Sorry, Andy, there’s no such thing as a Labour safe seat

Having twice run unsuccessfully for the Labour leadership, Andy Burnham is no stranger to failure. But a deeper humiliation might yet be in store for the Greater Manchester mayor.

On Thursday, Labour’s Josh Simons resigned as MP for Makerfield, in Greater Manchester. It is now expected that Andy Burnham will be allowed to stand as the Labour candidate in the upcoming by-election, predicted to be held within weeks. As everyone knows, Burnham needs to win this seat if he wants to enter parliament and challenge Keir Starmer for the premiership.

But he is far from a shoe-in. The Makerfield constituency is principally made up of eight wards, all of which voted for Reform UK in last week’s council elections. It is based in the borough of Wigan, where voters gave Labour an absolute hammering at the ballot box last week. It lost all 22 seats it was defending on the council to Reform. The polling aggregator Electoral Calculus has Reform the favourite to win Makerfield by 82 per cent.

Unsurprisingly, Nigel Farage smells blood, and has promised to throw the kitchen sink at the Makerfield by-election. He is right to fancy his chances. The fact that Labour has held the seat since it was created in 1963 now means very little. Ever since the EU referendum 2016, Red Wall voters are far more loyal to Brexit than they are to the Labour Party. There is every chance that the voters of Makerfield, 65 per cent of whom voted to leave the EU in 2016, will take a dim view of Burnham – a man who has been outspoken in his desire for Britain to cosy back up to Brussels.

The one saving grace for Burnham is that his vote is unlikely to be eaten into by the Green Party. Makerfield is an overwhelmingly white, working-class area. It has a far smaller Muslim population (less than one per cent) than the nearby constituency of Gorton and Denton, which Labour lost to the Greens in February. A sectarian campaign of the kind we witnessed from the Greens is unlikely to be a feature next month.

This fact will make the by-election all the more interesting. It will expose, one way or another, the extent to which Labour retains any support among its former working-class base.

Labour’s fascination with Andy Burnham is a mystery to most of the public. It is testament to how detached the party has become from its working-class origins that a middling functionary of New Labour – essentially a slightly wetter version of Keir Starmer – is being looked upon like some kind of aurora borealis, lighting up the night sky from the north. There is nothing remarkable about him, and Labour is setting itself up for the same disappointment it has experienced with Starmer.

That’s assuming Andy Burnham is successful. Which, at this stage, is a very big if.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.