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After Makerfield, what next?
Is winning in Makerfield a new dawn for Labour, or just that this time, voters chose Labour as the “Not Farage” candidate. Since they won in Runcorn & Helsby, Reform have failed in Caerphilly, Gorton and Denton, and now Makerfield, losing to Plaid Cymru, the Greens and now to Labour. It was a great victory for Burnham and Labour, but the question has to be asked together with has Labour learnt the lesson that to fight Reform, you need to fight it. (I think not!)
Having returned to the House of Commons, Burnham has forced Keir Starmer to resign and a time table for a Party leadership election has been declared.
Much has been written about why he had to go; I have been calling for it since February when the likely defeats in Scotland and Wales became obvious. On the day, Labour also lost three more London Councils.
Starmer’s resignation speech starts in the same way as his election campaign to be leader of the Labour Party, with lies. When Starmer inherited the Labour Party, it was in the strongest financial position it had been for decades and anyone who has closely read the Forde report and the EHRC report knows there is still work to do to eliminate racism from the Labour Party. The focus on macroeconomic statistics repeats the mistakes that Biden made. While I do not subscribe to the meme that “perception is reality”, perhaps it is truer in…
