Manchester ruminations

The Manchester vote is of very little significance. At most it is a general opinion poll of those who can be bothered to vote in such a cynical charade. The vast majority did not vote. 18,455 rejected ballots also tells us that the system is not working.

As far as party politics goes, it tells us that the Tories have a problem. It tells us that Restore has some momentum, but very little traction, and that Burnham has reconnected, to a point, with the Labour base. Reform, meanwhile, has underperformed. But then the right as a whole has underperformed when their combined vote still doesn’t rival that of the winner.

But like Westminster voting intention polls, the trends identified are temporary and do not necessarily scale up. If the vote tells us anything, it is that there is no enthusiasm for this phoney tier of government, and that it has no authentic mandate - which blows a giant hole in Burnham’s flagship regionalisation policy. Nobody wants it, and it does not operate with popular consent. If Burnham persists with it he is wasting bandwidth on hobby horse.

As to Restore, we see a fairly evenly distributed vote across the region, battling it out with the Greens for third place. Translated into a general election, their chief impact will be to cost Reform a number of seats, echoing the Ukip Effect. With that in mind, we can expect to see Restore losing out in a general election to tactical voting - fearful of giving Labour the edge. There doesn’t appear to be a Restore stronghold.

The extent to which this influences Reform’s messaging remains to be seen, but Reform has other problems to attend to right now, and its underperformance might well be explained by the diversion of campaigning resource to Clacton. Either way, Reform has a lot of work to do to arrest the decline. A series of staggered polls show that regardless of the Burnham bounce, Reform is stagnating, and needs to pull its socks up if it wants to stay in the game.

The Tory party is much harder to read because they’re just treading water and working to preserve their current standing. They didn’t perform particularly well in Manchester in 2024 so wouldn’t have wasted the campaigning resource this time around on an election nobody cares about.

What should concern the right is that even if the Burnham bounce abates as fast as we all expect it to, the right still doesn’t have the numbers to pull of a majority in 2029. It points to a much more serious crisis on the right that none of the parties are capturing the public imagination. This will have been a maximum effort for Restore, with only 2% of registered voters mobilising in their favour. Nobody on the right has any cause for celebration.

As it happens, I do have a pet theory here. The right has focussed almost exclusively on immigration since 2024. While it remains a top concern, parties of the right have become monomaniacs, who aren’t saying anything new, and anyone who does care about immigration is already voting in their direction.

The bottom line is that the right is boring and it is not saying anything of interest to the wider electorate, many of whom are too busy trying to make ends meet to devote any serious time to following the news.

While the right is good at sustaining its own little online ecosystem, it’s out of touch with the real world. Hospital waiting lists, housing, care places and childcare costs still influence votes, and the right has nothing at all of interest to say when it comes to bread and butter issues. Given the radical libertarian leanings of the right on these matters, the less they say the better if they know what’s good for them. But that still leaves them with nothing interesting to say. It’s a problem.