Going deep on the Makerfield by-election

**Seán** (0:00)
Am I tough enough? Strong and stable leadership.

**Ava** (0:02)
Total ruba.

**Seán** (0:03)
Hell yes, I'm tough enough. Shut the fridge. Not another once.

**Ava** (0:07)
It's the PoliticsJOE Podcast.
Makerfield. All right, I'm gonna go rogue, and I'm gonna start with the Green Party. The Green Party have not been present in Makerfield. There was this really, there was a battle at the beginning, a battle of ideologies, which were should the Green Party stand aside in this by-election, in order to have Andy Burnham elected, in order to not split the Labour vote against reform, and ensure that there's a delivery, a swift delivery of Andy Burnham into Parliament. Therefore, he could challenge the Prime Minister. And you had these big voices on Twitter. So you've got Caroline Lucas, who's a Green grandee, who said we should not be standing a candidate, really came out the gates quickly. You also have people like Carol Vorderman saying, do not stand a candidate. And there were a number of people who were upset with the Green Party because Green Party is a Democratic Party.
So every member gets a vote about whether they're going to stand a candidate or not. It's not a decision that individuals can make. Like Hannah Spencer was getting a lot of stick at the beginning. She was getting a lot of comments on her Instagram posts. Like, don't you dare stand a candidate. It's not to do with Hannah. It is, but she gets one vote because she's one member.

**Seán** (1:25)
And also how the constituency strategy works is all down to the constituency members as well, right? Rather than being imposed from the central party. It's not as though Zach Polanski turns around and says, right, we're going to bring everyone up from London. It's like on the request of the constituency party.
So it ends up being, do you, I don't know, do you know what? Do you think they would have had a chance? Do you think they would have split the Burnham vote significantly? If they put all of their eggs into the Makerfield basket?

**Ava** (1:56)
No, I don't.

**Seán** (1:57)
Why?

**Ava** (1:58)
I don't think that that is a green voting constituency. I think that you're on the south of Wigan. It's a deindustrialized town, former coal mining constituency. There were several sites. It's now a logistics constituency. The sort of thing that it does, it straddles the M6 and the biggest businesses there are food distribution, clothing distribution.
It's a lot of logistics.

**Seán** (2:28)
Warehouse constituency.

**Ava** (2:29)
Warehouse constituency.
That's not to say that I don't think within a couple of years could the more eco-populist policies of the Green Party embed themselves in a constituency like that. However, I would say the campaign hasn't been rolled out enough there.
You know, like if you look at, say, the local elections, reform won a large swathe of that patch. Reform were quite ahead, out of the gate campaigning up there. The Green Party is much smaller. To go into the minutiae very briefly, the Green Party, because of the way that their donations work, they don't have the capital to spend in every single constituency at all times campaigning. So they are much more targeted. They go for targeted seats. For example, in the local elections, big spend in Hackney, which they won.

**Seán** (3:24)
Because they're looking at demographics rather than philosophy.

**Ava** (3:29)
We could take this from Labour. So let's put the money that we have there. During those local elections, the spend wasn't put in Wigan. So they're already behind the curve. Reform have already been out on the doorstep. So it's battlegrounds for them. They've already shored up. They've got people moving.
I'm not saying that they wouldn't be able to turn...
I'm not saying because they work in logistics, they don't vote for the Green Party. I'm saying that they haven't quite tailored. How do Green Party politics work in a deindustrialized town like Wigan? They haven't quite worked out that formula yet. So they're not ready. They're not going from a rolling start. Does that make sense?

**Seán** (4:07)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the other side of it is the kind of the left-wing option to labor, right? That like you could have, you may not have bedded yourself in as a viable option for Westminster in that constituency, but you would have done a serious electoral damage to the Labour Party and for Andy Burnham's chances of getting in. Had there also, I suppose we're probably going to talk about these as well, restore at some point. But if the Greens ended up being the restorer for the Labour Party, it could have been a far more interesting race because we're polling, what, like 10, 12 percent. Andy Burnham's polling like 12 percent higher than Rob Kenyon at the moment.