In the event Andy Burnham scored a convincing victory in the Makerfield by-election in the Greater Manchester region of north west England on June 18, winning 24,927 votes, a 54.8% share, well ahead of the second-placed Reform UK candidate on 15,696 (34.5%).
It was a considerable turnaround. Just six weeks earlier Reform had swept the board in the May 7 local elections in the area, winning every seat available with an aggregate 50% of the vote across the constituency’s council wards, almost double the votes achieved then by Labour (26.7%). At that time too the Greens, fresh from their parliamentary by-election triumph in February in the Greater Manchester seat of Gorton & Denton which had seen off both Labour and Reform, polled over 3,000 votes (10.4%) in the Makerfield wards, to make them a viable contender. But on June 18 this had melted away to just 308 (0.7%). Makerfield really was Burnham’s ‘proof of concept’ victory – his argument that only he could hold back the prospect of a Reform government – which he was seeking when he decided to re-enter parliament to become eligible to stand for Labour leader and the premiership.
At the time of writing it is not completely certain that the result, while it has achieved Starmer’s resignation, will be enough to ensure the “cold, ‘orderly’ transition to the leadership” without a contest which we argued was a possibility in last month’s Socialism Today editorial, “with Starmer standing aside and no other challenger coming forward to prevent a coronation of the ‘King of the North’.” Such a development would be similar, we went on, to the “way Gordon Brown was able to succeed Tony Blair in 2007 when the Socialist Campaign Group MP John McDonnell was unable to secure enough MP nominations to stand” and the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) effectively decided who the new prime minister would be.
But then, as we also pointed out, Brown’s unchallenged assent to the premiership “didn’t end the ‘Blairite’ and ‘Brownite’ tensions within the PLP, a clash between different capitalist politicians, especially as the 2007-2008 world financial crisis broke”. And this time too, in an even more fraught geo-political and economic context for British capitalism – with a government debt-to-GDP ratio of 95% now compared to 43% in 2008 as just one example – Burnham’s move from Makerfield to Downing Street, by whatever means it is accomplished, will not produce the elusive ‘political stability’ sought by the ruling class to carry through their agenda.
Not an era of fixed allegiances
That, in fact, is the main lesson to be drawn from the three Westminster parliament by-elections that took place on June 18 – not just in Makerfield but in the Scottish seats of Aberdeen South and Arbroath & Broughty Ferry too. They confirmed the old adage that elections are only a snapshot of sentiment in any particular moment and circumstance. And that, at this point, the overwhelming ‘sentiment’ is a preparedness by the working class, and the big sections of the middle class hit by the capitalist crisis too, to use any readily available weapon to strike out at the most hated establishment politician in the given context.
So in Makerfield there was no candidate actually defending the Starmer government – Labour canvassers were briefed to tell undecided voters that they were from the ‘Andy Burnham campaign’ not the Labour Party. On that basis Burnham was able to add 6,725 votes to Labour’s 2024 general election score (and 9.6% to the poll share), on a turnout greater than in 2024. In contrast, in the Arbroath & Broughty Ferry contest, Labour’s support fell by 11,071 (and 18.1% in its vote share) compared to 2024, as the Scottish National Party (SNP) victor increased their share of the vote on a much-reduced turnout.
Meanwhile in Aberdeen South – in the context of the jobs crisis in the North Sea oil and gas industry as explained in Mark Best’s Global Warning column in this issue – Labour fell from second place to fourth, shedding 9,905 votes (19.3%), and the SNP lost the seat, with the Conservatives becoming the unlikely ‘available weapon of protest’, although again also on a 22% fall in turnout. But this does not signal a broad recovery in the Tories’ fortunes. In Makerfield the Conservative vote fell from 4,379 in 2024 (10.9%) to 997 on June 18, at 2.2% only marginally ahead of their all-time vote-share low of 1.9% recorded in Gorton & Denton in February.
This is not an era then of fixed voting allegiances but of profound instability and political churning in which, most importantly, the working class does not yet have its own political vehicle. It is not insignificant that, despite the hullabaloo around the by-election – with even an unprecedented special BBC Question Time programme aired – both Burnham’s absolute vote and percentage share were less than that achieved by Labour in Makerfield in the 2017 general election (28,245 votes and a 60.1% share) when turnout reached 63.8%, its highest since 1997. This, of course, was under the Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
As the Tory grandee Michael Heseltine – a former minister under Margaret Thatcher and the last defence secretary to walk out of the cabinet before John Healey’s June 11 resignation – recently commented on Starmer’s imminent demise and Burnham’s prospects: “In many ways, any prime minister would be in this present situation, because the underlying malaise affecting this government is the one that always affects governments: living standards are falling and people want change. It’s as simple as that”. (Politics Home, 16 June) It really is.
Nevertheless, the now inevitable Burnham premiership, posed by himself as Labour’s “final chance to change” in his victory speech, is a significant new development in Britain and the workers’ movement needs to discuss how to respond.
The capitalists’ dilemma
In last month’s Socialism Today editorial we analysed the dilemma the ruling class face in securing the necessary social-political base to push through their agenda to deal with the dire problems of British capitalism. We identified the problem they had of “no longer having a party rooted in the working class that they can call upon to carry it through”, which was the historic role that the Labour Party played when it was a ‘capitalist workers party’. That is, “a party with the dual character of having a socialistic ideological foundation and a structure through which workers and their trade union organisations could move to fight for their interests” – which created a working class loyalty to Labour as ‘our party’ – “but at the same time with a leadership that reflected and fought for the requirements of capitalism”.
“The problem with Starmer’s party”, we went on, “after the political and organisational transformation of the Labour Party under Tony Blair into the thoroughly capitalist New Labour – and the avoidable failure of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership to reverse this – is not the minutely-vetted ‘socialism free’ commitment of its MPs to defend capitalism”. There is no question there, with Starmer in his resignation speech notably holding up the expunging of Corbynism from the Labour Party as his defining achievement. The problem is instead, as we wrote, “the fact that the majority of the working class doesn’t see ‘Labour’ as their party anymore and has no loyalty to it to appeal to”, so that it can’t perform the function for capitalism of winning working class acquiescence to austerity which it did in the past.
“So is it really possible”, we asked, “without reversing the fundamental changes to the character of the Labour Party that have benefitted capitalism for a whole historical era, to use the Labour ‘brand’ to one more time carry out the capitalists’ demands?”
To resist that possibility from becoming the reality is the way the issue must be posed in the debates that will take place now in the workers’ movement on how to approach a Burnham government. Not to present the question as whether he should be ‘backed’ or not for this or that particular policy or personnel change but how this new manifestation of the crisis of capitalist political representation – the seventh prime minister in ten years – presents an opportunity for the working class to re-establish its own political vehicle to fight for a fundamental, socialist transformation of society.
The objective constraints on Burnhamism
The reconstitution of Labour into New Labour under Tony Blair from the 1990s – claimed by Thatcher as her greatest achievement although ultimately the product of the international processes unleashed by the collapse of Stalinism in Russia and Eastern Europe from the late 1980s – changed the balance of class forces to the advantage of the capitalists. Wages as a share of GDP fell from a 1975 peak of 65% to 53% by 2008 and have not recovered since, as profits have continued to swell. The top 0.01% of the population – those who make at least £2.2 million a year (in 2015-2016 values), with 40% of it ‘unearned’ income from assets – have tripled their share of pre-tax income from 1995. This ‘settlement’ is not something that will be lightly given up. One City analyst denounced even the recent modest proposals of the present chancellor Rachel Reeves that the big retailers should consider voluntary price caps on food staples to meet the developing cost-of-living crisis as “neo-Soviet policy ideas”! (The Guardian, 21 May)
But capitalism is a flexible system, particularly when it is faced by rising working class anger, and there could be some temporary leeway given to Burnham for him to try and build his authority, the better to force through its most fundamental requirements. Not incidentally both Burnham and the arch-Blairite Wes Streeting have spoken of equalising capital gain tax (CGT) rates with income tax – something that was also in Corbyn’s manifestoes in 2017 and 2019 – which could bring in an extra £15 billion or so a year, affecting the top 1% who increased the proportion of their earnings declared as capital gains from 3% of their income in 1997 to 13.3% by 2017-18.
This proposal, it is true, has earned Burnham and Streeting the wrath of Tony Blair, in his recent essay intervention into the government crisis, who said equalising the tax rates was “something rejected by successive governments for good reason”. (The Tony Blair Institute, 26 May) Yet this was a policy introduced, in 1988, by Thatcher’s chancellor Nigel Lawson, until the link was broken by Gordon Brown in 2008 ‘to encourage business investment’ after the financial crash. Restoring the link is hardly storming the Bastille!
On the other hand there will be the fear, reflected in Blair’s wild comments on Burnham’s “far-left critique” – about “nothing good coming out of the last ‘40 years of neo-liberalism’, which presumably includes the last Labour government” – that such measures will only whet the appetite of the working class, who will demand more.
Thames Water, for example, is set to run out of money in October and even Starmer’s environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, has balked at its creditors’ rescue plan. Public ownership however, she warns, could open up compensation claims and, although the mooted figure of £100 billion is undoubtedly exaggerated, how a Burnham government dealt with that would be keenly watched on the international money markets.
But other halfway ‘public control’ schemes being touted as ‘Burnhamism’, such as an independent company with worker representation on the board, would also face the same obstacles. And, applied more widely to the economy, would provoke the capitalists while still leaving them with decisive control of the economic commanding heights to defend their interests. The demand for nationalisation, with compensation only on the basis of proven need democratically decided, could rapidly gather mass support. This in turn creates the danger for the capitalists that the new government could be pushed to go further than it initially intends in encroaching upon their interests.
It is a precarious journey that the ruling class are embarking on to attempt to squeeze yet another subvention from the old tarnished ‘Labour’ brand but, with the only likely alternative at this point being a Reform-led government with even more unpredictable consequences, as explained in Hannah Sell’s lead article, it is the least worst option available to them.
Thames Water is just one of the immediate issues – alongside the coming energy price hikes, the renewed welfare or warfare spending row over the Defence Investment Plan, the re-set talks with the EU, special education needs ‘reform’ and the general crisis facing local government etc – that will be in the inbox of the new government.
Very rapidly what Burnham describes as his “business-friendly socialism” will be put to the test. And the working-class movement must use the experience to push forward the creation of the political weapon it really needs to roll back ‘the last 40 years of neo-liberalism’, a mass workers’ party with a socialist programme.