Andy Twelves

Last Wednesday I went up to Makerfield to do a bit of on-the-ground research into what voters there really make of Burnham, Kenyon, and whoever it is that’s standing for Rupert Lowe. To do so, I went from pub to pub in search of unguarded moments and in vino veritas. I have family just outside Warrington, ten miles up the road from Makerfield, and have lost more money than I care to count at Haydock Park Racecourse, on the border of the neighbouring seat of St Helen’s North, so I did not arrive entirely unfamiliar with the local area. I pulled into Wigan North Western just before ten in the morning, early enough to make it before the pubs opened. From the station, I took a taxi to Ashton, the largest settlement in the seat.

Green MP Hannah Spencer has said Parliament’s drinking culture makes her feel ‘really uneasy’. Her comments, in an interview with PoliticsJOE, have landed her in hot water with MPs who have a soft spot for at work tipples, many of whom think she is naive to the traditional drinking culture of Westminster. But Spencer is far from the first parliamentarian – particularly on the left – to have taken a dim view of British attitudes towards alcohol.  Across the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Temperance movement – which sought to prohibit the consumption of alcohol – plagued parliamentary agendas.

After losing the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election to a leftwing plumber, Reform’s Matthew Goodwin has published a new book: Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity. It’s clear that Goodwin was trying to emulate Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, which was published in 2017. It has almost the same tagline and rough thesis. But while we can be sure that Murray did not use AI to write his book, I cannot extend the same confidence to Goodwin’s attempt, which opens with: ‘There are moments in the life of a nation when everything changes – not with a bang, not even with a conscious decision, but with a quiet, creeping loss of confidence so profound that a people start to forget who they are.