Dear Subscribers,
The Makerfield by-election is taking shape as Labour and Reform have put forward their candidates. Labour’s is a career politician aiming at becoming Prime Minister, Andy Burnham; Reform’s is an ex-reservist, plumber and councillor called Robert Kenyon: David vs Goliath, as Reform have framed it. The conservative demands of the electorate of Makerfield vs. those of the liberal wing of the Labour party have tangled Burnham in knots: he has had to awkwardly flit over things like biological males using female toilets and rejoining the EU. By contrast, Reform’s candidate has not faced such complications. Kenyon is tied straightforwardly to his locality: hence his most effective online campaigning so far has been a nine-minute conversation in his van with Farage. The media is trying to do its worst, dragging up Kenyon’s pre-political social media for charges of political incorrectness, according to that arbiter of purity called Hope Not Hate.
The Makerfield by-election has fragmented the Labour party on its stance towards Europe. Burnham was initially emboldened but has since spluttered and equivocated. Wes Streeting, by contrast, has committed to rejoining the EU wholeheartedly, were he to become Prime Minister. While Ambrose Evans-Pritchard rightly emphasises the political-economic incoherence for rejoining, there is also a party-political pressure which is operating on Streeting’s commitment. The local elections were proof that the Labour party’s oblivion could be reality rather than mere conjecture: and so, the Labour left has deduced that it must reject ‘Starmerism’ and tack leftwards. Now, for many this would mean committing oneself to an anti-Israel position to meet the Greens and Lib Dems on their level. However, Streeting is reluctant about this, as a member of the Labour Friends of Israel group. In this light, rejoining for Streeting has an important party-political function for positioning himself on the left as a smooth and sensible alternative to the raggedness of Corbynism and the soft mindedness of Polanski.
Party politics aside, it has been revealed that youth unemployment has reached 16.2pc, the highest level in a decade. Moreover, wage growth is at its lowest level since the Covid lockdowns, and the Bank of England has forecast inflation to exceed 6pc later this year. Amidst this, Reeves has extended the fuel duty freeze; yet she is still set to introduce a 22pc tax on interest earned from cash held in stocks and shares ISAs, to be affected in April 2027. She has also introduced a summer-long reduction in VAT from 20 to 5pc for family days out and free bus trips for schoolchildren. Some voters seem not to care for such gimmicks, as Reeves was heckled at a petrol station by a white-van man. She promptly told him off for bad manners – a response which effortlessly combined headmistress, Keir Starmer and Alan Partridge all at once.
Blog
Labour’s Problem is Greater Than You Might Think by Dr Dan Boucher
This article explains why Labour now has a deep legitimacy problem arising from the combined impact of the recent elections and the very unusual nature of the mandate it received in July 2024. Drawing on precedents arising from previous General Elections, it reflects on the constitutional implications for Labour going forward.
Media
Why Our Elites Walked Away from Britain – Robert Tombs in conversation with James Orr
Whatever Rejoiners may dream, Britain will never go back into the EU by Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph
Key Points
Andy Burnham: a nullity
Have you seen Andy Burnham’s campaign posters? You know, the ones with that solemn, expressionless, AI-generated cartoon of his big head adorned by even bigger spectacles that he uses as his Twitter profile picture? Or put differently, have you ever listened to Burnham speak about anything of substance beyond his adolescent love of football and northern pop music, or his whining at ‘being in hock to the bond markets’? No, me neither.
In fact, it has taken but a week to show that there is nothing between Burnham’s ears or behind those spectacles. He is boringly conventional and has had a smooth, unscrutinised career in politics. It has been made a marginal, because inconvenient, fact that he took a degree in English from Cambridge and that he was a Blairite bag carrier before becoming a parliamentarian and then a mayor in the north.
The intellectuals of the New Statesman have tried their hardest at providing Burnham with a socialist doctrine called ‘Manchesterism’. Yet this is nothing more than a journalese. It shows no sense of the glaring cultural and economic complications of contemporary northern politics, which the Labour movement had once been able to contain by means of a low-keyed Christianity before being absorbed into the virtuous liberalism of the late-20th century Labour party. (Such are the bricks of the Red Wall, which have been slowly picked up by conservatives.)
Burnham’s position in Manchester owes more to a liberal northern sentimentality and Labour party clichés – vague but virulent Thatcher hatred, a northern accent and an elevated feeling for football – than to any concrete ideas. And he is relying on such sentiments to secure Makerfield, treating it with all the presumption of a Georgian rotten borough, as the Labour party has treated the north for generations. (It is indeed fitting that the Reform party are contesting the seat with an overtly local working-class candidate.)
In reality, Burnham is a simple-minded modern Labour politician whose enclosure within Westminster since leaving Cambridge has inhibited his development and maturity, his thought and character amounting to obvious soundbites and clichés. It is highly doubtful that Burnham would be any more competent than Starmer. He would certainly be no less righteous and priggish than the present Prime Minister, and would perhaps prove even more unenduring if he attempts to implement the ragbag of postures that he calls socialism.
