Labour joy at huge majority – region’s blue wall crumbles

Labour swept through the North West region in the General Election, winning back seats that were lost in the 2019 disaster.

Every Conservative held seat in Greater Manchester was won back by Labour – including Bury North, Bolton West, Heywood and Middleton North, and Andy Burnham’s former seat of Leigh.

As senior Conservatives such as Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt and Mark Harper lost their seats in the party’s worst ever defeat, it was in Lancashire where the most high profile Conservative loss came in the shape of former Northern Powerhouse minister Jake Berry. He lost his Rossendale and Darwen seat to Labour’s Andy MacNae with a collapse in his support from 25,000 to 12,619.

Labour came close to pulling off two further huge shocks in Fylde where two former university public affairs executives went head to head. Former Salford University director of external relations Andrew Snowden narrowly held the seat for the Conservatives despite a strong surge by Labour’s Tom Carver, a former policy adviser from Manchester Metropolitan University.

On Merseyside Labour took every seat, winning Southport from the Conservatives. Notably, in Southport, both St Helens seats and West Derby Reform UK candidates came second place.

The Liberal Democrats won the two Stockport seats of Hazel Grove and Cheadle from the Conservatives, and their former leader Tim Farron won the new constituency of Westmoreland and Lonsdale.

Tim Roca won Macclesfield for Labour with a majority of over 9000, the first time the party has come close to winning the Cheshire constituency previously held by David Rutley and a Tory stronghold since 1918. Last week the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was campaigning in the seat.

In George Osborne’s former seat of Tatton, Tory ex-minister Esther McVey scraped home with a close win by just 1000 votes.

The biggest regional shock of the night was Labour losing Blackburn to Adnan Hussain, an independent candidate from the town’s Asian community, who campaigned on the issue of the war in Gaza – he said: “This is for Gaza, I stand here as the result of a protest vote on the back of a genocide.”

Attention will now turn to who the new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer selects as ministers in his first government with key roles for two Tameside MPs as Deputy Prime Minister for Angela Rayner and Business Secretary position Jonathan Reynolds.

Next week Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham will outline the next steps to “transform education” across the city-region with the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate (MBacc) – one of a number of initiatives he will seek central government support for.

When Burnham and Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram were elected in May, TheBusinessDesk.com noted that both their manifestos and their pithy acceptance speeches seemed to price in a change of government, as did their outline of a vision in their book Head North, a rallying cry for a more equal Britain – a revelatory and confident celebration of what devolution has achieved so far, and what they hope can be the bedrock of a wider ambition to ‘rewire’ the constitution of the country.

Metro Mayors may have been a Tory idea, but for the two Mayors they have served to demonstrate to Labour leader Keir Starmer, and his would-be Iron Chancellor Rachel Reeves, that they can help an incoming Labour government to hit the ground running and be the legislative mechanism to deliver the party’s programme for government.

Relations with Labour HQ are cordial. At the Labour Party conference last October in Liverpool, Burnham was behaving himself, sharing platforms with would-be ministerial talent, such as Wirral MP Alison McGovern, about what they could do together in partnership.

And as Burnham told the Northern Spin podcast last summer: “The Combined Authorities of England now which are quite mature and quite established, and we could get on and make changes really quickly for a Labour government, for instance, building council housing, Net Zero homes for social rent, we could do that,” he said.

Similarly, Liverpool City Region’s Steve Rotheram has also spoken excitedly about the industrial opportunities that a Green Energy revolution can do for job creation around his Mersey Tidal Power scheme.

More updates to follow…