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As he rose to his feet in the Commons in September 2024, the incoming Labour MP Josh Simons echoed Keir Starmer’s promise to deliver.
“Unless working people like those I am so proud to represent feel change and unless we in this chamber demonstrate humility and honesty and act with integrity and with respect, they have no reason to believe in democracy,” he said.
Seventeen months on, Starmer is engulfed in a scandal that threatens to undermine those principles and could yet prove terminal for his premiership, having prompted the resignation of two key No 10 figures.
Simons, a Cabinet Office minister, is a staunch ally of the prime minister and his now-departed chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.
A former director of the pro-Starmer thinktank Labour Together, Simons won his seat in Makerfield, Greater Manchester, under the McSweeney-masterminded landslide in 2024.
But the mood among his constituents on Monday was bleak as the Mandelson fallout continued in Westminster.
“We voted Labour and we shouldn’t have,” said Clare Winterburn, serving up lunchtime pasties in Galloways Bakers. “You see it all day on the news: Keir Starmer doesn’t do anything but U-turns and couldn’t make a decision if one slapped him in the face.”
Winterburn, 42, said she felt McSweeney was a scapegoat and that the scandal was further evidence that “they don’t think the rules apply to them”.
“It’s time for Reform,” she said. “We’ve tried all the others and they’ve all been crap.”
Simons, 32, himself is also now under scrutiny over reports that he commissioned an investigative report into journalists who were probing the funding of Labour Together.
He said it was nonsense to claim he wanted to investigate journalists and he had asked a PR and lobbying firm to “look into a suspected illegal hack”.
Makerfield is a semi-rural collection of small towns and villages sandwiched between Manchester and Liverpool and has been Labour for more than a century, when its coal mining helped fire the industrial revolution.
As the “red wall” tumbled around it in 2019, Labour clung on in Makerfield and survived again in 2024, when Simons finished 5,399 votes ahead of Reform UK.
Yet Labour MPs worry this is exactly the seat – white working class, socially conservative – that will punish the government at the next election if delivery does not happen soon.
In Ashton-in-Makerfield, the constituency’s biggest town, change is happening thanks to a £6.6m levelling up fund awarded by the Conservative government to revamp its high street. Surrounding villages will get a further £20m under Labour’s “pride in place” scheme over the next decade.
Yet business owners said the disruption had hurt their takings and accused the Labour-led Wigan council of not listening to their concerns. “You put things across to them and they look at you like you’ve walked into their living room on Christmas Day and pissed on their kid’s Xbox,” said one shopkeeper, who did not want to be named.
At The Cupcakery, co-owner Fran said they lost at least £3,000 in revenue last summer when her shop was covered in scaffolding, meaning children had to walk in the road to get to them.
Fran, 36, who did not want to give her last name, said she refused to vote at the last general election because “they’re all a joke – they’re all liars”. Her friends felt similar, she said: “There’s so many women I know that refuse to vote and it’s because of the lack of trust in the government.”
Labour’s share of voters has dropped by 23 percentage points since 2001, while Conservative support rose markedly after Brexit – 65% of the constituency voted to leave the European Union.
The shift right took Reform UK to within 5,399 votes of Labour, in one of the 98 seats where it finished runner up to Starmer’s party.
David Baxter, whose Wigan and Leigh community charity was namechecked in Simons’ maiden speech in the Commons, praised the MP for being “really connected” to the area but that he “may be in a minority across the country”.
“I do feel people feel [that] politicians, across any party, are disconnected from their communities,” Baxter said. The prospect of a strong Reform UK vote in May’s local elections in Wigan, when a third of its seats are up for grabs, is a source of anxiety for other voluntary bodies.
Getting his hair cut while wrapped in a red, white and blue barber cape, builder Carl Pilling, 56, said Starmer “needs to go”.
“Everything’s just a shambles – it’s ridiculous,” he said complaining about small boats, the NHS and the Mandelson saga. “They’re all just looking after one another.”
Over a bacon and cheese toastie at The Cupcakery, Callum Freeman, 29, said he refused to vote for the first time in 2024 but worried now about the rise of Reform. “Last time I didn’t because it doesn’t seem to matter,” he said. “Why can’t it be about making the country better?”
