ASHTON-IN-MAKERFIELD, England — The future leadership of the British government will be shaped in the next 24 hours by just a few thousand voters living in a cluster of former mining communities who hate nothing more than getting stuck, as they often do, in a traffic jam.
The constituency of Makerfield in north-western England holds a special election on Thursday to choose a new Member of Parliament, with Labour candidate Andy Burnham — a local son now serving as mayor of Greater Manchester — the favorite to win. If he does, he has vowed to challenge the U.K.’s unpopular Prime Minister Keir Starmer for the party leadership, and the premiership.
When POLITICO asked Makerfield residents what was the worst thing about living in the area, as they prepared to take part in the most consequential by-election in living memory, they tended to give the same answer: Gridlock on the local roads.
“We need more money invested in the town,” said Peter Cain, a local butcher in Ashton-in-Makerfield. “The traffic system into the town center, it just can’t cope.”
The traffic is just one example of what many British voters feel is a degradation in the quality of their lives for which politicians must take the blame. The Makerfield election comes at a time of widespread disillusionment among British voters who are weary after a decade of political upheaval following Brexit. Since 2016, the country has held three general elections and been governed by six prime ministers, one of whom lasted just 49 days in office.
Starmer has only been in power for less than two years, but has recorded some of the worst poll ratings of any leader in British history — and his Labour Party has suffered a series of historic defeats at regional and local elections.
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Several senior ministers have quit Starmer’s Cabinet in protest at his failings, but Burnham is the highest profile of the potential candidates who would stand in any contest to replace the prime minister. First, though, he has to be elected back to parliament, and it will be up to voters in Makerfield to decide whether Burnham gets his chance.
How these voters feel about their lives, as well as how they feel about Burnham, is therefore critical to his prospects. “I’m a nurse in the community,” said Rebecca Ogden, who drives to see patients in their homes across the district. “I can be going from one visit to another and it takes forever and a day.”
“Bolton Road is murder sometimes,” explained another woman who works in a local supermarket. She asked not to be named because she was worried about reprisals from her employer. “When there’s any problems it can be snarled like anything.”
Shortly before 9 a.m. on a rainy weekday morning, as residents head to work and school, the extent of the issue becomes clear. Warrington Road in the south of Ashton is choked with cars, vans and a grindingly slow procession of heavy goods trucks, heaving their way through the narrow streets of the town center to and from the M6 motorway and other major link roads nearby.
A clogged road network is a problem anywhere, of course. But in Makerfield it has consequences for more people than average. According to POLITICO’s polling partners at Public First, the district ranks as the 14th highest out of 575 constituencies in England and Wales for the percentage of residents who drive a car or van to work.
Road rage
Ashton’s overloaded roads are emblematic, a suffocating expression of an economic and political system that many in the area feel has failed them for a decade or more.
Regardless of which party is in power in Westminster, Ashton residents feel their quality of life has fallen as the price of everyday expenses — from groceries to burger meals to rent — rocketed during the high inflation of the past five years.
Makerfield voters complain that hospitals are packed; people who come into the country illegally get better treatment despite not paying proper tax; the police don’t care about local crime anymore; gangs of kids have gone “feral”; and politicians in London are too busy feathering their own nests to do the right thing for the country. Nobody in Westminster, they say, cares about northern towns like theirs.
The sense of being unfairly trapped in a fundamentally broken system, like drivers in a traffic jam, frames the outlook of voters here. A POLITICO-Public First focus group last week found participants felt they had been let down by successive governments, and were desperate for something to change, though far from hopeful that it would.
And, as in many other struggling small towns around England, that has bred division and cynicism about politics.
“It’s sad that we’re in a country now, that we are split,” said Cain, the butcher in Ashton. “We’re all falling out over immigration, we’re all falling out over the price of living and why can’t all these other politicians have done something about it, before it’s come to this?” He said he felt Thursday’s by-election would see a substantial “vote of protest — because everybody’s had enough.”
Politics moves to the North
The by-election has turned the usually sleepy town into the red-hot epicenter of British politics over the past month, with visits from every major TV news outlet, among other media, as well as regular trips from front-rank government and opposition politicians.
“Vote Andy for us” is the most common Burnham campaign poster, put up in the windows of homes, on street placards and all over the Cross Keys, a closed-down pub. Others say: “Vote Andy, Vote Hope.”
Unusually in British politics, Burnham’s campaign literature routinely features a cartoon image in the style of a “memoji” of the candidate himself, characterized by his distinctive look: A T-shirt under a jacket, big black-frame glasses, and a Britpop star’s haircut.
Burnham’s brand is far bigger than that of the unpopular party he represents. His promise is that he will take Makerfield voters’ Northern concerns direct to London and fix them himself when he becomes prime minister.
At almost any other time over the past century or so, Burnham’s task in Makerfield would have been easy. The constituency has a potential electorate of 76,000 and Labour has held the seat — and its predecessor — solidly since 1906. Now, however, the nationalist right in the form of Nigel Farage’s five-year-old Reform UK party has made major gains in the area in the past year.
Competing for attention with the red and yellow Burnham placards are the aqua blue posters of Reform UK, and the Union Jacks of the splinter party that broke away from Reform, Restore Britain.
The district contains one of the most traditionally British demographic profiles you could hope to find. According to figures drawn from the last census in 2021, Makerfield’s population was 94 percent from a “white British” background (the average in England and Wales was 76 percent), and 64 percent of people identified as Christian — the sixth highest of any constituency in England and Wales, where the average was 46 percent.
Barbers and vape shops
If the worst thing about living in Makerfield is the traffic, the best, according to those who live there, is the friendliness of its people and the sense of living in the close-knit community that they share.
Social clubs and working men’s clubs are a rarity in affluent London but a vibrant community center scene can still be found in Ashton. There’s the Jubilee Club on Wigan Road, which features live music, quizzes and World Cup screenings, and Burnham’s campaign is being run from the Stubshaw Cross club on the other side of town.
“Everybody knows each other,” said Ogden, the community nurse. “Maybe not so much now, because there’s obviously a lot more people living here.”
But this feeling that the area is changing is an increasing concern. Hundreds of new homes are being built on the outskirts of Ashton, triggering fears that the road network won’t cope and the floods that caused widespread damage in recent years could get worse as green fields are paved over.
And, of course, there’s immigration, which POLITICO’s focus group participants worried puts more pressure on hospitals and other local services, as well as on rent prices.
Among the neat rows of terraced houses, and green parks with well-tended flowerbeds, Ashton has its share of small-town decay, a hollowing out of traditional shopping streets that is common to many parts of England outside the biggest cities.
Its center nowadays is a threadbare place, apart from barbers, a handful of bookmakers, takeaway food outlets, and some vape shops. While you can still buy fresh meat from Cain’s butcher and bread from a nearby baker, several traditional pubs and other stores have closed down and now stand boarded up.
“I have nothing against these foreigners coming in if they come from a war-torn country,” said Bob, who is in his 90s and is supporting Burnham. “You’re telling me all these people round here [in] Ashton especially — there’s six bloody barbers, all these vape shops — no way they’re coming from a war-torn country.”
The vast majority of Makerfield residents were born in England — around 97,411 — with most of the rest coming from elsewhere in the U.K.. Among those who were born overseas, the highest numbers come from EU countries such as Poland (496)and Romania (358), though immigrants from conflict-affected regions such as the Middle East, including Iraq (99) and Iran (93), also live there, according to the latest census data.
Farage’s big chance
Unease at the changing nature of the town and resentment over immigration gives Reform UK, the insurgent creation of Brexit firebrand Farage, its greatest opportunity to win the seat.
Wigan Council, the local government district which includes Ashton and other nearby villages in the constituency, has the highest ratio of asylum-seekers per local population of any of the 10 councils in the Greater Manchester area that Burnham oversees. There were 34.4 supported asylum seekers in the Wigan area per 10,000 population, against a U.K.-wide average of 14.1, according to data published earlier this month.
Public First’s polling analysis, shared exclusively with POLITICO, shows just how big a threat Farage’s movement is to Burnham’s hopes of holding onto Makerfield for Labour.
The election was triggered because sitting Labour MP Josh Simons stepped down to give Burnham a chance to become an MP — in order to challenge Starmer for the leadership. But Makerfield was a problematic choice. In fact, among all the parliamentary seats in the Greater Manchester area, which Burnham oversees as mayor, Makerfield is the single worst Labour-versus-Reform seat for his prospects.
According to recent Public First MRP polling, on a purely party basis (without naming Burnham as the Labour candidate), Reform were ahead of Labour in Makerfield by 41.4 percent to 24.5 percent.
The Public First analysis found that including Burnham as the named Labour candidate raised the party’s chances substantially, but only to around a 50-50 likelihood of winning against Reform (with Reform still slightly ahead on vote share). The race may have moved in Burnham’s favor since, but it is not certain and nobody is ruling out an upset.
White Van Man
Farage visited Ashton to campaign for Reform’s candidate, local plumber Rob Kenyon, a few hours before POLITICO held its focus group. It wasn’t an accident, in this traffic-heavy town, that Farage positioned his podium between two white vans, classic symbols of the self-employed British tradesperson.
Farage announced that if he became prime minister he would cut tax for electricians, plumbers and other self-employed people. “We are very much on the side of White Van Man,” Farage declared, as supporters and other interested locals watched his speech in the sunshine of a car park opposite a snooker club. His candidate, Kenyon, even released a campaign rap video on the theme of the man in his van.
But it’s not Farage’s policies that seem to have swelled his support so much as his style, which resonates with growing frustration among voters fed up with Britain’s gridlocked politics. Despite a private education and an early career spent as a City trader, he presents himself as the people’s champion, and while he isn’t personally popular, his hardline message on immigration certainly is.
Farage’s blunt and often angry critique of a “two tier” system in which privileged, “woke” elites in places like London take advantage of honest British workers elsewhere embodies the dismay and disillusionment of many voters who now just want to set fire to the whole system.
The gridlock is not just political, of course, but economic, too. Whoever is Labour’s leader will face the same problems of bond markets reluctant to trust the government with more debt, a welfare bill that is set to rise by perhaps 20 percent in the next five years, and a base of taxpayers already financially squeezed and reluctant to contribute more to the Treasury.
Polling a by-election is notoriously difficult — a reliable sample is hard to achieve and much depends on turnout, which can be impossible to predict. But polls so far do suggest Burnham can shake off his association with a deeply unpopular party to win. According to Public First’s research, Burnham’s relative popularity over Farage could also help him.
In a head-to-head, 66.3 percent of Makerfield voters think Burnham would be a better PM than Farage (and 76.5 percent prefer Burnham to Starmer), Public First’s analysis found. Among POLITICO’s focus group participants, even some who planned to back Farage’s party liked Burnham. Several others said they felt at least he cared about them and about this part of the country.
One of Reform’s most potent attack lines against Burnham is that he’s just another career politician who wants to use Makerfield as a “stepping stone” to Number 10. It’s hard to deny the charge, because Burnham has already said he wants to challenge Starmer to become prime minister.
In the end, this unique election may come down to how much the voters of a frequently gridlocked town mind helping to ease one man’s journey south to Downing Street.