Makerfield: Labour’s Turning-Point?

by D. K. Renton

Centrist pundits met Andy Burnham’s victory in the Makerfield by-election with a loud sigh of relief. Burnham was fighting two contests at once: the by-election, and the race which will now begin in open to replace Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. In the second of these contests, his pitch will be that he is the candidate best placed to win for Labour in its former Red Wall heartlands. Reform’s rise has taken place almost entirely in seats which were recently held by Labour. In the 2024 election, Reform came second in 94 seats, 89 of them were won by Labour and only 5 by the Conservatives. No other potential candidate for the leadership (whether Starmer himself, Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner or anyone else) has any better plan than him to hold these seats. Had Burnham lost in Makerfield, he could not replace Starmer as leader. Worse than that, it wouldn’t have been at all clear how his party could plot any path to victory.

The consensus appears to be that, from here, Burnham’s path is easy. The leadership contest will be a formality. If Starmer clings on, he will take into the contest a record of failure (Labour’s disastrous local election results in May). Burnham, having defeated Reform, will be so much credible. Taking over Labour may indeed prove easy but governing he’ll find harder.

Part of the reason is to do with how Burnham won. In capturing 35 percent of the vote, Reform didn’t do badly. Makerfield has been held by Labour in every contest since that party was founded in 1906. Labour candidates should win here, especially someone like Burnham who has a reputation for standing up for the region. He acquired that in an instant, at the start of Covid. Boris Johnson had chosen to put Manchester in “tier 3”, entitling the region to just £22 million in relief funding. Burnham grimaced. As onlookers shouted “disgraceful” at the news and booed, he told journalists, “It’s brutal, to be honest. This is no way to run the country in a national crisis, it isn’t.” The response was untutored, spontaneous; voters remembered it in 2026. But it is worth adding one important caveat. He was a Labour Mayor standing up to a Conservative government. Yes, he was guarding his people. But it was a lesser piece of bravery than would have been needed if he had been criticising his own party.

Languages of class

Makerfield is a constituency of Lancashire mining villages. A century ago, there were a dozen pits within its boundaries. But Abram colliery closed in 1933, West Leigh in 1935, Maypole in 1959, and Mains in 1960. You can look for any trace of the miners’ union; the NUM still has offices in Leigh but they’re shuttered. Calls go through to an answerphone.

In the early weeks of the bye-election, it seemed that Reform’s decision to run Robert Kenyon, a plumber and army veteran, would pay off. In one campaign film, Kenyon claimed that he would be the first Makerfield MP to have been born in the seat. “Labour have got career politicians. They go to private school, university, a think tank or they’re an assistant to an MP and they’re parachuted in to somewhere they’ve never even visited.” The film shows him doing manual work, in a t-shirt, his tattooed upper arms exposed. “I did my apprenticeship when I was 18, I love being a plumber. It’s hard but I do enjoy it.” Reform presented themselves as a party of manual workers, of slate-hard people committed to the local area. They were only hostile to the changes that were destroying the community, by which the party meant immigration and changing power dynamics within the family. 

It’s depressing to compare Kenyon’s films to the messages put out either by Labour or by its challengers from the left. Reform’s politics are dishonest. They want working-class people to hate social workers, teachers, and woke professionals. They have to keep quiet about the millionaires, the fortune Farage has made since he was elected, the £5 million he took from crypto-currency trader Christopher Harborne, the plutocrats his party serves. Class language ought to come so much easier to the left, and yet we are so awkward about it. 

Renegades badly needed

Makerfield was a hard place to visit for those of us hoping for a challenger to Labour from the left. I looked for some independence, any group of people in a combative relationship to the main two-party contest, and it wasn’t easy to find them. People who, in any other constituency, would have voted Green, voted Labour here. In the end, Labour’s challenger to the left won less than one percent of the vote. The problem for the left is that, if we shelter under Labour’s umbrella in elections, then we make ourself responsible for its decisions – we’re calling for a vote for the same people who proscribed Palestine Action, who tried to take away benefits from disabled people on PIP. We become, in Makerfield’s eyes, the establishment.

Whenever the far right grows, people on the left want to blame the petty bourgeoisie. Maybe there’s a blue-collar middle class in the constituency, but the white-collar one is marginal. Doctors, solicitors, upper managers don’t like in Makerfield – when people make money, the move to Cheshire to be near the footballers. Worse-off professionals inhabit the cities (Manchester, or Wigan), not the former pit villages where a 3-bed house costs you £150k. If the majority of people in England are working-class, this is one-class constituency.

Where Reform struggled

When I arrived in Makerfield, about halfway through the election, Reform was by some way the larger presence. Farage’s party posters were up in huge number. More than one cul-de-sac I walked past had seven blue Reform posters up and the eighth a vacancy. Reform canvassers knocked round in the week and at the weekend, Labour only during the week. I talked to neighbours, spent evenings in the pub, watched people arguing on local Facebook groups. If you’d asked me at the point, I would have predicted a Reform victory.

A Survation poll conducted at the same time, found that men in the constituency favoured Labour over Reform by just 2 percent, within the margin of error. But among women, Burnham was ahead of Kenyon by 17 percent. The people who picked Labour were working class women. I wouldn’t say that Labour had done much positively to court them; but they didn’t like the Reform candidate and that opinion was growing.

In 2021, a poster on X tweeted sexual fantasies he had Carol Vorderman from the Countdown gameshow, Robert Kenyon had liked those posts, adding, “He’s only saying what we’re all thinking”. “Women can’t ref, drive or give directions,” he wrote on the same site. Fiona Bruce, host of a Question Time special from Makerfield broadcast two weeks before the count, challenged Kenyon about his party’s plans to repeal the Equality Act. The candidate tried to reassure the audience that “no hard-fought women’s protections will suffer or be scrapped, especially maternity and pregnancy”. It had seemingly never occurred to him that the workplace is a site of conflict or that a boss might sack a pregnant woman.

Kenyon said, “There are a lot of female volunteers coming down and it’s not an issue coming up on the doorstep.” He was asked if he was sexist, which he denied. He was invited to apologise to Vorderman. The Reform candidate said, “The only time it comes up on the doorstep is when female voters have said ‘take no notice, they are just trying to smear you’.” “You have the female vote?” Bruce asked. “Yeah…” he said, shiftily. A member of the audience told Kenyon she’d “rather have a career politician than a plumber who is a sexist”. In that moment, a bloc of opinion in Makerfield turned against Reform and the party never won them back. They were not voting for Labour, they weren’t giving that party and blank cheque for government. They were simply saying that, in this one election, they didn’t like Farage’s candidate. From that point on, Burnham was winning in Makerfield.

Just another Blairite?

In Makerfield, the Mayor’s poster told people to “VOTE ANDY”. They made no reference to the party for which that candate was standing. Burnham’s campaign issued a fanzine, ‘Northern Souls’. He would “reindustrialise the North,” it claimed. This was a “fight to rebuild working-class Britain”. A map showed his plans for the constituency. In Ashton, he would save the library. In Orrell, he would help build a new health centre, in Hindley Green a new pharmacy. It didn’t refer to Labour’s achievements in office, didn’t claim there had been any.

One reason why Burnham has a good reputation in the region is because of the Bee Network of local buses, run by private companies but regulated by the state. That system was negotiated with the government years before he became Mayor of Greater Manchester. A large number of routes were announced, he appeared in a great number of press photos in the Network’s yellow colours. But what he had contributed to the network, as an exercise in regulation, was kept vague. Had he lobbied to tighten the rules? Was he the man who had insisted that fees should be capped to a round £2? No-one has ever said, least of all Burnham himself. 

He offers regulation, neither pure privatisation nor exactly nationalisation but a busy intermediate category of public oversight. The problem with the plan is that such intervention, on its own, wouldn’t alter anything. Manchester’s buses had been unregulated and the state now oversaw them; in that specific contest regulation still feels new. But across the country gas, water and electricity have been subject to rules for 40 years. The water companies which dump untreated sewage in the rivers, killing fish and poisoning people, do so in defiance of a regime which already fined them millions for the worst breaches. Those punishments have not caused them to invest, nor have they produced good infrastructure, or reliable water supplies. The largest water company in England, Thames Water, is in around £20 billion debt and close to collapse. Ministers say they have only two choices; either “special administration” (a temporary form of nationalisation, which would leave the ownership of the business intact) or a deal offered by the firm’s creditors in which government will keep the company going by writing off the over £100 million debt the company has accumulated in fines. Labour in government has been putting off this choice as long as it could, Burnham on the stump got no further than seeing that, under him, he might increase the water companies’ fines. “There is simply no justification for profiteering on this scale,” he said, “when people are struggling with the cost-of-living crisis.” But what would it change to threaten with more fines a business which has racked up £100 million of them without paying?

As Mayor, he oversaw the expansion of Manchester’s housing. New-built blocks of luxury flats occupy the city centre, facilitated by public grants. Burnham has shown less interest than Labour politicians almost anywhere in keeping these homes in public hands. Reform supporters said that Burnham, in office, would be “Starmer v2”. I distrust the politics which drew them to that conclusion; but as a description, it’s a fair one. 

When voters in Makerfield told canvassers they’d had enough of the Labour government and could never vote for that party again, the latter had a quick answer. Burnham wasn’t Labour; he wasn’t Keir Starmer’s Labour anyway. If you wanted to give the Cabinet a good kicking, and you voted Reform, nothing would change not for years anyway. But by voting for Andy Burnham, you could change the Prime Minister before Christmas. He stood as a change candidate in Makerfield, I can’t see how he’ll repeat that from here.

D. K. Renton is a barrister and historian living in London. His last book, Revolutionary Forgiveness, was published by Haymarket in May.