Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, during a meeting with English regional mayors, at No 10 Downing Street in Westminster, central London, July 9, 2024IT’S a truism that the Labour right would rather see the party lose than win from the left.
But the Starmer clique’s decision to bar Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from contesting the Gorton & Denton by-election shows paranoid factionalism on another level.
Burnham is not even on the socialist left of the party: this is an act of cowardice by a PM who fears a challenge to his leadership, and is prepared to risk a Labour seat falling to Reform UK rather than face him.
For Burnham was certainly the party’s best bet for winning the by-election, in a seat where the context of the last MP’s departure — Andrew Gwynne was embroiled in a scandal over expletive-laden text messages telling elderly constituents he hoped they would “croak” before long — can only add to the stench of out-of-touch arrogance that suffuses Labour.
Burnham is popular, a vanishingly rare quality among Labour politicians now. This fact will not be lost on MPs concluding that Starmer needs to go if the party is to have a hope of avoiding electoral annihilation.
The excuse given for his exclusion — that an early mayoral election to replace him would be inconvenient and costly — hardly matters. Not one person will believe it.
After all Starmer has form: stitch-ups are his stock in trade. Unlike former leaders of the Labour right like Tony Blair — or possible future ones like Wes Streeting — he has no political vision giving him confidence to seek to persuade people of his case. He lied his way to the leadership then excluded its left through expulsions and bans on debate.
He imposes candidates on local parties, and shows total indifference to the local standing of the candidates he blocks: another popular then Labour mayor, Jamie Driscoll, was barred from the shortlist for his own enlarged mayoralty when Labour were still in opposition.
…