‘A lesson from Makerfield: voters know Rupert Lowe, but not Labour’s immigration reforms’

The very first person I approached in the very first place I visited in Makerfield set the tone for the rest of my time talking to voters throughout the constituency. The scene was a proper greasy spoon café, the man was a railway worker eating an extremely good-looking fry-up.

Did he know much about the by-election? “Don’t really know what that is.” Did he have an opinion about Andy Burnham? “Not really.” At this point I started to talk to his friend, sitting opposite: she was a little more engaged. But then he piped up again. “I know about Rupert Lowe. He wants to send all the immigrants home.”

I am a seasoned political researcher, but my jaw very nearly landed in the brown sauce on the table.

READ MORE: What would Andy Burnham do if he becomes Prime Minister?

The rest of the project followed much the same pattern, with the Public First research team becoming less and less surprised by Restore’s cut-through. In every town we visited across the constituency we found people who had not only heard of Restore, but who also referred to its leader by his Christian name and who could parrot his signature policy.

It will not come as much of a surprise that my main take-away from Makerfield was that the polling is not over-stating what is happening: support for Rupert Lowe is strong and his political strategy is evidently working.

All of which begs several questions. How has this come about? And why? Will it be replicated nationally? And what does it mean for Labour?

There are clearly several, broadly unrelated, factors that have come together to allow this to happen. Most obviously, there is some very clever social media targeting going on. Restore strategists have identified exactly who their target voters in Makerfield are and have scientifically targeted them on Facebook and Instagram – not that hard in a place that overwhelmingly voted for Brexit in 2016. Mainstream parties and mainstream media were weeks or months behind spotting this trend.

Secondly, and this is unpalatable in the extreme, Lowe’s message has a simplistic, Trumpian quality to it. “I am going to send them all home,” makes Farage look nuanced and liberal. And it lends itself to the ‘five seconds or less’ that social media videos give you to catch viewers’ attention.

Thirdly, Farage has lost some of the lustre of insurgency. In whole swathes of provincial Britain, it’s no longer radical to say you’re voting Reform. Worse, it’s even a mainstream pursuit. Two years ago, when I took part in a similar exercise In Newark during the general election, voters told us, often nervously and without eye-contact, that they “might give Nigel a go”. At the time, we predicted that local MP Robert Jenrick would hold on to his seat because people weren’t quite ready to vote for Reform on mass. We were right.

This is no longer the case: Normal people are voting Reform. But much of their original angry, disillusioned base is now thinking about Restore.

In the short term, of course, this could be good news for Andy Burnham’s campaign. The right will likely be split – and he may well ride through the middle and straight into Downing Street.

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But there is a big “but” for Labour supporters – there is very little groundswell of support for the Manchester mayor, his metropolitan charm and his soft left policies. Indeed, if I hadn’t spent my time in Makerfield reeling from Restore’s support, I would have spent more time amazed by how underwhelmed voters were about Andy.

This last point is so important for Labour should we win this week. Makerfield is a lot more like the rest of provincial Britain than it is like glitzy Manchester with its skyscrapers and its young professionals wanging in about so-called Manchesterism. It may sit inside the combined authority but its heart is in left-behind Lancashire.

In short, it’s very like the kind of places where Labour will need to win in 2029. Burnham might just squeak it, but it will only happen with the entire political machine of Labour behind him, staggering name recognition and the right wing split. No one should conclude, based on this exercise, that Brand Burnham is set to retain the Red wall in three years.

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One final thought from Makerfield. Not a single interviewee mentioned Shabana Mahmood’s controversial immigration reforms. These might be the right policies (I believe they are) and they might even start slowing the boats (it’s possible), but we also need voters to know about them if they do. If the big majority of Labour’s key voters are talking about immigration, and this Labour government has spent a vast amount of political capital building a policy slate to respond, why does no one seem to know about them? Surely we should be shouting it from the Lancashire roof-tops?

You never know: my new friend in the Makerfield café might just be interested.

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