Let Burnham Bleed

The Makerfield by-election can either build the resistance or enable creeping fascism

TL;DR: The Makerfield by-election on 18 June is not a simple Labour-Reform marginal, and the left cannot afford to treat it as a routine tactical-voting question. Burnham has collapsed into ‘Keir Scouser’ territory in a single campaign week, running the Blunkett playbook of accommodating Reform’s framing on immigration and trans rights. That playbook deepens the Bonapartist drift; it does not reverse it. The accelerationist argument, that a Reform win clears the ground, is wrong and should be rejected. But the question for the left is not primarily who gets the MP. It is which campaign builds the organisational network capable of fighting Reform in Makerfield after 18 June. On that basis, the Green campaign, not Burnham’s, can unite the resistance. The Green candidacy then took a serious blow when its initially announced candidate withdrew after sharing antisemitic disinformation about the Hatzola ambulance arson. The problem that produced him has not withdrawn with him.

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In Red Mole No.3, published in April 1970, Robin Blackburn put a name to a position the British far left had been circling around for months. Harold Wilson’s Labour government had frozen wages, conspired with American imperialism in Vietnam, and brought Barbara Castle’s In Place of Strife to the brink of becoming law. Blackburn’s conclusion was that Labour should be left to bleed. No critical support. No vote. Let it haemorrhage working-class loyalty until something better grew from the wound.

Pat Jordan answered him in issue five, dated 14 May 1970. His rebuttal was not gentle, and it was not, as is sometimes remembered, simply a call for a critical Labour vote. Jordan’s actual position was sharper than that. “The best result would be a Labour win,” he wrote, “because another Labour victory would help to destroy social democracy.” He was not defending Labour. He was arguing that Labour in office accelerates working-class disillusionment with reformism, and that revolutionaries should be present during that process rather than standing outside it in principled abstention. He added, with characteristic realism: “If all the revolutionary Marxists in the whole country went all out to persuade people to vote Labour, it is doubtful whether this would win the L.P. one seat.”

Both observations remain true in 2026. The first is more complicated than it looks. The second should puncture, permanently, any illusion that the left’s electoral interventions are decisive.

Jordan was right in 1970. The question Makerfield poses is whether the same logic applies when the room has changed beyond recognition.

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Start with the numbers. Not the 2024 general election numbers. The May 2026 local election numbers. Reform UK won every single ward in the constituency. Fifty percent of the aggregate vote. Labour at twenty-seven. An eighteen-point swing in less than two years.

The standard framing, including an earlier version of this article, treats Makerfield as a Labour-Reform binary. It is not, and Simon Pearson’s careful ground-level analysis for Anti-Capitalist Musings, published yesterday morning, is worth reading in full before the polling commentary drowns it out. A third right-wing force is in the field: Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe’s franchise operation, which entered the contest from zero and built a vote share during the campaign itself. Lowe published canvassing returns showing over a thousand doorstep contacts with nearly a quarter expressing support. More significantly, Restore Britain’s ground data suggests it is performing strongly with working-class voters, activating people who would not vote at all if the party were not on the ballot. That is not the same electorate Reform is competing for. The split-vote arithmetic the Reform-aligned right is deploying against Lowe, forty plus seven equals forty-seven, Burnham wins, Restore Britain handed Labour the seat, rests on an assumption of clean voter transfer that the canvassing data does not support.

The Survation poll putting Burnham at forty-three percent and Reform at forty also requires more scepticism than it has received. The sample was 369 likely voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 5.1 points. The gap between the two leading candidates is within that margin. The race is genuinely undecided in ways the confident commentary is not acknowledging.

There is a position, audible in certain corners of the left, that this volatility should be allowed to resolve itself in Reform’s favour. Let them win. The radicalisation that follows will create the conditions for a genuine socialist alternative. This is the accelerationist argument and it is wrong. Not merely tactically wrong: morally and analytically wrong. The people who would bear the immediate consequences of a Reform MP for Makerfield are not abstractions available for pedagogical purposes. They are workers in a post-industrial Lancashire constituency who will be represented in Westminster by a party whose programme is an assault on migrants, on trade union rights, on the public sector. The lesson that follows is not guaranteed to be the lesson the accelerationist expects. It is at least equally likely to be demoralisation, fragmentation, and the further normalisation of a Bonapartist politics that is already normalising faster than the left can organise against it.

Accelerationism is off the table. The question is what replaces it.

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The conventional answer is: a critical vote for Andy Burnham, holding your nose, blocking Reform, extracting what leverage you can from the result. This was, broadly, the position a version of this article was developing before the campaign began.

Then Burnham opened his mouth.

In the space of a single week, he reversed his position on proportional representation, having allowed Caroline Lucas to counsel the Greens to stand aside partly on the basis of his support for electoral reform. He recommitted to Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules, having said something rather different last September when the bond markets were not watching. He moved from endorsing criticism of the government’s immigration approach to backing it, then went further and demanded net migration be driven still lower. He accepted the legal attack on trans people. Everything that was wrong about Labour a week ago is now his policy position. As Phil Burton-Cartledge observed when the campaign launch was barely cold: “The only difference that exists between him and the Prime Minister is over who should be in Number 10.” The phrase already circulating is ‘Keir Scouser.’ It is too kind. Starmer arrived at his politics through a trajectory that at least has internal consistency, however much we reject it. Burnham’s collapse happened in real time, in public, under the pressure of a single by-election campaign in a Reform-leaning seat. It is not conviction. It is the calculation of a man who has decided that winning requires him to become the thing he claimed to oppose.

The historical comparison is not Starmer. It is David Blunkett.

Blunkett, as Home Secretary from 2001, introduced increasingly punitive asylum and immigration policies in direct and explicit response to BNP gains in northern English constituencies. The argument was tactical: address the concerns, pull the rug from under the far right, deny them the issue. The result was the opposite. Legitimising the framing legitimised the BNP. Normalising the language normalised the politics. The BNP continued to grow. The dynamic of creeping fascism does not retreat when mainstream politicians accommodate it; it deepens, because accommodation teaches the electorate that the far right’s analysis of the problem is essentially correct and that the only remaining question is who implements it more competently.

Burnham is running the Blunkett playbook in Makerfield. If it fails, Reform gains a seat. If it succeeds, a Labour MP takes his place in Westminster having already conceded the terrain. Either outcome strengthens the Bonapartist drift rather than countering it.

And Restore Britain, the third force Pearson has tracked more carefully than anyone else writing about this contest, represents something beyond Bonapartism. Lowe’s canvassing transparency one day was followed, the next morning, by a different register entirely: civil servants going to prison, the state being torn apart, unprecedented change, the establishment wants us destroyed. The architecture is familiar. Every critical journalist, every legal process, every negative poll becomes evidence of establishment fear rather than legitimate scrutiny. It is the same structure Trump used for three years, and it works for the same reason: persecution and progress become indistinguishable. The subtitle of this article names creeping fascism as the risk. Restore Britain, more explicitly than Reform, is organised to deliver state destruction. The ground operation is genuine. So is the vision it serves.

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Here is where the analysis has to reframe itself, because the standard electoral question, who wins an MP, is the wrong question for the left to be asking.

One more Reform MP will not, by itself, determine the trajectory of British politics. The parliamentary arithmetic matters less than the organisational reality outside parliament. What matters in Makerfield between now and 18 June, and more importantly after 18 June regardless of the result, is whether there exists a network of people, structures, and relationships capable of fighting Reform and Restore Britain on the ground: in workplaces, in community organisations, in the physical geography of the constituency where the right’s support is being built ward by ward.

That is not an electoral question. It is an organisational one. And the electoral campaign can either build that network or fail to build it.

The Burnham campaign is not building it. It cannot build it, because the logic of Burnham’s campaign is the logic of the Labour machine: consolidate the non-Reform vote, win the seat, move on. The politics Burnham is now articulating offer no framework for sustained anti-fascist organising, because they have already conceded too much of the ideological ground on which that organising would have to stand. You cannot fight the right’s politics on immigration and trans rights from a platform that has just adopted a softer version of those politics.

The Green campaign is a different proposition. Not because the Greens will win: they will not. Not because a Green MP for Makerfield is a realistic prospect: it is not. But because a Green campaign conducted seriously in this constituency builds something that survives the count. It builds an action network of people who have refused the Blunkett accommodation, who have maintained the political clarity that resistance to Bonapartism requires, and who will be present in Makerfield on 19 June when the work of actually fighting the right begins. Where Restore Britain is activating non-voters around a politics of state destruction, a serious Green campaign activates non-voters around a politics of resistance. That is precisely the competition that matters.

That argument took a serious blow before polling day arrived.

The Greens’ initially announced candidate withdrew within hours of his selection after it emerged he had shared social media posts describing the March 2026 arson attack on four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green as a “false flag.” The attack was real: the Metropolitan Police classified it as an antisemitic hate crime, referred it to Counter Terrorism Policing, and arrested multiple suspects. The “false flag” framing is antisemitic disinformation, not a contested interpretation. The Green Party’s failure to catch this in candidate vetting is not trivial. You cannot build an anti-fascist network on a politics that cannot distinguish between solidarity with Palestinians and the circulation of conspiracy theories that recycle the oldest antisemitic tropes. The candidate withdrew. The problem that produced him has not.

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POSTSCRIPT: The Green Party has since selected Sarah Wakefield, a newly elected Manchester City councillor for Deansgate, whose stated priorities on the council include rent controls and landlord accountability. In Deansgate, where around three-quarters of homes are rented, that is a direct material demand for most of her constituents. Makerfield is a different place: around three-quarters of homes there are owner-occupied, the tenure pattern of a post-industrial working class whose survival terrain is shaped more by deindustrialisation, benefits cuts, and public service collapse than by the landlord-tenant relationship. Wakefield’s Deansgate priorities do not automatically transfer.

The indispensable demand is not a portable programme. It is derived from the specific survival terrain of the class in the specific place. In Makerfield that terrain points toward the two-child benefit cap: a specific, costed, nationally debated act of class hostility by the current government that hits large working-class families directly, that Labour under Reeves has refused to abolish, and that the Greens support. It is a transitional demand in a precise sense: it addresses immediate survival, requires redistribution against the fiscal framework Reeves has made her religion, and cannot be satisfied within the boundaries of what the current government will deliver. Raising it inside the Green campaign in Makerfield does not require the audience to have read anything. It requires them to have received a benefits letter.

Whether Wakefield’s campaign raises something like that demand prominently, or defaults to the Green party’s city-centre policy register, is the first test of whether the left can use this campaign for the purpose the argument here identifies. The question is not whether she is ideologically reliable. It is whether the network being built around her candidacy fights on the terrain Makerfield’s working class actually inhabits, and keeps fighting there after 19 June.

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The tactical vote is a real question and should not be dismissed with a wave of the hand towards organisational strategy. If the non-Reform vote fragments badly enough, Reform wins the seat, and the organisational question becomes harder to prosecute from a position of defeat. There are people in Makerfield for whom the Reform threat is sufficiently acute and immediate that the tactical calculation overrides everything else. That is not a stupid position.

But the lesser-evil logic is not born in this analysis and will not be contained by it. It already operates in the trade unions, in every CLP meeting where the same faces rehearse the same conclusion, in the instinct of every shop steward who knows Labour is inadequate and votes for it anyway. Jordan understood this in 1970. His point was not that the lesser evil was wrong, but that its logic had to be subject to conditions, rather than simply be submitted to. Submitted to without conditions, it produces permanent deferral: not this election, the stakes are too high; not this crisis, the enemy at the gate is too dangerous; not this moment, wait for better conditions. The conditions never improve under this logic, because the logic itself ensures they cannot.

In Makerfield in 2026, the campaign that imposes those conditions is not Burnham’s. The dynamics of creeping fascism deepen through accommodation. It does not reverse because a Labour politician who has adopted Reform’s framing on immigration holds the seat. It reverses, if it reverses at all, because an organised resistance exists in the constituency that refuses the framing entirely. Under a candidate who has not disqualified himself on antisemitism, the Green campaign is that resistance.

Build the network. The parliamentary arithmetic will follow, or it will not. The network is what remains either way.