Wigan: The first thing I hear when I get to Wigan is that there’s been a stabbing in the centre of town.
There’s a helicopter overhead, tracking the assailant, and there are five police officers searching an alleyway for the knife, lifting the lids on the garbage bins. The lights are flashing on the police cars outside the Ladbroke’s betting shop on Market Place.
The attack wasn’t fatal, says the man in the convenience store when I buy the local paper, but it’s another scare for the community. “It’s the end times,” he says, with a shake of his head.
The times were never easy in Wigan, the English town made famous by George Orwell when he met its coal miners and struggling families in 1936. He witnessed women so desperate for heating that they scrounged for fragments of coal, and he described crushing poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier when it came out in 1937.
But times are not so easy now, either. Wigan, halfway between Manchester and Liverpool, has been left behind since the coal mines closed in the 1980s. When I visit at lunchtime on Friday, the small central plaza is quiet apart from the men lounging on the council benches and the drinkers at the Wetherspoons, the pub chain with the cheapest pints.
“This town was never like this,” says Carol Pidgeon, a retiree doing her shopping. “I’m only here because I’ve not got my grandchildren with me. I don’t want to bring my grandchildren in because I don’t want them looking around seeing the homeless people.
“I think it’s a horrible place, with the decline of the town. My children, who are now grown up, used to go to the nightlife in King Street, and now it’s an absolute dump. It’s a disgrace.”
There is a powerful sense of decline in this town – so its voters are making themselves heard. Wigan was a Labour stronghold for generations, built by union muscle, but it flipped in the council elections last Thursday. Angry with Labour, the town rallied to populist leader Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party.
Of the 25 seats up for election in the district of Wigan and Leigh, 24 went to Reform UK. Another went to an independent. None went to Labour.
Pidgeon, who has lived in Wigan all her life and worked as a nurse at the local hospital, thinks Keir Starmer should be replaced – and she knows who she would prefer as prime minister.
“I would have Nigel Farage, I would,” she tells me.
Tony Holt, 74, who worked for decades at the Royal Mail before it was privatised, voted Reform because he thinks the Labour government has failed.
“They’re not sorting anything out in terms of the people coming to this country who shouldn’t be in this country,” he says.
“Number two, all this money that’s being wasted on welfare payments – on the people who are self-diagnosing as ill, and I don’t think they are. We need somebody to start telling it like it is.”
Like many others, including voters who spoke to this masthead in Manchester on polling day, Holt believes the problem is bigger than Starmer.
“He just hasn’t got a plan for what he’s doing,” he says. “He just seems to lurch from one crisis to another. But they haven’t got a better alternative that I can think of.
“And I don’t think the Tories are much better. So let’s give Nigel a run.”
The frustration in Wigan has been on display for years – in the Brexit referendum a decade ago, 64 per cent voted to leave – but political leaders have been incapable of lifting the city’s fortunes. Now, with prices rising and slow wage growth, people see migration as a source of pressure they do not want.
One local, Jimmy, is convinced that migrants are bringing in crime. “I’m not normally right wing. I’ve always been Labour, but not any more. This is the first time I’ve voted against Labour.” He backed Reform.
Stephanie, 40, an office worker, also worries about crime. She tells me that she was followed off a bus by two eastern European migrants when she was 16, and this influences how she thinks about the changes in the community today.
“I hate walking up this end of town,” she says. “I’ve got four nieces, and I’m terrified of them leaving the house.
“I feel like there wouldn’t be the pressures on housing and the NHS if there wasn’t all the extra people that we don’t need to be here.” The National Health Service, equivalent to Medicare, is stretched by funding shortages.
Wigan had 92.25 crimes per 1000 people last year, a slight fall on the previous year. The Greater Manchester Police said residential burglaries fell 24 per cent and knife crime was down by 16 per cent. But the police press releases do not show the trend over the long term. And the crime rate for England and Wales as a whole was only 72 crimes per 1000 people.
Whatever the statistics say, the people of Wigan know about the stabbing on the streets on Friday. The police later confirm that one young man was taken to hospital for treatment. Police arrested four teenagers on suspicion of assault, affray and drug offences.
In some ways, Wigan fares better than others. It was ranked 43rd out of 63 cities in terms of living standards in a nationwide study by the Centre for Cities, a non-profit think tank. Its unemployment rate, at 4.3 per cent, was at the midpoint of the scale. Its average house price, at £202,000 (about $380,000), placed it 53rd out of the 63 cities.
But it is certainly not prospering. And voters are blaming Labour.
Mackenzie Gore is walking through Market Place with her husband, David, and their new baby, just six weeks old. She is dismayed at the shift to Reform because she does not believe Farage when he vows to turn away migrants and stop the use of local hotels to house asylum seekers.
“If you look in your local town, there’s no issues of immigration here,” says Mackenzie, an office worker. “So what are you voting Reform for in this town?”
But the couple are disenchanted with Labour, which has run the local council for decades, so they voted Green. While Labour will keep control of the local government because only some of the council positions were up for election this year, it is on notice. If this result is repeated next year, Reform will run the council.
David, who works in telematics, worries about the constant division in public life and the direction Britain is taking: “I feel like we’re heading into a really bad place, this country.”
None of this is apparent at Wigan Pier, a short walk down the hill. It is the most peaceful part of the town, with old warehouses standing alongside the historic canal that runs from Leeds to Liverpool, offering an escape from the traffic on the main road.
The pier was a joke when Orwell came here in 1936. He described a landscape of slag heaps and scrap iron around the canal and the coal mines. Wigan was the subject of black humour from a music hall act that likened the town’s wharf to the pier at Blackpool, the resort on the coast.
But the pier stands today, better than it was in Orwell’s day, and there are plans to renovate the site.
Unfortunately, the redevelopment is taking time. Promises were made, but progress is slow. No wonder this community is frustrated with its leaders.
A retired couple, Cyril and Brenda, tell me what worries them: the impact of global warming on their children and grandchildren, the fact that Donald Trump is in the White House, and the rapid social change from migration, which they think puts a strain on schools and hospitals and infrastructure.
They are disappointed with Starmer, but they are not sure a leadership spill is the solution.
“I’ve voted Labour all my life,” Cyril says. “We did think about voting Green, but there was no way I was voting Reform.”
“Nor the Tories,” Brenda says. “I’ve been brought up as a Labour voter.”
Not so long ago, Wigan was full of loyal Labour voters. Not any more.
Cyril and Brenda are the first I’ve met who seem willing to give Starmer the benefit of the doubt. Most others feel that his time is up.
More than anything, there is an overwhelming sense of gloom about the future of the town and the country. It ranges from anxiety to discontent and outright despair, and it helps explain the visceral rejection of the two major parties at last Thursday’s elections.
The collective howl from the British public is powerful enough to put Farage into the prime minister’s office. But the challenges are so great that the gloom is likely to remain, no matter who is in charge.
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David Crowe is Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.