Makerfield and the battle for the soul of Britain

Imagine a Wetherspoons turned into a bearpit of political intrigue. That was the Sir Thomas Gerard in Ashton-in-Makerfield on Saturday afternoon. The whole place trembled from the thunder of clinking beer glasses and fierce debate about the future of the country. In one corner sat a noisy assembly of Pink Ladies, the grassroots movement of mums and nans pissed off with illegal immigration. In another was a gaggle of Reform UK supporters taking a beer break from canvassing, their turquoise placards rested against their knees. Even in the toilet there was no respite: two men at the urinal earnestly disagreed over Restore Britain.

‘Join us’, says Danuta. She and her husband are tucking into a Wetherspoons fry-up. ‘We’re not racist, we’re culturalist’, she says, seemingly in sorrowful anticipation that this hack from London will think the folk ‘up here’ are bigots. She has good cause to be wary. The towns of this Wigan constituency have been besieged by SW1 scribes ever since the by-election was triggered last month. There were so many on the day I was there that they were interviewing each other – taking a break from cosy chats in London clubs to have cosy chats in Wigan pubs. ‘The thing about immigration is the culture that’s coming in’, says Danuta. ‘Some of it feels alien.’ Her husband nods as he stabs a black pudding.

I hear this from everyone I speak to. Everyone. That our broken immigration system is the pressing crisis of our time, and it’s not racist to say so. Alice, a diminutive lady from Bangladesh, proudly holds up a ‘Makerfield Needs Reform’ placard. She and her husband have trekked from Northern Ireland to help make the case for Robert Kenyon, the Reform candidate. ‘We must stop the boats’, she says. She’ll flummox the woke racialists of the London chattering class, who defame migrants like her as traitors to their ‘race’. But her logic is solid. ‘I’ve worked as a nurse for 30 years. Why should others come here and get everything without working?’

It strikes me that this Wetherspoons is a hotbed of moral dissent. Not since the 17th century has a tavern throbbed with such seditious thinking. As politicians down south – like cabinet minister Hilary Benn – wag a finger at those who use the term ‘alien culture’, up here it flows from people’s mouths between sips of beer. Where the media elites tell us it’s bigoted to fret over mass immigration, here it is the burning cause that elbows aside almost everything else. One table has piles of beer-sodden Reform leaflets featuring Kenyon with arms outstretched – the man who says we must ‘remove people who shouldn’t be here’. On another lies a well-thumbed copy of Restore’s more forbidding manifesto. ‘Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality and Logistics’, it’s called.

The political clamour spills on to the streets where I encounter arguably the bravest candidate in the race: Peter Ward of the Rejoin EU Party. ‘Rejoin EU?! You’ll be lucky to get one per cent’, I say. Makerfield is solid Brexit territory, 65 per cent of its good people having voted Leave. ‘I’d be thrilled with one per cent!’, says Ward with a winning charm. Passers-by treat him almost as a circus-like curiosity – us Londoners might be used to seeing Remoaners on the streets, but up here it’s as mad as seeing an elephant. ‘Never happening, mate’, says a jovial local upon spying Ward’s blue-and-yellow ‘Rejoin’ rosette.

Beating the streets of Makerfield, it dawns on me: this is so much more than a scrap for a seat in the Commons – it is a battle for the soul of Britain. The by-election was triggered by the resignation of Labour MP Josh Simons, who wants Manchester mayor Andy Burnham to take his place in parliament so that he might challenge Keir Starmer for the leadership of Labour and ascend all the way to 10 Downing Street. But the King of the North’s dream of being crowned King of the Country could well be scuppered by Reform: ‘quiet man’ and devoted local, Rob Kenyon, is lapping up working-class votes here.

Behind the Labour-Reform stand-off lurks a far larger clash. What is really being contested in the pubs and halls and streets of Makerfield is nothing less than the future moral shape of the nation. This modest constituency has become an ethical battleground. I hear talk of identity, heritage, borders, security. The words ‘the meaning of Britain’ might not be on the ballot paper but they are on people’s minds. Even I, who fancies himself a pretty seasoned observer of political affairs, am taken aback by the zeal and fury with which the border crisis is discussed up here. Rob Kenyon isn’t, though. He knew immigration was going to be the defining issue of this electoral fight.

‘I always ask people what are your issues locally and nationally’, he tells me. ‘And it’s kind of the same thing. Nationally it’s immigration – illegal immigration – and locally it’s HMOs.’ An HMO is a House in Multiple Occupation, which the government uses to house asylum seekers. People sometimes raise other concerns, Kenyon says, like the fact that the local hospital is not fit for purpose or the flooding that has afflicted wards like Platt Bridge. ‘But it’s immigration first and foremost’, he says.

He’s late for our chat – he was coaching a kids’ football team this morning. We’re now surrounded by noise at Reform HQ in Goose Green. Ann Widdecombe has just given a pep talk to an army of excitable canvassers determined to make the most of the final weekend before the vote this Thursday. A turquoise double-decker Reform bus is waiting outside to whisk Kenyon off for a day of campaigning. Why immigration, I ask him? ‘It’s like… feeling powerless’, he says. ‘Every government that’s been elected [over the past 30 years] has had in their manifesto that they will lower immigration… and none of them have.’ This issue more than any other stirs up a deep ‘sense of unfairness’, he says.

There’s the ‘safety aspect’ too, he tells me. ‘People buying houses and old pubs and turning them into HMOs… and, you know, little old women going shopping and they’re walking past groups of illegal immigrants and they don’t feel safe.’ The Oxbridge classes who stink up our political and media establishments would write off such little old women as xenophobes, I say. Kenyon says with quiet anger: ‘This is why people aren’t voting Labour anymore… Because for the past 30 years, when people have raised concerns, they’ve been dismissed as bigots and racists. Even fascists. And it’s just not true. We just want law and order. That’s all we want. We want fairness.’

Kenyon could not be more different from how he’s been depicted in those media hit jobs penned by plummy southerners who couldn’t give a toss about places like Makerfield. They’ve called him a sexist old brute over some daft jokes he cracked on a digital rugby forum years ago. In truth, he’s unassuming, almost shy, and completely devoted to improving the lot of this corner of Wigan, where he works as a plumber and a Reform councillor.

How has he coped with the media invective? ‘That’s what has surprised me’, he says, ‘I’m not that bothered’. ‘In my little downstairs bathroom, I’ve got “If” by Kipling, so I just read that every time I go to the toilet and it keeps me on track: If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools…’ Try as I might, I could never imagine Andy Burnham studying the words of that most controversial poet of Empire as he empties his bowels. In fact, I’d rather not.

Burnham is using Makerfield as a ‘stepping stone’ to power, says Kenyon. ‘This “King of the North” thing is such rubbish. He’s more Stannis Baratheon than Robb Stark’, he laughs. If you haven’t seen Game of Thrones, you’ll have to Google that. Burnham ‘keeps banging on’ about what he’s done with Manchester buses, says Kenyon. ‘But all he’s done is paint a few buses yellow and put a bee on the side. The way he’s going on about it, you’d think he’d designed Rome.’

Okay, what about Restore, I ask? That hard-right party-of-sorts led by Rupert Lowe is reportedly nipping at the heels of Reform up here. Some polls even suggest Restore will ease Burnham into power by making a seven per cent dent in Reform’s vote. Restore is ‘using’ Makerfield every bit as much as Burnham is, Kenyon says. ‘They’ve got no branch structure, they’ve got nothing here. They’ve never been bothered about Makerfield.’ ‘Somebody’s ego could potentially put Andy Burnham in No10’, he says. Strikingly, he won’t say ‘Rupert Lowe’. Perhaps that name is like Voldemort to this plumber-turned-politician who so keenly wants to improve his hometown but might be prevented from doing so by a posh, eye-wateringly rich tweeter from down south.

Restore’s behaviour up here has been awful. I encounter some of them: gangs of gimps and nerds barking about remigration. A few hundred have answered Lowe’s call to blanket Makerfield in Restore leaflets. They sport Oswald Mosley haircuts and tight tweed suits and use words like ‘fightback’ despite clearly never having had a fight in their lives.

A bunch of them blocked the path of the Reform bus with their van – a scummy violation of the spirit of democracy.

They are driven by a burning animus toward Nigel Farage. Restore is less a political party than the physical extension of Lowe’s own boring beef with Reform, which kicked him out last year. It’s bitchy vengeance in party form. Get over it, mate. Every Restore person I encounter lets rip against Farage. One has even stopped watching GB News because Farage has a show on there. They talk about Reform having been ‘bought’, and being ‘controlled opposition’, and being ‘up the establishment’s arse’. Their one-eyed sectarianism would make Your Party blush.

Restore’s leaflet in Makerfield is entirely devoted to bashing Reform. It’s a mad, long-winded checklist of Reform’s positions and Restore’s positions. I got about halfway through before losing the will to live. Clearly these bozos are so mind-fried by three-hour podcasts about Richard Lionheart that they’ve lost all capacity to connect with the good (normal) people of Britain. ‘Only Reform can beat Labour here’, says Reform’s Kenyon-focussed leaflet. ‘Farage [has] sneered and laughed at us’, says paragraph 14 of Restore’s turgid, self-pitying handout. Jesus Christ, lads!

I meet Orla Minihane, Restore’s spokesperson on women and girls’ safety, and put it to her that her party is the best thing to ever happen to Andy Burnham. She bristles. ‘[We’re not] stealing votes’, she says. ‘No one’s got a gun to anybody’s head.’ To be fair to Ms Minihane, she’s a lot more normal than some of the other Restore folk I meet. She is passionate about having a reckoning on the rape-gang scandal and protecting working-class girls from the hundreds of unvetted men who arrive here every week. I can see how she rose to become a leader of the insurgent Pink Ladies movement.

‘You’re like me’, I say: ‘You have a London accent and an Irish name. So what are you doing in a party that has racists in it?’ To my surprise, she doesn’t balk. She acknowledges Restore has a problem. ‘Every party has its extremes’, she says.

‘I’m not an “ethnat”, or whatever they’re called. I do get a lot of pushback from the more right wing of the party. They’ll go, “Eurgh, you shouldn’t be here anyway because you’re [Irish]”. Whatever.’

So she doesn’t want to kick out all non-whites, like some Restore members do? ‘Absolutely not, because I’m not a moron.’ ‘When I was at school’, she says, ‘we had Jamaicans, we had Ghanaians… I went to Catholic school and every man and his dog was there. [We] didn’t bat an eyelid.’ Her concern is with ‘illegal men getting off the boats with no checks and no validation and then being put into our towns’. She echoes what I hear from others up here – that the issue is absolutely not race, it’s culture. She isn’t PC – she lays into new arrivals on our shores who ‘treat their women like shit and then claim benefits while telling everyone that they hate us’.

For me, the Wigan anger was summed up best in Hindley, a working-class town and Reform stronghold. The turquoise colours hang from so many living-room windows here. One household has turned a Labour leaflet into a Reform leaflet: they’ve added a speech bubble to Burnham’s smug mug saying ‘Vote Reform!’.

‘The country isn’t what it was’, says Paul in Hindley. ‘That’s all we’re saying.’ It’s what they’re all saying. Kenyon, too. ‘The culture, the heritage, the identity – that’s what people want back’, he says. The London elites who think the debate about borders, sovereignty and citizenship has gone ‘too far’ have no idea of the fury fomenting in the country. Their cluelessness scares me.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.