Campaigning begins in earnest for the Makerfield by-election battle

History hangs heavily over Makerfield. The Battle of Waterloo was fought on 18 June 1815, and Britain’s political class has now chosen 18 June as polling day for the Makerfield by-election — inviting comparisons they can hardly have failed to notice.

The fall of an emperor? The ascent of a new prince? Or simply a bruising political mess? On the 211th anniversary of Waterloo, several endings remain possible.

This by-election exists for one reason above all: to try to return Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to Westminster. Only as an MP could he mount a challenge to Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership — and, by extension, for the office of prime minister.

So is Burnham cast as the rising prince, in the mould of the Duke of Wellington — later made Prince of Waterloo by the Belgians and eventually prime minister — or as a modern Napoleon, charging close to ultimate victory only to see it slip away in a single day? By Friday, 19 June, will the mood be Oasis or Abba?

For Burnham, this is familiar ground. He once represented a large part of what is now the constituency when it sat within Leigh, the seat he formerly held. Voters know him here, and he performed strongly across the new constituency’s wards in the Greater Manchester mayoral elections.

But the electoral terrain is far from comfortable. The new constituency backed Brexit by roughly two to one, well beyond the 52-48 split recorded nationally. Then, in the local elections a fortnight ago, Reform UK dominated the eight wards, taking 50.4% of the vote to Labour’s 22.7%.

That is why some are portraying the Makerfield by-election as the latest battle over Europe — or, more precisely, over who gets to shape Britain’s future policy towards the EU.

A proxy referendum, according to that reading: Nigel Farage’s political forces on one side, and a Labour Party on the other that has grown noticeably warmer towards the EU, acknowledged Brexit’s avoidable economic costs, and is edging away from some of the harsher features of the hard Brexit settlement.

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer and Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham

The prime minister himself sketched out Labour’s position on Europe earlier this week:

“What I’ve done in two years is to completely reset our relations with our EU partners, to really improve on that deal, which is what I did last year.

“This year we have another summit with the EU where we’re going to take a really, really important leap forward in terms of the relationship. Bring us closer to Europe. It’s really good for businesses, really good for the country.

“So that’s what I intend to do, not get lost in a debate about what may happen years down the line. I’m grounded in the job that I’m doing, which is to make sure we are closer to the EU and doing the hard yards of making sure that we establish the relationship to make that work, get that relationship with the EU into a better place.”

Read more: Starmer to campaign for Burnham in UK bye-election’Truly historic shift in UK politics,’ says FarageStarmer ‘not going to walk away’ despite election losses

The Brexit impact

With Brexit weighing on UK growth, depressing tax revenues and forcing ministers towards spending restraint rather than expansion, any move that lifts economic performance is, on any cold reading, in Britain’s interest.

That helps explain Starmer’s pitch of getting closer to the EU — while stopping short of reopening the argument over rejoining.

Wes Streeting, his former health secretary, has shown no such caution.

In a speech last weekend, he said he would stand in a Labour leadership contest — should one materialise. Formally, there is no contest unless 81 Labour MPs sign up to a challenge under party rules.

It came in response to the very first question after he had finished speaking.

His second answer was even starker: he said plainly that he wants Britain to rejoin the EU and would pursue that goal if he became prime minister.

Was that the kind of blunt honesty voters always say they want from politicians?

Now clearly positioned as the rejoin candidate, does Streeting believe a showdown with Reform over Europe is a fight that can no longer be delayed?

Or was the intervention, as more suspicious minds suggest, a hospital pass for Andy Burnham — his chief rival for the leadership — who sees no political upside in talking about Europe in a constituency that has become firmly pro-Leave and increasingly pro-Reform.

Among Burnham loyalists, Streeting’s EU stance is viewed as toxic material, tailor-made to weaken Burnham and trip him at the first obstacle: the Makerfield by-election.

On Monday, Burnham was a keynote speaker at an investment conference in Leeds, where he was pressed to spell out his own view on EU membership.

“I am not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU. I respect the decision that was made at the referendum and it’s going to undermine everything I’ve said about strengthening democracy, if we don’t respect that vote,” he said.

“My view is that Brexit has been damaging, but I also believe the last thing we should do right now is re-run those arguments. Britain will be stuck in a permanent rut if we’re just constantly arguing and people are pulling away from each other.

Andy Burnham launched his bye-election campagin this week

“It is time, surely, to bring people back together, to focus on what we’ve got in common, to get the growth coming to all places, so it’s felt there. That is what we need in this moment.”

The opening exchanges in this latest struggle over Europe have now been made, and the manoeuvring to avoid a political bloodbath while still securing victory is well under way.

And that is only within one of the camps now assembling on the Makerfield battleground.

Because, before anything else, this is a Labour civil war.

Yet the consequences could spread much further, including to Ireland and the wider EU. A Burnham loss in Makerfield would likely put an abrupt brake on Starmer’s plans to draw Britain closer to Europe.

If the next EU-UK summit does go ahead in early July, it could quickly become collateral damage to the Irish Presidency’s hopes of delivering a meaningful improvement in the economic relationship with the UK, alongside the already flourishing links in security and defence.

And if Starmer were later cast aside by a mutinous parliamentary party? Streeting, if he took the leadership, would inherit a party that had just suffered a stinging rebuke over its EU posture — a result that would almost certainly kill off his ambitions to steer Britain back towards Brussels while handing Farage fresh momentum before the next general election.

So whether Burnham likes it or not — and plainly he does not — this by-election carries implications for Britain’s wider battle over Europe.

That is why he is working hard to keep Europe out of the foreground. First comes winning the by-election; everything else is secondary.

‘A change bye-election’

On Friday, Burnham’s campaign was formally launched on a patch of rough gravel, without a collar or tie in sight.

The slogan is “For Us”, as the mayor leans into a familiar political device: casting himself as the outsider, railing against Westminster as the source of what has gone wrong, and presenting the locality as the wellspring of what can be put right.

It is classic retail politics and, paired with Burnham’s high national profile, strong local record and personal popularity across the region, ought to leave him starting as the favourite.

His message to voters was blunt: change is overdue.

“This is not business as usual, this is not more of the same. This is a change bye-election.

“Politics in this country, British politics, is tired. It needs a new script, and over the next four weeks, the people of Makerfield are going to write that script, and it’s great that they’re going to get that chance.

“This bye-election will force Westminster to focus on the places it usually looks past.

“It will put the political parties on the hook to tell the people of Hindley, Hindley Green, Platt Bridge, Abraham, Ashton, Oral, Winstanley, what are they going to do for people in those places, and so they should be forced onto that hook, because no one has done enough.

“We have had 40 years of policies that have hurt the high streets of this constituency, 40 years of policies that have left people struggling to afford the everyday basics of their lives, policies that took away the good jobs that were once in these communities and have not done anything to replace them or put them back.

“Policies that have left people here struggling to afford a good home.

“This bye- election is a clarion call for change, change for people in this part of the world, a place I love so much.

“Change to the economy, change to education, change to housing, change to transport, change to care, and yes, to make it all possible – change to politics.

“We need change to the economy, so we don’t have an economy run for people far away from here, for whom life is already good, but works every day for people here, and we take action to lower their energy bills, their water bills, make everyday life more affordable for people, action to reindustrialise these communities with future facing jobs – good jobs.”

The UK economy is expected to be in sharp focus during the bye-election

Housing crisis

The centrepiece of Burnham’s forward-looking nostalgia is a major council housebuilding drive.

“If we’re going to solve the housing crisis, this country needs the biggest programme of council house building since World War II.

“But a new generation, a new generation of council homes, homes that are cheaper to rent and cheaper to run, so that is a real answer to the cost of living crisis that people are experiencing, and yes, in this borough, shifting the burden of development away from Greenfield to the local centres of this constituency, building more homes there that people can truly afford, and reviving the high streets of the Makerfield constituency.”

In a later interview with the BBC, he argued that much of the money for such a push already exists, pointing to £39 billion (€45bln) that the UK Finance Ministry has been able to set aside through careful management of resources.

He defended the idea of directing the full amount into council housing, arguing that “you get the maximum return from that in terms of reduction in spending in the benefits system, and of course you give people good modern homes as a result, which reduces pressure on other public services.

“It’s actually the opposite of what people are saying – I would say the money is there – I would just make sure that it is there to support council house building, because that gives you the maximum return,” he said.

There is, unquestionably, a strong case for more lower-cost housing in the UK.

Research published this week by Hamptons, the estate agency, examined the effects of a decade-old change to the way stamp duty is charged in the UK.

The reform was meant to curb the number of homes being bought by private landlords seeking buy-to-let investments, and to shift more housing stock towards first-time buyers.

Hamptons found that it has largely achieved that aim: first-time buyers are now typically outbidding buy-to-let investors, who often cannot make the numbers stack up above a certain price because of the heavy stamp duty cost.

Using a worked example, Hamptons economists say “The current stamp duty bill on a £350,000 home is £25,000 for an investor or second-home buyer. This compares with £2,500 for a first-time buyer, and £7,500 for someone moving up the ladder.”

But the shift has also produced another consequence, likely unintended: it has weakened a major source of funding for developers building town and city-centre apartment schemes, the very properties that tend to be easiest to rent and were once most attractive to buy-to-let landlords.

At least, that was the case before the new tax regime took effect.

The result has been a substantial shortfall in housing output.

Hamptons puts that gap at about 800,000 units over the past decade.

It says the private rented sector might have housed as many as 7.4 million people, but because of the impact of the stamp duty regime, that figure has remained at 5.2 million — slightly below where it stood a decade ago.

“Since 2016, the average rent has soared by 44.1%, and the supply of homes to let has shrunk – by an average of 25.4%,” Hamptons say in its latest quarterly Market Insights report.

That is the backdrop against which Burnham’s strategy — sidestepping Europe and fighting instead on domestic ground — has to be understood.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage

So far, events have broken kindly for him. The Green Party was forced within hours to drop its candidate after the emergence of a social media post in which he claimed that a March arson attack on four ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity in Golders Green, north London, had been a “False Flag” — in other words, staged.

Reform’s candidate, Robert Kenyon, has also faced scrutiny over his social media history, including the fact that he was a “Facebook Friend” of a follower of Oswald Mosley, the former leader of the British Union of Fascists.

For now, Kenyon appears to be riding it out, while Burnham’s campaign launch continues to dominate the airwaves and the papers.

Fresh clashes lie ahead before 18 June.

Farage is already campaigning on the ground alongside Kenyon, plainly aware that this latest battle over Europe could turn into his Waterloo too.

A Brexit Party splinter group, Restore Britain, is also fielding a candidate who may siphon off part of the Reform UK vote. The Conservatives, who disclosed the details of Kenyon’s Facebook activity, are running as well, as are the Liberal Democrats.

The Greens are expected to select a replacement candidate on Monday, though the national party is unlikely to throw significant weight behind the campaign, wary of splitting the left-leaning vote and opening the door to a Reform victory.

Reassuringly, the ballot will also feature an Official Monster Raving Loony candidate, Alan “Howling Laud” Hope.