Best Of

Reflecting on the Makerfield byelection result, I think (as I said) that Burnham was the favourite going in, and never really looked troubled.

Reform would always have struggled, but I think could have performed better if they had developed an effective counternarrative against Burnham, beyond their charge that he was using Makerfield as a stepping stone. That was clearly believed by a lot of people, but it couldn't really go anywhere. I felt where Burnham was weakest was at the point of WASPI - it was an embarrassing f U-turn in real time. But for whatever reason it didn't seem that this was capitalised on.

They also had a problem with the plumber, who I don't think was a terrible candidate, but was undoubtedly damaged, particularly by the Vorderman letter to the women of Makerfield. The letter was an utterly cynical piece of confected outrage, and I think in response I would have issued an utterly cynical confected apology, and gone the 'bad boy forgiven' route. I also might have been tempted to put Kenyon up for an interrogation with someone like Kuensberg so the public could see him sweat it out. High risk, but I think many women might have seen it and ended up with some sneaking sympathy. His line would have been - 'sorry, regret my comments, however do we want a society where the only people who are allowed to hold office are people who have never said anything regrettable on social media?'.

Even with all that, I think Reform's best result would have been to be 'robbed' by Restore. That would have fit their narrative nicely. Sadly they just missed out.

On your last point - I appreciate the short term benefit of that (consolidate the hard-right vote) - but isn’t that an extremely limited strategy?

Having a big argument with Lowe about split votes and precisely how many pogroms to conduct isn’t going to put Farage into No 10. At least this time they aren’t blaming “family voting”, which suggests they’ve learnt the lesson from last time.

Marina Hyde analyses it rather better than does Lucky.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/19/reform-candidates-nigel-farage-makerfield-prime-minister
..everything that went wrong for Reform here flowed directly from his personal character, and is going to keep happening in one way or another because people don’t change. Nigel’s gonna Nigel.

Nobody fetishises plain speaking like Farage, so we owe it to him to honour that and observe that Reform really shat the bed. Makerfield is among the party’s top 10 target seats for a general election, and Reform strategists’ decision to field yet another inadequate liability, whose past social media activity they simply couldn’t be arsed checking, seems to have proved something of a turn-off – for example for women, who strangely didn’t feel minded to vote for someone who had said: “I’m sexist, sorry but I am.” Rob Kenyon will no doubt be back on his plumbing rounds next week. So, Makerfield ladies, make sure your husband’s home to be consulted as to whether you really want your sink unblocked. It’ll honestly be cheaper to replace it.

Meanwhile it would take a heart of stone not to cackle at the fact that Reform is now losing votes to an insurgent party to its right. The thing to remember about Restore is that it is a party that genuinely only exists because Nigel couldn’t handle some light strategic criticism from Rupert Lowe. Why? Because Nigel is, and always has been, a diva who has huge fallouts with colleagues and allies...

Yes, if anyone is ever going to get their finger on the pulse of Reform and working class areas like Makerfield it’s Guardian writing upper class tedious Posho, Marina Hyde.

Burnham is now clearly the leftwing candidate in any Labour leadership election against Starmer and New Labour Streeting. Whereas he wasn’t in 2015 with Corbyn taking that role nor in 2010 when Ed Miliband and Abbott were the leftist candidates and he was still relatively New Labour.

Burnham might take some encouragement from Ronald Reagan who was beaten by Nixon in the 1968 Republican primaries and narrowly by Ford in the 1976 Republican primaries. As we all remember though Reagan won the 1980 Republican primaries and then the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections. Biden also ran for the Democrats nomination in 1988 and 2008 losing to Dukakis and Obama before finally winning in 2020 the nomination and presidential election

In this particular context what would 'leftwing' mean? Does it mean significantly more than having a particular rhetoric about how you talk politics? How does it relate policy and practicewise to: private enterprise, debt to GDP ratios, deficit, benefits, growth, NATO, overall tax levels, interest rates, migration, student loans, and so on? Unless it means different from Starmer, Tories, LDs, etc in ways that can be articulated, how are we to evaluate?

Burnham’s camp has said he will restore the 50% additional rate of income tax, introduce a land tax, a social care levy etc. It is not just he will renationalise utilities

Policies for which there is no mandate.

Mandates in manifestos don't matter in practice, except that the HOC can't oppose legislation that is in the manifesto.

However the House of Lords cannot block or amend taxation legislation. So a mandate is irrelevant for these measures.

Which gives Kemi an opportunity, as Reform falters after these by election defeats Labour are about to elect a leader committed to tax rises and nationalisations and taking Labour left which it had no mandate for when it won the 2024 general election with Starmer

If Burnham promotes policies that are generally popular then Kemi saying "He doesn't have a mandate" will fall on deaf ears, except for the Tory faithful.

Burnham restoring the 50% additional rate of income tax certainly won’t be popular with the City. A land tax won’t be popular with landowners and developers. His proposal to increase business rates on out of town warehouses won’t be popular with Amazon. While if a rumoured Burnham social care levy hits average home owners that would destroy Burnham’s popularity as badly as the dementia tax did for May’s

The City doesn't vote Labour. Landowners and Developers don't vote Labour (and it seems fair for them them to pay council tax on development land at the rate the finished properties will pay). Out of town warehouse owners and renters don't vote Labour.

Quite apart from addressing inefficiencies which seem built into the system, we just don't seem to be raising enough tax to fund the state we want. Rearmament? We can't even fix potholes.

A land value tax replacing both council tax and stamp duty would seem reasonable to me, levied on all land regardless of owner.

One problem us, of course, is that Burnham will have a maximum of 3 years to do unpopular stuff and wait for the memory to fade, or put anything complex in place, rather the normal 4-5

The City determines business confidence in the country though as New Labour and Thatcher and Cameron and Sunak and even Starmer and Reeves to an extent understood. Amazon is one of the biggest employers in the country and can move their warehouses abroad if the tax they pay in the UK gets too high.