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By-Electioncast: Old Tweets and New Essays
00:32:21
The latest from the Makerfield by-election
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK
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with Verbo care. Help is always ready before, during and after your stay. We've planned for the plot twists so support is always available because a great trip starts with peace of mind while it feeling extra light after the holidays. Yeah, same but recovery starts right now with TikTok slash and free. Here's how it works. Pick the products you want in TikTok, shop, share the link and watch the price drop all the way to zero. No tricks, no catch, just free stuff with free shipping. Download TikTok, search,/free and start slashing today.
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Hello.
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Here is your latest helping of By Election Cast where we zoom in on the constituency of Makerfield where voters will be going to the polls on the 18th of June. And actually cycling into the newscast studio today. I bumped into my friend's little sister whose birthday is on the 18th of June and she was not aware that there was a three by elections happening that day. But she is now and hopefully she is listening to this episode of By Election Cast. And by the way, if you'd like to come and see newscast being done live at the Edinburgh Festival, we're going to be there from the 10th to the 14th of August. There are still some tickets available, although they are going like hotcakes. So go to edfringe.com, click on shows, search for newscast and then you'll get the instructions for how you can get a ticket to come and see us in Edinburgh. But right now we're thinking of the northwest of England, just beyond Manchester, just beyond Wigan, and we're heading to Makerfield. Newscast.
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Newscast from the BBC.
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The political circus is coming to town.
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Makerfield have been given one heck of a responsibility.
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We're in this sort of holding pattern
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until that by election.
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I don't remember a by election like that.
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Every man and his dog's gonna be there.
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The most important by election contest in the past 50 years.
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Makerfield.
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Blimey.
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Hello, it's Adam in the newscast studio By Election Cast studio. And I'm joined by Lara Spirit, who's the deputy political editor of the Sunday Times. Hello, Lara.
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Hello.
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Also on the line is Luke Trill from the Pollsters More in Common. Hello, Luke. Hi and welcome to By Election Cast, Annabelle Tiffin, who's the BBC's political editor in the northwest. Hello, Annabelle.
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E
Hello.
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C
Although Annabelle, your whole patch, which covers a lot of constituencies and a lot of important people, I feel has probably like zoomed in on one particular bit in the last week or so.
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Yeah, Makerfield, which, you know, if I'm absolutely honest. I am the political editor for the Northwest, but I hadn't really been to Makerfield. Well, it isn't actually a place, to be fair.
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C
Yeah, nobody's been to Makerfield.
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E
Nobody's been to Makerfield. It's a suffix. It's basically from Ashton in Makerfield and Ince in Makerfield. But, yeah, so there's no such place as Makerfield. So if you are hoping to visit it, you. You can't. The nearest is Ashton in Makerfield, but we hadn't really paid that much attention to it until now because it was such a safe place. Red wall seat also, we thought, obviously at the 2024 election it wasn't so much, but it's never been one that's been necessarily on our radar, but it
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C
suddenly is now pinging away on the radar. Lara, you were there for the Sunday Times recently. I was gonna say what was the temperature? But I mean, the temperature was high everywhere this week. I meant sort of metaphorically.
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Oh, sorry. So politically not. Yeah, yes, politically, really interesting. Very hard to find anybody who hadn't spoken to a journalist before, for example, particularly if they were in place. So if they were running a local shop, for example, they would sort of sigh heavily when you came in. And I was going, I should remind you, like last week, so early days of the campaign, already, they had been met by a number of people asking them what they think. I mean, when Luke and I did a. Did a focus group, or rather Luke did a focus group that I joined, it was interesting that a number of the residents of the constituency were saying, it's kind of difficult because we've got a big regeneration project at the moment. And you do notice it when I was walking down the street, really, really noisy, tons going on, particularly in Ashton and Makerfield. So it's certainly a busy time to be there. But, yeah, very hard pressed to find anybody who isn't aware of the politics of this. But, you know, I spoke to one lovely woman who runs a. Runs a shop and she was quite distressed by the amount of journalists that were talking. She was saying, I'm just worried it's deterring people from coming into my shop at this point because it's just. It's become, you know, such a hotly watched place at such an interesting time.
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And Luke, Lara referred to it there.
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You've.
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You've done a focus group in the patch. You're about to go and do a virtual one just now after we finish recording, I think. And also we've had some. Had One opinion poll. So we're starting to get some kind of. Some. Some data of different. Different forms.
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We are. And if the data is confirming anything, I think it's what we expected going into it, that this is going to be a very hotly contested race, particularly between labor and Reform uk. I mean, it was interesting in the focus group, you saw those tensions on, play really starkly. On the one hand, you know, you had people in the group who had real appreciation for things that Burnham had done locally. On the other hand, there was a. And perhaps more than I'd expected, actually, in that group, a sort of resentment that the idea of Makerfield being used as a stepping stone to advance Burnham's political career. And then a really interesting tension which Lara and I talked about afterwards, actually, which was, you know, whilst the group were mixed on what they thought about Burnham, mixed on what they thought about Farage, they were very down across the piece on the Prime Minister. I don't think we had a Keir Starmer fan in the focus group. And yet it rubbed so much up against voter psychology, the idea that the best way to get rid of Keir Starmer was. Was to vote Labour to get Andy Burnham into Parliament. You know, people just aren't used to thinking like that and it was quite difficult. And so it really did show that sort of tightrope that Andy Burnham is trying to walk.
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C
Right, let's talk about some of the other candidates. We'll come on to Andy Burnham in a bit more detail in a second. But Robert Kenyon, who is Reform UK's candidate. Lara, you spent quite a lot of time on the campaign trail with him when you were there. Tell us a bit more about him and what he's actually campaigning on. On. Or maybe he's actually just his campaign is about him and his background and his vibe.
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Yeah, I mean, I should say I wasn't on the campaign trail with him. And I think it's quite. I think it's important to say that, because I interviewed him in his campaign office.
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Oh, I see.
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And I mean, and it is quite interesting when you think about the fact that Burnham is literally omnipresent in this campaign. I mean, he's doing so many interviews nationally, locally. He is making himself, I think it's fair to say, pretty available to the press and answering a number of questions on his policy stances, on Makerfield, on this election, on what might come in the future. Kenyon is very, very different case for Reform, not just because of these former comments, but because he's not really A known or tested political entity. I mean, he was. When I sat down with him, he was saying, you know, I was literally doing a plumbing job at the moment. I found out that I was going to be running in this by election. This is not a career politician. And I noticed when I sat down and spoke to him, he was quite nervous. I mean, he was sort of, you know, he was. He was touching his hands a lot. It was clearly not a sort of natural encounter for him to be talking to a journalist, but it was really interesting to talk to him, not just because he hasn't done many interviews, but also because this was at the kind of crest of these past comments coming out. So there'd been, I think, one tranche, but we hadn't really heard most of them, which have come out in the days subsequent to this. But he was quite forthright about saying, you know, basically, I'm just a bloke, I'm rough around the edges and this is stuff that I said in the past. He seemed, I have to say, pretty. For somebody who was relatively nervous and anxious about the interview setup in general, he seemed pretty relaxed about these particular comments. Now, I should say a number of them have come out since, which are, you know, very awkward for him. But he was at ease with sort of basically trying to make this pitch which Reform spokespeople are making simultaneously, which is essentially. This is what you get if it's somebody who is not a kind of trained or normal politician. I think a lot of people would argue with that, but that is essentially the case that they're making.
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And it is interesting, the two sort of main videos that Reform and Robert Kenyon have put out. The first one looked almost shot for shot, identical to Andy Burnham's launch video. It was lots of pictures of the location and the constituency and landmarks and just very normal looking streets with. Interspersed with clips of him talking about his roots there. And that seemed quite sort of. Some people said it was quite slick. But then the next video that came was a sort of dash cam video of him driving around in his plumber's van with Nigel Farage in the passenger seat and them just having quite a rambling, unfocused, not very polished chat about the local area and some of the issues that people probably feel everywhere. So I wonder if after video number one, they decided they needed to double down on the sort of more homemade stuff.
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Yeah, it's interesting that sort of. I think it was nine minutes, that video. It was long, you're right.
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And it worked.
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I watched it on Double speed looked like they were going really fast, breaking
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all sorts of speed limits. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. They definitely felt like they needed a sort of safe and controlled way to get more of his candidacy and kind of personality across. And obviously they are majoring hard on the fact that that was his career before. So I think it does make sense. But it is this kind of hyperlocal focus for something which is essentially a national campaign has been triggered for national reasons. I'm sure we'll come on to is so interesting because in that launch video, the first of them, he was basically trying to make it look like he was a much more local candidate than Andy Burnham. He was essentially saying he wanted to be an MP for the local area. He would be the first MP that had been born, you know, in the constituency of the constituency to represent it in Parliament. What was interesting was that when I spoke to him, he was quite open about saying, you know, it's pretty extraordinary. When I watched Andy Vernon's video, I saw that, you know, his kids went to the same school that I went to and so.
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And you know, Burnham then centralized as a taxi.
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Well, Burnham, his launch was also gave a big, I mean, very kind of targeted comments saying essentially, I love this place. I live, I think, two miles from here. I could walk here to this campaign launch if I wanted to. You know, I educated my kids here. So I don't think. I think that was a kind of Week one theme perhaps in this campaign, of who has better credentials locally. But I think what Luke was saying that came through in a really big way in that focus group was this sense that even if these voters accept that Andy Burnham is quote unquote local, they're not necessarily convinced that he would be a quote unquote local mp, that he would be in Parliament representing them. I think that there is a suspicion, you would say probably quite a well founded one, that this is somebody who might enter Parliament and perhaps have bigger ambitions at play here.
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Yeah. And Annabelle, where have we got to then with Robert Kenyon's comments and how they've played into the campaign? And I should say they're not his comments, they're his old posts on social media posts.
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Yeah, and some that he's just liked and so on. But I would just say actually it's come out not born and bred in Makerfield, he was actually grew up in Merseyside, but he has lived in. This is. Robert Kenyon has lived in, in Makerfield for a long time. So actually neither of them that Are say. I mean, they're both hyperlocal. Like they're saying Andy Burnham and Robert Kenyon. But obviously Andy Burnham wasn't born there either. He's also from Merseyside, but. Yeah. So when I was out there the other day, I have to say, nobody really spoke to me about the posts that he's done in the past. They just like him for the fact that he is a very local guy and he seems like. Like somebody they can relate to. But on the other hand, it does depend where you are a little bit. So Platte Bridge, which is one area of Makerfield, it's sort of made up of all these disparate towns, is very much reform land. You drive down the main road there and there are reform posters everywhere. But if you're in Ashton, most people only were talking about Andy Burnham. And going back exactly to what you said before, that they just want Starmer out, is what they were saying, and that actually Andy Burnham is the way to do that. Also going back to what you were saying about how people feel about that a little bit, that a few of them, they realize that they are, as I wrote in an article yesterday, at the epicenter of British politics at the moment, but they do feel a little bit miffed about that because they feel like, well, has Josh Simons, the previous mp, just stood down just to let Andy Burnham then stand in this seat? And what will that mean for them? You know, is he actually going to be a proper MP for them? So, as far as I'm concerned, and hands up, I think I've said it to you before, hands up, totally honest. I've just come back from my holidays, so I've. I'm.
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At least someone's got some energy levels.
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Absolutely. So I'm slightly out of place of the loop. But now I've been catching up very quickly. But the Robert Kenyon stuff when I was out the other day didn't really come up.
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And for people who haven't seen them, basically, there was one particular tweet where he talked about basically fancying Carol Vorderman and a particular part of Carol Vorderman's anatomy. Then there was some stuff about women drivers which was just clearly misogynistic. And then, Lara, there was one from 2016 that suggested that he voted remain in the Brexit referendum.
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Yes. And Reformer saying he voted Leave. And he is saying, you know, I had every right to. People had every right to have some worries about this. But, yeah, they. They suggested that he woke up feeling, you know, pretty nervous about the results, particularly on the economic consequences of it. And I think actually given, you know, just how graphic some of the language in the other, you know, posts and endorsements was, it's interesting that this seems to be the thing that is perhaps making reform more nervous, these sets of comments, given, of course how central Brexit was said to be to this particular debate. It's. This is a Leave voting constituency. Andy Burnham, of course, a remain voting candidate that was seen early on to be a kind of important facet of this. And Nigel Farage indeed said that Brexit would be an important facet of this. So the fact that it sort of manifested itself in this way is, of course a little bit awkward for them.
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And Luke, I feel that listeners to By Election Cast will have had a bit of a head start on the issue about Restore Britain. So the rival to reform, which is headed by Rupert Lowe, who used to be a Reform MP but had a falling out with Nigel Farage and is a sort of, sort of, I'm trying to think of trying to compare it to a soft drink. So it's like, it's not like, it's definitely not reform lights or diet reform or reform zero. So full fat, it's full like fuller fat reform when it comes to immigration and things like that. And I see lots of people have now got onto this idea that, oh, actually there's a bit of a threat to reform politically from Restore Britain. Do you what's your take on that?
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Well, it's really interesting because I think up until recently it's been quite easy to dismiss Restore Britain as an online phenomenon. People who are very engaged but actually not translating to real votes. They only ran candidates under the Great Yarmouth first banner in Rupert Lowe's constituency in the local elections and. And yet it seems like he's having bigger cut through so Rupert Loe and Restore Britain than we might first have fought. And a number of reasons to think that. Firstly, that constituency poll that you talked about which was from Cervation, had Labour on 43%, reform on 40. So three point gap, but restore Britain taking 7% of the vote. So, you know, the margin between the two, Restore Britain had more than that share there. So it looks like reform could face a threat on their right. And what seems to have happened is that Rupert Lowe has quite effectively used his social media platforms. Lots of people talk about X, but actually Facebook is a far larger part of it. I think he has 1.2 million followers on Facebook. That's. I think it's almost twice the amount that the Prime Minister has just for reference there. So he's got this reach.
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And also Elon Musk, talking of Twitter, says nice things on Twitter about or X about Rupert Lowe as opposed to Keir Starmer, where he says very negative things about him as opposed to Keir
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Starmer and opposed to sometimes Nigel Farage. You know, Elon Musk has been at times quite negative about reform and Farage. And so it does look. And again, in, in the focus group we ran, we had a few people mentioning Rupert Lowe and saying, you know, he's also on the right. Admittedly in the group, they were actually more worried about Rupert Lowe splitting the vote than they were about backing him. But yeah, basically it does seem, and I think this is, I actually think it's a sort of testament to our times that someone is able to use an online platform to basically create a political party. They're not getting huge shares of the vote. You know, in national polling it looks at those sort of 3, 4% when pollsters prompt for them maybe up to 7 in Makerfield. But in an era of fragmented politics, in a close race, this could make all the difference. And so my key question is because I think again it will say so much about the future of politics is can reform squeeze that vote down? Can they squeeze, if it is 7%, can they squeeze it down? And if they can't reform is going to be faced with this real strategic dilemma, right, do they go after and pivot further to the right to get Restore voters back? But actually lots of the positions that Rupert Lowe and Restore hold are way beyond the acceptability mainstream for lots of other voters that they need to build their tent on the other side and take more Tory and Labour votes. So you know, actually for Reform, if Restored do do well, I think this is really existential for them. On the other hand, it maybe we get to election day, you know, the bar charts that we see in every By Election work and Restore get squeezed and actually it is more of an online thing but you know, it is. I think it's one of the most interesting subplots of this By Election and
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Restores candidate is Rebecca shepherd who is a local businesswoman and who is 53. Do we know Lara if she's written a self published novel which is available as an ebook because Robert Kenyon for has.
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Exactly. Yeah. It's not totally clear, I would say nor if either of them have penned their required essays at this point because
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everyone's doing big long essays like Tony Blair at the moment.
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So we'd like to see all the candidates essays.
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Yeah, he's written a sort of time. He's written a time travel like sort of World War II themed novel.
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Yeah. I mean it is actually astonishing how usually with candidates and past comments, endorsements, etc, it will be the odd one. I think with Kenyan it has been a vast amount of content which just indicates that a lot of people now are very online genuinely regardless of what their careers are. Very often if they're politically interested, they have got a huge footprint with a, with a number of things. So I think unsurprising that we're seeing nowadays when you have one person who said things that are, you know, pretty controversial, there may well be more than one example of it.
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C
Now Annabelle, this is where your recent holiday comes in handy. Not because I'm going to ask you about your holiday reading, but I'm just thinking about that like. Well, we can do that in our companion literary podcast. I'm just wondering if, because you'd been reporting on Andy Burnham in various guises for a very, very long time, I just wonder was the Andy Burnham from before your holiday and before this all kicked off and the Andy Burnham who's now on the stump in Makerfield, is he the same person or has he sort of changed and morphed a bit in that time, in the, in the gap in between?
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Oh, I know he's the same. He is the same. I mean, you know, he's made no bones, has he, for a long time about, about having political ambitions. Although interestingly, and I do go back quite a few years with him, as you said. I was sitting next to him at an event during the Theresa May days and he said she was having some tough times. And he said I can't understand anybody who'd want to be Prime Minister. And I pointed out, well, you have tried twice by being. Trying to be leader of the Labour Party twice. But he said, oh God. But obviously have changed a lot since then. He has, he obviously tried for the Gorton and Denton by election, didn't he? And that was stopped. The thing with Andy is that he's got to a point where what he wants to achieve he can't do in Greater Manchester anymore. And he's said that, you know, he needs to get back to Westminster to, as he said, change politics, change the Labour Party. But he is essentially. Well, I hope he's the same person because you know, you would say a lot of people would say, well he's done an awful lot of good for Greater Manchester. Whether that can be translated then into if he did become leader of the Labour Party. I don't know. I mean he has, he's received an awful lot of praise since he came in to be mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017. He's won three rounds of that and in the last one as you all know he won every single award in Greater Manchester. You couldn't be more popular. I think he's also come across a lot of criticism in that his critics have branded him almost like sort of a weather vane that his views blow with the political winds. And we've seen that a little bit over the last since the sort of campaigns going back to Brexit. You know he did say back in September that he expressed a desire to see the UK rejoin the European Union. However now he's saying he's not going to be advocating for this in the maker field by election. He's a man with a lot of political ambition. He always has. And this is the next stage for him isn't it to get back into Parliament. And then I think everybody knows that he's doing this to try and be the Prime Minister and I think everybody in Makerfield knows that's what he's trying to do as well.
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C
And Lara, I mean you talked about the battle of the essays. Everyone's got one this week. Andy Burnham did write quite a long piece for the Times newspaper, your sister paper rebutting a lot of what he thought was wrong in Tony Blair's article from the day before. What did you glean from that essay? Because when I first read it I thought there's not a lot in here I didn't know already that Andy Burnham thought.
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D
I think that's fair. I think that's very fair. I mean to me the big picture is it illustrated just how hard it is to have these concurrent campaigns of he's trying to win in Makerfield. He said it was a beautiful thing that Tony Blair had made this intervention which I think is quite a Burnham esque turn of phrase in the middle of a byelection so that he could put this pen to paper. I'm not totally sure that necessarily is this necessarily is the most convenient time that he would be writing a long essay on exactly what he thinks the country's direction should be and diagnosing where he thinks the problems have come from. But I think I counted six mentions of Makerfield in that piece. I think there was clearly a kind of awareness that it had to be tied to the people of Makerfield and this contest even if it was a kind of national treatise of kind. But I think you're right, you know, centrally he repeated the criticism of 40 years of neoliberalism which was something that clearly got under Tony Blair's skin. You know, he said so in interviews with the State program and the BBC and elsewhere following the publication of, of that essay. But you know, you will. I mean one of the similarities with Hisan Keir Starmer's substack, another one who's penned his own essay this week, is this sense that the 2008 financial crisis was a really fundamental moment and rupture and that Blair doesn't take enough account of inequality. That's a word street in criticism to Andy Burnham. The fall of living standards that followed on from that and another, you know, that was another thing that Kisa Keir Starmer mentioned as well. So I think it's very interesting to have and I think not necessarily a coincidence during recess week that this is the time where we're having more of a discussion or there's more space for these issues to be debated.
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C
No parliament to talk in.
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D
There's no parliament to talk. It is interesting.
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C
And look, I have been looking at some of Andy Burnham's daily tiktoks that he's been doing from the campaign trail where he's walking down road says what doors he's knocked on and how much everyone loved him there. But he did the latest one where he says oh a thing I get asked a lot and I'm going to address it now is is there a danger that if I win I will take Makerfield for granted? The subtext being because I'm then going to become Prime Minister quite shortly afterwards. And he ends by saying think about it like this. This will make Makerfield one of the most important places in Britain. Now that then made me think actually has he got a point here and not about whether the Prime Minister's constituency ends up being more important than, than others but has he got a point that actually Makerfield is quite emblematic of quite a lot of the country.
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A
I think he's got a really good point and actually if you think about the constituen of recent prime ministers, right they, they actually have been quite unrepresentative of the country as a whole. You know, Hoban and St Pancras, you know, you couldn't get more unusual urban than that. You know, Richmond and Northallerton, Farishi Sunak, you know, Uxbridge for Boris Johnson, Maidenhead, you know it's, it's, you know, it's leafy Middle England. In fact, you probably got to go back to thinking about, I mean, you've probably got to go back to Tony Blair and Sedgefield to go back to that battle of ideas, to find somewhere that was a bit more kind of earthy, typical. More typical. And I think. But, you know, abstracting from that, moving up from that, I actually think he made the right choice. And he's made the right choice by putting this emphasis on actually as an MP for an area like this, I will be able to champion Makerfield and lots of other places like it, you know, when he moves on to the kind of wider pitch that we expect him to do if he wins, to become Prime Minister. Because there is a feeling in lots of these places. We know, you know, we heard it in the Brexit referendum. We heard it in 2019, in 2024, this feeling of being overlooked by the establishment. Some people use the phrase left behind, others don't like that phrase. But just this sense that so many, you know, we've put so many of the eggs in the sort of basket of the City of London and the southeast and let other areas languish as a result. And I think if Burnham can make his pitch to the constituency that actually my victory here will be the start of changing that. It will be what you wanted to get when you voted to leave the European Union or when many of you voted for Boris Johnson, although they didn't win Makerfield in 2019. I will realize that thing that you have been asking for, which is a contrary, that works for everyone and I think he has to lean into that. And I've always thought that, you know, actually since the start of the campaign, he almost has to go that step further and say, this isn't just about becoming MP for Makerfield. I think because no one believes it, right? Like, he's got to own that it's about him taking the next step and how that next step will benefit Makerfield.
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C
Also thinking back to Tony Blair's article, and of course he's not a candidate in the Makerfield by election this week, it sort of felt a bit like he is. He talks about, oh, you've got to create this center ground thing, which is a classic Blair trope of forget left and right. You've got to. You've got to fight in the middle because that's actually how you get most people. And I wonder at the end of all of this, if Andy Burnham wins, will he have found a new middle? Because he talks about the B network on one hand and his Amazing gift he would have it of running public transport network for the benefit of everyone. But then we keep hearing that Makerfield is the car constituency where everyone has a car and drives to work. And I just think if you can speak up for the public transport users and the car drivers of Britain, that's basically everyone.
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A
Yeah, I think that's it. I mean I think he clearly is going for a sort of pitch which is this new center. And I thought it was interesting in that essay he also didn't shy away from talking about tackling channel crossing with
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C
fundamental reform of the Home Office.
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A
Yeah, reform of the Home Office. And at the same time, you know, this kind of, you know, talk about nationalization, talking about public transport. Actually, you know, we've said for a while the real center ground of British politics is slightly socially conservative on cultural issues, particularly immigration and crime and a bit more left leaning on the economy, so wanting greater intervention, more state ownership. So he's clearly trying to earn that. Sweet. And you know, I actually think, you know, Tony Blair lots of interesting stuff in his essay, lots that I agree with but I think he's slightly speaking to a center ground of 1997 rather than 2026.
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C
Annabelle, you can have the last word.
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E
Well, I was just going to say when you're talking about commuters, of course you mustn't forget the whole debacle of the clean air zone which was almost Andy Burnham's. Well, that was just hung around his neck for an awful long time. And I think in one of those TikTok videos that you mentioned he addressed that as well, that this was, he felt, he says was forced upon him by the Boris Johnson government. But there'll be a lot of people, as you said, it is a it. There's not great public transport in Makerfield. There's none of the trams, so they do rely on their cars. There's a lot of people there that drive white vans like Mr. Kenyon and they will be saying, well you know, you wanted to impose a charge on us. It hasn't happened of course.
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C
Yeah, that would have been what, up to 60 pounds in most polluting vehicles.
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E
That's right, yeah.
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C
And, and he got it postponed and then in the meantime manage to electrify the buses so the air quality improves. Clean air zone.
- [28:59]
E
A lot of the money that he got he spent on doing that with the, with the buses. But it is something that hangs over him a little bit and certainly a lot of people felt very angry about the clean air zone. But as we said, it hasn't actually happened.
- [29:11]
C
Yes. This episode of By Election Cast has very much happened, though, so I'll say thank you to you all. Annabelle, thank you.
- [29:17]
E
Thank you. Pleasure.
- [29:18]
C
Luke, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Good luck with your many more focus groups in Makerfield.
- [29:23]
A
Thanks. Bye.
- [29:24]
C
And Lara, I look forward to hearing about your next trip to the constituency, if you have time to make one in amongst all the political turmoil. Thank you.
- [29:30]
D
Thank you.
- [29:31]
C
And since we recorded the last episode of By Election Cast, a few of the other parties have selected their candidates. Jake Austin represents the Liberal Democrats. He is a councillor born in Wigan who represents Hazel Grove in Stockport. He was the Lib Dem candidate in the Greater Manchester mayoralty election in 2024, where he won 4.25 of the vote and was in sixth place behind Reform and the Greens. I feel like I'm doing the commentary for Eurovision here. And Albania is about to walk on. And here are some facts about Albania, but no Walking on now is the Green Party's second candidate because the first one pulled out. It is now Sarah Wakefield. She says the Green Party can find better solutions for the people of Makerfield. But Caroline Lucas, former leader of the Greens, has said that maybe the Greens shouldn't have fielded a candidate at all because there was a danger that they will split the vote on the left, which would help reform, which the Greens are very opposed to. So that is the full list of candidates. Except it's not. But that's not the full list of candidates. And on by electioncast, we like to give you the full list of candidates and we thought we would do that this week by getting a mystery celebrity guest to read them all out for you.
- [30:41]
F
Hi, Adam and the crew. It's newscast superfan Zoe Ball and I'm here to read out the list of 14 candidates standing in the Makefield by election on Thursday 18 June, in alphabetical order. The candidates are Jake Austin, Liberal Democrats, Count Binface, Count Binface Party. Andy Burnham, the Labour Party, Dan Clark, the Libertarian Party, John Dyer, Independent Ed Gemmell, Climate Party Paul Gould, Independent Alan Howlin, Lord Hope, the Official Monster Raven, Loony Party. Robert Kenyon, Reform uk Robert Pownall, Independent Rebecca Shepherd, Restore Britain Sarah Wakefield, Green Party Peter Ward, Rejoin eu Michael Winn Stanley, the Conservative Party and that same full list of candidates, plus more information about the Makerfield by election is available on the BBC website.
- [31:42]
C
Cheers, Adam, Zoe, thank you so much for doing that. Now, was it me or was Zoe actually quite enjoying reading that out? And especially when she did the little bit at the end about you can find the full list of candidates on the BBC news website, which I think is a real perk of this job. Thank you very much, Zoe. And actually, if you've got any suggestions for celebrities you'd like to hear reading out the full list of candidates, then why don't you let us know and then we can use that to pressure them into doing it in Future Weeks. It's newscastbc.co.uk or you can WhatsApp us on 033-01-239480. Right, that's it for this episode of Bile Actioncast. Laura and this weekend, Joe pike will be back with some classic weekend newscasts very soon. Bye bye.
- [32:26]
D
Newscast, Newscast from the BBC.
- [32:29]
G
From one newscaster to another.
- [32:31]
E
Another.
- [32:31]
G
Thank you so much for making it to the end of this episode. You clearly do, in the words of Chris Mason, ooze stamina. Can I also gently encourage you to subscribe to us on BBC Sounds? Tell everyone you know and don't forget, you can email us anytime. Newscastbc.co.uk or if you're that way inclined, send us a WhatsApp 033-01-239480. Be assured, I promise, we listen to everyone.
- [33:17]
B
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