Keir Starmer is lost,” says Terry Miller.
It’s a sunny Friday morning in Ashton-in-Makerfield, a market town four miles south of Wigan that has spent the past month as the unlikely epicentre of British politics.
This town’s constituency, Makerfield, sent a decisive political message overnight, which means that Miller is likely correct – in many ways.
“We really feared that if Andy Burnham hadn’t won yesterday, then the Labour Party would have gone into meltdown,” the retired health worker adds. “And that would have just fed in to Reform.”
But Miller’s fears were misplaced. Labour’s Burnham, the soon-to-be former mayor of Greater Manchester, stormed to a commanding victory in the Makerfield by-election with 54.8 per cent of the vote.
He secured a majority of more than 9,000 votes ahead of Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon. Despite speculation that it would be a close race, Burnham won more votes than all of the other 13 candidates put together.
Nobody predicted the result would be as clear-cut as this; Reform were expected to mount a serious challenge in what has always been a Labour safe seat.
Makerfield’s safety was thrown into doubt after Nigel Farage’s party made huge gains across Labour’s historic Northern heartlands in May’s local elections, including here, where it won 24 of the 25 seats available on Wigan Council.
Ten of those wards fall within this parliamentary constituency, either wholly or partly, and Reform candidates won every single one of them.
Those dismal council results piled the pressure on an already beleaguered Starmer, and prompted Burnham to act, standing as a candidate here after Josh Simons resigned, in the hope of making a long-rumoured return to parliament.
His resounding win now paves the way for him to take on Starmer for the Labour leadership. He will head down to London to launch that challenge with Makerfield’s best wishes.
Miller, for one, believes it can’t come soon enough.
“This is a job that needs doing, and he’s the man to do it,” he tells The Independent. “I think his time has come.
“He’s got two and a half years to prove his mettle. And that will be his legacy – what he achieves in the next two and a half years. It’s a tough act, and we know what he’s up against.”
Like many in this constituency, made up of working-class towns and villages in what was a former hotbed of coal mining, Miller believes the Labour Party had lost touch with its core beliefs. As a result, the relationship with voters here – long the bedrock of Labour’s electoral coalition – has been slowly wearing away.
“I think over the last few decades, in order to attract Tory voters, Labour’s moved closer to the Tories,” he says. “I think there’s some people like Andy that had a little bit more principle and remained where he was, which is always focused around policy.”
Burnham’s campaign set out to reconnect with those voters, promising to change Labour so it could represent them once more.
That chimes with Jane Bale, 53, who always voted Labour until recently, when she decided she had seen enough.
“I didn’t vote [for Labour] the last time [in 2024] because I was so disheartened, but when I knew it was Andy who’d be running, and I knew the good things he’s done with Manchester... I’m hoping he’ll be able to do the same for Makerfield.”
There is no love lost for Labour in its current form here, particularly for the historically unpopular Starmer.
And when The Independent visited during the campaign, several people said their dissociation with the Labour Party could be traced back to how it had changed under Tony Blair.
“I just felt like the policies weren’t aligning, and they didn’t deliver on things that they’d said,” adds Bale. “When I’ve been listening to Andy and the things he’s spoken about, I just think he’d be really good for the country. So I do hope he gets the chance to be prime minister.”
Burnham, who was born on the outskirts of Liverpool, was raised in nearby Culcheth, and lives just outside this constituency – having been the MP for neighbouring Leigh from 2001 to 2017 – is immensely popular in England’s North West.
His time running Greater Manchester gave him the “King of the North” moniker, and he is seen by his backers within the Labour Party as its only hope of drawing lifelong supporters back, especially in this part of the country, after the local elections drubbing.
This constituency, found where Merseyside ends and Greater Manchester begins, is at the heart of his sphere of influence. If he couldn’t beat Reform here, no Labour politician could.
His victory here can be read as proof of concept – he delivered a decisive win in an area where voters abandoned Labour in their droves just a month ago.
He is expected to beat Starmer in a leadership race, but he will then have to convince voters across the country that Andy Burnham’s Labour Party would provide a clear break, if his victory is to go beyond this constituency.
Miller, however, is under no illusions about the scale of the task Burnham faces if he makes it to No 10.
“This is a temporary win for Labour – Reform will be back,” he warns.
It is telling that Burnham’s campaign material, though Labour-red, has little reference to the party on it. When people are asked whom they voted for, the response in Ashton is largely “for Andy”, not for the party he represents. Labour took a back seat to help “Brand Burnham” to a win here.
That brand can be boiled down to a fresh policy offering and its figurehead’s ability to represent, and connect with, the working class.
Peter Cain, 58, who runs his family butcher shop in the centre of Ashton, sums it up, telling The Independent: “He’s been in here, there’s no airs and graces about him.
“He’s down to earth, he’s a people person. I think he’ll do good for the area.”
At Ashton Town FC, where activists and supporters have gathered en masse in front of a scoreboard that reads “Home 1-0 Visitors”, Burnham addresses those local election results as he lays out his plans to change the party, describing it as the “last chance” to do so.
He says: “If you go back to May, this part of the world, people here issued quite a clear call for change. In fact, I would say it was more an instruction that things had to change.”
His campaign has been built around a brand of politics he now calls “Manchesterism”, once labelled “aspirational socialism”.
Burnham believes that Britain has surrendered control of its economy through Thatcherite politics, to the detriment of places like Ashton. He would counter that through increased public ownership, while remaining friendly to business.
“Manchesterism”, which Burnham describes as an end to neoliberalism, would offer hope for places left behind by deindustrialisation, Burnham tells the crowd, as he presents this victory as ground zero for that new style of Labour politics.
“The word ‘Makerfield’ in the future must be known as a byword for the change that came to British politics,” he says. “This is the moment. We’ve been on a path for 40 years that simply hasn’t worked for people and places in this part of the world, and this, now, is the change moment.
“We have an opportunity to turn the tide, to make the country feel like it’s working again, to make people see that politics can make a positive difference, to make people feel hope again.”
During the campaign, Burnham was accused of using the constituency for personal gain. But many who gave him their vote, including former Conservative supporter Cain, believe the prospect of being represented by the most powerful politician in the land can only be good for Ashton.
“It’s brilliant. A prime minister coming from Ashton-in-Makerfield. He actually lives locally, so it’s not like somebody from down south coming to be your MP up here and then going back down south. He has got ties to the area.”
Pauline Barker, 78, was more than happy to vote for Burnham to be her MP. But as he prepares for what appears to be an inevitable run for Downing Street, she wants him to keep one thing in mind.
“He connects with people, he seems to bother, whereas some of them are more for themselves,” she says. “I know this is probably a stepping stone to being prime minister, but I think he’d make a good prime minister as well. As long as he still bothers about us.”
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