With the elections just around the corner, we take a look at the three key seats to watch in the race
Longsight on a Wednesday is busy. Drivers are using horns as much as their indicators, shoppers are filtering through the high street, and the chatter of the market is alive and well.
They are not headaches which indicate a major threat yet — the party currently has 86 out of 96 total councillors so mathematically cannot lose control at the next election. But by their standards, 86 is a low sum. Meanwhile, Woodhouse Park, covering Wythenshawe town centre and Manchester Airport, is a ward where the Green party have shown themselves to be effective campaigners on local issues. In 2021, they picked up their first councillor there. In 2022, they added another. And last year, they completed the set by winning the third and final seat in the area.
Longsight The crossroads of the A6, Stanley Grove, and Dickenson Road are awash with colour. Usually, it’s a site used to advertise all manner of services essential to this corner of south Manchester. That is also seen inside the market. But, despite both sides showing their support for Palestine, voters in Longsight who spoke to the Local Democracy Reporting Service are largely focused on other issues.
“We need somebody in this area for this area… George Galloway’s party is not that,” he believes. But others are not so sure. And so, he is ready to vote for someone else. That someone else might just be the Workers Party. He goes on: “A couple of ladies came from George Galloway’s party and I thought about giving him some support.”
“I am on the fence at the moment. I have not put much thought into it yet, I hardly see the councillors,” Saqib Anwar, a Longsight resident, said a couple of days earlier from his shop in Burnage. Who her first ever vote will go to is unknown, she adds. But the LDRS encountered more certainty here than in Longsight.
Nonetheless the LDRS did hear firm evidence of support for Labour in the local elections here - despite the Lib Dems' foothold. Liz Graham, a 69-year-old volunteer at the Intermediate Care Unit at Withington Community Hospitality believes Lib Dem John Leech is ‘a very good councillor’ and someone who ‘has always been supportive of the hospital’.
Woodhouse Park A drab day at the Wythenshawe Civic Centre brings in people from across the town’s four wards. “A couple of times I have thought but I have never voted Tory. My son said he would support the Greens.”
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