The Battle for Makerfield & the Future
- Lucy Lydekker
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM — Andy Burnham is the new member of parliament for Makerfield following the dramatic by-election last night. Burnham, who will now need to vacate his position as the Mayor of Greater Manchester, will likely move to succeed Kier Starmer as leader of the Labour Party- just as Josh Simons, his predecessor, wants him to do.
Actually, it may be fair to say MOST of the Labour party wants to see Burnham as leader, as the most recent YouGov poll from May shows Burnham winning 59% to Starmer’s 37% in a hypothetical leadership election.
The campaign for this by-election has been one of the most bizarre in recent memory. The people of Makerfield knew that they were effectively choosing the next prime minister. The results echo a sort of presidential election between two candidates. Besides a new party, which we’ll discuss later, the traditional parties outside of Labour and Reform completely collapsed in support, losing their deposits.
The Greens, who managed an upset from 3rd place in the nearby Gorton and Denton by-election earlier this year, barrelled down to 5th place with just 0.7% of the vote. Their candidate, Sarah Wakefield seemed nice, but there was no public campaign, and party grandees such as Caroline Lucas, who was the party’s sole MP from 2010 to 2024, called for the party to stand down. Many progressive Greens will have voted for Burnham, who appears to Starmer’s left, in order to get a more effective and left-wing prime minister.
The Liberal Democrats, who remain the only main party not to win a by-election this parliamentary term after winning a bunch last term, finished in 6th place with just 163 votes- compare that to perennial joke candidate Count Binface, who finished in 7th place with 95 votes.
The Conservatives fared slightly better with roughly 1,000 votes, 2.2% of the vote, and 4th place, but this was down 9 points from 2024, when they didn’t even come second. This was expected, though, as many right-wing voters funnelled into Reform as Burnham’s primary opposition.
The Conservatives and Reform both know Burnham will be a tougher opponent in any general election and would want to vote tactically to prevent his return. It should be noted that the Conservatives didn't even keep their deposit.
The two major parties both had very interesting characters as candidates. Reform’s candidate was Robert Kenyon, a local plumber. You could say that they copied the success of the Greens’ Hannah Spencer, who was also a plumber. But Kenyon was actually the Makerfield candidate back in the 2024 election, too.
The decision to field him again was a direct response to the previous nomination of Matt Goodwin in Gorton and Denton, who was parachuted in by the party elite and had no local connection. It is inarguable that Kenyon is anything other than a local who can relate to voters. After a display of a poor vetting process, the pick had the potential to demonstrate that Reform had confidence in their candidates outside of their main leadership. However, this might’ve backfired because of the controversy surrounding Kenyon.
If you tuned into the most recent BBC Question Time, it was very clear that Kenyon was not a good public speaker and absolutely flopped compared to the rest of the panel, including the Liberal Democrat and Conservative candidates. When asked how he would recruit several thousand police officers, he replied that it’d be a “problem for the recruiters”.
There has also been significant uproar around his comments about women. Kenyon claimed women have abortions for “vanity purposes”, can’t drive or give directions, and said “I’m sexist, sorry but I am” on a forum in 2019 uncovered by the i Paper.
Kenyon also said back in 2021, “He’s only saying what we’re all thinking” in response to a user wishing to do explicit things to former Countdown star Carol Vorderman. He seemed massively out of touch with regular people because of this, despite his local roots, alienating women and progressives.
Despite this, Reform achieved its 2nd-best by-election result ever, right behind their only successful parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby. They came in 2nd place, increasing their vote share to 34.5%, but will be bitterly disappointed by losing the seat by a margin of 20 points! This was a strong seat for Reform in 2024, and was their 29th target seat.
If Reform wants to win a majority, the seat of Makerfield is necessary in order to win in a General Election, so they may lay the foundations before they can think about winning marginals across the country. The justification for their loss from Reform leadership will no doubt be the idea that Reform voters switched votes to Labour specifically to get Starmer out.
Meanwhile, Burnham has been termed by some, including himself, as the King of the North and bringer of Manchesterism. This is a self-created ideology which Burnham said would be the end of ' 40 years of neo-liberalism’, which importantly includes the entire New Labour government, which took on several Thatcherite policies. This is particularly notable as Burnham served as a minister within some of the New Labour governments.
He refers to changes he has made in Manchester during his mayoralty, such as the nationalisation of buses in the Bee Network. The view of Burnham that he seems to want to portray is one of pragmatism, nationalisation, appealing to everybody, and a return to soft left politics.
However, he has made several U-turns during the campaign to appeal to moderates, too. This has included promises to maintain Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules, ruling out any electoral reform until after the next election, when it might be too late, and agreeing with the new EHRC, which over 100 Labour MPs disapprove of due to its transphobic nature. Burnham also served as a cabinet minister in the New Labour government, and he has been described as an ideological chameleon, bending his thoughts to each successive leader.
Despite this, in Burnham's victory speech, he reiterated many of his left-wing talking points, such as ending trickle-down economics, pushing reindustrialisation, and promoting youth employment. He has further reiterated his goal to change Westminster politics in other speeches since retaining Labour's seat in this contentious by-election.
Burnham has won this by-election convincingly on several metrics. First is the vote share in which he won. Labour at the 2024 election received 33% of the vote nationwide, and won Makerfield with 45% of the vote with Josh Simons as the candidate.
This time around, not only has Burnham increased that vote share by 10 points to a whopping 55%, but he has done this in a national environment where the Labour Party has polled as low as 16% nationwide. This is a very clear indication that, at least at the moment, there is a Burnham boost, leading to credibility for his pitch to be Labour leader.
Secondly, turnout for the seat has increased from 52% in 2024 to 58%. This is extraordinarily rare for parliamentary by-elections, which usually fall to around 30% turnout from the usual 60-70% turnouts at general elections.
Compare that to the Scottish by-elections in Aberdeen and Arbroath, which also took place on the same day; those had turnouts of 31%, much more usual. Burnham’s candidacy has inspired a large number of people who just didn’t vote at the last election, which is another piece of good news for Labour- this is the highest turnout increase for a by-election versus the last election since 1969.
Finally, we should touch on Restore Britain. This is a party to the right of Reform, who go further on immigration policy than any of the major parties, led by the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, endorsed by Elon Musk. In the local elections, they fielded 10 candidates, all in Great Yarmouth (the seat of Lowe), and all candidates were elected with strong margins.
This is the first parliamentary election the party has ever contested, and they started with a bang. They kept their deposit by receiving over 5% of the vote, and were pretty accurately polled by pollsters to get 7% of the vote. There were worries that they could be accused of vote splitting by Reform, which Farage has already jumped to, but their combined votes would still be way off of the amount Burnham received.
Starmer will have likely gone into this by-election in an incredibly weak position, unable to block Burnham from standing with no political capital after the local elections. He would have hoped that the Greens split the vote and Reform won the by-election, humiliating Burnham and destroying the idea that Burnham as PM was the solution to any bad electoral woes.
Now Andy Burnham has forgoen the Mayor prefix and affixed the MP suffix, it seems very unlikely he will be able to hold onto his position, but he will certainly try. It is kind of bizarre to see not only the prime minister but challengers Burnham and Streeting openly talk about this before it’s even begun– on Question Time last week, Burnham openly stated he would join a leadership contest. The Tories were always a bit more low-key than that.
There will now be a by-election for the Greater Manchester mayor. The previous one used the first-past-the-post electoral system, after the Conservatives abolished the supplementary vote for all combined authority mayors, but in a last-ditch effort, the government passed a statutory instrument to revert this decision a couple of days ago.
This means that smaller parties do not need to worry about vote splitting in this election, as voters will rank a second choice on their ballots. Green voters won’t need to shift their votes to Labour to keep Reform out, as they can just mark them as their second choice, and if eliminated, will see their votes flow to them. There is potential for a Green mayor here, but either way, it will be incredibly difficult for any Reform victory now.
