I find myself outside the Cross Keys pub, a huge red brick building on Chapel Street in Ashton-in-Makerfield. I stood on this same spot in the days before the Makerfield by-election. I remember that because I saw a young lad dropping a lesser-seen plastic straw to the ground. I told him not to litter, and he told me to f*ck off as he disappeared into the sunset.
I find myself standing over that same straw again. It is still where he dropped it. Crumpled into the ground, dusted by the traffic, charred by the hot weather. But still here.
It’s a striking reminder of how rapidly things have moved: how so little has changed, and yet everything has changed.
The following day, the people here handed Andy Burnham an emphatic victory. Reform UK’s recent march through this town was halted, and the coast cleared for Burnham to become Prime Minister.
Democracy is asking a lot of the people of Makerfield. Up next: electing somebody to replace Andy Burnham.
Tomorrow is polling day in the biggest by-election in history. Ten towns, two cities, two million voters and an enormous litmus test of British politics.
This week, I have been journeying through Greater Manchester to tell some of its stories. I return to Gorton and Denton, the scene of a by-election that could have been Andy Burnham’s original route to Downing Street but was instead – in a three-way split between Labour, Reform and the Greens – a story of the fracturing of British politics. I also return to Rochdale, where George Galloway won in 2024, the latest insurgent in Rochdale’s rich history of political rebellion. And to Oldham, where four council leaders have lost their seats in recent years and where baseless accusations of corruption have poisoned the town’s politics. All stories of this by-election, all stories of life in modern Britain.
I tell some more of these stories – and take a closer look at how Andy Burnham’s No.10 North will work – in today’s episode of The Story, the daily podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. You can listen to that by clicking here.
For now, though, welcome back to Makerfield. Labour’s Mayoral candidate, Bev Craig, is looking to capitalise on the enthusiasm there was for Andy Burnham here. Reform’s Mayoral candidate, Sian Astley, will be looking to win back some of those who drifted to Labour in June.
Roadworks rumble through the main thoroughfare in Ashton-in-Makerfield, where I find Trevor. Let’s call him Trevor. Several of the names in this article have been changed.
“I’ve been a fan of Andy Burnham long before he became Mayor of Manchester,” he tells me, “and I have high hopes for him. The Labour candidate [Bev Craig] knows what’s happening, so she seems the best one for the job for me, especially in Manchester. Manchester’s got confidence.”
Trevor’s support for Labour is generational.
Angela’s family have always voted Labour, too. “I just feel like Labour is going to get in, they take priority,” she says, “irrespective of who is in charge or anything. I think everybody around here is for Labour. Andy Burnham’s a lovely guy. He’s actually my neighbour. I’ve seen him out and about and we’ve been on walks with the kids and stuff. He’s always very friendly, always approachable.” Angela speaks to a level of support Labour have been accused of taking for granted. But not for her. She is one of those who drifted to Reform and is staying there. “…immigration…” she says, “… Reform UK are focused on that.”
“I’m thinking that he shouldn’t even exist,” says Brenda, “that we don’t need a mayor, we don’t need devolution to different areas of the country. That’s what MPs are for, not mayors. And to be honest, I don’t consider myself as part of Greater Manchester. I consider myself as Lancashire.”
For some people in these towns, nestled on the fringes of Greater Manchester and neighbouring Lancashire, their sense of identity is complex.
“I was born in Lancashire… and suddenly I’m part of Greater Manchester. Yet, I drive a mile out of the borough and I’m in Lancashire again.”
I had wondered if that would impact the result of the Westminster by-election here, where Andy Burnham was selling his vision of a buoyant Manchester to people who were 20 miles away from the high-rise buildings and prosperity of the city centre. It didn’t, and I wouldn’t expect it to be a factor in this mayoral by-election either. But it’s a complexity that Andy Burnham may run into in his plans for devolution, as he looks to shift power out of Westminster and to local authorities. Some could feel, rightly or wrongly, that a decision made twenty miles away in an alien city may as well be made in London.
As I leave Ashton-in-Makerfield, I see an Andy Burnham banner clinging to a wall, the lingering debris of the carnival that had rumbled through here just a few weeks ago. It says Vote Andy, For Us. Labour’s candidate Bev Craig has adopted the same slogan – Vote Bev, For Us – in the same branding and typeface. She has planted Andy Burnham’s campaign on to hers, but can she translate that sense of insurgency that worked so well for him, that undercut Reform, and rebuilt a coalition that Labour had let slip through their fingers?
If she does, she will need to win Andres back, too. Andres is playing loud music from his backpack as he rides his bike along Stockport Road in Levenshulme, his light green linen trousers occasionally catching the cog of its gears.
“Hannah Spencer was the second vote I ever made after Jeremy Corbyn,” he says. The Gorton and Denton by-election could have been Andy Burnham’s route to Westminster, had Labour’s National Executive Committee not blocked his attempt to stand here. In the end, The Greens’ Hannah Spencer won, as Labour bled to both left and right in a splintering that has come to define British politics.
“When Hannah Spencer made her speech at Parliament,” Andres continues, “I cried. I cried watching that speech because it was literally the first time that I’d felt seen. And Hannah did it. I think the full political system needs to be shaken up and changed.”
Isn’t Andy Burnham, and by extension Labour, now making the same argument?
“Nobody up here wants the Downing Street of the North. That’s not proper devolution. That’s a stunt.”
If Labour are going to bring the left back home, Andres isn’t coming.
***
You know you have arrived in Oldham when you drive into a blanket of smoke. Wildfires on the moorlands have left a thick haze in the air. It’s hard to see through it, hard to breathe through.
Makerfield, and Gorton and Denton, have been the scene of extraordinary by-elections in recent years. Oldham hasn’t, but it has been the scene of some extraordinary politics. A story of the blurring of the lines between truth and fiction, and the poison of misinformation.
In January 2025, Elon Musk tweeted about grooming gangs in the north of England, and it put a rocket under the story. The man Elon Musk retweeted was Raja Miah, a local activist who has spent several years selling the idea that the local authority was in cahoots with cartels and grooming gangs, and covered them up.
The issue of grooming gangs is very real. The accusation that they haven’t been taken seriously enough, and that prosecutions weren’t robust enough, is credible. But there isn’t evidence of an industrial cover-up. Inquiries and journalists have searched but have come up short. Regardless, the idea lit a spark and has spread like wildfire through Oldham’s local Facebook groups. The accusations have hung in the air like the thick smoke that envelops the town right now.
Four council leaders have lost their seats in recent years; one had their car firebombed. Another of them, Sean Fielding, a young rising star of the Labour Party, was specifically, and wrongly, targeted by the accusations. He lost his seat to an independent candidate, Mark Wilkinson, who was the admin for one of the Facebook groups where the accusation thrived.
Sean told me that he was so heavily targeted, he had to leave his hometown. I wrote about this story in more depth last year, and you can read that here.
The handling of grooming gangs is a real and emotive topic, and local politicians, including the mayor, have become lightning rods for people’s frustrations. Restore Britain’s candidate, Marlon West, has put it front and centre of his campaign. His daughter, Scarlett, was a victim. For them, this is personal. For Ian, who I meet in Oldham Town Centre, it’s why he’s voting for him.
“There is chaos on the streets. We’ve got total open borders. Grooming gangs is a big issue. I have two daughters of my own that I’ve had to keep an eye on until they got through their teenage years, whilst people around them were part of this grooming gang scandal. It seems to have been catered for by political parties. It’s still being brushed under the carpet.”
Ian tells me he watched Rupert Lowe on Joe Rogan’s podcast a few weeks ago, in which the Restore leader suggested the Labour-aligned think-tank the Fabian Society is orchestrating a secret cabal, out to destroy Britain.
“Labour backbenchers have to be part of [the Fabian Society],” says Ian. They don’t, I tell him. “I didn’t say all Labour MPs. I mean all frontbenchers.” They don’t either, I tell him, and I suggest this is starting to sound a bit conspiratorial.
“Well, it’s all about money and greed. They’re saying now police officers were involved, MPs were involved… you never know what’s going on in this world today. Whose fingers are in what pies and who’s pulling what puppet strings?”
I suggest it may be more straightforward than that, and that grooming gangs weren’t taken seriously enough, and not enough prosecutions have been brought, without a mass cover-up.
“You can go where you want with it, nobody is going to bring out the truth. Everybody’s trying to hide the truth. That’s where we’re at. It’s totally gone. It’s corrupt. It’s backwards. We’re a lawless society.”
I look around. Oldham Town Centre seems quite nice, I say. It has a newly refurbished town square, Nando’s is busy with people having lunch, a small group wanders towards the ODEON cinema, people seem to rub along well together as they go about their business. This doesn’t feel lawless or chaotic.
“No, but just opened buildings, 90% of which are empty, the cinema hasn’t had a full seat since it opened…”
Fewer people going to the cinema isn’t a civilisation collapsing, is it?
“We’re inheriting every culture from every part of the world,” he says, brushing past my observation, “which is great if you fit into a Western society, total chaos just isn’t part of Western culture.”
Elon Musk was back in Greater Manchester’s politics last week when he waded into a row between Restore Britain and the Nursing and Midwifery Council. Marlon West, who is also an NHS nurse, was suspended over a series of controversial social media posts. Musk shared a letter from Rupert Lowe in which he claimed the suspension amounted to “political interference.”
This may not influence the outcome of this by-election, but it’s worth us understanding how hard it can be to separate truth from fiction in towns like Oldham. It doesn’t have a present local newspaper, Facebook is the news, so accusations often go unchallenged and unfiltered into people’s feeds… upending the politics, and people’s lives.
Ian is restless for change. And that’s a restlessness that Rochdale, a few miles further north, knows well.
You drive under a blue bridge, splashed with white paint, as you arrive in Rochdale – it reads: ‘the birthplace of the co-operative movement.’
And it was more than that: at the start of the twentieth century, it was a birthplace for the suffragettes. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Rochdale’s textile workers gathered and marched ten miles to St Peter’s Field to demand parliamentary reform, before many were slaughtered by an armed cavalry in what became known as the Peterloo massacre.
More recently, it was the scene of an era-defining mistake. In April 2010, Prime Minister Gordon Brown ran into a woman called Gillian Duffy. They had a conversation about levels of immigration. As he left, Gordon Brown was caught on hot mic describing her as ‘some bigoted woman.’ The story ran for days and derailed Labour’s campaign.
Then, in early 2024, Rochdale shook Westminster again by electing left-wing firebrand George Galloway, largely in protest at the government’s handling of the situation in Gaza, in what was an extraordinary and chaotic by-election where both the Labour Party and The Greens withdrew support for their candidates.
All these moments of history are expressions of frustration, cries to be heard, to be taken seriously. They speak to a rupture of the relationship between power and the people.
I’m on Rochdale market in the centre of town, a smattering of people shuffle along the stalls, occasionally picking up and putting down a bar of soap, or a handbag, or a scarf, as they steady themselves for another electoral test.
Muhammad crouches next to a battered old pram, stuffed with food.
“We’ve got tins, we’ve got crisps, we’ve got chocolates, we’ve got cold drinks, we’ve got chicken, we’ve got burgers, kebabs. You know, just the basic stuff. And Indian curry as well. Chicken curry, beef curry, with rice, naan.”
Muhammad has gained a reputation locally for wheeling his pram of food through the town and feeding Rochdale’s homeless.
“Domestic violence at home, bereavement, loss of job, they’re in mortgage arrears and they become homeless, or they’re in rent arrears. There’s lots of stories, and it’s very depressing sometimes.”
He turns, lifts his head, and looks towards the enormous new development towering over us.
“All we’re asking for is affordable housing. They built some flats just behind the cinema here, and the rent is sky high. It’s like Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham. For a small, one-bedroom flat, you’re talking about thousands of pounds. People can’t afford that. Those flats have been empty for the last three or four years.”
It’s a question that lingers in the air in this by-election: has Manchester’s economic success rippled far enough into the towns that surround it? Muhammad looks on, his eyes heavy, as a homeless woman rummages through his pram.
“Sometimes, it’s quite tiring. It is quite hard. They have no family support. They have no network, and nobody is willing to listen to them. It’s quite depressing at times, humans being disregarded or disrespected.”
That centuries-old feeling – that lived in the textile workers, in the women denied a vote, in Gillian Duffy – lives on.
