There is something deeply revealing about the Makerfield by-election, and it has nothing to do with who wins it.
This is not an ordinary contest. No member has died. No scandal has forced a resignation of conscience. A sitting MP, Josh Simons, stood down on 14 May for the express purpose of vacating his seat, and he said so plainly. A constituency has been placed on the board so that one man can move from a mayoralty back into Parliament and, from there, into a leadership contest he cannot otherwise enter. You have to go back to the 1965 Leyton by-election to find the last time the country manufactured a vacancy to import a particular figure into the Commons. Makerfield, in other words, has become less a constituency than a rescue mission for a sinking Labour Party.
The trappings are all there: the candidates, the boards, the activists bussed in from safer seats, the media vans, the rehearsed concern for towns nobody in Westminster could find on a map a year ago. Fourteen names will sit on the ballot on 18 June. Labour wants you to see a fresh horse led into the stalls, a thoroughbred ready to run a race the old nag could not finish. What is actually being led out is the other half of the pantomime horse: the back end to Keir Starmer’s front, waiting to swap places in a seamless transition, act two of the farce the party has made of itself. You can turn the costume around as often as you like. It is still the same horse, and it still shuffles in the same direction.
So the only question worth asking is the one the whole production is staged to discourage. Does Andy Burnham offer a new politics, or the same play and the same production of decline and decay?
Andy Burnham: A Better Actor in the Same Bad Play
For all the northern soul, the open collar, the warmth that Keir Starmer could never fake if he rehearsed for a decade, Burnham’s politics are strangely familiar. He is more human than the Prime Minister. He is, without question, a better actor. But a better actor in the same bad play does not give you a different play. He gives you the same lines, delivered with feeling.
This is the pantomime horse. One half has swapped places with the other, and the crowd is invited to cheer because the back end is now the front end. It is still the same horse, and it still walks in the same direction.
The proof arrived this week, and it arrived twice.
Burnham’s Fiscal Rules Dodge: What Are the Rules?
On Friday, BBC Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire put a simple question to the man whose team had confirmed he would keep the Prime Minister and Chancellor’s self-imposed fiscal rules. Could he say what those rules are? Burnham declined. He compared the question to sitting an exam. Pressed, he offered only that he knew what the rules were, and that he would set out a plan within them so as to “keep the discipline.”
He was asked to name the rules he would bind the country to. He could not, or would not. That is not a gaffe. That is the whole policy.
He was asked to name the rules he would bind the country to. He could not, or would not. That is not a gaffe. That is the entire policy.
It is worth saying clearly what these rules are, since the candidate would not. They sit in the Charter for Budget Responsibility, and they come to two. The first, the Stability Rule, demands that the government’s day-to-day spending be paid for entirely out of its revenues, so that the state may borrow only to invest. The second, the Investment Rule, demands that public sector net financial liabilities, the Treasury’s preferred measure of debt, be falling as a share of the economy. That is the machine in two sentences. It is not a law of nature. It is a political choice dressed as economic necessity.
And here is a question Burnham has never been asked, because the entire Westminster class shares the assumption behind it. What if the rules themselves are the problem? Britain’s self-imposed limits are cousins to the European Union’s own fiscal theology, the Maastricht commandments of deficits below three per cent and debt below sixty, the same belief that democratic economic choice must be fenced inside a number agreed in advance and policed by people no one elected. We were told for years that leaving the EU would free us from that cage. We left, and our own Treasury built a smaller one and locked us in voluntarily.
A government that issues its own currency is not a household balancing a chequebook. Its real limits are inflation, labour, skills, materials and productive capacity, not some invented morality of the family budget. The honest question is never “where will the money come from.” It is what we need to build, who has the power to build it, and what real resources we can command to do it. Burnham had the chance to challenge that frame on national television. He accepted it instead, and asked only for better lighting in the cell.
Understand how the thing actually works and the rules look stranger still. Taxation does not fund spending; it drains money out of circulation. Public spending does not wait for tax receipts; it puts money in. The gap between the two is the deficit, financed by a state creating its own currency, and the country has already watched that happen on a heroic scale. The Bank of England conjured eight hundred and ninety-five billion pounds out of nothing through quantitative easing to steady the financial system. The money was there. It was found in an afternoon, when it was the City that needed saving. It is only ever missing when the queue is made of nurses, councils, bus routes and disabled people.
Look, then, at the arithmetic the rules actually produce. In the year to March 2026 the government borrowed around a hundred and thirty billion pounds, with day-to-day spending alone running some fifty billion beyond what tax brought in. Rachel Reeves is not living inside her own Stability Rule now; she is promising to reach it by the end of the decade. There are only three ways to close a gap that size while the rule stays sacred: cut welfare again, cut the NHS and the services and the defence budget, or tax the wealth that has spent forty years floating free of the bill. Burnham has pledged himself to the same rule. So one of those three doors is his future, whatever warmth he brings to the announcement, because he has bolted the only other exit shut. That is the choice the bluster on Newsnight was built to hide.
And here is the tell that should trouble anyone tempted by him. To the New Statesman, Burnham says Britain must get beyond being “in hock to the bond markets” and floats nationalising key industries, a 50p top rate, tens of billions borrowed for council housing. To the markets, his spokesman says he supports the rules and has no plans to change them, and one of his backing MPs tells Times Radio there would be no trouble from the markets under him at all. Both audiences are meant to believe him. That is not a programme. That is a man facing two ways at once, which is precisely what a pantomime horse is built to do.
Tell them what they want to hear: To the people, he says, we must stop being in hock to the bond markets. To the markets, his team says nothing will change. Both audiences are meant to believe him.
Burnham on Europe: From Rejoin to Retreat in One Week
The second proof is Europe. At Labour conference last autumn, Burnham said he hoped to see Britain rejoin the European Union in his lifetime. It was bold, it was honest, and it was the kind of thing Starmer would never risk. Then the by-election arrived. Makerfield voted around 65 per cent to Leave in 2016, one of the most strongly Leave constituencies in the country. And so the conviction went back in the drawer. Burnham now says Britain should not seek to rejoin, a line he drew specifically to separate himself from Wes Streeting.
Set the two performances side by side. A man who sells himself as the alternative to Starmer’s hollow triangulation spent a single week triangulating on the two largest questions in front of him: the economy and Europe. He blustered past the rules he claims to honour, and abandoned the position he claims to hold. The repositioning he condemns in the Prime Minister is the thing he does most fluently. That is not an alternative path. It is the same path, walked with a warmer voice.
CONTROL, NOT OWNERSHIP
His admirers have a strongest card, and it is worth meeting honestly. The Bee Network, Greater Manchester’s yellow buses, brought local services back under public control for the first time since deregulation, the first city region outside London to manage it. The flat fares, the integrated ticketing, the single map across bus and tram: this is a genuine improvement, and it is genuinely his. Credit where it is due.
But look hard at what it is, and what it is not. The Bee Network is franchising. The public authority sets the routes, the fares and the standards, and then private operators bid, through competitive tender, for the contracts to run the buses and take a fee. It is the model Transport for London has used for decades, the model Ken Livingstone reached for before the courts struck his cheap fares down in 1981. It is public control. It is not public ownership. The wheels still turn for private profit; the public sets the timetable, carries the revenue risk and paints the buses a cheerful colour. The deeper thing, a publicly owned operator running buses for need rather than margin, the model South Yorkshire built when its own buses ran on fares held down to a few pence, is exactly the thing the Bee Network stops short of.
Press him on what “public control” means beyond the buses and the same fog rolls in. Burnham talks of bringing water and energy back under public control, and the phrase does a great deal of warm work. But asked about Thames Water, the most scandal-ridden of the lot, he reaches not for ownership but for a “localised public control option,” a form of words that answers none of the questions that matter: who owns it, who runs it, who carries the debt, and where the profit goes. The Guardian’s own City commentator, no one’s idea of a firebrand, looked at the same proposals and concluded simply that Burnham was too vague to judge. And the reason for the fog is the reason for all of it. Speaking to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, he said his economic vision was built to reassure bond investors, that restoring public control would lower the state’s long-term costs, and that this was “the way to reassure markets.” There it is once more. The public-ownership music is played to the members; the reassurance is played quietly to the City. The vagueness is not a lapse in preparation. It is the seam where the two costumes are stitched together.
And here the two halves of the horse meet again. To the New Statesman, Burnham talks of nationalising key industries. To the country, he pledges to take Britain back into the European Union. Those two promises are not friends. Franchising survives in Brussels happily enough; London ran it inside the EU for years. But genuine public ownership outside a tendering framework is, as one study of EU competition law and public transport put it, virtually impossible to sustain. The “level playing field” we were sold as fairness is the same cage as the fiscal rules, built to turn every public good into a market and every act of common provision into a contract put out to bid. The man who would lead us back into it is the same man who says he wants to break free of the markets. Front end, back end, one horse.
In fairness, the wall around full public ownership was not built in Brussels alone. The ban on councils founding new municipal bus companies was written into a British Act in 2017, by a Conservative government, and Labour is repealing it only now. The cage has more than one architect. What should trouble us is that Burnham has spent an entire career comfortable inside it, and proposes to walk us back through a door he calls an escape.
A Man of The Machine
None of this makes Burnham Starmer’s clone. He is not. He talks the language of place better than anyone in the Cabinet. He broke with the leadership over Gaza, calling early for a ceasefire when his party was offering Israel unqualified support. He backs proportional representation and deeper devolution. But notice where the divergence stops. A Blairite-era minister who voted for the Iraq war, a member of Labour Friends of Israel since 2015 who once said his first state visit would be to Israel, he has spent his entire career inside the machine that built the politics he now critiques. His instincts run with institutional power even where his rhetoric softens against it. He is not a tribune who arrived from the shop floor with dust on his boots. He is the system’s most sympathetic representative, which is a different thing entirely.
It is worth being concrete about what that career did, and did not, do. Burnham now speaks with real feeling about Thatcher’s neoliberalism and the wreckage it left in towns like these, and he is right to. But he sat in Parliament for sixteen years and did nothing to shift the model; on the evidence, he made his peace with it. The clearest test came in July 2015. George Osborne’s Welfare Reform and Work Bill, twelve billion pounds of cuts, carried the two-child limit and the lowered benefit cap, the very measures Burnham now campaigns to scrap. Harriet Harman ordered Labour to abstain. Of the four leadership candidates, only Jeremy Corbyn defied the whip and voted against. Burnham abstained, alongside Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. He said afterward that he would have opposed the bill outright “if I was leader,” but that as a member of the shadow cabinet he would not split the party. There, in one evening, is the whole man. He knew the right thing. He could even name it. And when it cost something, he chose the institution over the instinct. That is not a tribune. That is a manager who regrets the policy and votes for the quiet life.
Makerfield a Political Stage
Let us not forget what Makerfield has been turned into: a political stage on which Labour’s civil war can be acted out while the audience is encouraged to forget what created the present crisis in the first place. This is not simply two years of mismanagement under Starmer. It is the tangled web of power, patronage and elite entitlement, exposed most clearly in the Mandelson affair: the same old world of access, favour, appointment and consequence-free failure. Makerfield is not just a by-election. It is misdirection. It is an attempted resuscitation of a party whose lungs are full of the very politics that poisoned it.
This is what makes the contest hollow rather than merely cynical. Communities like Makerfield have been ignored, hollowed out and managed for forty years. The industry was stripped, the services stretched, the high streets abandoned. Then, the moment Westminster needs them, they are rediscovered as “proud working-class communities,” their neglect repurposed as scenery for a leadership drama. First they took the jobs. Then they took the services. Now they want the symbolism.
And they want it on a knife edge. Survation’s polling has Labour ahead Burnham 49, Kenyon 39, a ten-point gap, but inside a genuine fight, with Reform’s Robert Kenyon, a local councillor who came second here in 2024. Reform took seven of the eight Wigan council wards in May and leads on the generic question by double digits. Labour’s own people are blunt about why Burnham might just hold it. As one MP put it to The Independent, the Labour brand is not just bad, it is toxic; Andy isn’t toxic, Labour is, and that is the only reason they might get over the line. There is the strategy in a sentence. Not a new politics. A single name not yet poisoned by association with the government it intends to inherit.
The party did not run out of candidates. It ran out of conviction, and then went looking for a face.
That is the deeper indictment. Labour holds more than four hundred seats. The bench is crowded. Streeting has resigned and declared. Rayner, cleared at last by HMRC, is circling. Miliband is briefed as the soft-left option. Burnham has launched a group, Mainstream, promising “radical realists” a “democratic socialist future,” a phrase that performs the same trick as the man: radical at the front, realist at the back. The party does not lack names. It lacks leaders. It spent a decade driving working-class candidates and the dissident left out of its selections, built the desert with its own hands, and now presents a single drop of water as an oasis. Burnham is not the answer to that. He is its symptom.
Abandoned Again Tomorrow
Britain does not need a smoother manager of decline. It does not need Starmer with a regional accent, a warmer delivery, or the same character performed by a better actor. It does not need a new cast climbing into the same old costume. It needs a politics prepared to say, without apology, that the economy exists to serve the people and not the other way round. A politics willing to rebuild industry, restore public ownership where it matters, invest in council housing, defend wages, revive local government, and break with the permanent austerity that has been sold to us as prudence. It needs, in short, not a change of performer, but a change of play. And no one on that ballot is offering one.
So the people of Makerfield should put the same question to every candidate who knocks, Burnham included, and they should keep asking it long after the cameras have packed up, the activists have gone home, and the posters have peeled from the windows.
Are you here to represent us, or are we here to advance you?
That is the question the whole performance is staged to prevent them asking.
Andy Burnham loves his Shakespeare. He quotes the Bard in his set-piece speeches and credits the Collected Works with giving him his love of English itself. So he will know A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He will know Nick Bottom, the overconfident weaver whom Puck fits with the head of an ass, before the enchanted Titania sinks adoringly at his feet, garlanding the donkey, cradling him, and mistaking the grotesque for the beloved.
There is the scene Labour is now performing.
The party is Titania, bewitched and breathless, crowning the transformation, certain at last that it has found something worth adoring. Burnham is its Bottom, fitted with a new head for an old performance. And Bottom was a weaver, fittingly enough, in a constituency whose looms and pits were carried off long ago.
But enchantment is not love. It is a spell. And every spell in that play is broken by morning.
The pantomime horse will not be replaced. It will only be turned around. The back is now the front, the front is now the back, and the crowd will be told to applaud a fresh beginning. But at the end of the day, it remains the same pantomime horse: same costume, same players, same farce, trotting in circles while the scenery collapses behind it.
And that is the final insult.
The people of Makerfield are not the audience this play was written for. They are the scenery. They are the borrowed backdrop, the honest faces in the campaign footage, the doorstep testimonials, the local colour, the necessary props in someone else’s leadership drama.
Their town has been turned into a stage. Their vote has been turned into a vehicle.
And their by-election has been turned into a coronation rehearsal for a party still too cowardly to admit that changing the front end of a pantomime horse is still a pantomime horse.
