Citizen Writes

Implications of the Makerfield byelection

18/05/2026

Tor Clark, Associate Professor in Journalism, has reported on UK politics for almost 40 years – yet, he says, the current political turmoil is unprecedented. Here he looks at what has just happened in our national politics, what will happen to resolve the question of who governs Britain and what the stakes are for all of us.

The forthcoming Makerfield byelection is shaping up to be nothing short of the Battle for Britain. Whoever wins reshapes UK political power, sooner or later.

The prize is huge and total for both the Labour Party and Reform UK.

Reform UK is riding high in the opinion polls and in the recent local elections in the constituency. If they win this parliamentary seat, they prove their ascendency and open the path to Downing Street for leader Nigel Farage.

If popular local lad Andy Burnham, successful Mayor of Great Manchester, can win this seat for Labour, he proves Reform are beatable by Labour in a traditional working class seat, but makes the point Reform are only beatable by a Burnham-led Labour Party.

Whatever you think of Burnham, this is a huge and courageous gamble – from which there will be no turning back whatever happens.

But all this is still in the future. The byelection may be held on 18 June and Burnham has still to win that and then challenge and defeat a sitting Prime Minister for leadership of his party.

Meanwhile once-powerful but now fatally wounded Prime Minister Keir Starmer attempts to govern and dismiss challenges while holed-up in Downing Street.

Last week his biggest opponent inside his cabinet, Wes Streeting, dramatically quit so he could challenge him – but then didn’t.

His former deputy Angela Rayner resolved the tax scandal that saw her banished from government, opening up her route back to power.

In the shadows lurks former leader Ed Miliband, until now a Starmer loyalist, but likely to become the next Chancellor of the Exchequer, whoever wins this battle for power.

How did we get here?

Sir Keir Starmer was elected in a Labour landslide less than two years ago in July 2024. He has more than 400 MPs and there is no need for another general election until July 2029. Having been elected with such a huge majority he ought to have been able to make huge changes and get every and any policy through the House of Commons.

But that hasn’t happened. An admittedly poor inheritance has been followed by a series of unforced errors, ill-advised policies and poor government public relations, which has led to a series of disastrous high profile policies such as the botched scrapping of winter fuel payments for pensioners, the botched attempt to make millionaire farmers liable for inheritance tax and perhaps worst of all, the botched attempt to deal with the spiralling, increasingly unaffordable welfare bill by making changes to benefits.

None of these policies appeared to be well thought-through or sold to the public, while Labour MPs could not be organised to support them in Parliament.

These failures should have benefited the main opposition party, but the Conservative Party has been so damaged by its previous 14 years in office, especially the chaotic Boris Johnson and Liz Truss premierships, that it was in no position to look like a credible alternative and has tacked to the right to attempt to shore up support being lost to Reform UK.

On that right hand side, with no experience of governing, but lots of simple solutions to complex problems and a disproportionate emphasis on the role of immigration in Britain’s malaise, Reform UK have arrived and quickly and consistently topped the opinion polls by offering soundbites on their easy solutions which offer little connection to reality but resonate emotionally with a sizeable group of voters who feel neglected and angry.

All this creates a situation which looks fairly hopeless and deeply disillusioning for so many followers of UK politics and many Britons who just want to be governed properly.

How will the current crisis be resolved?

Keir Starmer is fatally damaged as Prime Minister. He is right to say his 2024 general election landslide gave him an electoral mandate to govern for five years. Unfortunately his record over his first two years in office shows he may have exhausted the goodwill with which he was elected.

Wes Streeting has set himself up to challenge his old boss, but although he is an excellent communicator – head and shoulders above everyone else in the cabinet – he is another London area MP with a tiny majority, whose period in charge of the NHS has failed to deliver the dramatic transformation the public demands, despite his courageous and refreshing admission at the start of his tenure that the NHS was ‘broken’, which its users already knew.

So we are left with a potentially drawn-out process in which Andy Burnham must stand and beat Reform, which has just wiped out Labour in that area in the local elections, then must turn up back in Westminster and defeat the incumbent Prime Minister to take over running the country. That is an incredibly tall order.

If he loses the byelection to Reform the UK will be facing a polarised and polarising shoot-out between the Greens on the left and Reform on the right.

But if he wins the prize is so great, it has to be worth a try. If he can win Makerfield even by one vote he will become in political mythology the one man who can beat Reform, his path to the Labour leadership will be open and he will take that victory into the next General Election with a better chance of beating Nigel Farage’s party than any other politician.

What is likely to happen?

There are too many unknowns in this scenario to confidently predict the outcome, but Andy Burnham has now plotted the most realistic course for Labour to stay in power and possibly deliver on its 2024 mandate.

Reform UK are reliant on the negative emotions of their supporters and generally parties win elections when they offer prosperity to voters. Reform are totally dependent on their leader Nigel Farage, a clever and successful politician. They are appealing to a dispossessed white working class core audience using yesterday’s failed Conservative politicians. If the various Reform factions fall out, if Farage quits again or if Labour recapture those supporters, their bubble will burst.

Meanwhile the Conservative Party has tacked to the right to try to recapture its former right-wing supporters lost to Reform, while the Liberal Democrats have hoovered up moderate former Conservative supporters across middle class England. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch seems determined to ignore these once core voters, despite urgings from an impressive group of former leading Tories, led by ex-West Midlands mayor Andy Street and ex-Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson.

UK general elections are won in the centre ground of UK politics. A large section of the UK electorate is naturally ‘small c’ conservative but that party seems to have forgotten that, so the Lib Dems fill their electoral boots with disillusioned former Tories and the once dominant Conservative Party remains in self-imposed marginalisation.

Labour has three years to find the right leader and deliver prosperity to working and middle class voters, reassembling the electoral coalition which won so big for Tory Blair in the 1990s and Keir Starmer a couple of years ago.

Delivering tangible satisfaction to voters would marginalise Reform, and Farage may then quit politics one final time.

The Greens have advanced and are likely to remain a credible political party, in the same way the Lib Dems and previously Liberals have been for a century, and whilst the environmental concerns at the heart of their philosophy remain popular and relevant, especially with young people, their economic ideas – like Reform’s – do not stand any kind of serious scrutiny.

A more moderate Conservative Party under a serious leader like Andy Street could well make a comeback. Reports of the death of two-party dominance in UK politics have so far been premature. It is an entirely avoidable fate for both of them.

Watch this space…

The Makerfield byelection will be the most important byelection, with the most depending on its outcome, in modern times. It could genuinely be a turning point in UK history.

If Burnham wins, he has a chance to show there is no inevitability about the triumph of populism and its politics of division. If he loses, Reform may be looking at an unchallenged route to national power. If they get there, they will learn the hard way there are no easy answers to the serious problems affecting everyone – and the electorate will be back to square one.

But make no mistake, it is nothing less than the future of tolerant, moderate, liberal democracy on the line in this small corner of post-industrial Lancashire most of us had never heard of before last week. The political stakes are as high as they could possibly be.

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