Following the welcome result Sam Colclough makes the case for intensifying the fight against austerity

Andy Burnham is the new MP for Makerfield. The size of his victory over Reform confounded most forecasts; Burnham’s lead in the opinion polls averaged around 10% immediately prior to polling day. In the end, he won by 20 points (55% to 35%). There are two immediate insights to draw. 

First, as we pointed out earlier this week, the anti-Farage vote is bigger than the pro-Farage vote. Reform are vulnerable even in seats like Makerfield – which they’ll have to win if they are to form a government after the next general election – if the anti-Farage vote can coalesce around a single candidate. This repeats a pattern in recent by-elections, with Reform losing to Plaid Cymru in Caerphilly (Welsh Senedd by-election) and the Greens in Gorton and Denton. It also indicates voters aren’t as stupid as the political class like to make out: electoral pacts aren’t necessarily required. Voters can often work it out for themselves.

Second, while Keir Starmer is obviously despised by the Right, he’s scarcely more popular among progressive voters. It would be churlish to deny Burnham’s personal popularity helped. But his status as Prime Minister-in-waiting – and therefore the best chance to get rid of Starmer in the coming months – clearly drove his impressive vote share.

Taken together, the result in Makerfield is good news. Reform have lost some of the momentum they’ve picked up in recent months – especially last month’s local election results – and while they remain the likeliest party to form the next government, that’s far from guaranteed. This result is undoubtedly a setback.

Meanwhile, voters have yet again told the government they won’t tolerate what has been on offer for the past two years. Labour has failed to deliver the change it promised, and while Starmer’s time in Downing Street is coming to an end, the message to heir apparent Burnham is clear: more of the same will not be tolerated.

Labour’s Long-Term Decline

There are two other important lessons to draw from the result in Makerfield on Thursday night. First, as polling company More in Common have shown, while the vote share of the major parties looks quite different this time compared to the 2024 general election, the split of the vote between the centre/centre-left and the right wing blocs remained almost identical. Any differences were driven by changes to the distribution of votes between parties within blocs. The Green and Liberal Democrat vote collapsed to almost zero and fell behind Burnham, while Reform both gained from the Tories and lost to Restore Britain. Burnham didn’t so much take votes off Reform as unite the vote against them.

Second, as pollster Peter Kellner states;

Burnham has not lifted Labour back to the heights it once enjoyed. When Tony Blair led the party to its landslide victory in 1997, 74 per cent voted for Ian McCartney to be Makerfield’s Labour MP. As in so many of Labour’s industrial heartland seats, the party has lost much of its support in recent decades.

Despite Burnham exceeding expectations, his 55% of the vote – an increase in the party’s share from two years earlier – was still almost 20 points worse than Labour’s vote share in 1997. Voters in seats like Makerfield are just less inclined to vote Labour than they once were. The absence of a genuine left-wing alternative has opened up opportunities for parties of the right to sweep up votes. Reform in particular has proven an attractive option for many.

Building the Alternative

Farage and his particular brand of far-right politics have been a feature of British elections and public discourse since the 1990s. It remained a fairly marginal force until the mid-2010s. Since then, it has emerged from the margins and given us a potential party of government in Reform. This hasn’t come from nowhere.

The global financial crisis at the end of the 2000s precipitated the austerity consensus that characterised mainstream British politics in much of the 2010s. Western foreign policy has destabilised vast parts of the Middle East and North and West Africa, leading to a refugee crisis in which people from these countries – often Muslims – have sought sanctuary in Europe. The so-called ‘War on Terror’ and media demonisation of refugees and Islam, which is often portrayed as an existential threat to western civilisation, has stoked Islamophobia and anti-refugee sentiment among certain sections of the public. Fascist street movements, supported by prominent businessmen – particularly US billionaires – have given oxygen to far right ideas.

All these things have facilitated the rise of Reform. The long-term rise in support for that party in seats like Makerfield can only be reversed by a wholesale attack on the conditions that have supported its emergence from the shadows. That’s why the mass movements are so important and why Counterfire has played a leading role in building key united fronts of the labour movement and associated civil society groups. These united fronts have taken demands for the end to austerity, the proper funding of public services, and the nationalisation of essential industries to the streets. They’ve developed principled anti-war positions and turned support for Palestine into the dominant position among the public.

Yet despite the successes of our united fronts, Reform is still in a strong position. Combined with the tragic failure of Your Party to become a party of the broad left and put socialist ideas on the ballot paper, we’re still in a perilous position. But the good news is the fight against Reform isn’t a distraction from our political activity. Instead, it is precisely by building our movements further, by taking them into every community and every workplace across Britain, by making our demonstrations bigger and better, and by linking the different aspects of our struggle – the economic, the social, the geopolitical – that we can simultaneously stop Reform from winning in 2029 and begin to build towards socialism. 

An archetypal career politician like Burnham, and a Labour Party so wedded to establishment ideas, aren’t going to fundamentally alter the conditions that have given us Reform. And herein lies the ultimate contradiction of Makerfield. Burnham has defeated Reform there, but a more meaningful victory over Reform will require an almighty struggle against Burnham. That starts now.