Even I’m rolling my eyes as I write this: the Makerfield by-election will be nothing short of historic. I know, I know. We’re all sick of every electoral contest being inflated into a grand national story; every local snapshot turned into an existential verdict on British politics. But in this case, the cliché may actually be true.
If Andy Burnham wins in Makerfield, it will be read as a defining moment in Labour’s ongoing crisis, lobbing a grenade straight into the political safe house Keir Starmer has tried to barricade himself into.
But to see it only through that lens would be to miss the point. This is not just another crunch by-election for politicos to salivate over, nor a new act in the party’s internal psychodrama. A Burnham victory would amount to something far bigger: a test of whether Labour has finally found a credible political answer to the rise of Reform UK, and whether that answer can scale beyond a single seat.
Makerfield compresses several political realities into one contest. Reform’s surge in recent local elections has shattered the assumption that Labour “safe seats” still exist. The party’s traditional coalition is visibly fraying, with voters drifting left and right. And now, unusually explicitly, voters will be asked to think tactically about something far bigger than the seat itself. This contest will be framed as the “stop Reform” moment of moments, a proxy battle for the soul of the country.
There are Labour figures who are already uneasy about what happens here. At the 2024 general election, Labour held the seat with a majority of 5399 votes over Reform . That once looked comfortable. Now, it looks risky. Since then, a string of local elections and bruising by-election results elsewhere have shown how quickly Labour’s goodwill has depleted.
But Reform’s vote may not be as solid as it appears. Early reporting from the area suggests a softness to it: support that is often more about frustration, than conversion. Many voters are not persuaded by Reform so much as they are fed up with everything else. The question is, therefore, not only why voters are turning to the insurgent party, but what might pull them back.
Enter Burnham. As Mayor of Greater Manchester, he’s never really set out a grand ideological project or a neat, three-word mantra you can stick on a placard. There’s no tidy “Burnhamism”. What there is, instead, is something basic and arguably more powerful: a reputation for getting things done.
The much-discussed “buses” – his transport reforms in Greater Manchester, where he has taken control of franchising routes to improve reliability and accountability – have become shorthand for his political identity. Day-to-day policies that make people’s lives easier, and a sentiment that government can still work in ways people can actually see.
In an era where voters feel increasingly impatient with distant, performative politics, Burnham cuts through as someone who actually does things, rather than just announces them. More than that, he has managed to project something quite rare at the moment: a sense that he is genuinely on the side of the people he’s trying to represent.
If he can translate that into a win in Makerfield, it would create a much-needed blueprint for Labour to win back voters in places where it is haemorrhaging support, not through sweeping ideological reinvention, but through competence and connection.
It would also strengthen the argument already circulating across the party that Burnham is the only counter to Farage, because he offers something Reform has struggled to match: visible delivery.
None of this is to say Reform would be stopped overnight. The conditions that have fuelled Farage’s rise – impatience, distrust, disillusionment – aren’t going away because of one by-election.
But it might start to point towards a way of dealing with it. Reform’s strength isn’t just that it channels dissatisfaction, it’s that it’s made itself feel bleakly inevitable. Labour can’t just argue its way out of that. Instead, it has to make that feeling less convincing by showing, in fairly concrete terms,that government can still make things better.
That’s what makes Makerfield so important. It’s not just a test of whether Labour can hold off Reform in one seat, but whether a different kind of politics – more practical, visible, and more obviously on people’s side – can be the antidote to a politics that thrives on telling people nothing will ever get better.
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