Makerfield voters are giving Burnham the benefit of the doubt. If he fails, the consequences will be grave | Owen Jones

Winning this byelection wouldn’t make Reform disappear. Would Burnham really have the courage needed to see them off in No 10?

‘W ell, good,” says a middle-aged woman outside Boots about the prospect of millions of migrants being deported. “Because we want the country safe.” I point out that, even as immigration has risen sharply for the last two decades, by every measure – murder rates , or numbers of people admitted to hospitals because of knife attacks and assaults – violence has fallen steeply. She doesn’t believe it. “It seems to be going up,” she says.

She is one of the voters who will determine the future of the country. This is Ashton-in-Makerfield, a market town in the parliamentary constituency of Makerfield. On Thursday, Andy Burnham will either be elected and swiftly move to overthrow Keir Starmer as prime minister, or he will be defeated, plunging Labour into existential crisis, with the near-inevitability of Nigel Farage as prime minister looming over the wreckage.

Whatever happens, Reform will do well. So, too, will Restore Britain, its new challenger from the right. The engine of both is anti-migrant backlash – even here, in a constituency where fewer than one in 20 people are foreign-born, around a quarter of the rate for people resident in England and Wales.

For those who believed that reducing immigration would somehow drain the issue of its political potency, a reckoning with reality beckons. Last year, net migration fell from its post-pandemic peak of 944,000 to 171,000. Starmer has ransacked the rhetoric of the anti-migrant right, claiming immigration has inflicted “ incalculable damage ” on the UK, in a speech referring to Britain as an “island of strangers”, which he has since said he “deeply regrets”.

Yet only 16% of Britons believe net migration fell last year, while 49% think it increased. Farage has now pivoted to claims of discrimination against white people , while he and Restore Britain demand the deportation of legal migrants . Starmer’s government has succeeded only in increasing the salience of immigration without satisfying anyone. Britain’s discourse on the subject is now more toxic and more sinister than ever.

That poison fuses easily with grievances left by public services that are starved of adequate resources. “Well, if you get rid of half of the immigrants,” says another woman I talk to in Ashton-in-Makerfield, the “NHS will have more money, so will all the councils. Everything will have more money.”

That isn’t true . On average, migrants contribute more to public finances than they receive from the state. But Labour has simultaneously helped toxify immigration and failed to confront an economic model no longer capable of delivering rising living standards, security or decent public services. If citizens feel they are trapped in a zero-sum scramble for ever-scarcer resources, it is hardly surprising when they turn their anger towards those they have been told are taking too much.