Anti-racists have been on the streets in Makerfield every week campaigning against far right Reform UK
Whichever way the Makerfield by-election goes this week, Keir Starmer will lose.
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is using the election in the north west constituency in a bid to get back into parliament. He has now made clear that he will challenge the prime minister for the leadership of the Labour party if he wins the seat.
On the other hand, a victory for the racists of Reform UK would also be a setback for Starmer’s Labour.
Anti-racists have been on the streets in Makerfield every week campaigning against far right Reform UK and its rightwards split, Restore Britain.
We know where the racism of these parties will lead. Last week, crowds of people torched cars and houses in a pogrom in Belfast, in the north of Ireland. Afterwards, Farage claimed they were right to be worried about migration and denied they were far right.
“The vast majority of those people who were out on the streets in Belfast were not far right,” he said. “They were not extremists—just really scared about what’s going on in their communities and about the lack of government action.”
Happily, the huge demonstrations in the north of Ireland over the weekend show that anti-racists are in the majority. We can fight them back on the streets and at the ballot box.
The crucial task in Makerfield is to label Reform UK and Restore Britain as racists and to stop the far right gaining the seat.
But we shouldn’t think a win for Burnham will stop their rise. He has bent to the right during the election campaign. He backs home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s plans to clamp down on immigration. And he has thrown trans+ people under the bus by supporting transphobic EHRC guidance on which services they can use.
Burnham will not break with Labour’s self-imposed “fiscal rules” that commit it to austerity. He will continue with Starmer’s toxic combination of failure to address the cost of living crisis and an attempt to out-Reform Reform UK. This can only fuel the growth of the far right.
Many voters recognise this. Recent polls show Burnham’s support dropping. And that half of voters think that he is no different to Starmer.
The prime minister is a dead man walking. And the vultures are circling. Defence secretary John Healey and armed forces minister Al Carns both resigned last week in a row over defence spending.
Labour is already committed to raising defence spending to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2035. Britain is now the world’s third biggest nuclear spender, ahead of Russia and behind only the US and China.
Yet still the right wing of Labour wants Starmer to spend even more on warfare. But where is the organised left? It is positive that the Unison union is planning to ballot local government and school support workers next month. And that UCU members in further and higher education backed a call for strikes at their congress last month.
But the resident doctors—formerly junior doctors—of the BMA union have called off their planned strikes this week for pay restoration. Resident doctors are right to be angry with the union’s leadership for pulling action over a poor offer.
The cost of living crisis is set to deepen and Labour has no solutions. We will need a much bigger fightback from the union movement. Push for strikes this autumn.
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