The Little Referendum: Makerfield Andy Burnham’s £5m Gamble

Five million in public money, a sprung trap, and a party that forgot how to grow its own leaders.

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.” -Tony Benn

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.

---

Enjoyed this read? I’m committed to keeping this space 100% ad-free so you can enjoy a clean, focused reading experience. Crafting these articles takes a significant amount of research and heart. If you found this helpful, please consider a “small donation” to help keep the lights on and the content flowing. Every bit of support makes a huge difference.