Makerfield: The Little Referendum

Paul Knaggs writes:

Labour holds 404 seats in the House of Commons. And yet, when the crisis comes, the party’s great hope is a man who has not sat in the Commons since 2017 and currently manages the buses in Greater Manchester, being parachuted through a cleared seat in a constituency where Reform won every ward last week, to fight an election where his position on the defining question of the decade is public record and will be weaponised against him from the first day of the campaign.

This is not a problem of personnel. The bench is full. Wes Streeting has resigned and declared. Angela Rayner, cleared by HMRC, is circling. Ed Miliband is being briefed as the soft-left alternative. Behind them sit David Lammy as Deputy Prime Minister, Shabana Mahmood at the Home Office, Bridget Phillipson at Education, Lucy Powell as elected deputy leader, and the wider cabinet behind them. There is no shortage of names. There is a shortage of leaders.

And the irony cuts deep. The same Labour Together operation now opening gates for Burnham, run for years by Josh Simons and Morgan McSweeney, spent the last decade engineering the very vacuum it now claims to fill by paving the way for Burnham. Selection panel by selection panel, NEC vote by NEC vote, the machine placed its own through the door and pushed working-class candidates and the dissident left out of it. They built the desert, ignoring all the warnings, they carried out their little spiteful purges, ignoring all the signs, the warnings the history. Tony Benn, four decades ago, told them exactly where the road would end:

“If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media – having tasted blood – would demand next that it expelled all its Socialist and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.”

Read that again. Read it slowly. Then look at the Makerfield wards Reform took last week, the Red Wall seats slipping toward Farage, the working-class voters who have stopped voting Labour because Labour stopped speaking to them. Benn saw it coming. Labour Together saw it coming too, and built it anyway. Now they drag in Burnham and pretend that a single drop of water is an oasis in a dry exhausted desert.

Here we are with a commons of 404 Labour MPs and not one of those left standing carries the stature of a Bevan, the conviction of a Benn, or the working-class authority that a moment like this demands. Not one speaks naturally to the towns Labour has spent a decade losing. That is the deeper indictment. It is not that the party lacks candidates. It is that with 404 MPs and the full apparatus of government in its hands, the best Labour can produce is a mayor smuggled in through a by-election and a former health secretary calling for the country to undo the largest democratic decision of the modern era, Brexit.

And then there’s the cost of it all.

Five Million in Public Money

That is the state of British politics, measured in one grim number: £5 million.

That is the combined estimated cost in public money of the Makerfield by-election and the Greater Manchester mayoral contest that would follow if Andy Burnham succeeds in returning to Westminster. The by-election alone could cost up to £226,000, the maximum the returning officer can claim from central funds to cover ballot papers, IT, staffing and administration. A snap poll to replace Burnham as metro mayor is expected to add another £4.7 million to the bill.

That is what it costs when a political party forgets how to produce leaders from within its own ranks and has to go shopping in Manchester.

The Trap in the Gate

Josh Simons, once a staunch Starmer loyalist, announced he was standing aside so that Burnham could “return to his home, fight to re-enter Parliament, and if elected, drive the change our country is crying out for.” The language of noble sacrifice. But look at the terrain on which that sacrifice is being made.

As we examined in detail in The Burnham Gambit, Makerfield voted 64.91 percent in favour of Leave in the 2016 referendum. It is not a marginal Leave area. It is one of the heaviest Leave constituencies in Greater Manchester. In the eight Makerfield wards contested at the local elections earlier this month, Reform took approximately 45 percent of the vote to Labour’s 32. Most recent MRP polling puts Makerfield down as a firm Reform win.

And Simons knows all of this. His career was not built on naivety. He entered politics through Jeremy Corbyn’s office, then turned on Corbyn and contributed to the machinery that destroyed him. He built Labour Together, the vehicle that engineered Keir Starmer’s rise. This is not a man who acts without calculation. The gate has been opened. The question is who left it open, and why.

The same No. 10 that blocked Burnham from Gorton and Denton in January by eight votes to one, with the Prime Minister casting his own vote against, has now stood aside for Makerfield, where the constituency voted nearly 65 percent for Leave, where Reform are polling at roughly 45 percent, and where the candidate has said publicly that he hopes in his lifetime to see Britain rejoin the European Union.

The Europhile Twins and the Betrayal They’re Handing Reform

Wes Streeting, speaking at the Progress conference on Saturday, confirmed he will stand: “We need a proper contest with the best candidates on the field, and I’ll be standing.” He used the occasion to call for Britain to rejoin the European Union, describing leaving as a “catastrophic mistake”, arguing that in a dangerous world, Britain must club together with its neighbours to rebuild its economy and trade.

So there it is. The two leading candidates to save Labour from itself are both Europhiles who have placed EU membership at the front of their pitch to a country that voted to leave. Burnham made his position clear at Labour conference last autumn. Streeting has now made his in public, from a conference platform, into a bank of microphones.

Streeting warned that unless Labour changes course, it risks becoming “handmaidens of Nigel Farage and the breakup of the United Kingdom.” It is a vivid phrase. But by planting a rejoin flag in the opening days of a leadership contest, both he and Burnham have handed Reform exactly the ammunition they need across every Leave heartland in the country. Millions who voted to leave, working-class voters of left and right, who made a democratic decision that the political class spent years trying to reverse, will watch this and feel not just disagreement but recognition. They have seen this before. They know what betrayal looks like, because betrayal has become the defining experience of their relationship with the Labour Party. 

Reform will not need a sophisticated response. They will play the clips on a loop.

The Demolition

If Burnham wins Makerfield, he enters Westminster as a force to be reckoned with. If he loses, his national career is finished, and a Starmer with no challenger left standing is not a weakened Prime Minister. He is a liberated one. The arithmetic of Makerfield may be less a coronation route than a controlled demolition, with Burnham as the charge.

And here we are. A party with 404 MPs should not need a saviour smuggled in through a by-election. The fact that it does is not a sign of strength. It is an epitaph, written in the language of democratic process, costed at £5 million in public money, and paid for by the same working-class communities now lining up to vote Reform.

What Labour needs at this point is not a saviour. It needs a necromancer. And those are in even shorter supply. 

Have no doubts this will be a little referendum.

Inevitably, whichever way this falls, the fight will be fought on Brexit. And the cost may well be democracy.

Herewith, by the same hand and mindful that the NEC had now approved Burnham, The Burnham Gambit: Labour Civil War:

A Coronation or a Cliff Edge?

The King of the North is coming home. Or so the story goes. It is a story constructed almost entirely from conditional clauses, each one balancing on the last like a conjuror’s act that requires everyone in the audience to look away at precisely the right moment.

Andy Burnham will contest the Labour leadership, if the National Executive Committee can be persuaded to grant him permission this time, having blocked him from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election in January by eight votes to one, with the Prime Minister himself among those who voted against. He will return to Westminster, if he can win the Makerfield seat that Josh Simons vacated yesterday in what has already been noted as the first time in over sixty years that a sitting MP resigned specifically to clear a path for someone outside Parliament. He will unite the party, if the membership, the trade unions and enough of the Parliamentary Labour Party can be brought to believe that the figure presenting himself represents something genuinely different from what went before. That is a great many ifs. And behind each one sits a question the Burnham camp would rather you did not pause to consider.

The NEC: The First Gate Has Not Opened

Begin with the NEC. Burnham has confirmed he will request permission to stand. He has not received it. The same committee that blocked him in January, with the Prime Minister casting one of the eight votes against, must now rule again. Those who argue the political weather has changed since January are correct. But a committee with the Prime Minister’s allies on it does not become a different committee simply because his authority has weakened. The first if remains precisely that.

The Cliff Edge: What the Numbers Actually Say 

Then there is the seat itself. Makerfield is being presented in some quarters as a vehicle for Burnham’s return, a formality to be processed before the real business of the leadership contest begins. The polling says something rather different. In the eight Makerfield wards contested at the local elections earlier this month, Reform took approximately 45 percent of the vote to Labour’s 32. The Greens, resurgent under Zack Polanski’s leadership, came in at 19 percent across Greater Manchester and are not standing aside for anyone. Nigel Farage has already confirmed that Reform will, in his own words, throw absolutely everything at the by-election. Most recent MRP polling puts Makerfield down as a firm Reform win.

If Burnham wins, he enters Westminster with a narrative no other leadership candidate can match. If he loses, his career as a national political force is effectively finished. The cliff edge is real, and the fall is a long one.

There is one further fact that the Burnham camp has been notably reluctant to address in its briefings to a sympathetic press. Makerfield voted 64.91 percent in favour of Leave in the 2016 EU referendum. It is not a marginal Leave area. It is one of the heaviest Leave constituencies in Greater Manchester. And Andy Burnham, at the Labour Party conference last autumn, told delegates in his own words: I hope in my lifetime I see this country rejoin. That is not a nuanced position carefully calibrated for a Leave audience. It is a public, on-record commitment to EU membership, delivered into a microphone, in a room full of journalists. Reform will play that clip on a loop from the day the by-election is called to the moment the polls close.

The Kingmaker: A Study in Shadow

History offers a useful shadow for Josh Simons. Richard Neville, the sixteenth Earl of Warwick, was the great kingmaker of the Wars of the Roses: a man who placed Edward IV on the throne, grew impatient when Edward refused to remain his instrument, and then attempted to unmake the king he had created. The romantic telling casts Warwick as a man of thwarted principle. The accurate telling is less flattering. Warwick was not a democrat. He was an operator whose loyalty was always to his own proximity to power, and who treated the crown as a piece to be moved rather than an office to be served.

Simons is a more contemporary variation on the type, though the darkness around him runs considerably deeper than any medieval parallel can fully illuminate. He entered politics through Jeremy Corbyn’s office, then turned on Corbyn and contributed to the machinery that destroyed him. He built Labour Together, the vehicle that engineered Keir Starmer’s rise and oversaw the systematic removal of the party’s democratic socialist wing. He sat at the centre of the operation that contracted a public affairs firm to compile dossiers on the personal backgrounds of journalists whose only offence was investigating Labour Together’s finances. His career is not the biography of a man who keeps finding new causes. It is the biography of a political operative who has served the apparatus throughout, and whose loyalty has never been to the Labour movement but to the circle of power that captured it.

If Josh Simons is a true believer, one is entitled to ask who exactly he believes in, because the evidence of his career answers that question with a clarity that is not flattering, and the answer is not the democratic process, and it is not the Labour party he helped to hollow out. 

The Open Gate: Who Benefits? 

Which makes his sudden generosity toward Andy Burnham the most interesting question in British politics this week. The same No. 10 that blocked Burnham from Gorton and Denton in January by eight votes to one, with the Prime Minister casting his own vote against, has now stood aside for Makerfield. Makerfield, where the constituency voted 64.91 percent for Leave in 2016. Makerfield, where Reform are polling at approximately 45 percent to Labour’s 32. Makerfield, chosen as the stage for the return of a candidate who told Labour conference last autumn, in his own words, that he hopes in his lifetime to see this country rejoin the European Union.

Warwick at least had the courage to declare his hand openly. What is happening here is quieter, and in politics, quieter things are usually more dangerous. The gate has been opened. The question worth sitting with is not why Simons opened it. The question is who calculated that opening it served their interests, and whose interests those are. Because the arithmetic of Makerfield, for a pro-rejoin candidate in a 65 percent Leave seat against a Reform machine throwing everything at it, is not the arithmetic of a coronation. It is the arithmetic of a controlled demolition.

The Record: What Burnham Actually Stands For

Set aside for a moment the question of whether Burnham can win the seat. Consider what he is proposing to do if he survives it. His supporters argue that he is the only figure with sufficient political weight to hold off the Reform insurgency and speak credibly to the voters Labour has been haemorrhaging across the post-industrial towns of the North and Midlands. This argument deserves serious engagement, because those voters are real, their anger is legitimate, and Reform’s capture of their loyalty represents a structural crisis for the left.

But Burnham is a man with a record, and that record deserves examination rather than hagiography. He voted for the invasion of Iraq, loyally, as a foot soldier of the Blair project. He later expressed regret. Regret, at the price of hundreds of thousands of lives and the permanent destabilisation of a region, is the minimum acceptable response to that decision, not a credential for leadership. He remains a member of Labour Friends of Israel. At a moment when the British public is watching the destruction of Gaza in real time, when younger voters and communities of colour are expressing not mere unease but outright revulsion, one is entitled to ask whether his foreign policy would differ from Starmer’s in substance or merely in the warmth of its accompanying language. His record suggests the latter.

The case for Burnham rests on the assumption that Labour needs a figure who looks like change without being change: someone who can reassure the party’s institutional funders and the centrist press while projecting enough northern authenticity to recapture the seats lost to Farage. It is a theory of political management, not political transformation. And if there is one lesson from the Starmer years that the party ought to have absorbed by now, it is that management without vision produces precisely the situation Labour currently finds itself in: a majority government with no discernible purpose, declining poll ratings, and a leader whose grip on his own party loosens with every passing week.

The Reckoning

If Andy Burnham clears every obstacle before him, wins Makerfield against a Reform machine throwing everything it has at the seat, secures the NEC’s blessing, gathers his 81 nominations and walks through the door of Westminster only to offer the party Starmerism with a Mancunian accent and a warmer handshake, then Labour will not have found its future. It will have found a more charismatic iteration of its present.

However, Nietzsche wrote that what does not kill you makes you stronger. Remember that, because it applies here with a precision that should concentrate the mind.

If Burnham fails in Makerfield, if the gamble collapses in a Leave heartland against a Reform machine that has already taken the area ward by ward, then Starmer does not fall. He survives. And a Starmer who has watched his most dangerous rival destroy himself on the wrong side of a Brexit-scarred constituency is not a weakened Prime Minister. He is a liberated one. What follows that liberation is not difficult to predict from the evidence of his conduct so far: a Digital ID programme that the public never voted for and Parliament has barely scrutinised; a managed drift toward EU structures that stops just short of the mandate the country was never asked to give; and the continued, methodical removal of the civil liberties and democratic norms that his administration has treated, from the beginning, as inconveniences to be quietly retired.

A Starmer with no challenger left standing is not a Starmer who moderates. He is a Starmer with nothing left to lose. That is the outcome the gate at Makerfield may have been designed to deliver. And it is the outcome the British public, whatever it thinks of Andy Burnham, should be most afraid of.

The working class of this country deserves better than a movement that mistakes a change of voice for a change of direction.

The King of the North may yet sit on the throne. The question, when the dust settles and the votes are counted, is whether anyone left a kingdom worth ruling.