The earth just shifted beneath Labour's feet

THINGS don’t change around here, until they do.

- By ROB WILLIAMS

The light blue of Reform is building across Greater Manchester

There are political moments that build, almost imperceptibly, over years. And then the results of those slow granular shifts arrive all at once. On Thursday night, Greater Manchester witnessed one such arrival.For those paying attention, it was not a surprise.

In the streets, pubs and cafes of the region the voters the Manchester Evening News spoke to in the run up to these seismic election results have often given us similar versions of the same message: politicians are all liars, no one is listening to them and things seem to be getting worse. There is a lack of trust and a surfeit of anger. Much of it is directed at the prime minister.

Still, there has been dissatisfaction here before. The old adage about being able to stick a Labour rosette on a pig and it would win in some areas of Greater Manchester was less about patronising voters and more a way of demonstrating the extraordinary dominance of the Labour Party across much of the 10 boroughs whatever the political weather.

For decades, politics in this region has been built on continuity: Labour as the default governing force across most of the ten boroughs. Opposition parties came and went, often divided and localised. Even the sharpest internal disputes existed within a fixed framework that accepted that there was little by way of a real threat to Labour dominance. That has now fundamentally changed.

Thursday night was not just a bad night for the Labour Party, it was a night in which the assumptions underpinning the operation of Greater Manchester's local government were undermined.