Makerfield voted for Brexit in 2016. Only a month before the by-election, it gave Reform UK a 20 per cent lead over Labour in the local elections. Then, on a Thursday in June, Andy Burnham took the seat with 55 per cent of the vote, about 20 percentage points clear of Reform.
Labour did what desperate parties do. It started planning a coronation. Andrew Neil, writing in the Daily Mail, says that is exactly the mistake.
Why the margin flatters him
Neil does not dispute the size of the win. He disputes what it proves. Burnham is the popular mayor of Greater Manchester, a local man with a northern accent, and the contest was fought on his home ground. Better still for him, Makerfield offered a neat choice to anyone who disliked both Reform and Keir Starmer. The Liberal Democrats and the Greens together barely reached one per cent.
Neil also points to the opposition. Reform fielded a lacklustre candidate, and Restore, led by Rupert Lowe, split the vote on the further Right. Even so, he concedes, a united Right would not have stopped Burnham.
His comparison is a telling one. The same Thursday, the Conservatives took Aberdeen South with 50 per cent to the SNP’s 29 per cent, a result driven by local anger over the SNP’s stance on North Sea oil and gas. The Tories, Neil says, know they cannot copy that nationally. Labour has not grasped the same thing about Makerfield.
A rescue that nobody has costed
In Westminster, the talk is of Burnham in Downing Street within days or weeks. Peter Kyle, the business minister, told broadcasters that Starmer was weighing the “political realities”. Burnham, for his part, has not ruled out the top job, though DW noted he had taken no obvious step to force a contest. His victory speech was pointed enough: “Tonight could, just could, be the turning point.”
Neil is unmoved. He argues that Burnham is even less prepared for power than Starmer, with no blueprint and no team. Running a city region on a £3billion budget is a long way from a £1.4trillion budget and a nuclear deterrent, he writes, and Burnham held three Cabinet posts in three years without staying long enough in any of them to make a mark.
The by-election campaign itself tied his hands. Burnham said he would keep to Labour’s fiscal rules and broadly to the 2024 manifesto, which sits awkwardly beside his talk of a big council house programme or a national social care service. Both would cost tens of billions. Neil notes that within hours of the result, official figures showed the government had borrowed £23.3billion the previous month, almost £6billion above forecast, with nearly £12billion going on debt interest alone.
Neil’s wider point reaches beyond one man. Centre-Left and centre-Right parties across the democratic world are hunting for an antidote to populism, and nobody has found it. Labour believes it has. He expects disappointment before the year is out.
Lord Falconer, a senior Labour peer, has already called for an agreed handover between Burnham and Starmer. Neil’s closing verdict on the party is blunter: it thinks it has found the holy grail, and it is more likely to get an unholy mess.
Sources
- ANDREW NEIL: Labour thinks it has found the holy grail in Andy Burnham. It's more likely to end up in an unholy mess (Daily Mail)
- Starmer mulls 'political realities' of Burnham by-election (Deutsche Welle)
