Politics
Will the establishment accept a Reform election victory?
The British establishment, we are assured, is entirely comfortable with democracy. Should Reform UK win the next General Election, it will be welcomed with open arms by the civil service, the public-sector unions, the teaching profession, the senior judiciary, the cultural establishment, the third sector, the arts and the unelected House of Lords. Everything will proceed with the smooth courtesy that marks the peaceful transfer of power in a mature democracy…
Of course, if you believe any of that, then I have a bridge available, if anyone is interested.
What actually confronts a Nigel Farage-led government is the most comprehensive mobilisation of institutional resistance that any incoming administration has faced in British peacetime politics. This is not a matter of inference or speculation. The resistance is not hidden. It is loud, organised and proud of itself.
Consider the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents nearly 200,000 civil servants. Last week, delegates at the PCS annual conference voted to put £3million a year towards a war chest to fight a potential Reform UK government. General secretary Fran Heathcote warned delegates they would ‘need every penny’, backing a motion to double its budget surplus to 10 per cent of members’ subscription fees, ring-fenced until at least the end of 2029.
Pause on that. A union representing the state’s own administrators is formally preparing to resist a government that has not yet been elected, on the grounds explicitly that it disapproves of its politics. A further motion, which the conference ran out of time to vote on, called for a comprehensive ‘Industrial Defence Strategy‘ specifically designed to counter a hostile Reform government, expressing fears of a ‘culture war aimed at demoralising public servants’.
Reform’s Danny Kruger, who has been doing the most serious thinking about civil-service reform from any frontbencher in living memory, responded with appropriate directness: striking on grounds of political objection to an elected government would be illegal, and those civil servants who do so would soon find they have no jobs to return to. He is right, and right to say it loudly.
But the scale of the provocation matters as much as the response. We are witnessing something that constitutional theorists prefer to discuss in careful academic prose. Dr Ben Yong, in a lecture at UCL last year, gave voice to views held in certain Whitehall circles: that the civil service might have duties to ‘the continuity of the state’ separate from its duty to support incumbent governments. Officials, he suggested, might legitimately engage in ‘guerrilla government’, including bureaucratic shirking, leaking and whistleblowing, if they disapprove of an incoming administration. This is the doctrine of the permanent government asserting its primacy over the elected one. It is profoundly unconstitutional. It is also, I am afraid, all too predictable.
Then there are the schools. The National Education Union’s annual conference passed a motion describing Reform UK as a ‘racist and far-right party’ and agreed that the union’s political fund should be used to campaign against Reform candidates at elections. The NEU’s general secretary, Daniel Kebede, warned that Reform would make education a ‘hostile place’ for many children, and suggested that the party’s ‘divisive messages’ were already ‘playing into the classroom’. The union has also introduced ‘anti-fascist’ training sessions for its members, with Reform UK in mind.
The NEU has nearly half a million members. Those members teach every child in England. The voting data collected by Teacher Tapp tells you something important about the political monoculture involved. In 2024, 62 per cent of teachers said they would vote Labour, with nine per cent for the Liberal Democrats and a mere three per cent Conservative. In the actual 2024 General Election, only two per cent of teachers voted Reform. We are entrusting the formation of the next generation to a workforce that is, as a matter of statistical fact, overwhelmingly hostile to the political movement that leads every national opinion poll.
One should be careful here. Teachers are entitled to their political views like anyone else, and the vast majority are professionals who, whatever they think privately, do their jobs conscientiously. But when the union that speaks for them votes to use its political fund to campaign against a specific party, the line between private conviction and institutional action has been definitively crossed. Kebede has already claimed that ‘Austerity Labour is paving the way for a Reform government’, a statement that reveals his understanding of the NEU as a political actor rather than a professional body.
Extend the view and the picture darkens further. Unison – representing public-sector workers across local government, health, education and the emergency services – has mobilised over 1,000 activists in its ‘Responding to Reform UK’ network, sharing resources, conducting conversations with colleagues and campaigning publicly. The arts establishment, from the subsidised theatre to the publicly funded gallery, from the Booker longlist to the museum profession, is uniformly and vocally hostile. Leading academics at the institutions training our teachers, doctors, lawyers and civil servants treat Reform as an embarrassment to be managed rather than a democratic phenomenon to be engaged with. The third sector – that vast archipelago of charities, pressure groups and advocacy organisations substantially funded by the very state it exists to lobby – is already writing its position papers. Even some prominent sporting figures have felt it necessary to discover political passions that coincide, with remarkable consistency, with those of the institutions that fund and platform them.
This, broadly, is what I prefer to call not the Blob, which is a useful shorthand but lacks precision, but the Stables: the accumulated detritus of decades of institutional capture, comprehensive and self-reinforcing, every bit as formidable as anything Augeas managed. The task of reforming this is akin to a labour of Hercules, requiring a river diverted at its source and a willingness to accept that things will smell considerably worse before they improve.
And then there is the House of Lords. This is a chamber now composed exclusively of appointed loyalists and the accumulated obligations of successive prime ministers. In December 2025 alone, Starmer appointed 25 new Labour peers, alongside five Liberal Democrats and three Conservatives. Reform, meanwhile, despite receiving over four million votes at the 2024 election and leading the polls for months since then, has zero representation in the upper house. Farage wrote to Starmer describing the situation as a ‘democratic disparity’. The Conservative leader in the Lords, Lord True, called for Reform peers to be appointed as ‘a sensible constitutional principle’. Starmer declined. The Liberal Democrats, who received a slightly lower vote share than Reform in 2024, have 73 peers. The DUP, with a fraction of Reform’s national support, has six peers. Even the Greens have two.
Let us be plain about what this means in practice. If Reform wins the next election, it will face an upper chamber packed with the appointees of its predecessors, with no members of its own, and with the capacity to obstruct every bill it wishes to pass. The Salisbury Convention, which holds that the Lords should not block manifesto commitments, may or may not hold in a chamber that is collectively committed to the view that Reform represents an existential threat to the values of public life. The Parliament Acts remain available, but they are slow, cumbersome and politically costly to deploy. The king could be asked to create hundreds of new Reform peers, as Lloyd George threatened in 1911: that avenue exists, but it constitutes a constitutional crisis of the first order.
Every member of a Reform government, from cabinet minister to parliamentary private secretary, needs to understand before they take office that the opposition he or she will face is not Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, comfortably confined to its green benches and bound by parliamentary convention. It is dispersed through every government department, every classroom, every committee room, every subsidised arts venue, every quango boardroom, every unelected chamber that has been carefully prepared to second-guess the choices of the electorate.
Kipling had the precepts for such a moment. Whether you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. Whether you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting, too. Whether you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.
If Reform wins the next election, it remains to be determined whether the institutions that exist to serve the people will honour that verdict or whether the stables will outlast the will to clean them. The stakes are Britain’s future. They cannot be understated.
Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK. His Substack is Fainting in Coils.
FOXBOROUGH, Massachusetts — Boston is bouncing and the Massachusetts governor wants to thank thousands of kilted Scottish soccer fans who have taken over the city between Scotland’s first match against Haiti last weekend and its second, against Morocco, today.
The tournament’s shock love affair is sparking delight in Gov. Maura Healey’s office as the supporters plow cash into the local economy, star in feel-good viral videos and drink copious quantities of Sam Adams Boston Lager.
Earlier this week, the governor — who’s seeking what stands to be an easy reelection this year — spoke with POLITICO about which of Massachusetts’ World Cup wins can be made permanent, including extended hours for bars and service along mass-transit networks.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Were you expecting this?
Oh, yeah, what do they say? No Scotland, no party? [Author’s note: This is, indeed, what they say.] I would say the Tartan Army’s reputation precedes them in the best of ways. So we knew that they would bring a ton of energy and joy and the noise. The bagpipes, the partying in our restaurants and bars, it’s just been great, and to think — it’s very warm here, of course — half of them are doing it in kilts. It’s really amazing to see.
What has stood out to you?
In just a matter of days, the Tartan Army has become part of the Massachusetts family. We have seen them become regulars at our local restaurants and our pubs. We’ve seen them take over Fenway Park. 5,000 fans marching with bagpipes into the games. We loved the viral videos of them trying hot dogs […] inside Fenway. The videos of them taking over the cruise ships in Boston Harbor. We even had a Boston police officer kicking a soccer ball with them at the fanfest. So it’s just been really wonderful for us in Massachusetts, and we’re thrilled to have them here.
Do you have plans to capitalize on this beyond the World Cup?
Given that Scotland-Haiti was our first match, we were really thrilled. Massachusetts has a huge Haitian population. And then, of course, a lot of people in Massachusetts have ties with Scotland because many, many families here have ancestors who came from Scotland. And I have to say, I think Scotland just set the tone from the day the fans got into town. There was concern leading up to the World Cup, you know, how’s this all gonna work? And the media was covering a lot about security and transportation, and all these things about what could go wrong. And as soon as the Scottish fans arrived, they just laid the whole vibe for the World Cup. It’s gonna be about joy, energy, fun and bringing people together from all around the world. And I really credit them with establishing the vibe for our World Cup experience right at the outset.
Have the ticket prices charged by FIFA had an impact on that?
Well, one thing that I was really determined to do was to make sure that we were able to secure tickets for young people here in Massachusetts, which we did. 1,100 tickets that we distributed through Boys and Girls Clubs, so the kids who otherwise wouldn’t have a chance to see the game, were able to see the game — and for free. We’ve tried as a state to help out where we can, making $10 million available to communities around Massachusetts to host watch parties, because we know not everybody can afford to go to the game.
And as the governor of a blue state, how were your interactions with the Trump administration on planning for the tournament?
Well, when it comes to public safety that is something that it’s so imperative that local, state and federal authorities work together on. We did around transportation funding, security funding, that’s the way it should be. There should be that kind of work and coordination.
At the local level, would you support either a pilot program or a permanent extension of later last call and public drinking districts after the end of July? And would you encourage the legislature to start working on a bill about this?
We wanted to do that to create a welcoming environment, and I know that extension is helping our restaurants and bars and helping local businesses, and helping fans enjoy this experience. I’m certainly open to making some things more permanent, and I think this gives us a great opportunity to pilot it right now and see how it goes.
Do you see it as a runway for allowing happy-hour discounts, which have been banned in Massachusetts for decades, to become legal again? Because you’ve previously expressed problems with the concept.
I expressed support for happy hour the other day. We’ll see, we’ll have more conversations with the legislature.
And in terms of the transport would you consider keeping extended service hours on the MBTA?
I’ve always been for extended service hours. For us, it’s just a matter of budgeting and the labor costs associated with that. Also, you need a little bit of downtime so that trains can get repaired and maintained. We extended hours well before the World Cup on weekends, and it’s certainly something that I’d like to see us do across the system. But again, it’s just a matter of what we can do in terms of budget. But so far, transportation has been working really well. Trains have been made available, and selling out, and people have really enjoyed that experience; it’s been super easy, you know, getting to and from the match.
I think some Scotland fans would maybe dispute that it was easy getting back from the [Haiti] match, but I guess it’s all relative when the stadium is far away from the city.
I know. You can only run so many trains at once. But, hey, they won, so …
I understand it’s a challenge to keep young people in state. Are these measures you approved for a summer of intense tourism part of a longer-term solution?
I think that they’re really important to making sure that people know that we’ve got a great culture here and a great vibe for young people. That’s why I’m building homes […] so we can look at housing costs. Massachusetts is a place where people come to study from all around the world, and it’s a place that’s filled with young people, filled with opportunity. We’ve got an innovative economy, and doing so much in life sciences and robotics and AI, and cutting-edge industries. And it’s a very safe state and safe city. We’ve got the best schools in the country, best health care in the country. We got a lot going for us. And we’ve got great sports teams, too. So it’s a great vibe for young people, and we’re working always to try to make sure the message is out there around the globe. This is a great place to come and study, and start a business or raise a family.
Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.
(Alamy)
2 min read
Labour MPs who remain loyal to Keir Starmer have told PoliticsHome they will force a leadership contest to stop an Andy Burnham coronation if Keir Starmer doesn’t stand.
The Prime Minister is expected to spend the weekend mulling his future after Burnham’s landslide victory in the Makerfield by-election on Thursday injected fresh momentum into his bid to replace Starmer in No 10 and triggered new calls for the PM to stand aside.
Over 100 Labour MPs have publicly called on Starmer to set out a resignation plan at the time of writing, and Burnham backers are hopeful that the PM will agree to an orderly and non-confrontational transition of power in the coming days.
Earlier today, Starmer insisted he would “fight” any challenge to his leadership.
Among Starmer loyalists, however, planning is underway for the event that the PM decides not to enter a leadership contest. Within this group, there is strong opposition to Burnham taking over as leader without being put through a contest.
Starmer loyalists would need 81 MPs to force a contest, with organisers telling PoliticsHome on Friday night that they could raise the numbers to do so.
“There is a sizeable number of MPs who will not just sit back and allow Andy to be crowned,” said one.
Another added: “There will be a candidate but only if Keir Starmer decides he won’t stand.”
Loyalist Labour MPs have told PoliticsHome that Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Darren Jones could be the candidate they unite around to trigger a contest.
Last month, PoliticsHome reported that Jones was believed by Labour MPs to be sounding out support for a potential future leadership bid.
MPs reluctant to get behind Burnham say they are unclear on where he stands on key policy issues and have deep concerns over suggestions that Ed Miliband could become chancellor.
They are also concerned about left-wing group Momentum’s involvement in Burnham’s by-election campaign, as well as former shadow chancellor and Jeremy Corbyn ally John McDonnell’s tearful reaction to the outgoing Manchester mayor’s victory.
While Starmer loyalists remain willing to fight the PM’s corner, the growing feeling within the party is that it is a matter of when, not if, he is replaced by Burnham.
The long-serving Labour MP Harriet Harman today told the Electoral Dysfunction podcast that Burnham would become prime minister, adding that the Parliamentary Labour Party “herd” wasn’t just moving against Starmer, it was “stampeding”.
Alan Johnson, the former Labour health secretary, who, like Harman, is a respected figure in the party, told LBC he would advise Starmer: “It’s over, Keir”.
The post What Makerfield means for Labour, Reform and Restore appeared first on spiked.
VANCOUVER — Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber joined Prime Minister Mark Carney on Friday to watch Canada’s thrashing of Qatar. Garber probably did not want Carney to enjoy the stadium experience too much.
BC Place is Major League Soccer’s most troublesome facility. The arena is old, was not designed with soccer in mind, and is owned by a government agency — the BC Pavilion Corporation, which also controls the Vancouver Convention Center — that forces the Vancouver Whitecaps to fight for dates on the calendar against concerts and other events.
“We want to be the ones that control our destiny, like every sports team does,” Garber told reporters Friday in Seattle.
The Whitecaps are now up for sale, and Garber is actively pushing British Columbia’s political establishment — including Premier David Eby and Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim — to find a solution can keep the team from decamping to Las Vegas. While the government has been willing to renegotiate its financial relationship with the team, a proposed new stadium would take “four-plus years” in construction, which Garber said was untenable.
“It unimaginable how long we’re going to be out of the stadium,” he told reporters Friday in Seattle. “They are very relevant club that doesn’t have a good business model, and you can’t be sustainable.”
Garber recounted he met with Eby while in Vancouver, and sat with Carney and Victor Montagliani — the head of regional soccer confederation CONCACAF and a close ally of the prime minister — during the match itself. Garber said he has placed a league official in Vancouver full-time to manage the negotiations with local officials over the Whitecaps’s future.
“We want to be the ones that control our destiny, like every sports team does,” said Garber. “It’s easier for business people to make decisions, a little harder for politicians.”
SEATTLE — Some American fans walking toward Lumen Field on Friday morning were playfully jeering their Australian peers whenever they spotted a telltale yellow jersey. But a major driver of the local economy offered a kinder greeting to the visiting team.
Cranes in view of the stadium gates have been outfitted with the Australian flag and a WELCOME message from the Northwest Seaport Alliance, which manages the ports of Seattle and Tacoma, along with dockworkers’ union ILWU Local 19.
The seaport alliance and the labor union representing its workforce are mounting a similar display throughout the World Cup, rotating flags out to reflect the pair of teams that will face off next in Seattle. But keeping the Australians happy is a more urgent cause for Seattle harbor interests than, say, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Qatar.
Australia is one of the ports’ top trading partners, with the 14th largest source of container volume at the Port of Seattle, but ranks much higher when it comes to the dollar value of goods that come from there. (New Zealand, for example, sends more volume to Seattle than Australia but it’s worth only half as much.)
Meat, including beef and lamb, and minerals comprise the biggest categories of goods that Australia ships to the United States, although some of the most valuable exports — gold and pharmaceuticals — are more likely to land at Sea-Tac airport than via the harbor.
The U.S. and Australia have had a free-trade pact since 2005, although President Donald Trump’s tariff regime threatens to disrupt some trade flows. Australia is currently pushing back on its inclusion on an American list of countries alleged to use forced labor in its supply chains, which the U.S. Trade Representative is using as the basis to impose a 12.5 percent tariff.
Politics
Politics Home | Reform Council Leader Under Investigation For Sharing Contract With Reform HQ
3 min read
The leader of Reform-run Lincolnshire is being investigated by his own council after claiming to have shared a local authority contract with senior party figure Zia Yusuf.
Sean Matthews, who became leader of Lincolnshire County Council in 2025, said he had shared an IT contract with Yusuf, who was Reform chairman at the time, soon after he was elected.
Speaking on the Reform Party podcast earlier this month, Matthews said: “A lot of the work that we have is contracted out, and some of those contracts are ridiculous. Some of them are 25-year contracts.”
He continued: “When I took over last year, there was a new IT contract waiting to be signed and…the contract was put in front of me, and it was an 11-year contract in IT, and you go, this is not something I’m about to sign.
“In fact, I sent it off to Zia Yusuf and said, ‘look, am I being crazy here, is this contract ok?’ He said ‘leave it with me, I’ll have a look at it’.”
Matthews went on to claim that Yusuf “had a look at it” but, in the meantime, he had looked through it himself and come to the conclusion that it was “a lot of money” and “a long time”.
The council leader said he had persuaded the company offering the contract to make some changes, introducing a no-break clause and “they saved us over the period of those seven years, over £20m”.
After Matthews appeared on the podcast, PoliticsHome understands that his comments were raised with the council. As a result, the case was referred to the Council’s Information Assurance Team to be reviewed.
Nigel Farage’s party went into the 2025 local elections pledging to cut council waste through what it described as its own ‘Doge’ (Department of Government Efficiency) unit.
Inspired by Elon Musk and the Donald Trump administration, and led at the time by Yusuf, the party said this cost-cutting drive would free up money for Reform-run local authorities to lower council taxes.
The plan ran into GDPR issues, with questions raised over what data Reform councillors were legally able to share with senior party figures. Reform-run councils have also been forced to raise council tax, though the party argues they are smaller increases than those implemented by other political parties.
A Reform UK spokesman said: “Reform has a wealth of businesslike experience and we support our council leaders wherever we can. We do that in the right way, with the right boundaries, and our councils have achieved huge savings and efficiencies.
“We will not take any pathetic lectures from bureaucrats or journalists who whinge if we don’t save money, then whinge if we take action to save money. Reform UK are proven to be delivering better value for taxpayers.”
Lincolnshire County Council did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The best-selling newspaper in Sydney, Australia, is out with a pep talk for the country’s national team ahead of its match today against the United States:
Politics
Politics Home | Greens Will “Throw Everything” At Manchester Mayoral Election, Says Caroline Lucas
Lucas said that the party had made “the right decision” not to throw all of its resources at the Makerfield by-election (Alamy)
4 min read
Exclusive: The Greens “will be throwing everything” at the contest to replace Andy Burnham as Greater Manchester mayor, their former leader Caroline Lucas has said.
“I have to say that the foot is about to be on the pedal for the mayoral, of course, now in Manchester to replace Andy Burnham,” she said in an interview with The House magazine.
“The Greens definitely will be throwing everything at that, and I would absolutely support them in so doing, and will be up there to do what I can to help.”
Speaking to The House following Andy Burnham’s landslide victory in Makerfield, Lucas, who was the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion for 14 years, said Zack Polanski’s Greens had made “the right decision” not to run a full-throttle campaign there.
Responding to suggestions last month that the Greens would properly contest the by-election in Makerfield, Lucas posted on X, formerly known as Twitter: “I hope this isn’t true.
“There are times when it’s more important to put country before party. This is one of them. Burnham’s longstanding commitment to a fairer voting system could transform our democracy and counter [the] dire threat of a Reform UK government.”
Lucas, who was the party’s first MP, told The House that the Green candidate in Makerfield, Sarah Wakefield, “did a good job, and she did us proud, but it wasn’t the kind of campaign where the whole party was absolutely throwing all of our resources at it, and that was the right decision”.
Wakefield won just 308 votes (0.68 per cent of the vote share) after the party was widely seen to have counted itself out of the contest.
Burnham cruised to a comfortable victory, securing almost 55 per cent of the vote and winning more votes than all other candidates combined.
He must now resign as the Mayor of Greater Manchester as the law forbids him from continuing with that role while also being an MP.
The election to choose Burnham’s successor will take place on 30 July, and Lucas believes the contest will be less like Makerfield and closer to the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, when Green candidate Hannah Spencer unseated Labour.
“The Greens are out there to win as many seats as possible, and as I say, the next priority is the Manchester mayoral, and we think we’ve got a really good chance of winning that.
“We think that will be much more along the lines of Gorton and Denton than it was along the lines of Makerfield. I know Zack is going to be up there at the weekend getting ready to launch a campaign, so we’re taking it very seriously.”
Asked who she would like to see as the Green candidate in Greater Manchester, Lucas said that the party “have just such a wonderfully broad now set of really qualified, excellent candidates that I just want to see who’s putting their name in the ring”.
“I haven’t seen the full list yet, so I don’t doubt that we’ll come up with a really good person.”
The leader of the Green group on Trafford Council, Geraldine Coggins, is expected to be the party’s candidate, The New Statesman reported on Friday.
Commenting on the idea that the Greens could step aside for Labour in the mayoral election, Lucas said: “We certainly won’t be doing that.”
The election to choose Burnham’s replacement will use a more proportional voting system than first-past-the-post, in which voters express a first and second choice. If no candidate secures 50 per cent of the votes after the first round, then the top two candidates will be given the second preference votes from the defeated candidates.
A Green Party spokesperson said: “The Greens will be campaigning hard to win the by-election for the Greater Manchester Mayoralty and, as we showed in the Gorton and Denton by-election and local elections in the area, it is going to be a clear Greens vs Reform race in this election.”
The House magazine’s full interview with Caroline Lucas will be published in print and online in June.
19 June 2026. Andy Burnham speaks to supporters after the Makerfield by-election in Ashton in Makerfield. (Alamy)
3 min read
Andy Burnham has told Labour it is the party’s “last chance to change” in a speech following his landslide victory at the Makerfield by-election.
“It is our last chance to change, but we’re going to take it, aren’t we? We are going to take that opportunity, and we are going to lay out a new path for Britain,” said Burnham, who secured his return to the House of Commons by winning over 50 per cent of the vote on Thursday.
“We have an opportunity to turn the tide to make the country feel like it’s working again, to make people see that politics can make a positive difference, to make people feel hope again.”
Burnham, who must now resign as Greater Manchester mayor to take up his role as MP, comfortably defeated his closest rival, the Reform UK candidate Rob Kenyon, by 20 percentage points.
The by-election in the northwest of England has widely been described as one of the most consequential in British political history, with Burnham now expected to launch a bid to replace Keir Starmer as prime minister.
PoliticsHome reported on Friday that he is expected to meet with Labour MPs in Westminster on Monday as he prepares his push to enter No 10.
Starmer had today insisted he would fight any leadership contest, warning that he would not simply “walk away” after being elected nearly two years ago.
In a speech to supporters, Burnham called for an economy that “works for everybody” and the end of “trickle-down economics”, saying he wanted to see the renationalisation of key industries and the use of public procurement to reindustrialise Britain.
“You have to respond to what people here are saying. You have to do something to make life more affordable, to put more money in people’s pockets, to give people more breathing space again, so that they can have a better life.
“That’s what people were saying, and we must respond to that.
“We need an economy that works for everybody, not a few in far-off places from here, but an economy that works for people right here.”
He continued: “We do need to bring down water bills, energy bills, rail fares, just as we brought down bus fares in Greater Manchester to make life more affordable for people.”
The former health secretary said he would apply a “Makerfield test” and that if policies did not work for his constituency, they could not work at all.
He called for an education system less “dominated by the university route”, and on immigration vowed to bring an end to “HMO Britain”, whereby communities are not given a proper say over asylum accommodation in their areas.
“It’s not fair that they think that they can just operate like that and not hear the call of people here, the decent people here who always will do the right thing, the compassionate thing, but not when it’s unfair in terms of the way places like this are treated.”
So that’s it. Populism has peaked. It had its moment in the sun but now it lies gasping for breath on the battlefield of Makerfield, vanquished by the King of the North and his trusty sword of Manchesterism. That, at least, is the tenor of the Andy Burnham fangirling that’s trying to pass itself off as political commentary this morning. From Sky to the BBC to the liberal press, reporters are failing miserably to hide their partisan smirks over Burnham’s win and Reform UK’s defeat. ‘Normalcy’s back’, you can almost hear them say.
It’s a masterclass in wishful thinking. Yes, Burnham won the by-election emphatically. Fair play. He got just shy of 55 per cent of the vote, higher than even the giddiest polls predicted. He increased Labour’s vote share in Makerfield by almost 10 per cent, which feels miraculous in the Starmer era where ‘Labour’ has become a byword for crap, robotic politics. Starmer is toast now: the size of Burnham’s win will turbo-charge his plot to clear Sir Keir out of Downing Street.
And yes, Reform’s result was not great. Plumber turned politician Robert Kenyon — who I interviewed for spiked last week — won 35 per cent of the vote. A total of 15,696 people voted for him, against the 24,927 who went for Burnham. That might be an almost three per cent hike on Reform’s performance in the General Election here in 2024. But as Reform leader Nigel Farage candidly said this morning, they were hoping for 18,000 votes.
Yet reports about the death of populism are greatly exaggerated. To extrapolate from Makerfield to the entire nation is to engage in wilful self-delusion. It is to overlook all the unique factors at play in this electoral clash.
First there’s the Burnham factor. Yes, the ‘King of the North’ stuff is bollocks, more likely to be spouted by the tweeting classes of SW1 than by your average Mancunian who’ll be well aware of Burnham’s failings on the rape-gang scandal and his past guzzlings from the Kool-Aid of wokeness (he thought a woman could have a penis until about five minutes ago). Yet there’s no denying the northern star cachet of the Manchester mayor. Who’s Labour going to replicate that with elsewhere in the country? Rachel ‘rictus grin’ Reeves? Ed Millipede?
More importantly, there was the ‘Kick Out Keir’ factor. King Andy was gifted Makerfield, essentially, precisely so that he could challenge Starmer for the leadership of Labour and of Britain. This bestowed on the people of Makerfield an extraordinary power over the destiny of the nation — in voting Burnham they could expel from office our flailing, spine-free PM. That’s pretty much unprecedented in the history of British by-elections. It’s not repeatable anywhere else.
Then there was all the tactical machinations of those who hate Reform. For me, the most staggering results from Makerfield were not Burnham’s or Kenyon’s. They were the Lib Dems’ — which got just 0.36 per cent of the vote — and the Greens’ — who got 0.68 per cent. Just 163 people voted Lib Dem, an almost seven per cent drop in their vote share. It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on. It’s not that these parties became toxically unpopular overnight — I wish. It’s that the largely middle-class / public-sector folk who would normally vote for them leant their votes to Labour. Why? To stop Reform.
As the Financial Times found, tactics were key to the Burnham surge. The Lib Dems and the Greens tacitly agreed not to ‘campaign wholeheartedly in the by-election’. One public-sector worker told the FT that they ‘don’t want Reform to get in’, mostly because of ‘their views on immigration’. How striking that the Greens pose as an insurgent party sticking it to The Man, yet as soon as the prospect of a working-class revolt against the uniparty raises its snarling head, they park their am-dram faux-radicalism and do their craven duty to sustain the status quo.
Now that is replicable. In fact, we’ve seen it in other by-elections: the clubbing together of middle-class voters into a Stop Reform lobby designed to frustrate the working-class thirst for change. Reform needs to factor this into its strategising: how to outflank these tactical populism thwarters. Yet far from suggesting populism is on its last legs, the rise of these anti-Reform factions confirms it remains the most dazzling threat to business as usual. Polite society’s very fear of Reform is all the proof we need that populism is alive and well and dangerous.
Then there’s the funniest result of all: Restore’s 6.8 per cent. Restore’s leader, Rupert Lowe, and the Mosleyite geeks who advise him were all over the internet, where they live, yapping about a quake in Makerfield. Some were predicting 20+ per cent for Restore. This, kids, is the danger of internet brain. These perma-online tossers thought that just because they get off on memes of Lowe in a suit of armour saying ‘You’re getting deported’ that the rest of the country would too. They forgot people have jobs. They’re busy.
In the end, Restore did even worse than the British National Party did in 2010, when it won 7.4 percent in Makerfield. They’re so over. They’ve been exposed as a gaggle of spectrum-dwelling meme makers who had the gall to call themselves a party. Some of them clearly thought their rape gang ‘inquiry’ would boost their vote. Deploying one of the worst postwar atrocities as basically an election leaflet was repulsive beyond belief. The working classes will not take kindly to the weaponisation of their daughters’ suffering for clicks and vibes.
Anyone who thinks Burnham will resuscitate Labour and put down the ‘populist menace’ is in for the rudest awakening. All the questions raised by the working classes’ electoral revolts — on sovereignty, borders, immigration, identity — remain unanswered. The days when a ‘king’ could placate the restive masses are long gone.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
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