The truth about Makerfield

There is a white rage in the air and no by-election is going to change that

Will Lloyd

Good morning. This is Will Lloyd, deputy editor of the New Statesman.

I’ve just spent most of the last two weeks in Makerfield during what I suppose we must call an unprecedented, even historic by-election.

Image: The Red Dress

I tried to avoid politicians and the media, and spend as much time in the towns and villages that make up the constituency. The longer I was there speaking to people about their lives the more I felt that the country’s problems were much deeper than one by-election or switch of Prime Minister could solve.

A season of superlatives was dawning over Makerfield, a collection of peri-rural suburbs, former pit villages and obscure towns spread beneath Wigan. The vote was seismic. Historic. Make-or-break. The chance of a lifetime. Andy Burnham had staked his political future and the future of the Labour Party on a single vote against Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon, a plumber and former army reservist, burdened by a digital fossil record of embarrassing remarks about women. Makerfield was a constituency that, like Wigan itself, like so many other places with largely white, Brexit-voting, working-class populations, was speeding to the right. Win or lose, mayor or prime minister, Burnham was run close – terribly close, given he was the most popular Labour politician in the country up against a man who as one union apparatchik put it to me acidly, was “only as good as the last podcast he listened to”.

Thank you

—Will

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Have a great day. Thank you.