What Makerfield Tells the Socialist Federation
The amendment that Makerfield makes necessary
TL;DR: Burnham won Makerfield with 54.8 percent and a majority of 9,231. The anti-Reform tactical squeeze was total: the Greens, Liberal Democrats, and Conservatives combined for 3.3 percent, down from 22 percent in 2024. Sarah Wakefield received 308 votes. The campaign that was making the right arguments, naming public ownership, connecting deindustrialisation to austerity, pressing Burnham on local delivery, was squeezed to a rounding error by the logic this article has been arguing against. Reform still has 15,696 votes in the constituency, its best ever by-election total. The ward-by-ward organisation that produced those results is still there. The Socialist Federation’s 28 June conference now has to answer what an anticapitalist pole looks like in the landscape this result has produced. This article argues for three concrete additions to the platform composites, drawn from what the Green campaign got right and what the squeeze revealed about what is missing.
Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election on 18 June 2026 with 24,927 votes, 54.8 percent of the poll, a majority of 9,231 over Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon who took 15,696 votes and 34.5 percent. Restore Britain’s Rebecca Shepherd came third with 3,111 votes and 6.8 percent. The Green Party’s Sarah Wakefield received 308 votes, 0.7 percent, losing her deposit. The Liberal Democrats took 0.4 percent. The Conservatives 2.2 percent. Turnout was 58.77 percent, six points up on the 2024 general election, the third highest by-election turnout increase in post-war history. Labour’s vote share rose 9.6 points on 2024. Reform’s rose 2.7 points. The three parties that combined for 22 percent in 2024, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Greens, combined for 3.3 percent.
What the result demonstrates
Burnham won decisively. The majority of 9,231, Labour’s vote share rising nearly ten points on 2024, the third highest by-election turnout increase in post-war history: by any conventional metric this is a Labour triumph. It is also a precise demonstration of everything this article has been arguing.
The anti-Reform tactical squeeze was total. The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Greens combined for 3.3 percent of the vote. In 2024 they combined for 22 percent. That 18-point collapse did not go to Reform. It went to Burnham. An anti-Reform coalition, constructed on the logic that beating Reform required voting Labour regardless of anything else, delivered Burnham his majority. Sarah Wakefield received 308 votes. The Green campaign that was making the right arguments, naming public ownership, pressing Burnham on the library, connecting Durham’s deindustrialisation to Wigan’s, was squeezed to a rounding error by the same logic this article spent several thousand words critiquing. The ‘Don’t Vote Reform’ imperative, whether delivered by SUTR, by Caroline Lucas, by Diane Abbott, or by the sheer weight of the stakes attached to Burnham’s candidacy, performed exactly as predicted: it subordinated every independent left voice to the requirement of Labour’s victory.
The result that follows from this logic is a Labour majority of 9,231 and an organised left presence in Makerfield of approximately zero. Reform still has 15,696 votes in the constituency, its best ever total in any by-election. Reform still won every ward in the May locals. The ward-by-ward organisation that produced those results is still there. Burnham will go to Westminster and likely to a leadership contest. The 15,696 people who voted Reform in Makerfield on Thursday will still be in Makerfield on Friday, and Saturday, and the day after.
Burnham’s victory speech called for ‘a new politics based on unity and hope, turning away from the path that takes us to a divided politics of the kind we see in the United States.’ He said this was Labour’s ‘final chance to change.’ He has already ruled out changing the fiscal rules. He cancelled a hedge fund call during the campaign not to oppose hedge funds but to manage the optics of meeting them, as the Financial Times reported. Lord Blunkett, sixty years a Labour member, said his party was in a ‘massive pickle’ and needed a ‘complete rethink.’ That rethink will be conducted entirely within the parameters of what the bond markets will accept. The ‘final chance to change’ runs until the first time Burnham’s new politics meets the fiscal framework Reeves has made her religion. The left should not be waiting to find out what happens then. It should be building now.
The result also confirms a point the companion piece ‘Let Burnham Bleed’ made before the count: the 308 Green votes are not evidence that the Green campaign failed to make the right arguments. They are evidence that a campaign without ward-by-ward organisational infrastructure, capable of reaching voters directly through channels it controls, will be eliminated by the tactical squeeze every time the stakes are high enough. The squeeze will always come. The question is whether the left is organised enough to survive it.
The general secretary of Unite, Sharon Graham, whose union remains affiliated to Labour, put it with unusual precision for the morning after a Labour victory: 'There is absolutely no doubt that over the last two years workers and the working class have fallen out of love with Labour. The win for Andy Burnham in Makerfield is a glimmer of hope but it must not be taken as a business as usual mandate.' She called for Starmer to step down and named what a genuine change of direction would require: energy price caps, releasing the freeze on tax bands, a wealth tax, a comprehensive industrial plan. These are not aspirational policies. They are demands that cannot be satisfied within the fiscal framework Reeves has made her religion. The general secretary of Labour's largest affiliated union is, the morning after a Labour by-election landslide, making the indispensable demands argument. The left outside Labour should take note, and act on it faster.
The opposite examples in Scotland
The same night, two by-elections in Scotland produced the opposite result. In Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, Labour fell from 33.4 percent in 2024 to 15.3 percent, finishing fourth behind the SNP, the Scottish Conservatives, and Reform. In Aberdeen South, Labour's vote collapsed entirely and the Scottish Conservatives took the seat with nearly fifty percent, their first Westminster by-election gain in Scotland since 1967. The coalition Burnham assembled in Makerfield, an anti-Reform squeeze that pulled votes from across the spectrum under the weight of exceptional national stakes, is not a template. It is an outlier. The structural conditions that produced 308 Green votes and a Labour landslide in Makerfield produced fourth place and irrelevance in Arbroath. The question for the left is not how to repeat Burnham's result. It is what to build in the spaces where Burnham's result is not available, which is almost everywhere.
The Green campaign: what actually happened
The national media coverage of Sarah Wakefield’s campaign was not a fair account of what the campaign actually said. The food decolonisation controversy, amplified by Jeremy Clarkson and GB News, consumed the coverage. What was actually happening in campaign events and materials tells a different story.
Wakefield’s campaign rally speech, delivered in her own voice, was grounded in exactly the survival terrain the situation required. ‘Durham shares a lot of similarities with Wigan,’ she said. ‘It’s an area where it has been left behind for 40 years of deindustrialisation topped off by 15 years of austerity that hasn’t been dealt with.’ On youth services: ‘more youth clubs, more opportunities for sports, more opportunities for creativity, reinvestment in youth workers, reinvestment in proper sports facilities.’ On local infrastructure: ‘investing in the high streets, making sure that we give local authorities the ability to compulsory purchase empty shops, reduce business rates for local businesses.’ On the library question, addressing Burnham directly: ‘the money is coming, but where is it?’ Ashton-in-Makerfield library remains temporarily displaced from its building while restoration costs are unconfirmed and a timeline for reopening has not been established. That sentence names a concrete unresolved situation, presses the responsible party on delivery, and does so in a room full of local people living with the displacement.
The campaign’s visual materials ran a public ownership poster claiming “We Own It”: ‘Only the Green Party commits to public ownership in Makerfield.’ The Rochdale Green campaign in the May locals, fought in Greater Manchester a few weeks earlier, ran ‘Stop Racist Reform’ and ‘Make Labour Pay’ on the same leaflet, used polling data showing the Greens ahead of Reform, Labour, and the Conservatives simultaneously, and put warm affordable homes and fair wages alongside renewable energy as its central promises. The infrastructure for a class-confrontational campaign existed in this county’s Green network. It was being deployed.
The problem was not the content of the campaign. It was the mediation, and behind the mediation, the organisation. The national party ran ‘hope and joy’ in its official statements. Caroline Lucas provided the meta-narrative of a campaign standing aside for Burnham. The national media amplified the food decolonisation angle every time it appeared. A campaign without the ward-by-ward infrastructure to reach voters directly, through channels it controlled, was always going to be defined by the channels it did not control. When the tactical squeeze arrived, there was nothing beneath it: no local network, no trusted relationships built over months, no reason for a Makerfield voter who agreed with the Green platform to resist the pull of the anti-Reform logic.
The Green Party’s closing statement named the right demands: fiscal rules, public ownership of water and energy, electoral reform before the general election, an end to the cruelty of settled status policy. Addressed to Andy Burnham in the closing hours of a campaign he had spent ignoring those demands, they were a form of political subordination: the party that raised them was waiting to see whether the man who dismissed them throughout would listen after winning. That is not the indispensable demands strategy. It is its parliamentary shadow.
The 308 votes are not a verdict on the arguments. They are a verdict on the absence of the infrastructure that would have made those arguments land. That is the distinction the Socialist Federation’s conference needs to understand.
What the Socialist Federation composites offer
The platform composites going to the 28 June conference are, taken together, more adequate to this situation than the process that produced them might suggest.
The O’Connor Meldau and Richard G platform composite establishes ecosocialism as a foundational principle, links ecological collapse to declining living standards, and explicitly proposes practical campaign work alongside Greens and Your Party where they are doing good work on the ground. That formulation is directly responsive to what the Makerfield campaign demonstrated: the left’s actually-existing presence in the constituency was mostly inside formations it does not control, and any serious anticapitalist federation needs a principled basis for relating to those formations without either subordinating to them or refusing to work within the terrain they occupy.
Tom Lennard’s complementary platform document on building solidarity and trust addresses the relational question that the structural debate has so far obscured. The anticapitalist pole is not built by resolving theoretical disputes about federal architecture. It is built by people who trust each other enough to act together when the moment requires it. That trust is built in campaigns, in common work, in the relationships that Wakefield’s rally and Rochdale’s leaflets were beginning to build, and that the absence of organisational continuity will not sustain beyond the count.
The structural composites went to conference counterposed rather than composited, because the compositing process broke down. The 28 June conference will have to make a substantive choice between Kulmer and O’Connor Meldau’s detailed federated assembly model with its explicit anti-capture guardrails, and Presland’s Common Ground proposal with its emphasis on local financial sovereignty and community rootedness. Both contain serious ideas. The conference should assess them on their content. What it should not do is allow the structural debate to consume the time and energy that the platform questions deserve. Platform first. Structure second. The Makerfield result is not an argument about federal architecture. It is an argument about what happens when the right arguments meet the wrong infrastructure, and the answer is 308 votes.
Three things the composites need to learn from Makerfield
The platform composites are right in their broad direction. They need sharpening in three specific ways that the Makerfield experience directly suggests.
The first is named demands rather than named principles. The Rochdale Green leaflet’s ‘Make Labour Pay’ section worked because it was specific: a named councillor cautioned over election fraud, a named quote from Starmer about Gaza, a named policy on immigration. The platform composite’s commitment to ecosocialism and fighting exploitation is correct. It becomes actionable when it names the bedroom tax, the benefits freeze, the collapse of the Environment Agency’s capacity to deal with flooding and fly-tipping, the specific library whose restoration timeline has not been confirmed. The conference should discuss which concrete demands the Socialist Federation will make its own, and which it will require of candidates seeking its support, because without that specificity the commitment to practical campaign work has no content.
The second is direct communication infrastructure. The gap between what the Makerfield Green campaign was actually saying and what the national media reported it as saying was not a communications failure. It was an organisational failure: no ward-level network to deliver the right message directly to the right households, independent of press mediation. The composites’ commitment to building a federation is the right instinct. The federation’s practical value will be measured by whether it can produce the equivalent of the Rochdale ‘Make Labour Pay’ leaflet in every constituency where it is active, and get it through the right doors, without depending on the national media to carry the argument. When the tactical squeeze comes, and it will come again, it is that direct infrastructure that determines whether the left survives it with 308 votes or with something worth building on.
The third is the anti-austerity pledge as an electoral instrument. The Socialist Federation should develop and promote a Communities Before Cuts pledge for the 2027 local elections, requiring candidates seeking active Socialist Federation support to commit to: opposing all cuts to local services; refusing to implement central government austerity through council budgets; supporting workers in dispute with local employers including Labour-controlled councils; and opposing the use of council powers against tenants, benefit claimants, and migrant communities. The pledge is not a condition of membership or affiliation. It is a condition of active electoral support and the deployment of campaign resources. It makes the test explicit, visible, and replicable. A Green candidate who signs it and runs on the bedroom tax abolition earns active Socialist Federation support. A Labour candidate who refuses it faces organised opposition.
The bedroom tax, introduced by the Coalition in 2013 and maintained by every government since, cuts housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have a spare room by fourteen percent for one spare bedroom and twenty-five percent for two or more. It hits disabled people, carers, and the long-term unemployed hardest. Labour has made no commitment to abolish it. The Greens have. The two-child benefit cap was also Green policy; it was abolished in April 2026 under sustained political pressure. That a demand can be won is not an argument against raising it. It is the argument for raising it. The 2027 local elections are less than a year away. The composites need this instrument in them before 28 June.
The morning after
Burnham will challenge for the Labour leadership. The Greater Manchester mayoral by-election, which must by law take place by 6 August, will be by electorate the largest by-election in British political history. Two million voters. Reform will contest it hard. The left will face the same choice it faced in Makerfield: subordinate to the anti-Reform logic, or build the infrastructure that makes independent politics possible.
The Makerfield result did not resolve that choice. It clarified the cost of avoiding it. 308 votes. A deposit lost. An argument made to nobody in particular because nobody had built the network to hear it.
That is what the Socialist Federation conference is for. Not to resolve the structural debate between two counterposed proposals. Not to produce another document with ecosocialism in the preamble and no named demands in the body. But to answer the specific question the Makerfield result poses: what do we build in Greater Manchester between now and August, between now and 2027, that means the next time the tactical squeeze arrives, the left is still standing when it passes?
The 15,696 Reform voters in Makerfield are not going anywhere. Neither is the deindustrialisation, the austerity, the flooded streets, the displaced library, the bedroom tax, the benefits freeze. The arguments Wakefield made at that rally were the right arguments. They needed 308 votes’ worth of organisation behind them. They need rather more than that behind them next time.
Build it now.
Postscript: a necessary correction
A comrade raises three points that require honest engagement rather than defence of the original text.
On the decision to stand a candidate: a comrade argues that standing was the wrong tactical call and that a vigorous intervention without a candidate, extracting public commitments from Burnham on PR and public ownership in exchange for a directed vote, would have been more effective. Caroline Lucas and Phil Hearse made this argument before the count and the result gives it retrospective force.
The disagreement here is not primarily tactical. It is about what a Green campaign in Makerfield was for. If the goal is to keep Reform out as efficiently as possible, then a conditional directed vote is the more effective instrument and standing a candidate in an exceptional high-stakes contest is a costly distraction. If the goal is to build an independent working class political pole in the constituency, one that has a presence, relationships, and organisational continuity after the count regardless of the result, then standing and campaigning actively is the only way to do it. You cannot build a local network by directing votes toward someone else’s candidate.
The article’s argument is the second one. The Green vote across the Makerfield wards in the May local elections, approximately 3,500 votes just weeks before the by-election, shows that the constituency base exists. The tactical squeeze compressed it to 308 on the night. But the 3,500 are still there, and a campaign that put activists into the constituency, identified those voters, and built relationships with them has left something behind that a directed vote has not. Whether the Makerfield Green campaign actually achieved that organisational legacy is a question only those who were on the ground can answer. The article cannot answer it from the outside. What it can say is that this is what the campaign should have been trying to build, and that the test of whether it succeeded is not the vote share on 18 June but the state of the network on 19 June.
On the May local elections as the correct comparator: this is the most important correction. The Greens received approximately 3,500 votes across the Makerfield wards in the May local elections just weeks before the by-election, doubling their 2024 vote. Their vote fell by a factor of twelve on 18 June. That is not evidence of a weak campaign. It is evidence that the tactical squeeze is structural: voters who chose Green in the locals switched to Labour when the stakes were high enough to activate the anti-Reform logic. The 308 figure is therefore a poor measure of Green organisational capacity in the constituency. The article uses it as a baseline when it should use it as a measure of how total the squeeze becomes under exceptional high-stakes circumstances. The Green vote was there in May. It was not converted to the by-election because nothing could resist the pull of the Burnham candidacy at that level of national significance.
On the Greater Manchester mayoral election: the article frames it as posing the same choice as Makerfield. This is wrong in one specific respect. If the government introduces preferential voting for the mayoral contest, as is widely expected, the spoiler logic does not apply. The Greens can stand with a genuine prospect of mattering, either as a winning candidate or as a second preference bloc that shapes the outcome. That is a fundamentally different tactical situation from Makerfield, and the article’s framing obscures it. The preferential voting system is precisely why proportional representation is an indispensable demand of the current moment: it transforms the electoral terrain for the left in a single move. The Greens should be demanding it as the explicit price of any accommodation with Burnham’s leadership campaign, not waiting to see whether he volunteers it under pressure.
None of these corrections undermine the article’s central organisational argument: the left needs ward-level infrastructure, named demands, and an anti-austerity pledge as a condition of electoral support rather than a general aspiration. They do sharpen it. The prior tactical question, whether to stand at all, should be decided by organisational capacity and electoral context, not by aspiration alone. The GM mayoral election, under a preferential system, is the opportunity to demonstrate what standing with genuine infrastructure and clear indispensable demands actually looks like. Six weeks to build it.
Add your name to the Communities Before Cuts amendment
The Communities Before Cuts amendment will be submitted to the Socialist Federation compositing process before the midnight Monday 22 June deadline. The amendment calls on the Socialist Federation to develop and promote a pledge for the 2027 local elections requiring candidates seeking active Socialist Federation support to commit to opposing cuts to local services, refusing to implement central government austerity through council budgets, supporting workers in dispute with local employers including Labour-controlled councils, and opposing the use of council powers against tenants, benefit claimants, and migrant communities.
If you want to add your name as a supporter, email redmole@substack.com with ‘Communities Before Cuts’ in the subject line and your name and any relevant organisational affiliation in the body.
Formal co-signing of the amendment requires membership of the Socialist Federation Register of Interest. If you are on the register, say so in your email and your name will be added to the submission. If you are not, your name will be cited in covering correspondence as a supporter from the broader left.
The deadline is midnight Monday 22 June. Names received after that point cannot be included in the submission but will be published here as a record of support.
This article is a companion to ‘Let Burnham Bleed’ and ‘Don’t Vote Reform Fails Makerfield’.
Very important analysis.
In relation to the other nations of the UK, Cymru'n Codi has made this comment on the agenda for the Socialist Federation conference on 28 June:
"Good to see a wide ranging and open debate.
There are some important issues to resolve. One of them is the place of republican and ecosocialists movements in the other countries that compose the current UK: Cymru, the North of Ireland, and Scoland. One proposal refers to the Senedd and Holyrood and independence referenda others refer to UK as a whole without any distinction. It is critical that ecosocialists in the UK recognise the different political dynamic in the countries that make it up and how this has a critical impact on working class and interntional politics.
It also relates to the destructive democratic deficit that is the UK constitution, unwritten and with a focus on the monarch and people as subjects of this system and not citizens. It is this lack of democracy that poses a total road block to an ecosocialist programme. In Cymru over 40% of the electors in the Senedd elections voted for parties that support independence.
Cymru'n Codi is a cross party, republican, interntionalist and ecosocialist political movement that argues the radical left case for independence. Comrades should recognise that building a federation of socialists is an international endeavour and have to accept that comrades in Cymru, the North of Ireland, and Scotland will organise in our own way, and will certainly be prepared to work with any internationalist ecosocialist federation but the starting point has to be a recognition of our independent agency."
https://cymruncodi.substack.com/
This is not a bad analysis as it stands, but there is one glaring omission. It fails to truly analyse the role of First Past The Post (FPTP) and plan for a future where this antiquated voting system is replaced by a proportional one, like in most advanced democracies, and already implemented in one shape or another in the devolved regions. Anti-Reform voting tactics will of course always play out like this result in Makerfield under FPTP. But Burnham is a fan of PR, where number of votes equals the number of seats (more or less, depending on which variant is chosen). And once we have PR, the game changes completely. The Left will then really have a chance at electoral success. So the strategy now should be building the local base with community organising, proving our concrete worth, and only going for a full-blown electoral strategy under PR. Get all our ducks in a row locally. And bide our time til blast-off, after electoral reform.