‘Well, good,” says a middle-aged woman outside Boots about the prospect of millions of migrants being deported. “Because we want the country safe.” I point out that, even as immigration has risen sharply for the last two decades, by every measure – murder rates, or numbers of people admitted to hospitals because of knife attacks and assaults – violence has fallen steeply. She doesn’t believe it. “It seems to be going up,” she says.

She is one of the voters who will determine the future of the country. This is Ashton-in-Makerfield, a market town in the parliamentary constituency of Makerfield. On Thursday, Andy Burnham will either be elected and swiftly move to overthrow Keir Starmer as prime minister, or he will be defeated, plunging Labour into existential crisis, with the near-inevitability of Nigel Farage as prime minister looming over the wreckage.

Whatever happens, Reform will do well. So, too, will Restore Britain, its new challenger from the right. The engine of both is anti-migrant backlash – even here, in a constituency where fewer than one in 20 people are foreign-born, around a quarter of the rate for people resident in England and Wales.

For those who believed that reducing immigration would somehow drain the issue of its political potency, a reckoning with reality beckons. Last year, net migration fell from its post-pandemic peak of 944,000 to 171,000. Starmer has ransacked the rhetoric of the anti-migrant right, claiming immigration has inflicted “incalculable damage” on the UK, in a speech referring to Britain as an “island of strangers”,........

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