‘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”, which he has since said he “deeply regrets”.

Yet only 16% of Britons believe net migration fell last year, while 49% think it increased. Farage has now pivoted to claims of discrimination against white people, while he and Restore Britain demand the deportation of legal migrants. Starmer’s government has succeeded only in increasing the salience of immigration without satisfying anyone. Britain’s discourse on the subject is now more toxic and more sinister than ever.

That poison fuses easily with grievances left by public services that are starved of adequate resources. “Well, if you get rid of half of the immigrants,” says another woman I talk to in Ashton-in-Makerfield, the “NHS will have more money, so will all the councils. Everything will have more money.”

That isn’t true. On average, migrants contribute more to public finances than they receive from the state. But Labour has simultaneously helped toxify immigration and failed to confront an economic model no longer capable of delivering rising living standards, security or decent public services. If citizens feel they are trapped in a zero-sum scramble for ever-scarcer resources, it is hardly surprising when they turn their anger towards those they have been told are taking too much.

Will Burnham offer an alternative? His call for net migration to fall further suggests he will double down on a failed strategy. His proposal to devolve responsibility for housing asylum seekers and migrants to local authorities with little housing stock shows worrying naivety. He has a welcome analysis of the failures of neoliberalism, yet remains committed to the straitjacket of the government’s fiscal rules, which preclude the scale of investment required in services and communities.

Although he has ruled out income tax hikes, he has said there is a “big case for land and business and property taxes to be changed”. Unless a Burnham government raises large sums of money, it will fail to address the economic and social insecurities on which Reform feeds. “Why don’t you go after the rich bastards instead?” as one disabled pensioner wisely puts it when I ask him about Labour. “The ones who get clever fellas to get them out of paying tax.”

Burnham undoubtedly has the benefit of the doubt from many voters in Makerfield. “He’s been around in Manchester for a long time and he’s done a lot of good with the buses here,” says one woman, doing her weekly shop. As mayor, Burnham has used limited powers well, while largely staying out of the defining political storms of recent years. His popularity owes much to that distance. It has allowed those disillusioned with Starmerism to project something better on to him.

“I don’t think it can get much worse than Keir Starmer, to be fair,” a young man in the town of Hindley tells me. The danger is that Burnham repeats the incumbent’s fatal error: coming to power without a coherent plan for a country in crisis, and without any real appetite for confronting powerful vested interests. His language about “public control” of services is a case in point. To the average punter, it sounds like public ownership. In practice, Burnham would use a spectrum of interventions, including “tougher regulation”.

Labour MPs have rallied around Burnham for the same reason the Tories plumped for Boris Johnson in 2019: blind panic. Yet if Johnson was a bad guy who wants to be liked, Burnham is a nice guy who wants to be liked. That is morally preferable, but not necessarily strategically successful. Challenging a broken economic order would mean inviting a deluge of hostility from the media, the rightwing parties, big business and, indeed, many Labour MPs. It is reasonable to doubt whether Burnham has the ideological commitment and political appetite for those fights.

For progressives, the best-case scenario may be a hung parliament with a significant Green contingent, which would finally discard our discredited electoral system. But if Burnham reaches office and then falls apart, the consequences will be grave. A hard-right authoritarian government, increasingly comfortable with the language of white ethnonationalism, would beckon. Reform’s exploitation of the murder of Henry Nowak and the Belfast knife attack offer chilling indications about the country’s direction.

“You never see any of this when it’s Black people being killed, when it’s unfortunately immigrants being killed,” as a young man in Hindley tells me. “It’s only like this when it’s the white people being killed, unfortunately. It needs to change. Everything needs to change.” The question is whether Burnham has the courage – and the strategy – to enact that change.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist