Source: Red Mole
Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election on 18 June 2026 with 24,927 votes, 54.8 percent of the poll, a majority of 9,231 over Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon who took 15,696 votes and 34.5 percent. Restore Britain’s Rebecca Shepherd came third with 3,111 votes and 6.8 percent. The Green Party’s Sarah Wakefield received 308 votes, 0.7 percent, losing her deposit. The Liberal Democrats took 0.4 percent. The Conservatives 2.2 percent. Turnout was 58.77 percent, six points up on the 2024 general election, the third highest by-election turnout increase in post-war history. Labour’s vote share rose 9.6 points on 2024. The three parties that combined for 22 percent in 2024, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Greens, combined for 3.3 percent.
The same night, two by-elections in Scotland produced the opposite result. In Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, Labour fell from 33.4 percent in 2024 to 15.3 percent, finishing fourth behind the SNP, the Scottish Conservatives, and Reform. In Aberdeen South, Labour’s vote collapsed entirely and the Scottish Conservatives took the seat with nearly fifty percent, their first Westminster by-election gain in Scotland since 1967.
The coalition Burnham assembled in Makerfield, an anti-Reform squeeze that pulled votes from across the spectrum under the weight of exceptional national stakes, is not a template. It is an outlier. The question for the left is not how to repeat Burnham’s result. It is what to build in the spaces where Burnham’s result is not available, which is almost everywhere.
What the result demonstrates
The anti-Reform tactical squeeze was total. The 18-point collapse in the combined Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Green vote did not go to Reform. It went to Burnham. An anti-Reform coalition, constructed on the logic that beating Reform required voting Labour regardless of anything else, delivered Burnham his majority. The ‘Don’t Vote Reform’ imperative, whether delivered by SUTR, by Caroline Lucas, by Diane Abbott, or by the sheer weight of the stakes attached to Burnham’s candidacy, performed exactly as predicted: it subordinated every independent left voice to the requirement of Labour’s victory. The result is a Labour majority of 9,231 and an organised left presence in Makerfield of approximately zero.
Reform still has 15,696 votes in the constituency, its best ever total in any by-election. Reform still won every ward in the May locals. The ward-by-ward organisation that produced those results is still there. Burnham will go to Westminster and likely to a leadership contest. The 15,696 people who voted Reform in Makerfield on Thursday will still be in Makerfield on Friday, and Saturday, and the day after.
Burnham’s victory speech called for ‘a new politics based on unity and hope.’ He has already ruled out changing the fiscal rules. He cancelled a hedge fund call during the campaign not to oppose hedge funds but to manage the optics of meeting them. Lord Blunkett, sixty years a Labour member, said his party was in a ‘massive pickle’ and needed a ‘complete rethink.’ The general secretary of Unite, Sharon Graham, whose union remains affiliated to Labour, was more precise: ‘There is absolutely no doubt that over the last two years workers and the working class have fallen out of love with Labour. The win for Andy Burnham in Makerfield is a glimmer of hope but it must not be taken as a business as usual mandate.’ She called for Starmer to step down and named what a genuine change of direction would require: energy price caps, releasing the freeze on tax bands, a wealth tax, a comprehensive industrial plan. These are demands that cannot be satisfied within the fiscal framework Reeves has made her religion. The general secretary of Labour’s largest affiliated union is, the morning after a Labour by-election landslide, making the indispensable demands argument. The left outside Labour should act on it faster.
The Green campaign on the ground
The national media coverage of Sarah Wakefield’s campaign was not a fair account of the campaign on the ground. The food decolonisation controversy, amplified by Jeremy Clarkson and GB News, consumed the coverage. What was actually happening tells a different story.
Wakefield’s campaign rally speech was grounded in exactly the survival terrain the situation required. ‘Durham shares a lot of similarities with Wigan,’ she said. ‘It’s an area where it has been left behind for 40 years of deindustrialisation topped off by 15 years of austerity that hasn’t been dealt with.’ On youth services: reinvestment in youth workers and sports facilities. On local infrastructure: compulsory purchase powers for empty shops, reduced business rates for local businesses.
On the library question, addressing Burnham directly: ‘the money is coming, but where is it?’ Ashton-in-Makerfield library remains temporarily displaced from its building while restoration costs are unconfirmed. That sentence names a concrete unresolved situation, presses the responsible party on delivery, and does so in a room full of local people living with the displacement.
The campaign’s visual materials ran a public ownership poster sourced to We Own It: ‘Only the Green Party commits to public ownership in Makerfield.’ The Rochdale Green campaign in the May locals, fought in adjacent wards a few weeks earlier, ran ‘Stop Racist Reform’ and ‘Make Labour Pay’ on the same leaflet, used polling data showing the Greens ahead of Reform, Labour, and the Conservatives simultaneously, and put warm affordable homes and fair wages alongside renewable energy as its central promises. The infrastructure for a class-confrontational campaign existed in this regional Green network. It was being deployed.
The problem was not the content of the campaign. It was the organisation behind it. No ward-level network to deliver the right message directly to the right households, independent of press mediation. The national party ran ‘hope and joy’ in its official statements. Caroline Lucas provided the meta-narrative of a campaign standing aside for Burnham. A campaign without the ward-by-ward infrastructure to reach voters directly was always going to be defined by the channels it did not control. When the tactical squeeze arrived, 308 votes was what remained.
The Green Party’s closing statement named the right demands: fiscal rules, public ownership of water and energy, electoral reform before the general election, an end to the cruelty of settled status policy. Addressed to Andy Burnham in the closing hours of a campaign he had spent ignoring those demands, they were a form of political subordination: the party that raised them was waiting to see whether the man who dismissed them throughout would listen after winning. That is not the indispensable demands strategy. It is its parliamentary shadow.
What the Socialist Federation composites offer
The platform composites going to the 28 June conference are, taken together, more adequate to this situation than the process that produced them might suggest.
The O’Connor Meldau and Richard G platform composite establishes ecosocialism as a foundational principle, links ecological collapse to declining living standards, and explicitly proposes practical campaign work alongside Greens and Your Party where they are doing good work on the ground. That formulation is directly responsive to what the Makerfield campaign demonstrated: the left’s actually-existing presence in the constituency was mostly inside formations it does not control, and any serious anticapitalist federation needs a principled basis for relating to those formations without either subordinating to them or refusing to work within the terrain they occupy.
Tom Lennard’s complementary platform document on building solidarity and trust addresses the relational question the structural debate has so far obscured. The anticapitalist pole is not built by resolving theoretical disputes about federal architecture. It is built by people who trust each other enough to act together when the moment requires it. That trust is built in campaigns, in common work, in the relationships that Wakefield’s rally and Rochdale’s leaflets were beginning to build, and that the absence of organisational continuity will not sustain beyond the count.
The structural composites went to conference counterposed rather than composited, because the compositing process broke down. The 28 June conference will have to choose between Kulmer and O’Connor Meldau’s detailed federated assembly model with its explicit anti-capture guardrails, and Presland’s Common Ground proposal with its emphasis on local financial sovereignty and community rootedness. Both contain serious ideas. The conference should assess them on their content. What it should not do is allow the structural debate to consume the time and energy that the platform questions deserve. Platform first. Structure second. The Makerfield result is not an argument about federal architecture.
Three things to learn from Makerfield
The platform composites are right in their broad direction. They need sharpening in three specific ways the Makerfield experience directly suggests.
The first is named demands rather than named principles. The Rochdale Green leaflet’s ‘Make Labour Pay’ section worked because it was specific: a named councillor cautioned over election fraud, a named quote from Starmer about Gaza, a named policy on immigration. The platform composite’s commitment to ecosocialism and fighting exploitation is correct. It becomes actionable when it names the bedroom tax, the benefits freeze, the collapse of the Environment Agency’s capacity to deal with flooding and fly-tipping, the specific library whose restoration timeline has not been confirmed. Without that specificity the commitment to practical campaign work has no content.
The second is direct communication infrastructure. The gap between what the Makerfield Green campaign was actually saying and what the national media reported was not a communications failure. It was an organisational failure: no ward-level network to deliver the right message directly to the right households, independent of press mediation. The federation’s practical value will be measured by whether it can produce the equivalent of the Rochdale ‘Make Labour Pay’ leaflet in every constituency where it is active, and get it through the right doors, without depending on the national media to carry the argument. When the tactical squeeze comes again, it is that direct infrastructure that determines whether the left survives it with 308 votes or with something worth building on.
The third is an anti-austerity pledge as an electoral instrument. The Socialist Federation should develop and promote a Communities Before Cuts pledge for the 2027 local elections, requiring candidates seeking active Socialist Federation support to commit to: opposing all cuts to local services; refusing to implement central government austerity through council budgets; supporting workers in dispute with local employers including Labour-controlled councils; and opposing the use of council powers against tenants, benefit claimants, and migrant communities. The pledge is not a condition of membership or affiliation. It is a condition of active electoral support and the deployment of campaign resources.
The bedroom tax, introduced by the Coalition in 2013 and maintained by every government since, cuts housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have a spare room by fourteen percent for one spare bedroom and twenty-five percent for two or more. It hits disabled people, carers, and the long-term unemployed hardest. Labour has made no commitment to abolish it. The Greens have. The two-child benefit cap was also Green policy; it was abolished in April 2026 under sustained political pressure. That a demand can be won is not an argument against raising it. It is the argument for raising it. The 2027 local elections are less than a year away. The composites need this instrument in them before 28 June.
The morning after
Burnham will challenge for the Labour leadership. The Greater Manchester mayoral by-election must by law take place by 6 August. Two million voters. Reform will contest it hard. The left will face the same choice it faced in Makerfield: subordinate to the anti-Reform logic, or build the infrastructure that makes independent politics possible.
The 15,696 Reform voters in Makerfield are not going anywhere. Neither is the deindustrialisation, the austerity, the flooded streets, the displaced library, the bedroom tax, the benefits freeze. The arguments Wakefield made at that rally were the right arguments. They needed more than 308 votes’ worth of organisation behind them. Build it now.
This article is a companion to ‘Let Burnham Bleed’ and ‘Don’t Vote Reform Fails Makerfield’.