Over in the UK Andy Burnham, who had been the mayor of Greater Manchester, won a byelection in the nearby constituency of Makerfield yesterday. This means that he is now an MP and thus in a position to challenge Keir Starmer for the Labour party leadership and, if he wins, become the next prime minister. Indeed, that clearly has been his goal all along and the MP who had represented Makerfield resigned his seat just so as to create an opening for Burnham.

There had been some concerns that the candidate of the surging right wing Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage might take the seat away from what had once been thought to be a safe Labour seat, held by them for more than 120 years but that did not happen. Burnham won comfortably by 55% to 35%, even increasing the party’s majority from the 2024 election, which they won 45% to 32%. The new more extreme right wing party Restore Britain won just 7%, while the Conservatives, Greens, and Liberal Democrats continued their slide with 2.2%, 0.7%, and 0.4% respectively.

Starmer is in big trouble. His leadership has been utterly appalling. After winning a huge majority in parliament in 2024 on the vague promise of offering change after 14 years of Conservative rule, he has been utterly feckless, abandoning the working classes who had voted for him and tacking to the right seemingly to protect that flank from Reform only to find that his party hemorrhaged support on the left, leading to huge losses in earlier byelections and in local council elections.

But I also do not think that Starmer’s move to the right was purely tactical. He and the Democratic Party leadership in the US are very much alike, running as if they were supporters of the interests of ordinary people and then when in office catering to the wealthy. Starmer is a typical neoliberal politician, comfortable with appeasing the wealthy and business classes and abandoning the very people that the Labour Party traditionally was supposed to represent. He has also shown himself to be a hopeless judge of character, appointing people (most notably Peter Mandelson, a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein) to high posts only to find that they had to resign or be fired. He seems to command very little passionate support either within that party’s ranks or among the general public. The fact that Burnham significantly reversed the downward slide will provide ammunition to those who think that the party needs new leadership and that Starmer should go.

Last Sunday, John Oliver provided a good background and analysis on the Makerfield election and its implications.