Makerfield Results

Turnout July 2024  52.5%               June 2026  58.75%   Burnham majority: 9,231

In the end Andy Burnham smashed it.  He won an absolute majority beating the far right of both Farage’s Reform and Lowe’s Restore by 14 percentage points. He increased the Labour vote by 9 percentage points .  Clearly Liberal Democrat and Green voters voted tactically for Burnham in large numbers to ensure the far right did not win. They lost their deposits as did the Tories whose voters may have also migrated to the far right. Turnout was up 5 percentage points on the general election result which is unusual for a by election. Just a few months ago Reform won every local election seat contested in this area.

The gamble made by the Manchester mayor and so-called ‘King of the North’ paid off handsomely. Starmer’s position is increasingly untenable. Discussion in the press is really just about how long it will take. The mood in the Parliamentary party may be to go for a coronation. Already early Friday we have previously loyal MPs calling for Starmer to go. 

Currently, we have dual power at the heart of the Labour leadership.  The right wing and apparatus may well have been hoping for a narrower win where the combined Reform/Restore vote would have been greater than Burnham’s.  That scenario might have given Starmer some faint hope he could hang on and fight.

The situation is as clear as day for Starmer.  A month ago his Labour party suffered an historic defeat in the local elections which produced projections for a general election where his party would be under existential threat and Farage in Dowining street. Yesterday, in a campaign where Starmer was totally absent and where Vote Andy For Us replaced any Labour branding, the political result was very different.  Everyone in the constituency and in the whole country knew this bye election was as much about Burnham challenging Starmer as it was about defeating Reform.

Gissa job Andy

For all those hundreds of Labour MPs facing defeat by Reform in the next general election this result offers hope that they are not going to lose their jobs.  That motivation is always the decisive one in any leadership contest, not values or political manifestos. All those McSweeney/Labour Together imposed candidates are learning northern as quickly as they can.  Even before the result, Starmer’s ministers have been jostling in the queue to see if Andy will sign them up.  Streeting came up to canvass on Monday and had a private meeting.

Lisa Nandy speaking on election night was classic. As a minister she has to show some loyalty but she wants a job like everyone else. She was enthusiastic about the Burnham victory but in some alternative universe she gave the impression that he could join Starmer’s team:

‘I think that with him back in the top team, at the top table, helping to drive that change, I think we’ll be in a really strong position.’

The fact that the Burnham team has done nothing to dispel the idea that his government will keep key people on indicates that Starmer is going but the extent of any real political changes of direction is very limited. In fact ministers are being encouraged not to start a wave of resignations because it will produce instability.  Diane Abbot tweeted perceptively weeks ago  ‘ Meet the new boss, same as the old boss’.  Since then we have witnessed U turn after U turn with Burnham backing away from a number of his more radical statements aimed at mobilising the soft left inside Labour:

• from challenging the bond markets now he wants to respect Reeves’ fiscal rules,
• from providing more support for refugees now he more or less supports Shabana Mahmood’s reactionary proposals,
• he spoke up for trans rights now he supports the exclusionary Supreme Court ruling,
• he was for compensating the WASPI women who were fiddled out of their pension rights
• he even trashed the soft left’s banner of stopping Starmer’s attacks on disability/welfare payments by saying he was not squeamish about welfare reforms
• he is on board with defence spending increases and of course remains silent on the attacks on Juries and on the rights to take non-violent direct action

IBurnham’s team announced that three prominent mainstream economists,  including former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane, have been brought in to ‘reassure the markets’.

A minor reset?

So they may be something of a reset. Burnham may well support taking over Thames Water and his proposals for ‘public control’ (whatever that means) of water and energy as well as proportional representation remain on the table. Burnham also talks about moving away from the Labour Together tightly controlled internal Labour Party regime towards ‘working with all the talents’. Political debate inside Labour may improve and former activists may reactivate. Rhetoric about ending 40 years of neo-liberalism and questioning the idea of trickle down economic can provide openings for the left to intervente.,

Is this programme more radical than the one the Greens put forward? Not really. Will it lead to a new surge of membership or a rebirth of the Labour left?  Even with the debacle of  Your Party it is hard to see young people or other activists embracing someone who has refused to call out the genocide in Palestine, who does not seems to care about the erosion of democratic or migrant rights and is talking about drilling for more fossil fuels in the North Sea.

Makerfield shows both the continuing resilience and the limits of the far right vote. Reform’s vote was still up by over 3 percentage points and you can add the Restore breakthrough of nearly 7 per cent. The far right, who want forced re-migration, has just scored over 40% of the popular vote in a by election. It is winning votes above its polling average of just under 30%.  This still means it has a reasonable chance of a being in government.  Reform will not be facing a Burnham figure in their backyard in every seat next time.

Unless Burnham can radically change how people materially experience this Labour government he could see his popularity decline on a national level. People here could directly get rid of an unpopular Prime Minister; it was a fairly unique situation.  It is unclear how a folksy appeal to northern identity will work so well on a national basis in a general election.

When he addressed the Belfast riots, instead of challenging the arbitrary link between migrants and serious violent crime , Burnham actually referenced how the Tories had let immigration rip. Hardly the approach of somebody who will challenge racism head on.

A contradictory result

This result is contradictory. It shows mass popular support for racist, far right parties including a radicalisation further to the right. At the same time we see a mobilisation of broadly progressive voters against the far right. The few thousand Green voters at the last election seemed to follow Caroline Lucas’s advice to back Burnham to stop the far right.  Work on the streets, workplaces and in the communities exposing Reform as reactionary does have an effect on voters. Reform may suffer more than currently estimated from tactical voting in a general election. Projections on seat total do not necessarily take that into account.

The size of Burnham’s win means that events could move quite quickly this week. Starmer’s ‘clever plan’ to offer him a ‘big job’ in the cabinet or to use the Greater Manchester mayoral election to delay a leadership challenge has been exposed for what they were – desperate measures of a dead man walking.

Leaving the issue of who is prime minister to drag on would actually produce more instability. Every key decision will be discussed from both Burnham and Starmer’s perspectives, government will be paralysed unless there is an orderly surrender.  Will Streeting stand even if Starmer bows out?  He does not have the numbers to win and he will be easily bought off with some cabinet post.  Burnham is no Corbyn so the Labour right and apparatus are ready to handle him, particularly after seeing him already U turn on so much.  The Labour Together people might not have so many of the plum jobs but many will recycle themselves as born again Burnhamites.

Simons – a question of morality

Talking of recycling there has been little comment about Josh Simons. Remember him? He gave up his seat for Andy. It is reported that he will be a key advisor in the new government.  This is a man who was sacked/resigned from his junior minister role for using an investigative consultancy to smear journalists who were exposing what Labour Together were doing inside Labour.  Simons was a key leader of that organisation. People were accused of being in the pay of the Kremlin.  Their professional reputation and livelihoods were threatened.  Simons has apologised for his ‘actions’ but as far as we know not personally to the people involved.    Simons is the epitome of the value free consultant/political advisor/lobbyist/MP/company director who flits from political line to political line as long as it is a well paid job. American politics is full of them. For Burnham just to take someone like this into his team tells you something about his politics.

In fact it is quite difficult to pin down what Burnham’s vision and project is.  I watched the folksy video he put out during the campaign. Based on a decent poem by Afro Caribbean poet Lemn Sissay, it is a rallying cry for regional pride in the north. It celebrates the work ethic, competence and resilience of northern working people. There is a reference to suffragettes and the miners but radicalism is not foregrounded in words, an image or clip.  Being up north somehow allows you to be a guide like the north star and at the same time brings light from darkness. It is all very lyrical and sums up much of his campaign which was more about vibes and bland proposals than hard policies.

Obviously making people feel good about themselves and their community is better than the hatred spewed by Reform and Restore. The vibe worked too with the result.  However by definition this is not a coherent national project – I mean can people from other places in Britain not also bring light and inspire waterfalls? It was noticeable that apart from one Afro Caribbean figure there were no Asian heritage people in the video despite their massive presence in the northern working class.

Weakness of Burnham’s project

“That changes tonight. This result changes that. This result will bring about a country that works fairly for everyone. People here have voted for change, they have voted for more power for the north and everywhere forgotten by Westminster. Now let’s give that back to them.”  Burnham election night statement

Can you build a real alternative to Starmer’s partnership with neo liberal capital by being a normal nice guy surfing the vibe of northern working class identity? Any notion of challenging class power and the mass struggle needed to really change things is evacuated from all this massaging of northern identity. 

Like Starmer, Burnham does not really challenge or call out the interests of the one percent, of the people who fly in on private jets and arrive in big private yachts.  He has joined in with the obsession about refugees on small boats. Zack Polanski has been more critical of this power.

Standing alongside the Palestinians and denouncing the genocide is another question that messes with simplistic visions of northern working class goodness. Nobody disagrees about honest working folk but taking on the well organised Zionist organisations that accuse anyone supporting Palestine as being antisemitic, now that is a lot tougher.  Jeremy Corbyn wrote to Burnham asking him to back any enquiry into British complicity with the Israeli government’s actions in Palestine. He has received no reply.

Socialists are happy to see the back of Starmer. We welcome any progressive actions Burnham takes to sort out Water or Energy or to make fairer taxes. We agree with the urgency of changing our undemocratic voting system. But let us not get carried away. Burnham is not even another Corbyn.

We need something a lot more radical – an ecosocialist alternative that has to be built from the bottom up in the green and labour movement. Will Lloyd, a journalist from the New Statesman spent some time in Makerfield and he picked up on something which shows that tinkering at the edges will just not fix it:

‘