Wes Streeting will not stand in the Labour leadership contest and is backing Andy Burnham. The announcement came from outside Downing Street, hours after Burnham swept back into Parliament with a decisive victory in the Makerfield by-election — a seat Reform UK had won outright just five weeks ago.
Burnham, who left parliament more than nine years ago to head north as Greater Manchester’s mayor, returns with a blueprint that his supporters say can make Labour electorally competitive again. In May’s local elections, Reform won every single seat up for grabs in Makerfield. On the doorstep, voters voiced intense displeasure with Keir Starmer’s government. Yet on polling day, Burnham delivered a Labour win in the towns and villages that had heartily rejected the party weeks earlier.
“Wes Streeting backs Andy Burnham for Labour leader after Burnham's decisive Makerfield by-election win.”
His campaign slogan — “for us” — worked because voters genuinely see him as a politician on their side, attuned to the concerns of ordinary people and serious about action. But analysts point deeper. The New Statesman argues that Burnham offered a new economic and political settlement: public ownership of essential utilities, a land value tax, and electoral reform — policies that have felt fringe under Starmer but were front and centre of Burnham’s appeal.
UnHerd notes that Reform’s candidate, local plumber and former army reservist Kenyon, was hobbled by a woeful performance on Question Time and a digital paper trail in which he came across as boorish and misogynistic. The sociologist Sacha Hillhorst has shown that Reform’s vote in the last general election was basically unstable — a coalition of nostalgic ex-Labour voters and former Tories, all brought together by opposition to immigration, a sense of decline, and a desire for political renewal.
Burnham managed to combine urban progressives — voters Labour has been losing to the Greens — alongside soft-Conservative and Reform types who had turned away from Labour because of its rejection of progressive policies and its new identity as the party of the “lanyard class”. Had Burnham been blocked from standing, as he was in Gorton and Denton, and replaced with another wooden Labour technocrat, the result would have been very different, UnHerd says.
Now, with Streeting out of the race, the question is whether “Brand Burnham” can survive the journey south. The answer may determine not just the next Labour leader, but whether the party can learn the lesson of Makerfield: that voters in post-industrial towns are not inherently reactionary, but searching for a political project that names the causes of their crisis — deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity — and offers a credible remedy.