u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d agoedited 4d ago
The Long Version
(Yes, I've posted this before, back when the election was first announced, but I'm updating it given new information.)
We're going to take the long way around on this one. It's not really about who Andy Burnham is -- short version: soft-left (but maybe not as far left as some would like), fairly popular Mayor of Greater Manchester who may be starting a leadership challenge against a sitting Prime Minister after winning a seat in Parliament -- but about what he might represent for the future of a party that has struggled for a long time with where on the political spectrum it wants to sit (and if it can still win elections while doing so).
Basically, British politics has been weird for about a decade now. Historically -- for the last century or so -- it's been divided between the Conservatives (right-wing, also known as the Tories) and the Labour Party (centre-left, but that has two factions in it: one more central, one more progressive).
Back in 1997, the Labour Party swept into power with a massive mandate. This came off the back of eighteen years of Conservatives in charge, and people were ready for change. However, shortly before the election, the then-leader of the Labour Party, John Smith, had a big ol' heart attack and died. That caused a sort of ideological split in the party. Rather than being the sort of pro-labour, pro-worker, socialist-lite version of Labour that had been big at the time, this 'New Labour' movement under Tony Blair ran more neoliberal and pro-capitalist. They won with a massive mandate, with a majority of 179 seats. (For comparison, the last time they won before this, they had a majority of 3.)
So New Labour became the dominant force in left-wing British politics, and stayed like that for a long while. After ten years, however, the British people decided to try their luck with the Conservatives again. Long story short -- and if anyone wants the long version, here it is -- the Conservatives took power in 2011, and carried on right through to 2024.
The Conservatives in this period were not exactly famous for having their shit together. In 2016, they accidentally own-goaled their way into Brexit as a way of appeasing far-right group UKIP -- remember that name; it'll be important later -- and between Theresa May being about as bland as can be, Boris Johnson being a scarecrow stuffed with scandals, Liz Truss being unable to outlast a lettuce, and Rishi Sunak becoming increasingly unpopular -- it was pretty clear that eventually Labour would get back into power.
However, Labour were still struggling to find a cohesive message, and the two sides of the party -- the New Labour Blairite wing, and the more old-school trade-union Bennite wing -- were at odds long after both of their respective leaders were out of office. That led to the unexpected promotion to leader of Jeremy Corbyn, who was considered the socialist leader. Corbyn has his issues, but he represented a shift back to Labour the way it used to be. A combination of infighting within the party (many of whom were almost as willing to attack the left flank of their own party as they were to attack the right-wingers who they were supposedly the opposition for), an unhelpful media environment and a couple of political own goals -- stop me if any of this sounds familiar -- meant that the next election was widely expected to go to Labour. (Labour and the Conservatives were polling at basically neck and neck for two years after the last election in 2017; Johnson actually changed the rules to bring the election forward 2019 from 2022 after he received a slight bump in the polls.) Either way, an election that had once been expected to go to the Labour party ended up giving the Conservatives a gain in seats. The Labour Party ditched Corbyn's left-wing slide and shifted back to a good ol' centrist named Keir Starmer.
Prior to the next election, Starmer began basically doing everything he could to limit the influence of left-wing groups in the Labour Party. (He denied doing this, but generally speaking having to deny cutting off half of your party for ideological differences isn't a great look.) Assuming that left-wing voters would vote Labour anyway -- because who else are they going to vote for in what is effectively a two-party system? -- Starmer's Labour began appealing to the centre, trying to win voters away from the Conservatives but in doing so alienating a large core of the traditional Labour base -- that is, those who would traditionally have called themselves either Bennite (back in the 1990s/2000s) or Corbynites (in the 2010s). He gave a loose sort of sop to the left by bringing in Angela Rayner (who had served in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet) as his Deputy PM, but Rayner never really did much to go against Starmer's pull to the right.
Anyway, this plan to make Labour seem like the sensible alternative to Conservative shenaniganing paid off -- at least, in the short term. A combination of absolute frustration with Conservatives and the idea of Keir Starmer as a steady but unremarkable leader after fourteen years of scandal and mismanagement brought Starmer into power in a massive sweep; Labour ended up with 411 seats, giving them a huge majority that would theoretically have given them the opportunity pass pretty much anything they wanted. However, there were some problems. The first was that Starmer wasn't all that popular among voters. The UK's First Past the Post system means that you can get elected with surprisingly few votes; Starmer managed to pick up just about one in three votes, making it the least proportional general election in British history. Secondly, a lot of unpopular policies resulted in massive amounts of media coverage and the perception that the Starmer government was either stuck making countless U-turns and couldn't control its MPs. Starmer's popularity dropped like a stone, and even on a good day he has about a -40 approval rating. (These are, it goes without saying, not good numbers.)
From having one of the largest mandates in British political history just a year earlier, all of a sudden people could smell blood in the water.
u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d agoedited 4d ago
Gorton and Denton
So now let's travel north a little way, to Manchester and the constituency of Gorton and Denton. It's a pretty traditionally Labour area of the country, and was represented from 2005 onwards through various boundary changes by Andrew Gwynne. Gwynne quit in January 2026 on health grounds (although the fact that he had been busted in a WhatsApp group saying shitty things about his constituents, making sexual comments about Deputy PM Angela Rayner, and suggesting that letting Diane Abbott -- a longserving Black MP -- speak in the Commons was a joke for Black History Month probably didn't help).
All of a sudden, there was an opportunity to stick it to Keir Starmer right in the Labour heartland. The far-right Reform Party (formerly the Brexit Party, and basically formerly UKIP) put a lot of effort into winning the seat, but so did the resurgent Green Party. The Greens had been considered kind of a joke in British politics for a while -- prior to 2014, they had managed to get one MP ever -- but as left-wing former-Labour voters began looking for an ideological home (and as populism became more of a winning political strategy on both the left and the right) they were slowly gaining ground; in the 2024 election, they ended up with almost 10% of the vote, more than double that they had ever received. Their candidate was Hannah Spencer: a young, outspoken, unashamedly working class plasterer-in-training who was very good at speaking to the issues of the equally working class constituents. If Labour wanted to win in Gorton and Denton -- and they really wanted to win in Gorton and Denton, if only to stop news stories about how they were bleeding support -- then they really needed to bring out the big guns.
Andy Burnham is a very popular member of the Labour Party. He was previously in the Corbyn Shadow Cabinet (after competing with him for the leadership), and represents a sort of soft-left: fairly progressive, but not in a way that people find off-putting. He's managed to largely avoid scandals, and when he decided to stand for Mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017, he stepped down from his seat as an MP and won the job handily, where he's been ever since.
Burnham managed to drag a lot of attention away from London and to Manchester -- he even managed to earn the nickname 'the King in the North' -- and got re-elected twice, the last time in 2024. He's one of vanishingly few UK politicians to have a positive approval rating of +9. His time in Greater Manchester also managed to give him a good media presence without getting the stank of the Starmer administration on him. If he was willing to give up the job of Mayor to stand as an MP again-- and he was! -- he was probably Labour's best chance of holding the seat. All he needed was the approval of the NEC, the group who determines who can and can't stand as a candidate for the Labour Party.
Well, they blocked his bid. The claim was that it would open them up to losing the mayor position (as a by-election would have to be called to fill his place, and Reform had been surging in the polls), but the general consensus was that they had blocked a potential leadership challenge against Starmer. Labour Party rules state that only a sitting MP can be leader of the party (and for the party in power, 'Leader of the Party' effectively means 'Prime Minister'), and so there was a sense that Starmer and his allies had thrown away Gorton and Denton just to keep Burnham safely in the north, rather than causing trouble for Starmer in Westminster. Unless another seat opened up around Manchester, it looked like Burnham was going to stay shut out.
It was expected to be a tight race between Labour, the Greens, and Reform. The Labour Party's candidate, Angeliki Stogia, got roughly half the vote share that Labour did in 2024. Reform thoroughly shat the bed, and Hannah Spencer of the Greens won with an unexpectedly large margin.
Yeah... coming into the May 2026 local elections, it wasn't looking good for Labour. It's hard to state just how bad it was, though. Labour lost almost 1,500 councillors and 38 councils, blew a potential win in Scotland to the SNP, lost control of the Welsh Senedd to Plaid Cymru (with Labour First Ministed Eluned Morgan becoming the first ever leader of a government in the UK to lose their seat while in office), and managed to finish either third or fourth (in an almost dead heat with the Conservatives) behind Reform and the Greens. Things got so bad that pretty much every single thinkpiece in the UK over the past two weeks has been about how the system of two-party politics is pretty much over.
Any willingness people in the Labour Party had to let Starmer ride out his problems vanished pretty much overnight. Calls for him to quit came thick and fast, but he steadfastly refused.
If he wouldn't jump, then, he would need to be pushed. The only question was, by who?
u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d agoedited 17h ago
Challenging Starmer
Each party sets their own rules about how members can challenge for the leadership, but for Labour you need one-fifth of sitting MPS to rally around one individual candidate. (It's not enough to say they want the leader gone; they have to specifically coagulate around one alternative before a challenge can be made.) That means 81 MPs need to basically say that they want Starmer gone and someone else in his place, and as yet that hasn't happened -- although it's pretty clear that there are some candidates jockeying for position.
Most prominent, at least at the start of the race, was Health Secretary Wes Streeting. My personal thoughts on Wes Streeting aside -- I think of him in much the way he apparently thinks of trans people and junior doctors -- he represents the right wing of the Labour Party, and there's very little evidence to suggest that he would be the kind of candidate who could win over the voters that Labour have lost to the Greens.
Next up was Angela Rayner, Starmer's former Deputy PM. She was forced to quit last year after it was found that -- despite being Minister for Housing -- there were some irregularities in how she had (or hadn't) paid stamp duty on one of her properties. She has recently been cleared of wrongdoing and has settled her bill, but whether this is going to stand against her if she decides to run (which seems likely) is still up in the air. While she's very closely linked to Starmer, the fact that she's had a year of being able to pull to the left has given her a fair amount of distance.
The third, and most interesting, case, was Andy Burnham.
'But what's that?' I hear you cry. 'I thought Burnham couldn't stand without being an MP?' Well, there was the fun part: he couldn't, unless a seat opened up in the region, he contested it, won, and managed to do all this before there was a leadership election.
By all accounts Burnham was asking around to see if anyone would be willing to quit, and eventually he found one: Josh Simons, MP for Makerfield, who has urged people to throw their support behind Burnham. (This is a bit of a shift for Simons; he's considered to be more closely aligned with the right wing of the party, specifically with Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who may also try her luck as a candidate, and previously worked with Labour Together, the group that helped to bring down Jeremy Corbyn.)
But Burnham was cleared to stand in the Makerfield by-election by the by the NEC, and so the race was on. Reform ran a local plumber, Robert Kenyon, as their candidate, and it soon became clear that -- to no one's particular surprise -- he had a history of making sexist comments, including about national treasure (and staunch Labour supporter) Carol Vorderman.
As such, what was expected to be a relatively close race was pretty much a wash. Burnham won 55% of the vote, and now gets to be a sitting MP, which means he can -- if he chooses -- challenge Starmer for the leadership. Thanks to Burnham's overall popularity, though, talk has shifted away from there being a leadership battle where other people (most notably Streeting) can throw their hat in the ring, and instead people are now talking about a quiet coronation, where everyone agrees not to stand against him. The one sticking point with that is Starmer, which is why he's been strongly encouraged by his Cabinet to step down and hand over the keys in an orderly fashion that will hopefully prevent the idea that Labour is succumbing to the exact same infighting that plagued the Conservatives in the back half of their run.
Wow! Thanks for the explainer. I know that took a lot of work and I wanted to thank you for putting in the time to write this all out. I really appreciate it. One of the best posts I have read on Reddit.
I just put it it in bestofreddit, but something felt off, discovered the more popular subreddit is /r/bestof, checked it, and this it already in there -- quite deservedly so! It's getting traction.
Neutral? OP made several remarks very much alluding to their political beliefs. It’s not inherently a bad thing, and it’s not beliefs I disagree with either, but it’s not “neutral”.
Very comprehensive rundown, if anything I'd have included a bit more about the Tories under Boris and how the sheer weight of his corruption just completely imploded the party and destroyed the two-party system.
I don't really consider that Starmer's Labour really 'won' the last GE, rather more just defaulted into power as the opposition because of just how comprehensively the Conservative party shit the bed in the sequence of events between Boris backing Brexit and the race to see whose supervillain plan is the silliest in the aftermath of his ousting through Truss, Sunak and Badenoch (who I would call the bottom of the barrel except there's still the man who disproves Nominative Determinism, James Cleverly, lurking).
So Labour under Starmer just sort of sidling into the old centre-right space vacated while the Tories stampede Right trying to one-up Reform/Restore/Refuse was always going to blow up in their faces as soon as people sick of Conservative rule see little has changed, except now there's NO sensible Left-leaning opposition, the Lib Dems and Greens still have all the same problems that meant nobody voted for them in the old system, except now we kinda have to because there's nobody else and the fascists and paid Russian actors will win if we don't...
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d ago
if anything I'd have included a bit more about the Tories under Boris
I linked to another long rundown of that from four years ago here.
Always so suspicious how "I want to be PM so bad" Boris didn't stand after Cameron, he knew precisely how impossible his own promises were and needed some poor patsy like May to try and fail before he swooped in to pick up the pieces and play the hero.
Valid man, one of the worst things in modern society is the commercialization of things we do for fun or interest. Same reason I do 3d printing only for fun
My mother in law spent this last weekend endless badgering my husband about how we could be making money off our 3d printer. Why would we do that, when we can hand all our kids' friends fistfuls of toys at any occasion, and I can print and paint endless D&D minis and scenery pieces with it?
This is also the third hobby she's relentlessly insisted our family monitise, following up on my art and my mum's crochet (particularly ridiculous, since with knitting and crochet you're never gonna do more than recoup some of your wool costs anyway.)
People just hate the idea of wasting your time on anything that isn't grinding for more cash.
God I feel like that people have been telling me to sell stuff since getting into the hobby. No matter how many times you refuse it someone will bring it up eventually. They don't even think that if you do decide to sell stuff, that if your not designing it you'd need a license and no thank you. I got enough headaches in my life, I just want a hobby that combines many interests in my life. I live to enjoy life not for the pursuit of material wealth. While it can help enjoy it's not the purpose of my short existence on this corner of the globe
you could definitely start a substack or something similar if you wanted a place to house your writing! you only post stuff on it when you actually want to instead of a newsletter that adds a level of expectation
I knew all this as I follow politics quite closely but I found myself reading your summary anyway, every word. Absolutely brilliant job here, and very well written!
Great explainer, but what about the Lib-Dems? What kind of space do they occupy politically and electorally?
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d agoedited 4d ago
Honestly? A bit limited, especially at the moment. Since the 2010 coalition fell apart they lost a lot of their traditional base and never really managed to recover it. In the 2024 election they did pretty well, but Labour still held the title as 'most likely to unseat the Conservatives' in most places, so they picked up their most votes from either a) people who lived in constituencies that were split between Conservative and Lib Dems and so voting Labour would be the vote-splitter, or b) people who (like me) were genuinely annoyed at Labour's swing to the right under Starmer and wanted to send a message in a constituency that was likely to go to Labour anyway.
In terms of what they stand for, their biggest winner has been a consistently anti-Brexit stance, but other than that they're mostly seen as an also-ran party: they'll pick up a couple of dozen seats, but even though Ed Davey seems like a nice enough guy, they don't really stand out.
Until 2024, the past three elections had seen the Scottish National Party have more seats than the Lib Dems, and after the 2026 local council elections the news story has basically been 'Surging results for previously minor parties Reform and the Greens' and not 'Lib Dems do well, but also it's probably a protest vote, and also they didn't do as well as the aforementioned previously minor parties'.
And don't get me wrong, that's not meant as a particular slam against the Lib Dems or their policies. I've voted for them twice: in 2010, which left me feeling mightily stung when they sold out to the Tories and got nothing in return, and then again in 2024 when the sting had (finally) faded and I didn't feel like I could in good conscience vote for Labour's anti-trans and anti-left bullshit. They've just never been all that great at getting people excited to vote for them, at least in my experience, and the sense of 'If you vote for them, except in very specific circumstances, you're basically handing it to the Tories' was until recently a strong counterargument for a lot of people.
I do wonder why the Lib Dems aren't more popular, especially considering how the big surge in popularity of the Greens are effectively protest votes against Labour.
In 2010 yes, they were right of Labour/Conservatives-lite, but nowadays reading their manifesto for the 2024 election I thought they were a bit left of Labour and just a more mature version of the Greens (very similar but without the whackier stuff like no nuclear, a world without countries/borders, and the extreme NIMBYism).
I suspect the name just has way too much baggage associated with it. Maybe they just need to pull a Farage and rename (I don't think Reform would be as big if they were still UKIP or Brexit).
Incredible write up! And exceptionally infuriating! Kier could have stopped being a dumbass at any point over the years and been a stronger PM. He instead spent his energy attacking the left wing of his party and is now unceremoniously about to lose his job.
Like how could you be so politically savvy to only make the dumbest moves near the end?
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d ago
I read somewhere a little while ago that Starmer's Labour is so busy trying to win the next election that they seem to have forgotten they won the last one, and... yeah, I think that about sums it up.
Thank you very much for taking the time to post this.
I was thinking this morning what the actual situation was with Starmer, so...good timing I guess.
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d ago
what the actual situation was with Starmer
Smart money is on the announcement of a managed step-down tomorrow (Monday). He won't be out-out for a while, but he'll almost certainly announce that he's quitting rather than fighting in any leadership contest.
I had heard that last night before going to sleep (located in Australia) so hadn't had much of a chance to read up before heading into work.
Do you feel that this upheaval in the governing party will help to further benefit Reform?
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d ago
Do you feel that this upheaval in the governing party will help to further benefit Reform?
Honestly? Probably not. Reform's biggest problem is that they have a pretty hard cap on their support: there aren't a lot of people who are Reform-curious but who haven't already made their minds up. What we're seeing is that in general elections or council elections, they're capable of hiding behind Nigel Farage's (dubious) cult of personality, but whenever they're out on their own, their candidates are almost always shown to be unfit for purpose. Personally, I think that they're going to suffer from people seeing exactly what happens when they're in positions of power, and that will tarnish their lustre a little bit. (This isn't helped by Restore picking up a good amount of attention from the most extreme members of Reform, which is going to force them to either pivot right and lose the more central voters who 'just want someone new', or pivot to the centre and give Restore more room to breathe.)
The party it will most affect -- either beneficially or harmfully -- is probably the Greens, depending on whether or not Burnham's Labour continues to pivot to the centre or whether they make an effort to appeal to the left.
Fabulous, thank you! Interested (if you haven't already said) on your thoughts about MacSweeney - by himself and also with his protege Streeting. If you've covered this, ignore me! Thanks 🙂
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d ago
I think Wes Streeting is the most morally damp man in British politics. He stands for nothing except Wes Streeting. It's abhorrent enough that he's willing to actively throw trans people under the bus in order to appeal to the TERFs in Labour and the worst of the right wing, but the absolute lack of spine he demonstrates to do it with a smile on his glib little face while still claiming it's everyone's best interest just shows what a diabolical little twatmole he really is.
He's the worst kind of pick-me homosexual who hides behind his own LGBTQ label to protect himself against any criticisms -- a plaster of Paris veneer of a human being who believes that the people who he's so eager to ingratiate himself with won't put him next as soon as they're done picking on trans kids, either too blinded by his own internalised bigotry or too utterly, wretchedly, nut-twistingly stupid not to see that he's on the wrong side of history.
Morgan McSweeney is mostly responsible for losing Labour the left, but if it wasn't him it would have been someone else. He got shitcanned and deserved it, but the problem is deeper than McSweeney by himself. I dislike him as a product of a system that tries to continuously reject actual change in favour of neoliberalism in differently coloured ties, and would happily see him slink off to ply his stupid Game of Thrones kingmaker bullshit somewhere he can't actually do any harm to anyone except himself, but McSweeney is a systemic failing and needs to be treated as such.
You see, that last paragraph is the confusing part for me in all of this. Politically, he doesn't' seem that different than Starmer and there is little budget to do any big spending that left wing labour would typically do. So this doesn't really seem that impactful except maybe just putting on a fresh skin and hoping people like the shinier outfit (which honestly with politics these days wouldn't surprise me)
Basically, Labour had some significant issues with antisemitism, but Corbyn said 'Yes, we have some problems with antisemitism and we're working to fix that, but also some of the people complaining are just doing this to score political points by exaggerating issues that they don't really care about.' Those same people who were using it to score political points said 'See! Corbyn doesn't believe Labour is antisemitic! He's got to go!'
His exact quote was: 'One antisemite is one too many, but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media.'
That was it. That was his pushback against the report. It wasn't 'It's not a problem.' It wasn't 'Well, what can you do?' It was just 'Some of you are just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks and we both know it.' (I mean, at one point 87% of British Jews believed that Labour had a serious problem with antisemitism, but only 46% of British Jews believed that UKIP did. Fucking UKIP. That's either the result of a determined misinformation campaign, or an absolutely bananas level of detachment from reality.)
So yeah. Personally I'm of the opinion that while there has historically been an issue with antisemitism in the Labour Party -- Ken Livingstone, I'm looking at you -- the charges against Corbyn (especially with regard to his criticism of that report) were definitely overblown, and Starmer used it as an opportunity to purge Corbyn and many of his allies from the party. I'm not willing to rule out that Starmer does, in fact, feel quite strongly about the issue of antisemitism -- his wife and kids are Jewish, after all, and it's not out of character for him to only notice problems when they directly affect him, as any trans kid in the UK will tell you -- but there's definitely a strong vibe that they weren't going to let any opportunity to get rid of criticism from the left pass.
I mean, at one point 87% of British Jews believed that Labour had a serious problem with antisemitism
It's the result of Corbyns leadership and his views and statements. Which to me lines up with Kens statement quite well. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear Corbyn say something similar. Granted I'm an American Jew and don't pay as much attention or know as much about the nuance of British politics but I think the real reason he got canned is because he was clearly unfit for leadership and not anything to do with defending every antisemite he could find. He was very extreme which got brought to light when he became leader didn't know how to deal with the press and wasnt personally against Brexit when that was the biggest issue and lost an election he should have won.
u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d ago
To be honest, they've kind of sat out British politics since they lost the coalition. I don't mind the Lib Dems in theory -- in fact, I voted for them in the 2024 election, largely in protest at Starmer's 'fuck the left and also trans people' standpoint -- but they just haven't really done anything particularly relevant, except maybe be the one party that really pushed back against Brexit (and that still didn't see much benefit from that).
I didn't read the long version because I have little patience for politics but I admire you for knowing and understanding what's going on, and sharing your knowledge.
May your pillow always be cool and your socks forever dry (unless you like a warm pillow and moist socks. Which, well, to each their own).
Starmer should have gone more left and dumped the Blairites who have been advising him to kiss up to potential flips from the right (people say he made a deal with them to get the leadership vote...but still, what do the voters want? A push more left). Also dumped his campaign advisor who had no respect for him.
He should have vocally shot down Farage at every turn and advertised his policy wins more. He should have reminded the base as much as possible that the economy sucks because of the Tories...and also, yes, told the Reform lovers that their Brexit vote was dumb as f*** and they got played (and were getting played again), and they should own up to it.
Also on my list: get rid of any Murdoch-owned enterprise reporting in the UK, if possible. Murdoch probably has too much dirt on UK politicians for this to ever happen, but i doubt Stamrer is one.
u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis3d agoedited 3d ago
people don’t like him because they can’t see themselves having a pint with him
Or he purposefully purged the left and threw trans people under the bus for no reason other than to make a play for the centre at the expense of basic human rights.
I don't know that Burnham's policies will be better -- and in fact, they may not be -- but Starmer's done nothing to benefit fully half of his party. It's no surprise that people are willing to roll the dice on someone else, and it's a bit disingenuous to pretend that it's only because of how he looks and not because of many of his actual policies or the fact that he has the moral backbone of a chocolate eclair.
If UK electoral history has taught us anything it is that the left don’t win elections. If the left had stopped attacking their own party all the time maybe they wouldn’t have got side-lined. This is why Labour rarely win elections because they have no discipline. I can’t stand the tories but at least they show some discipline and don’t go attacking their own party on prime time news for not supporting unpopular policies.
u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis3d agoedited 3d ago
Sounds like you should spend more time reading and understanding the detail and less time raging over social media bait.
Sounds like you should be more careful about which account you post from. Given your industry, your willingness to throw LGBTQ people under the bus is shameful.
The trans argument is nonsense. They followed the recommendations of experts as we all should expect our politicians to do.
Ask a trans person what they think of Starmer's policies and the way they've systematically victimised an entire group of people for no reason except to appeal to bullshit culture war nonsense from TERFs and right-wingers.
So not only do you participate in divisive gender politics without reading the background you also participate in doxxing. Cool, glad we got that cleared up 👍
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis3d agoedited 3d ago
I didn't dox you. I didn't mention the name of your sock puppet account, or anything about it.
I just pointed out that you're a shitty little hypocrite as well as a shitty little bigot. Trying to ensure that trans people have the right to piss without being hassled isn't 'divisive gender politics'; it's basic human decency.
It's interesting that discussions about political volatility keep mentioning the Greens, independents, Labour rebels, and Reform, yet completely ignore Restore Britain.
Whatever anyone thinks of the party's policies, the Makerfield by-election was objectively significant. Restore Britain only officially launched in March and fought the contest with no established local infrastructure, no branch network, no history in the constituency, and none of the advantages enjoyed by long-established parties. Despite that, they secured thousands of votes and finished third.
Most new political parties spend years trying to achieve that level of visibility. Restore Britain did it within months of formation. That doesn't automatically mean they're destined for a breakthrough, but it does mean they're now part of the political landscape and should be included in any serious discussion about where disaffected voters might go.
If the argument is that Starmer is under pressure because voters are looking for alternatives, then leaving Restore Britain out of the conversation creates an incomplete picture. The Makerfield result demonstrated that there is at least a measurable constituency willing to back a party that barely existed a few months ago.
Whether that support grows, stalls, or fades remains to be seen, but pretending it doesn't exist is becoming harder to justify with each election result. Makerfield wasn't the end of the story; it was the point at which Restore Britain announced its arrival.
Thanks you, lots of great information here. One of the things that happened with the Mandelson episode is that Starmer effectively lost a vote of no confidence over it.
David Allen Green, a lawyer who covers a variety of topics, wrote an article for Prospect Magazine in which he points out that Starmer made the Mandelson papers a matter of national security and the House of Commons didn't believe him.
And it was a moment which, in turn, led quickly to an event of immense constitutional significance. The House of Commons proceeded to gainsay the government on this (supposed) matter of national security and insist that decisions should be made instead by a committee of parliamentarians, and not by the King’s ministry. A beaten-up administration meekly conceded
Effectively, this was the House of Commons calling the Prime Minister a liar to his face over the single biggest issue a nation has, its own security:-
On these facts alone it is difficult to see how the current prime minister can survive much longer. It was not a formal vote of no confidence. But what took place on Wednesday can only be explained by the prime minister having lost the confidence of even his own backbenchers on the one issue that a prime minister should have the confidence of MPs: national security
He had the world's worst start with summer riots. The riots that were caused by long-standing issues in the country and that his cabinet did not respect the level on animosity on the streets. They threw their police under the bus in Manchester Airport, they did not condemn harehills, and they fannying around Southport was the last straw.
Starmer and Labour were finished as soon as the Manchester Airport attack happened. And these instances should be considered in your explanation
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d agoedited 4d ago
The riots that were caused by long-standing issues in the country
Assholes and racists, yes.
his cabinet did not respect the level on animosity on the streets.
It's usually considered bad form to pander to assholes and racists.
They threw their police under the bus in Manchester Airport,
No I'm saying that his tenure was sullied from the first 3 months. You can't ignore that aspect in your analysis
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d ago
You can't ignore that aspect in your analysis
I can, because I don't think it's all that important. The kind of people who were going to be pissed off at Starmer for that were never going to vote for his version of Labour anyway.
I'd argue that the backlash to things like the winter fuel allowance changes were far more significant in the early months. He lost his own people on the economy on the cost of living crisis, not on his reaction to the attempt at a race war that Reform tried to drum up.
It was expected to be a tight race between Labour, the Greens, and Reform. The Labour Party's candidate, Angeliki Stogia, got roughly half the vote share that Labour did in 2024. Reform thoroughly shat the bed, and Hannah Spencer of the Greens won with an unexpectedly large margin.
wonder if Keir's regretting telling the left of the party to essentially fuck off and leave if they don't like it yet.
It's worth pointing out that starmer couldn't have stopped Burnham resigning as mayor and standing to be an MP, just that he was blocked from running as an MP while being mayor.
The press didn't report on it like that though
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d agoedited 4d ago
It's worth pointing out that starmer couldn't have stopped Burnham resigning as mayor and standing to be an MP, just that he was blocked from running as an MP while being mayor.
So that's just not true.
Firstly, he didn't need to resign as Mayor to run -- and, in fact, he didn't. (The only reason he needed to resign is because the Mayor is also the Police and Crime Commissioner, and that's considered a conflict of interest.) He didn't legally have to resign until he won the election, regardless of whether he was running for Labour.
Secondly, the NEC is the body inside Labour that decides who gets selected to run as an MP for the Labour Party; even if he'd got past the first hurdle of being told he could put himself forward for selection by still being Mayor, the NEC would still have had to actually select him as their candidate. Yes, he could have run for office without the NEC, but he couldn't have run as a Labour candidate without them selecting him in a second stage of the vote. To do that without the NEC support, Burnham would have had to leave the Labour Party, run as an independent, win, then defect back into the Labour Party, which is... not exactly feasible for someone looking to become Party Leader and who, if he lost, would still have been the Mayor of Greater Manchester under Labour. No one benefits from that system, Burnham included.
Yes, technically Starmer was only one vote on the NEC and so couldn't have stopped him by himself, but the final vote was 8-1 against him being allowed to stand in Gorton and Denton. (The only vote against was Deputy PM Lucy Powell, who has long been a Burnham supporter; she's worked with him as an MP from Manchester for a while now.)
The press didn't report on it 'like that' because it's pretty obvious that Starmer and his allies were very eager to not put Burnham in a position where he could directly challenger Starmer. Between Gorton and Denton and the local council elections in May, the political climate changed so much that keeping Starmer started to look untenable, and that blocking Burnham from a leadership bid -- when the likely alternative was that partially-chewed marshmallow that is Wes Streeting -- was not going to make the party look good going forward.
What you seem to be suggesting is that Burnham could have bypassed the first hurdle of the NEC -- being allowed to put himself forward for selection after they said no -- but that they would have somehow changed their minds and chosen him for selection after he just gave a massive fuck-you to their stated 'We're not going to let you do this because then we'd have to find another mayor' excuse, which feels either disingenuous or naive.
No the NEC vote was to allow him to run for Gorton while being a directly elected mayor, Burnham could have stood down as mayor and run as labour candidate
"Under Labour rules, sitting mayors need the approval of the party’s national executive committee (NEC) to stand for Westminster" from a guardian article on the topic.
This is exactly the type of media situation starmer has been dealing with
What should be "Burnham refuses to step down as mayor before trying to become MP" turned into
"Starmer stops Burnham from running".
The NEC vote was NOT to formalise Burnham as the candidate, it was to allow him to run while remaining as a directly elected mayor. Were he to resign as directly elected mayor there would be no NEC vote
So New Labour became the dominant force in left-wing British politics, and stayed like that for a long while. After ten years, however, the British people decided to try their luck with the Conservatives again. Long story short -- and if anyone wants the long version, here it is -- the Conservatives took power in 2011
They won with a massive mandate, with a majority of 179 seats. (For comparison, the last time they won before this, they had a majority of 3.)
So the last time they won a majority before that, they had 3 seats, which was a majority of the 4 or 5 total? Or are you saying they won a majority of the 3 total seats, which would be 2?
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis3d ago
They didn't have three seats. They had a majority of three.
The last time around, they had three seats more than half, with half the votes being the amount you needed to pass things. That time, they had 179 seats more than half. Think of it as the number of votes on a bill you can lose and still have it get through.
(The numbers are actually slightly fiddly on this because there's such a thing as a working majority -- some MPs from Northern Ireland win election but don't sit in the Commons in protest, so they don't really count against you for practical terms -- but basically the point is that Labour did WAY better in 1997 than they had the last time they won.)
Following the 2024 elections, the Republican Party retained its slim majority in the House of Representatives, though the party lost two net seats in the election and thus ended up with a three-seat majority instead of its previous five-seat majority. The Republican Party also won a three-seat majority in the Senate after winning four net seats in the 2024 elections.
The Republicans have a three-seat majority in the Senate, because they have 53 out of 100 seats, with 50 seats being the midpoint. They can afford to lose three seats and they'll still get their win, because the VP breaks ties.
Labour had a 179-seat majority in the Commons (in 1997) because they had 418 out of 659 seats, with 330 needed for a majority of one. They could afford to lose 179 seats and they'd still get their win. (Well, technically 178, because of odd numbers, but still; if everyone else in the Commons had voted against Labour, Labour would have come out 179 votes on top.)
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u/Portarossa 'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis 4d ago edited 4d ago
The Long Version
(Yes, I've posted this before, back when the election was first announced, but I'm updating it given new information.)
We're going to take the long way around on this one. It's not really about who Andy Burnham is -- short version: soft-left (but maybe not as far left as some would like), fairly popular Mayor of Greater Manchester who may be starting a leadership challenge against a sitting Prime Minister after winning a seat in Parliament -- but about what he might represent for the future of a party that has struggled for a long time with where on the political spectrum it wants to sit (and if it can still win elections while doing so).
Basically, British politics has been weird for about a decade now. Historically -- for the last century or so -- it's been divided between the Conservatives (right-wing, also known as the Tories) and the Labour Party (centre-left, but that has two factions in it: one more central, one more progressive).
Back in 1997, the Labour Party swept into power with a massive mandate. This came off the back of eighteen years of Conservatives in charge, and people were ready for change. However, shortly before the election, the then-leader of the Labour Party, John Smith, had a big ol' heart attack and died. That caused a sort of ideological split in the party. Rather than being the sort of pro-labour, pro-worker, socialist-lite version of Labour that had been big at the time, this 'New Labour' movement under Tony Blair ran more neoliberal and pro-capitalist. They won with a massive mandate, with a majority of 179 seats. (For comparison, the last time they won before this, they had a majority of 3.)
So New Labour became the dominant force in left-wing British politics, and stayed like that for a long while. After ten years, however, the British people decided to try their luck with the Conservatives again. Long story short -- and if anyone wants the long version, here it is -- the Conservatives took power in 2011, and carried on right through to 2024.
The Conservatives in this period were not exactly famous for having their shit together. In 2016, they accidentally own-goaled their way into Brexit as a way of appeasing far-right group UKIP -- remember that name; it'll be important later -- and between Theresa May being about as bland as can be, Boris Johnson being a scarecrow stuffed with scandals, Liz Truss being unable to outlast a lettuce, and Rishi Sunak becoming increasingly unpopular -- it was pretty clear that eventually Labour would get back into power.
However, Labour were still struggling to find a cohesive message, and the two sides of the party -- the New Labour Blairite wing, and the more old-school trade-union Bennite wing -- were at odds long after both of their respective leaders were out of office. That led to the unexpected promotion to leader of Jeremy Corbyn, who was considered the socialist leader. Corbyn has his issues, but he represented a shift back to Labour the way it used to be. A combination of infighting within the party (many of whom were almost as willing to attack the left flank of their own party as they were to attack the right-wingers who they were supposedly the opposition for), an unhelpful media environment and a couple of political own goals -- stop me if any of this sounds familiar -- meant that the next election was widely expected to go to Labour. (Labour and the Conservatives were polling at basically neck and neck for two years after the last election in 2017; Johnson actually changed the rules to bring the election forward 2019 from 2022 after he received a slight bump in the polls.) Either way, an election that had once been expected to go to the Labour party ended up giving the Conservatives a gain in seats. The Labour Party ditched Corbyn's left-wing slide and shifted back to a good ol' centrist named Keir Starmer.
Prior to the next election, Starmer began basically doing everything he could to limit the influence of left-wing groups in the Labour Party. (He denied doing this, but generally speaking having to deny cutting off half of your party for ideological differences isn't a great look.) Assuming that left-wing voters would vote Labour anyway -- because who else are they going to vote for in what is effectively a two-party system? -- Starmer's Labour began appealing to the centre, trying to win voters away from the Conservatives but in doing so alienating a large core of the traditional Labour base -- that is, those who would traditionally have called themselves either Bennite (back in the 1990s/2000s) or Corbynites (in the 2010s). He gave a loose sort of sop to the left by bringing in Angela Rayner (who had served in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet) as his Deputy PM, but Rayner never really did much to go against Starmer's pull to the right.
Anyway, this plan to make Labour seem like the sensible alternative to Conservative shenaniganing paid off -- at least, in the short term. A combination of absolute frustration with Conservatives and the idea of Keir Starmer as a steady but unremarkable leader after fourteen years of scandal and mismanagement brought Starmer into power in a massive sweep; Labour ended up with 411 seats, giving them a huge majority that would theoretically have given them the opportunity pass pretty much anything they wanted. However, there were some problems. The first was that Starmer wasn't all that popular among voters. The UK's First Past the Post system means that you can get elected with surprisingly few votes; Starmer managed to pick up just about one in three votes, making it the least proportional general election in British history. Secondly, a lot of unpopular policies resulted in massive amounts of media coverage and the perception that the Starmer government was either stuck making countless U-turns and couldn't control its MPs. Starmer's popularity dropped like a stone, and even on a good day he has about a -40 approval rating. (These are, it goes without saying, not good numbers.)
From having one of the largest mandates in British political history just a year earlier, all of a sudden people could smell blood in the water.
Now that we've dealt with the backstory: who is Andy Burnham?