Letter from Makerfield: Can Andy Burnham hold back the tide?

Despite having a heavy cold, Andy Burnham was energetic as he answered questions at a hustings at Winstanley College in the metropolitan borough of Wigan on Wednesday afternoon. He told the audience that his “three kids” had attended the sixth-form college. He mentioned buses a lot. He said he wanted to “change the story” of the country.

His chief opponent, Reform’s Robert Kenyon, a local plumber and former Army reservist, spoke about grooming gangs and defending the green belt. The Restore candidate, Rebecca Shepherd, was absent but her party, led by Rupert Lowe, MP for Great Yarmouth, is threatening to split the vote on the right and therefore ease Burnham’s return to Westminster. The Liberal Democratic, Conservative and Green candidates are irrelevant in the contest. Only Reform can stop Burnham but Restore are determined to thwart Reform.

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What is Makerfield? There is no town by that name and no coherent centre to the semi-rural constituency, which is an agglomeration of former mining communities, small towns and villages. In the May local elections, Reform won 24 of the 25 seats contested in Wigan borough, with Labour failing to win a single seat. The constituency is 97 per cent white British. Property prices are relatively low and home ownership is at around 70 per cent. There are areas of deprivation in Abram, Bickershaw, and Hindley Green but, overall, this is far from the caricature of a left-behind northern constituency.

And yet, during the several days I spent here, I picked up an overwhelming sense of unease. The most hopeful were the students at Winstanley College. One super-optimist was Angus Chang, a sixth-former studying science A-levels. He travels to the college by coach from Warrington, where he lives with his parents in what he called “mini-China town”. Originally from Hong Kong, he has found a new place to call home. “In Hong Kong people are emotionless, they protect themselves. Here people are much more open.” But even he conceded that he would have to return to Hong Kong to find a good job.

While in Winstanley I visited the Bag and Bean café. “You’re the first journalist we’ve had in here,” said Alexandra Massie, who is in her forties and the mother of an adult son. She was “definitely not” voting for Burnham. Like so many, she mentioned the exploitation of vulnerable white working-class girls by rape and grooming gangs. “People are fearful of what’s going on in the country and what’s going to happen. So many young men are coming in but we don’t know who they are. They’re unvetted, they don’t have credentials. They come from different cultures. We fear them.”

Alexandra is now reluctant to visit Wigan city centre, only a few miles away. It used to have a “lovely, thriving market”. Her colleague Laura Albers, manager of the café, has two daughters at Deanery School in Wigan. “But we’ve had lock-ins at the school recently because of stabbings near the bus station. We are sheltered out here in Winstanley but it’s changing. It’s fear people feel, especially when you have daughters. Go on, walk around on the estates, talk to people.”

Which is what I did.

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Wigan has one of the highest male suicide rates in the country. Between 2010 and 2017 the local council had its budget cut by 43 per cent, the third worst affected local authority in England. The city has few anchor institutions. There is Wigan Warriors, the all-conquering rugby league club, and Wigan Athletic. Heinz is the largest local employer. Last summer, Nippon Electric Glass, the country’s largest fibreglass factory in Hindley Green, in Makerfield, closed with the loss of 250 jobs.

Last year Lisa Nandy, MP for Wigan since 2010, speaking to me about asylum seekers being dispersed across her constituency into Serco-run houses of multiple occupation (HMOs), said that locals were so “angry” the north of England “could go up in flames”.

The towns of Makerfield are not about to go up in flames, and many locals welcome the influx of Burnham-curious media from across the world. “We’ve not had this much political interest in my lifetime,” said Peter Brown, a retired NHS finance director.

He is affluent, a traditional Labour supporter. “But I’ve had the feeling in recent years that neither of the two main parties have been listening to people. Look at all the flags up everywhere. It’s not racist. We’re a small island and I think we’ve already lost our identity. And it’s a message that the two main parties don’t want to hear.”

I mentioned his comments to Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary who is co-political lead on the Burnham campaign, when we had lunch in the market town of Ashton-in-Makerfield.

“It’s not anger or rage I’m picking up,” she says. “It’s disappointment, frustration at the lack of change. There’s a general feeling that government doesn’t understand the issues people face, it isn’t listening. There’s a complete sense of betrayal – voters put their trust in Labour and have been let down.”

When George Orwell visited Wigan to write about the effects of mass unemployment in the 1930s, he was struck by the harshness of working- class life and the resilience of the local people. Deep underground among the miners he encountered a social solidarity that moved him. Here was an England he could finally respect. Being a contrarian, in the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell directed his polemical fire not at the mine owners, but the bourgeois left in London. He had identified a faultline in the coalition between Labour’s working-class base and middle-class progressives that has today widened into a chasm.

“Labour used to weigh the votes around here,” a middle-aged Reform canvasser told me as he and eight male colleagues knocked on doors in heavy rain on a housing estate in Abram. “These estates used to be all Labour. Now we find they are for Reform. You find the Labour voters in the wealthier areas and the bigger houses.”

The canvasser grew up in Wigan, went to Oxford University and now lives in Darwen. “Labour have turned a blind eye to the grooming gangs,” he said, more in sadness than anger, “to what’s going on in the country, to the state of the country. They’ve betrayed the working class.”

That word again: betrayal.

“If Andy wins here,” one visiting Labour MP said, “it will be symbolic. He will have taken on and beaten Reform.”

The Wigan constituencies have been Labour since before the First World War. That Reform is even close to winning here demonstrates just how desperate Labour’s plight is.

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On Thursday my return train from Wigan was delayed (“because of issues on the West Coast mainline”), and so I spent a couple of hours in the city centre. I have family living across the former mill and mining towns of the north-west and on my visits over the decades I have always been struck, particularly in Wigan, but also in the centres of Oldham, Blackburn, Rochdale, and Burnley, of something having been lost - civic pride, collective purpose.

It was early evening yet the mood after a day of torrential rain was desolate. In Market Square there were seven young men sitting on benches, smoking or looking at their phones, and I approached them. Three were Afghans, two were Iranian Kurds and the two others turned away when I addressed them. The Afghans said they had arrived as asylum seekers, were working (two in restaurant kitchens, one in a warehouse) and would soon be British citizens. The Kurds had not worked since arriving in the country two years ago. “We have no passports,” one said. The men lived in shared housing and were not threatening but they were bored. I recalled what Alexandra and Laura had said at the Bag and Bean café about why they avoided the city centre.

Apart from the students at Winstanley College who had vigorously applauded Burnham, everyone I spoke to, including numerous Labour and Reform activists, felt something had gone wrong or been lost. Different reasons were cited: uncontrolled immigration, the grooming gangs, the cost of living, poor infrastructure, congested roads, inadequate housing. The Green Party candidate, Sarah Wakefield, spoke of a mood of “fed-upness among people on the doorstep”.

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One morning, while visiting an illegal toxic rubbish tip in Bickershaw that has been the source of much local anger, I met Professor Helen Thompson, writer and Cambridge University academic. She was visiting for a chapter of her forthcoming book on England.

The site resembles a set from a dystopian movie: burned out vehicles, barbed wire-strewn fences, derelict pre-fabs, toppling towers of stinking rubbish. Controlled by criminal gangs, the toxic dump is close to houses and backs on to a local school and last summer a fire there took several days to contain. Part of the land is owned by the Crown Estate and Burnham has intervened, through the King’s private office, to have it closed. “If you want a symbol of politics not working, it’s that illegal dump,” Haigh said.

“Labour can only be led from the north or Midlands if it is to have a chance of restoring the trust it has lost among the working class,” Thompson said. “If it is not led from the north, it concedes places like these to Reform. Starmer can’t compete here. Another north London liberal leader would kill the party.”

There is kind of shared foreboding among Labour people. Dark undercurrents are flowing in our politics. Before I left for Wigan, a Starmer adviser at No 10 said to me: “a wave is coming”.

What is this wave, what do they think is coming? Is it victory for the Reform-led radical right, or something darker? Kemi Badenoch has spoken of the looming threat of ethno-sectarian civil war. Rupert Lowe spoke to me last week of a coming “retribution for people who’ve undermined Britain as it used to be”.

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Burnham is what the sociologist Max Weber called a charismatic politician. One ally described his style as “Clintonesque”. I’ve watched him over the years. He has emotional intelligence. He is relentlessly ambitious but also pragmatic, nimble, flexible. The Reform canvassers dismissed him as a “chancer”. But you need swagger in politics, you need to relish the game. It helps if you like people.

Burnham has become a vessel of hope for a party that is demoralised and divided. There is pathos in Starmer’s struggles as he stands defiantly on deck as senior ministers mutiny around him and the ship of his premiership goes down. “Nothing Keir does matters now: it is over,” one Labour MP said.

If Burnham wins, he will arrive in Westminster during an economic downturn without a direct democratic mandate and, his team concede, politically constrained by Labour’s 2024 manifesto. There is rightly discussion about a democratic deficit: Burnham, if he becomes prime minister, would have entered No 10 via the back door of a by-election.

This is what’s at stake in Makerfield: voters have the chance to choose the man who would be prime minister. Or they could reject him. Whatever happens on 18 June, Burnham believes he can hold back the coming wave and defeat Reform or a coalition of the radical right.

But what if he can’t? What if the king of the north, so confident as he tours Makerfield, where he feels rooted, turns out to be Labour’s King Canute: a leader who finally accepts that he cannot hold back the tide? We could be contemplating the end of the Labour Party.