We live in an age of insurgents. Andy Burnham can only win the Makerfield by-election by leading a more complete rebellion than Reform UK are able to offer.
Burnham may win. After all, he can hold out the prospect of pretty much instantaneous regime change in Downing Street.
But a vote for Reform UK would be a protest against the whole of the Labour Party, and the Tories too, which is perhaps what a majority of voters will yearn to do.
And by describing Brexit as a “catastrophic mistake”, and calling for Britain one day to rejoin the European Union, Wes Streeting has just made Burnham’s task harder.
Streeting has reminded people that Burnham too has spoken in favour of rejoining the EU, saying in a Guardian podcast at last year’s Labour Conference:
“Long term, I’m going to be honest, I’m going to say it, I want to rejoin it. Look, I hope in my lifetime I see this country rejoin the European Union.”
It would be hard to think of a remark more calculated to make voters in Makerfield suspect that behind Burnham’s friendly, laddish, Mancunian manner, and his claim yesterday afternoon that he is “not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU”, one finds a fully paid up member of the pro-European Establishment.
This is the charge Reform UK will make, and if it sticks, it will wreck Burnham’s campaign. For as the Labour MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, Jonathan Hinder, remarked at 8.12 yesterday morning on the Today programme,
“If I went into the Wallace Hartley pub in Colne in my constituency and I said to them, you know that thing we just did which paralysed our politics, which tore our country apart…and I said to them, ‘We’re going to reopen it’…they would rightly look at me as if I’d gone mad.”
The pub is named after Wallace Hartley, who born in Colne, served as bandmaster on the Titanic and was hailed as a hero for playing the hymn Nearer, my God, to Thee as the ship went down.
After this disaster his body was recovered and brought back across the Atlantic to Colne, where 30,000 people lined the streets to see his coffin go past, and the choir of the Bethel Chapel, in which as a child he had taken his first steps as a musician, sang Nearer, my God, to Thee.
At a time when the two-party system has sunk, it seems, beneath the waves, this image of a shipwreck looks all too fitting.
Streeting’s intervention is not only a problem for Burnham. It points to the gulf between Labour’s ruling class and the millions of people who used to vote for the party in constituencies such as Makerfield.
Labour MPs and activists are mostly in favour of rejoining the EU. Sir Keir Starmer surprised and delighted the Labour Conference in 2018 by coming out in support of a second EU Referendum, with Remain as an option on the ballot paper. This won him what is almost certainly the warmest and most sincere standing ovation he has ever received, albeit a minority including Dennis Skinner refused to stand, or indeed to clap.
An underestimated aspect of Starmer’s failure as a communicator is that he can seldom say what he really thinks. He dare not avow his enthusiasm for international law, human rights and anything containing the word “European”, which dates back to his discovery of these wonderful concepts when he was a student at Leeds.
Yesterday he promised to give “one hundred per cent” support to the Labour candidate in Makerfield, in other words to Burnham, his would-be assassin.
Like so much of what Starmer says, this rings hollow because it is neither plausible nor sincere. He is stuck saying what he thinks he ought to say.
All politicians have quite often to do this, but more gifted figures than the present PM manage to show where their heart lies while ostensibly sticking to the party line.
The PM finds himself in the unhappy position of an advocate who cannot conceal his dislike of his client, the British people; in particular the large part of the staunchly patriotic working class which until recently voted Labour, and which holds small-c conservative views on such emotive questions as immigration, gender and eligibility for welfare benefits.
David Lammy appealed yesterday morning for an end to the present squabbling within the Labour Party:
“I say to colleagues, ten days of this, fine, I think the British people will forgive us for the introspection. Ten weeks of this and we’re in desperate trouble. We’ll be out of office and what we’ll be ushering in is Farage.”
In the short term Lammy is not quite right. If Labour win in Makerfield, to start with they will be ushering in Burnham, on whom an unrealistic burden of expectation will rest.
As recently as the 2019 general election, the Conservatives came a strong second to Labour in Makerfield, with Farage’s then vehicle, the Brexit Party, a distant third.
In the five months leading up to that election, Boris Johnson demonstrated to voters that he was a mightier insurgent than Farage, who found himself forced to stand down his candidates in Tory-held seats.
Conservative difficulties returned after the victory of December 2019, when Johnson had to make the transition – difficult even for Disraeli – from rebel leader, an audacious improviser who could often take opponents by surprise, to commander of the state’s far less mobile but also much larger and heavier conventional forces.
At the 2024 general election, Reform UK came a strong second to Labour in Makerfield, and it was the Conservatives who were relegated to a distant third.
In Makerfield and many other places, it is at least for the time being impossible to deny Lee Cain’s gloomy observation in his piece yesterday for ConHome that “Reform has already replaced the Tories as the real opposition.”