on June 19, 2026, 5:02 pm
Andy Burnham wins the Makerfield by-election, paving his way to becoming the next Prime Minister
Another Angry Voice
Jun 19, 2026
In the end it wasn’t even that tight. Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election with 54% of the vote, beating the combined right-wing Reform-Restore-Tory vote by over 5,000 votes.
Even though Reform won every Wigan council seat that was up for grabs in the local elections in May, they didn’t really come close to beating Burnham.
When given the direct choice between the prestige of being the home constituency of the probable future Prime Minister, or backing the perverted, riot-stoking weirdo that Reform selected as their candidate, the choice was obvious for the majority of the 58% of people who voted in the by-election.
Even though it wasn’t that close in the end, Makerfield was absolutely crucial for Labour. If they hadn’t managed to win with the most popular Labour politician in the country as their candidate, standing in his home turf, where could they ever have won an election again?
It was also crucial to get Keir Starmer’s main challenger back into parliament, because the man needs to be deposed as soon as possible.
Starmer’s team want him to cling on for as long as possible, so that he can railroad through as many of his deeply unpopular authoritarian policies as possible.
If Burnham has any sense whatever, he’d launch his challenge quickly, and make scrapping Starmer’s plan to erase our right to trial by jury one of his key pledges.
The fact that Starmer’s plot to revoke our right to trial by jury wasn’t even mentioned in Labour’s 2024 manifesto makes it a very easy target.
Burnham should also develop a policy platform based squarely on improving living standards for ordinary people, and ordinary communities, and make as much noise as possible about it, in the style of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
It’s an absolute no-brainer that Burnham should go down the road of clearly positioning Labour on the side of ordinary people, but whether he will or not is up for debate.
He won a lot of credit with the Labour left for remaining in post while 172 of his Labour colleagues stabbed Jeremy Corbyn in the back during the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup in 2016, and he’s won more plaudits for his successful time as Mayor of Manchester.
On the other hand, he was handed the Makerfield constituency by one of the worst of Keir Starmer’s Labour-right henchmen. A guy called Josh Simons, who was forced to resign from Starmer’s government over his harassment of journalists who uncovered Labour Together’s unlawfully undeclared donations.
Labour Together have now sneakily rebranded themselves as ThinkLabour, to distance themselves from their dodgy undeclared donations, and their disgraceful hounding of journalists, but you’d be a fool to imagine that this powerful right-wing faction of the Labour Party hasn’t sought concessions from Andy Burnham, in return for standing down one of their key guys so he could return to parliament.
What seems obvious is that the Labour leadership election will be a cake walk for Burnham compared to the Makerfield by-election, given that he’ll be up against a historically unpopular haircut in a suit if Starmer tries to make a fight of it, and probably the deeply unlikeable figure of Wes Streeting if Starmer sees sense and calls it quits.
Burnham does seem to know the score, judging by his victory speech in which he said stuff like wanting to "bring about a country that works fairly for everywhere and for everybody".
"I say to my own party: this is a final chance to change. This is what people said directly to me on the hundreds of doorsteps that I stood on. We must hear it, we must act upon it and we must get it right".
"People here have voted for change. They have voted for more power for the North and everywhere forgotten by Westminster. They have voted for hope. Now, let’s give that back to them".
It is inspiring stuff, and he does seem to have captured the public mood, but it all depends on whether he has the desire and the strength of will to face down the Labour-right ghouls in his own party. The ones who want to serve the interests of capital, and landlordism, and genocidal Israelis, and crush ordinary British people under continued austerity and mountains of repressive legislation.
The saboteurs who spent years wrecking the party from within under Corbyn’s leadership, plus the huge number of right-wing Labour Together MPs that Starmer flooded the Labour ranks with in 2024.
If Burnham sticks to his word, he’s going to have a massive fight on his hands, not just in beating the billionaire-bankrolled faragists at the next general election, but also in quelling the internal sabotage of the Labour-right wreckers within his own party.