Makerfield by-election and the reshaping of Britain

The Makerfield constituency is in the heart of rugby league territory.

Effectively, it's the suburbs of southern Wigan.

One of the bigger towns in the constituency is Ashton-in-Makerfield, near the horse racing track at Haydock, and it is home to the Brian Boru Irish Center.

Dating from 1889 it's Britain's oldest, according to Club Secretary Tom Moran.

"The Irish community now - there's not many first generation Irish.

"Back in the day, after the famine in Ireland, we had a lot of immigration to the mills in Wigan, glass making in St Helens.

"And it's a huge mining area around here, or was.

"Many people coming in from Ireland got the jobs and congregated in Ashton-In-Makerfield, which is in the centre of all those areas of Wigan, St Helens and Liverpool and Manchester."

A bastion of Labour in the past, the economic and social shifts in the area have changed its politics too.

No simple routine of voting for the Labour candidate.

Once the mines closed down and people moved on to other types of work, there was less automatic loyalty.

Labour's vote share fell from 75% to 45% over the past three decades.

But the Conservative vote has virtually disappeared.

In the general election two years ago the new party Reform UK - the rebranded Brexit Party -came in second.

Its candidate was Robert Kenyon, who is standing once again for the party in the by-election.

Is Reform worth a try, we asked voters in the constituency?

"Definitely worth a try. Labour's let us down, Conservatives have let us down. We need a change, people need a change," was a typical response.

"I think it's less about Reform and probably more about Labour and the way they've probably changed their approach," said James Carr, a former Labour voter who now says he is not sure.

"They lost a lot of supporters through, you know, taking away support for old age pensioners around the heating allowance, and I think Reform, you know, speak to people around immigration, which I think floats a lot of people's boat in that respect - doesn't float mine - but there is an echo chamber there.

"Which goes back to my original point of why you probably don't know really where to vote."

Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, is well aware of these changes and the challenges they present.

He has made little secret of his ambition to lead the Labour Party and replace Keir Starmer as prime minster.

But if he is to do so he must first become an MP, and that means getting elected in Makerfield in the by-election that was arranged to get him back into parliament.

It is a hurdle he simply must clear: fall here, and his career in national politics ends.

Win, and he gets to move to the next level, setting up a leadership challenge against a sitting prime minister.

The stakes are massive for him, his party and his country.

We caught up with him in a housing estate in Winstanley.

His campaign is concentrating on undecided voters, going door to door in a very low key, unobtrusive way, with a very small canvas team.

"We've had so many people out, we've knocked every door (in the constituency) twice now, we know who those people are, and I'm going back personally to them, because same will be true in Ireland: People have lost a lot of faith in politics, they've lost trust in Labour," he said.

Is it going to be as tight as some people think?

"It's tight, yeah. And I don't take anything for granted, not a single vote.

"The risk is, I think, if we don't do this job of reconnecting with people, you know, Britain will become like America, where politics becomes very deeply divided, very dysfunctional, you know.

"People who vote for the different parties not able to talk in the workplace or in the community or in the pub, and we really can't let Britain go there.

"And I think this by-election is on the cusp of that of that challenge, but this area is a place I know well.

Mr Burnham stresses his local connections to the area: part of Makerfield was once included in the neighbouring constituency of Leigh, which first elected Andy Burnham to Westminster a quarter of a century ago, and saw him rise up to become Health Secretary.

"Yeah, this area is a place I know well. I've got deep roots here.

"I've lived in this borough for 25 years. I grew up here, born in Liverpool, as people probably know.

"My kids went to school and college here. I was in the local Irish club this morning, and had a wonderful morning chatting to people who have got that similar heritage as I've got.

"And they just want better from politics, and that's what we're trying to get to.

"It's change Labor, change politics, hopefully change Britain back to a better place as a result.

"They're looking at both, you know, looking at all of those issues, local and national.

"There's a very big local issue here around planning and the green belt, but nationally they worry that Labour lost touch.

"A lot of people cite the removal of the winter fuel payment, you know, as the first big sign of that. So it's a job of reconnecting with people."

But social democrat and labour parties all across Europe, with the exception of Spain, have lost huge amounts of support over the past two or three decades.

A fragmenting political marketplace has made space for the hard right and green parties at the expense of the centre left.

Does Any Burnham think the British Labour Party can buck the trend, or is Labour already going the same way as its French, German and Italian sister parties?

"No, it's not gone," he insists, "but if we do nothing and we leave things as they are, then we will start to lose places like this forever, and we can't let that happen".

Mr Burnham said that what has happened to the Labour Party in Scotland cannot be allowed to repeat elsewhere.

"But this is the challenge that we've got, and this is what this fight is all about.

"I'm a person who tries to unify people. I do my politics in a positive way, place first, not party first.

"You know, we’ve got to change politics if we're going to get people's trust back.

"You have to change politics, and I do my politics very differently than the Westminster way, and that's what I'm trying to do."

Labour got 45% of the vote here in the last general election, but Mr Burnham scored 62% in the Greater Manchester mayoral election.

So he is more popular than the party around here.

But such is the change that this former red wall area has undeergone that nothing can be taken for granted.

Ask the Tories.

They used to be the second party of the Makerfield constituency.

But that came to a halt two years ago, when they were eclipsed by Reform.

In last month’s local elections, the eight wards that cover the Makerfield constituency didn’t return a single Conservative Party councilor to Wigan Borough Council.

Reform won half the vote, but Labour’s better vote management and candidate selection saw it emerge as the biggest party.

But Reform is definitely number two.

Yesterday, Nigel Farage paid his latest trip to the constituency his party has already declared it will throw everything at to win.

"There is no doubt in my mind that this is close, no doubt in anybody's mind that it is a two-horse race," declared Mr Farage, who also said momentum is swinging behind his local candidate, Councillor Kenyon.

This month sees the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum, when Mr Farage said many things to get that one over the line.

His Vote Leave campaign did very well in Makerfield, pulling in 65% of the vote - much better than the national average of 52%.

So it’s a 'Brexity’ kind of place too.

Which means Rob Kenyon - a local plumber and army reservist who is not a political big shot by any means - nevertheless is in with a shot on 18 June, polling day in Makerfield.

He has been battling national press exposure of old social media posts that don’t look good, especially to women voters.

His solution is to stress his local credentials.

Explaining his move into politics, he told the BBC: "First and foremost, I think people would feel like they had a voice now, whereas in the last 40 years they've not had a voice, and that's why people are stopping voting for Labor around here.

"We were knocking on doors this morning - ex-miners voting for Reform - a lot of people have given up on Labour because they've not been listened to.

"I've said it before, and it might sound like a cliché, but I'm not a career politician.

"I'm just a normal working lad who's become so... I don't say angry, but I thought... nobody's listening to us. I'm going to throw my hat in the ring, and I'm going to have a go myself. I'm not perfect, but I'll do my best."

In their appeals to the traditional working class in the north of England, Rob Kenyon and Andy Burnham are fishing in the same pond, but offering very different bait and lures.

Which is what makes this by-election an important clash of ideas, not simply a vehicle for Mr Burnhams’s leadership ambitions in his own party.

Because if Reform can stop the Burnham bandwagon here, it will have everything to gain from Mr Starmer’s continued tenancy in 10 Downing Street.

However, Reform is facing a battle on its own right flank with Restore Britain, a breakaway party that is further to the right on migration.

Led by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, the party, launched in February, has attracted the backing of Elon Musk, who has amplified its message on his X platform.

It won’t win the by-election, but if small sample polling is in any way correct, the 7% share it seems to be attracting is bled off almost entirely from the Reform vote.

Which in a first past the post system, hands an advantage to Andy Burnham.

It is why Nigel Farage was so quick to make political capital from the Henry Nowak case in Southampton last week, and why the events that are playing out in Belfast are proving to be such a delicate matter for Reform right now.