Labour faces the possibility of a Titanic shipwreck in the Makerfield by-election
ANDREW GIMSON
We live in an age of insurgents. Andy Burnham can only win the Makerfield by-election by leading a more complete rebellion than Reform UK are able to offer.
Burnham may win. After all, he can hold out the prospect of pretty much instantaneous regime change in Downing Street.
But a vote for Reform UK would be a protest against the whole of the Labour Party, and the Tories too, which is perhaps what a majority of voters will yearn to do.
And by describing Brexit as a “catastrophic mistake”, and calling for Britain one day to rejoin the European Union, Wes Streeting has just made Burnham’s task harder.
Streeting has reminded people that Burnham too has spoken in favour of rejoining the EU, saying in a Guardian podcast at last year’s Labour Conference:
“Long term, I’m going to be honest, I’m going to say it, I want to rejoin it. Look, I hope in my lifetime I see this country rejoin the European Union.”
It would be hard to think of a remark more calculated to make voters in Makerfield suspect that behind Burnham’s friendly, laddish, Mancunian manner, and his claim yesterday afternoon that he is “not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU”, one finds a fully paid up member of the pro-European Establishment.
This is the charge Reform UK will make, and if it sticks, it will wreck Burnham’s campaign. For as the Labour MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, Jonathan Hinder, remarked at 8.12 yesterday morning on the Today programme,
“If I went into the Wallace Hartley pub in Colne in my constituency and I said to them, you know that thing we just did which paralysed our politics, which tore our country apart…and I said to them, ‘We’re going to reopen it’…they would rightly look at me as if I’d gone mad.”
The pub is named after Wallace Hartley, who born in Colne, served as bandmaster on the Titanic and was hailed as a hero for playing the hymn Nearer, my God, to Thee as the ship went down.
After this disaster his body was recovered and brought back across the Atlantic to Colne, where 30,000 people lined the streets to see his coffin go past, and the choir of the Bethel Chapel, in which as a child he had taken his first steps as a musician, sang Nearer, my God, to Thee.
At a time when the two-party system has sunk, it seems, beneath the waves, this image of a shipwreck looks all too fitting.
Streeting’s intervention is not only a problem for Burnham. It points to the gulf between Labour’s ruling class and the millions of people who used to vote for the party in constituencies such as Makerfield.
Labour MPs and activists are mostly in favour of rejoining the EU. Sir Keir Starmer surprised and delighted the Labour Conference in 2018 by coming out in support of a second EU Referendum, with Remain as an option on the ballot paper. This won him what is almost certainly the warmest and most sincere standing ovation he has ever received, albeit a minority including Dennis Skinner refused to stand, or indeed to clap.
An underestimated aspect of Starmer’s failure as a communicator is that he can seldom say what he really thinks. He dare not avow his enthusiasm for international law, human rights and anything containing the word “European”, which dates back to his discovery of these wonderful concepts when he was a student at Leeds.
Yesterday he promised to give “one hundred per cent” support to the Labour candidate in Makerfield, in other words to Burnham, his would-be assassin.
Like so much of what Starmer says, this rings hollow because it is neither plausible nor sincere. He is stuck saying what he thinks he ought to say.
All politicians have quite often to do this, but more gifted figures than the present PM manage to show where their heart lies while ostensibly sticking to the party line.
The PM finds himself in the unhappy position of an advocate who cannot conceal his dislike of his client, the British people; in particular the large part of the staunchly patriotic working class which until recently voted Labour, and which holds small-c conservative views on such emotive questions as immigration, gender and eligibility for welfare benefits.
David Lammy appealed yesterday morning for an end to the present squabbling within the Labour Party:
“I say to colleagues, ten days of this, fine, I think the British people will forgive us for the introspection. Ten weeks of this and we’re in desperate trouble. We’ll be out of office and what we’ll be ushering in is Farage.”
In the short term Lammy is not quite right. If Labour win in Makerfield, to start with they will be ushering in Burnham, on whom an unrealistic burden of expectation will rest.
As recently as the 2019 general election, the Conservatives came a strong second to Labour in Makerfield, with Farage’s then vehicle, the Brexit Party, a distant third.
In the five months leading up to that election, Boris Johnson demonstrated to voters that he was a mightier insurgent than Farage, who found himself forced to stand down his candidates in Tory-held seats.
Conservative difficulties returned after the victory of December 2019, when Johnson had to make the transition – difficult even for Disraeli – from rebel leader, an audacious improviser who could often take opponents by surprise, to commander of the state’s far less mobile but also much larger and heavier conventional forces.
At the 2024 general election, Reform UK came a strong second to Labour in Makerfield, and it was the Conservatives who were relegated to a distant third.
In Makerfield and many other places, it is at least for the time being impossible to deny Lee Cain’s gloomy observation in his piece yesterday for ConHome that “Reform has already replaced the Tories as the real opposition.”
See Related Article Below
Maker Mess of Makerfield
MIRI AF
I have a cousin, soon to turn 30, who currently lives in a house-share with ten other people (yes, ten) in a northern city, hundreds of miles away from where he was born in London.
His parents, my aunt and her husband, met as students in the early 1980s, and when they graduated, were easily able to rent a flat in Islington, just off the iconic Upper Street, despite their youth and modest salaries.
Later on, when they had accrued a bit more money, they moved to more expansive premises in Ealing, just by the tube station, and had their first child in their mid-thirties. A second child followed a few years later, and the family remained resident in Ealing until the children had grown up and left for university.
In terms of advantageous starts in life, the children appeared to have had it all: born into a comfortable middle-class environment with two employed parents and a stable home life not disrupted by family breakdown, it was expected they would enjoy successful life trajectories comparable to their parents.
Yet on the cusp of turning 30, their oldest child, my cousin, has achieved none of the milestones his parents had at the same age. Not married or in a stable relationship, not a home owner or even able to rent his own place, and not on a stable career track. He graduated from university with a degree in the arts, as his parents had, but whilst their qualifications led them straight into stable graduate work, he has been eking out a living working in bars.
Most notably, he is not able to live in the city of his birth (to rent a single room in a shared house in London costs around £1,000 a month, plus bills), and the city where at least six previous generations of his family were born, because he has been completely priced out. So has his sister.
I relate this anecdote to underline that I empathise entirely with the idea of a ‘broken Britain’, and that various (wholly engineered) social and economic shifts have left many indigenous Britons facing a very raw deal, with many not able to enjoy even (what should be) the most basic birth right of being able to live in their own hometown.
(I face sort of the opposite problem – technically, I could live in my hometown, as it’s one of the cheapest places to live in the country, but the factors that make it so cheap have driven every other member of my family, as well as all of my old friends, away, so there’s nobody I know there left.)
When looking at the prospects – or the lack of them – for their children and other young family members, it’s no wonder there is an increasing groundswell of frustration amongst many in the UK, culminating in the idea that we need to “take our country back” from the forces that have so decimated it: forces that are perceived to be squeezing out the native populace in favour of immigrants.
This is to say, I understand why the ruling classes needed to invent a ‘Restore’, which is currently at the forefront of a major socio-political battle as pertains to the northern, working-class constituency of Makerfield.
In case you don’t spend a lot of time engaging in complex political analysis* (*arguing with bots on Twitter) and missed it, last week, Labour MP Josh Simons stood down from his seat in the traditional Labour heartland of Greater Manchester’s Makerfield, in order to trigger a by-election in which current Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, can stand as an MP.
As the Labour Party continues to further collapse under the catastrophic leadership of Keir Starmer, increasing support is building behind Burnham to take over as party leader – but he can’t make a leadership bid unless and until he is an MP (which he was from 2001-2017, before giving it up to serve as mayor). Hence, this by-election has been arranged specifically in order to propel Burnham to power.
The only obstacle that stands in the way of Burnham – who is very popular locally – is Reform, who gained 31.8% of the Makerfield vote at 2024’s General Election, coming in second, and only losing out to the Labour candidate by around 5,000 votes. Public mood towards Labour has soured considerably since then, as the recent local election results attest, so running a contest between Labour and Reform – even with a candidate as popular as Burnham – was always going to be a very close race, and one that Reform could conceivably have won…
Until ‘Restore’ entered the picture.
I’ve written about Restore before, Rupert Lowe’s hard right new party, and what I believe its role in the political pantomime is: essentially, to hoover up Reform’s less desirable “lunatic fringe” (the genuine far-right, those seriously invested in ethno-nationalism and remigration), therefore making Reform look far more moderate in comparison, and thus, far more electable.
In short, the press will stop calling Nigel Farage and Reform “far-right extremists” if they’ve got an even further right party like Restore to point fingers at instead.
Although vehicles like Restore create the illusion of great popularity on social media (and we will delve further into how they accomplish that shortly), the reality is that they are completely unelectable at a national level, as there simply isn’t an appetite in this country for a far-right government, and Restore are polling at about 4% nationwide.
“But their odds are brilliant for Makerfield! They’re dropping and dropping!”
This triumphant declaration is currently echoing all over Twitter, proliferated by Rupert Lowe himself.
Although this is true, it’s important to ask why:
It’s because (”allegedly”), rich Restore bigwigs are betting on themselves precisely in order to cause the odds to drop. It’s a tried and tested political tactic to manipulate the electorate by creating the illusion that a fringe party is in with a chance and voting for them isn’t a wasted vote.
If the odds weren’t being manipulated in this way, then the electorate would see for themselves that Restore cannot win, and that a vote for them simply functions as a vote for Burnham. In essence, this election is less a by-election and more a referendum, where the question is: do you want Andy Burnham as Prime Minister? If yes, vote Labour. If no, vote Reform.
However, with Restore in the race, there is now another ‘yes’ option for Burnham, and that’s a Restore vote.
There is absolutely no question whatsoever that Restore knows this, which is precisely why they are fielding a candidate. They’re fielding one (and not a particularly credible one) precisely in order to hand the election to Burnham. It was always going to be exceptionally close, but without Restore in the race, Reform could have won it. With them, they very likely cannot.
If this happens – if Labour wins the seat by a slim margin and we end up with Andy Burnham in Downing Street – then both Reform and Restore voters alike will be furious with Rupert Lowe. He will be held as personally responsible for ensuring a Burnham premiership, when he could have prevented it by refraining from standing a candidate (as Advance’s Ben Habib has).
The backlash this creates could be unsurvivable for such a fledgling, and disorganised new party, causing thousands of its supporters – many/most of whom are ex-Reform – to flood back to Reform in their hordes.
And that, I believe, is precisely the point – that Restore was only ever a containment vehicle to manage Reform’s outliers, for whom the party was not right-wing enough, in order to eventually coax them back into the fold.
It is therefore entirely possible that, after the mess of Makerfield, Rupert Lowe will simply take his millions (Restore is estimated to have taken in roughly £2 million in membership fees) and disappear, perhaps blaming the “dementia” it keeps being rumoured he has, and that would provide a very handy “exit stage left” strategy.
Personally, I wouldn’t vote for any of these sham parties, but Makerfield residents should know that, if they vote for Burnham, they’re voting for Burnham, but if they vote for Restore, they’re voting for Burnham as well.
(This, as an astute Tweeter pointed out, is why Advance’s Ben Habib is backing Restore: it’s because he knows Restore running almost certainly means a Burnham victory, and a Burnham victory means a new mayoral election as Burnham cannot serve as MP and mayor at the same time. Advance’s Nick Buckley stood unsuccessfully in the mayor elections last time, and no doubt is very keen for another shot at it.)
The overlords desire a Reform supermajority at the next General Election, for reasons I have laid out in this article, and the best way of ensuring that is reuniting the ever more splintered right around a single party, and that is what I believe Restore is ultimately there to do. It is there to self-detonate, and therefore send its dismayed and betrayed supporters careering back to Reform, crowning them “the real deal all along, not like that bitter loser Lowe who couldn’t put his ego aside for the good of the country”.
After Makerfield, we can expect that Burnham, if and when he is installed as PM, will do some truly horrendous things, which will trigger an early General Election (2027, according to predictive programming vehicle, Years and Years), in which Reform, with no significant competition on the right (the Tories and Restore both having imploded), will win a landslide victory, making them a particularly powerful administration.
To achieve this resounding victory, they will cynically exploit all the social problems I outlined at the beginning of this piece, disproportionately blaming them on immigration (and yes, immigration is a problem, but it’s not, for instance, why 90% of 30-year-olds were married in the 1950s compared to 20% today), whilst enacting some seriously sinister social changes. You may have seen those videos doing the rounds on Twitter, showing that, beyond immigration, many Reform voters not only have no idea what the party’s other policies are, but are actively horrified by them when they find out.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting Labour are any better, or that any party that’s considered ‘electable’ is, I’m merely outlining what I believe to be the current trajectory, and why and how the electorate is being manipulated to ensure a Reform supermajority at the next General Election.
Can we stop this? Probably not, but we can be aware of how and why it’s happening, and to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
We could also take a leaf out of the crafty politicians’ books and place a few bets… So, while we may not be able to afford to live in our capital city, with 11/2 odds for a 2027 General Election, we might almost be able to afford a pint there…
Thanks for reading! This article was originally published at miriaf.co.uk, which is entirely reader-supported, with no paywalls, adverts, or wealthy corporate backers, meaning your support is what powers this site to keep going. If you enjoyed this article, and would like to read more in the future, please consider…
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This article (Maker Mess of Makerfield) was created and published by Miri AF and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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