In his acceptance speech in the early hours of Friday, a triumphant Andy Burnham tried to convince wary Makerfield voters, this is your last chance, that he would not treat them as a “stepping stone”. No, he promised: they would be a “touchstone.” He didn’t say out loud “when I’m prime minister”, but vowed that as a direct result of his election, there would be a “Makerfield test at the heart of British politics” that would “ensure that the countries that Westminster has neglected now get justice”. Which is not something he can pull from the backbenches.
This may sound like a recipe for perverse incentives—for decision-making that is narrow, focused, or just plain confusing. One area where Burnham faces criticism, for example, is his lack of foreign policy experience: how will a Makerfield test help with the Iran crisis, further aid to Ukraine, to take two examples, or dealing with Trump?
There is, however, a not insignificant risk, among those who roll their eyes at the idea, of being literally overwhelming. Burnham doesn’t make it clear that policy ideas will be considered to cut the mustard only if they benefit his new patch — or if they play well in former mining areas, or the Northwest, or areas that are 97 percent white. He’s talking about many countries “across the country that have been neglected, who think that the country works for other people in other countries, but not for them.” As one source close to Burnham puts it, the test is to translate the political decision to run and win in this particular position into a broader test of politics, because the issues Burnham points to “grasping the ways in which our economy and our state are broken” need to be fixed.
One reason why we shouldn’t be too literal on the tram line about the idea is that literalism – and its analogues, proceduralism and data worship – are part of how we got to a point where Makerfield is anything but safe Labor territory. It’s easy to wade through think tank newsletters, policy announcements, and private briefings to fail to notice how disappointing is to hear politics performed in terms of metrics and rules. Who sat on the edge of their sofa watching the last election, fingers crossed, desperately hoping Labor would get in… so we could achieve the highest GDP result in the G7? Perhaps Burnham the English graduate understands that politics must be conducted in metaphors and symbols as well as metrics and statistics.
This kind of literalism is not simply alienating because it is disconnected from the lives the policy is supposed to be improving. This is also because it shows why this does not happen. It embodies how power is exercised and who comes first. It is very close to the Treasury’s tendency to respect the costs set over the potential benefits – to see only the risk of doing things rather than failing to do them, leaving under-served areas to go unnoticed.
Two months after the general election, Makerfield’s then newly elected Labor MP Josh Simons took part in a panel organized by the Institute for Public Policy Research – and said something I didn’t expect to hear from the former head of Labor Together, but which clearly came from what he had heard from its residents during the campaign. When economists, lawyers and civil servants tell MPs that something can’t be done, he declared, the MP’s job is not to explain this to their constituents. It is to ask, “but why can’t it?”
It is not unreasonable that, in the absence of any other basis on which to make a policy choice in government, people stick to what the metrics or rules seem to suggest is the best decision. But it has turned out to be politically disastrous. As he took office, Keir Starmer promised he would stand for “stability”, leading a “government unencumbered by doctrine”. That he has led a government unencumbered by coherence – or indeed stability – is no accident. Doctrine IS stability. You need a north star, for a general purpose, or you leave yourself too open to the dilution of vested interests and their acolytes in our thriving public affairs firms.
The Makerfield Test is intended to be a clear and memorable signal that sticks in the minds of ministers and officials as they make difficult decisions, to ensure that ordinary voters do not continue to be put second, or worse.
It’s all going to be messy, messy, and difficult, though. Burnham has talked a good game about hope and unity, but you can’t do it with charm and exhortation alone. You must fight fundamental, unresolved power struggles. Ten years and two days after the Brexit referendum, the people voted once again to take back control.
The Makerfield poll by Convergent and Persuasion UK’s Steve Akehurst suggests that, as Akehurst told Bluesky, “among the Burnham coalition, strikingly, the main pro (Burnham) quality was his platform to take back control of public essentials”. Even beyond Labor voters, he notes, it speaks to voters feeling “hit by forces beyond their and the government’s control”. A new report for the think tank Common Wealth by sociologists Sacha Hilhorst and Megan Murphy, Popular Radicalism in Post-Industrial Englandproves this. He argues that among the main barriers to the “success of progressive politics” is the way in which popular economic radicalism does not always “match the real places of surplus profit”.
If Burnham is going to respond to that – what he described as Makerfield’s vote “for more power to the North”, for example – it means taking power away from people who don’t want to give it up. The Makerfield test will also have to be a way of doing this: to equip uncertain and inexperienced ministers to withstand the shenanigans of lobbyists, to assert their power on behalf of the public and to say no.
The test may not tell him much about how to deal with Trump. However, as a way of supporting the approach that helped him defeat the Reformation and the Restoration, it may help us to avoid choosing our own version. But it won’t be a test that Burnham can simply apply to other people. The voters will apply it to him. Will he use it to mount a successful war against vested interests and those “places of excess profit”? If not, we all know what’s coming.
(Further reading: Makerfield is Labour’s last lifeline)
Phil Tinline is the author of The Death of Consensus AND Ghosts of Iron Mountain.
