More than nine years after leaving parliament to head north, Andy Burnham is back. Thanks to the support of the good people of Makerfield, he returns with a tried and tested plan to make the Labor Party electorally competitive again. As the party processes this result, learning the right lessons is the next essential step.
This is not a seat that Labor should have been able to win five weeks later – let alone win decisively. In May’s local elections, Reform UK won every single seat in Makerfield. On the doorstep, the open hostility of voters to the Prime Minister and his Labor government was palpable. In Makerfield, I lost count of the number of voters I spoke to who expressed great displeasure with Keir Starmer.
In the coming days, there will be a flurry of analysis about how Burnham delivered a Labor victory in towns and villages that heartily rejected Labor just weeks ago. The most obvious explanation is “Brand Burnham”. In poll after poll and focus group after focus group, Burnham’s personal popularity has come to the fore. His campaign slogan – “for us” – only worked because voters really see Burnham as a politician who’s on their side; someone meaningfully attuned to the concerns and priorities of ordinary people and serious about taking action.
But if Labor is to heed the lessons of the Makerfield by-election, it needs to understand why there is a “Brand Burnham” at all. The answer is political and only partly about personality. While Burnham’s gifts as a communicator and relationship builder no doubt helped him resonate with the people of Makerfield, it was the political offering he made that secured victory in this by-election. It is precisely in this political offer that the plan for the future of Labor should be found.
Burnham offered voters a new economic and political solution and a Labor Party brave enough to bring it to life. He offered a diagnosis of the problems experienced by the people in Makerfield and a prescription for correcting them.
He was willing to name the political causes of the affordability crisis afflicting the people of Makerfield and beyond – deindustrialisation, privatization and austerity – and propose a series of progressive but workable policies to alleviate them. Front and center in Burmham’s pitch to voters were policies that are familiar to the public and have great transformative potential. Public ownership of essential services, a land value tax and electoral reform have felt like small propositions under this Labor government, but they were front and center in Burnham’s appeal to Makerfield.
Reform in the UK leads the polls precisely because they are populists. But a less-spoken wrinkle is that criticisms of the current Labor government, that it lacks a coherent analysis of Britain’s issues and a coherent way of solving them, apply to Reform in the long run. When faced with something like that in Burnham’s campaign, one that has not even developed to the level it will be by the time of any possible future leadership contest, the boastful promises of Reform appeared as the emperor’s new clothes.
One particular aspect of Brand Burnham is a way of dealing with Britain’s omnicrisis that might actually work. Reform is able to tap into anger and discontent with falling living standards and political disengagement, but the truth understood across the political spectrum is that Reform will never be able to fix those issues. Burnham, on the other hand, has talked about what people interact with every day — energy bills, water bills, roads, the transportation system — and has shown a willingness to do something about it that’s equal parts ambitious and doable. For all their attitude, Reform simply cannot commit to reforming everyday issues, as Burnham now can, because ultimately they are fine with the austerity, privatization and outsourcing agenda that has gotten Britain into the trouble it faces today.
“Brand Burnham” exists because Burnham’s is a politics that speaks to the crisis of power and control felt in communities like those in Makerfield. The bureaucratic managerialism that voters have come to expect from all the major political parties, including Labour, stands in stark contrast to the agenda that Burnham delivered at this by-election. And that was reflected in the way Burnham ran this campaign. The transaction-seeking approach that modern parties rely on was challenged by Burnham’s determination to speak to every undecided voter.
The danger for Labor now is that it misunderstands what happened at Makerfield. There will be those who conclude that the lesson is simply to find more candidates with Burnham’s profile or communication skills, or to echo the campaign’s core messages about listening to communities and building new politics together. But “Brand Burnham” cannot be removed from politics.
To attempt to replicate the Makerfield campaign without embracing the essence of the offer Burnham made to voters would be to miss the point entirely. Labor cannot simply market its way back to the affections of voters who feel abandoned. It must demonstrate a willingness to confront the sources of that alienation and offer meaningful change.
This challenge applies to Burnham himself as he heads south. As the political earthquake emanating from Makerfield begins to reverberate across the country, there will be pressure to soften, accommodate and become just another parliamentary operator. But the reality is this: the very qualities that make Nurnham successful were forged outside the conventions of Westminster. His popularity was built not by conforming to the political center of gravity in London, but by challenging it.
What Burnham and the wider Labor Party must do next is, simply, nurture and advance the core politics of the Burnham Brand. In it, there may simply be a project to take the Reformation and the causes of the Reformation across the country.
(Further reading: Only Keir Starmer can take away Labor’s hope now)
