Last week I conducted focus groups among former Labour voters in the Gorton & Denton constituency to see what was on their minds as they prepared to vote in the by-election later this month.
There were mixed feelings about the decision to block Andy Burnham from standing as Labour’s candidate. Several said they had wanted him to stay as Mayor: “He’s done a good job, and he’s visible. He’s fought for us;” “I was like, I want him to stay for Greater Manchester. I don’t think his job is done here. It wasn’t about holding him back from Westminster and challenging Keir Starmer, it was more of the local ‘let’s make Manchester great’.”
Even so, they would have wished him well on his return to parliament: “I’d be quite happy for him to move on and share all that good work with the rest of the UK;” “He’s a very savvy operator and he would have taken that into the halls of Westminster. Let’s face it, Gorton and Levenshulme, Tameside, these places, then majority of politicians down in Westminster couldn’t pick them out on a map. He would have given the interests of those people more clout.”
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