up and saw very little arrive. If we want those votes back, we have to earn them with the basics done well: lower costs for small businesses, a fair deal for farmers, and transport that actually works.
As our party looks towards national recovery, the answers we need will not be found by chasing fleeting trends or over-intellectualising our message. They are found by returning to the steady common sense of places like Lancashire.
The values of a generation born a century ago – resilience, responsibility, and a commitment to home – remain the blueprint for a stable and prosperous future. My grandparents carried those values through the last century without ever calling them conservative. Our job is to carry them through this one, and to be proud to give them that name.