“This is a final chance to change,” Andy Burnham said last night. “There will be no second chance.” The result was seismic. This should have been one of Reform’s safest seats. Instead, Burnham – not Labour – won by 20 points. Reform was flattened and Restore, despite thousands of activists and a real presence in the constituency, barely made an impression. But Burnham is right: this is Labour’s last throw of the dice.
Gramsci distinguishes between organic forces – deep, far-reaching shifts in the economy and demography of a country – and conjunctural forces – the swirling drama of circumstances, events and personalities which constitute day-to-day politics. Without leadership, politics is theatre and its protagonists are buffeted by organic forces which they cannot understand or master. Six prime ministers in less than a decade is the result. It is likely soon to be seven.
Burnham is on the brink of winning the leadership of the Labour party and with it the country. As important as his record as Mayor of Greater Manchester is that he exudes an ease with and affection for ordinary people and this country. He is a “good bloke”, and appearing to like people is a rare distinction in a Labour party utterly at odds with the common culture of the country, a party of the furrowed brow, the nasal voice, and a permanent state of disappointment. Too often, Labour resembles the line in Bertolt Brecht’s satirical poem, Would it not in that case / Be simpler for the Government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?
Burnham has proved himself the man of the conjuncture. But Makerfield was the easy part. He will soon inherit a country ill at ease, tired of false hope, and quick to turn. This was the most pivotal by-election in British history: doors were knocked on, and knocked on, and knocked on again. Ashton-in-Makerfield was a carnival yesterday, every roadside verge and roundabout packed with activists from all Labour, Reform and Restore; every spare bit of wall festooned with flags, banners and posters.
Despite that, 42% of voters didn’t think voting was worth their time. For others it really was a final shot in the dark, and Labour activists who think Nigel Farage is the cause and culmination of the country’s malaise are severely naïve. Burnham will have less than three years to master the organic forces driving the profound discontent in the country, otherwise he will become their seventh victim.
Those forces – deindustrialisation, sustained economic stagnation and the attendant breakdown of associational life; the metastasising of our State and its institutions into something at once hollowed out and bloated, overly centralised in SW1 and far too diffuse; and the crack-up of our common culture, caused by technological acceleration and demographic fragmentation – will not be mastered by feel-good vibes and “Northern Soul” alone.
For his calls for reindustrialisation to be more than an aesthetic, he will need to transform our political economy, including revitalising vocational education – an idea he endorsed in a Policy Exchange paper here.
For the Future of the Left Project at Policy Exchange, it also means contending with the very mixed legacy of Net Zero. On immigration, the hopeful theory is that Makerfield will keep him tethered to the common ground of the country and toprevent a slip into the Soft Left comfort zone. On every single hard issue, the current “Stakeholder State” will be there to make inaction the easy option. Burnham must lead where Keir Starmer could not.
For those of us who want a Labour party capable of representing working class people and places, Burnham was always the only serious answer. It is hard not to see so much of Westminster Labour’s sniffiness about Burnham as simple jealousy. On the ground in Makerfield, there really was a sense of hope – a hope many are feeling for the first time in years or decades, if not their lives. But despair is hope’s close cousin and underneath is a country suffering all manner of morbid symptoms, and whose patience has run thin.
Tobias Phibbs is a contributor to the Future of the Left Project at Policy Exchange