When he gets to his feet in the Commons in September 2024, incoming Labor MP Josh Simons echoes Keir Starmer’s promise to deliver.
“I am proud that working people represent change and unless we in this room show humility and honesty and act with integrity and respect, they have no reason to believe in democracy,” he said.
Seventeen months later, Starmer was embroiled in a scandal that threatened to undermine those principles and could yet prove terminal to his premiership, prompting the resignation of two key No 10 figures.
Simons, a Cabinet Office minister, was a close friend of the Prime Minister and his now-departed chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.
A former director of the pro-Stormer think tank Labor Together, Simons won his seat in Greater Manchester’s Makerfield in 2024 in a McSweeney-mastermind landslide.
But the mood in his constituents was somber on Monday as Mandelson continued to fall in Westminster.
“We voted Labor and we shouldn’t have that,” said Clare Winterburn, serving lunchtime pasties at Galloway’s Bakers. “You see it on the news all day: Keir Starmer does nothing but U-turns and can’t make a decision if someone slaps him in the face.”
Winterburn, 42, said McSweeney was victimized and the scandal was further evidence that “they felt the rules didn’t apply to them”.
“It’s time for reform,” she said. “We tried all the others and they were all crap.”
Simons, 32, is also now under scrutiny over reports he commissioned an investigative report on journalists looking into LabourTogether’s funding.
He said it was nonsense to claim he wanted to investigate journalists and that he had asked a PR and lobbying firm to “look into the suspected illegal hack”.
Makersfield is a semi-rural collection of small towns and villages between Manchester and Liverpool and has been a working class for more than a century, its coal mining sparking the Industrial Revolution.
As the “red wall” came tumbling down around it in 2019, Labor clung to Makerfield and survived again in 2024, with Simons ahead of Reform UK by 5,399 votes.
Yet Labor MPs worry that this is a sure seat – white working-class, socially conservative – that will punish the government at the next election if delivery is not made quickly.
In Ashton-in-Makerfield, the constituency’s largest town, the Conservative government is reviving its high street thanks to a £6.6m leveling up fund. A further £20m will go to surrounding villages under Labour’s “Pride in Place” scheme over the next decade.
However business owners say the disruption has hurt their takings and accused Labour-led Wigan Council of not listening to their concerns. “You put them across and they look at you like you walked into their living room on Christmas Day and pissed on their kid’s Xbox,” said one shopper, who didn’t want to be named.
At The Cupcakery, co-owner Fran said they lost at least £3,000 in income last summer when her shop was covered in scaffolding, meaning children had to walk across the road to get to them.
Fran, 36, who did not want to give her last name, said she refused to vote in the last general election because “everyone was a joke – they were all liars”. Her friends felt the same way, she said: “I know a lot of women who refuse to vote and it’s because they don’t trust the government.”
While Labour’s voter share has fallen by 23 percentage points since 2001, Conservative support has risen significantly since Brexit – 65% of the constituency voted to leave the European Union.
Shift-right reform took the UK to Labour’s 5,399 votes, second only to the Stormers’ party in one of 98 seats.
David Baxter, who recognized the name of the Wigan and Leigh community charity in Simons’ maiden speech in the Commons, praised the MP for being “genuinely connected” to the area and “probably in the minority across the country”.
“I think people are feeling it [that] Politicians, of any party, are disconnected from their communities,” Baxter said. A strong Reform UK vote in May’s local elections in Wigan, which could rob it of a third of its seats, is worrying other charities.
Cutting his hair while wrapped in a red, white and blue barber’s cape, builder Carl Pilling, 56, said Stormer “gotta go”.
“Everything is just a mess – it’s ridiculous,” he complains about small boats, the NHS and the Mandelson saga. “Everybody’s looking out for each other.”
Over a bacon and cheese toastie at a cupcakery, Callum Freeman, 29, said he refused to vote for the first time in 2024 but was now worried about the rise of reform. “Last time I didn’t because it didn’t matter,” he said. “Why isn’t it about improving the country?”
