#by-election

[holymolyyikes]

ALL THE OTHER PARTIES (OF NOTE) HAVE DROPPED OUT, nigel farage v count binface is on. if binface wins it will all have been worth it

[tomorrowusa]

Andy Burnham wins Makerfield by-election, paving way for him to challenge Keir Starmer as Labour leader

Burnham - who comfortably beat Reform UK's Robert Kenyon by more than 9,000 votes - tells the Labour Party it is the "final chance to change

Mayor Andy Burnham, called "the King in the North" by his supporters in Manchester, just got elected to a seat in Parliament from the constituency of Makerfield. This means he will become prime minister (probably) in a few weeks pending a Labour leadership challenge. And it also lessens the possibility that there will ever be a Prime Minister Nigel Farage.

The turnout in Makerfield was 58.75% on Thursday. That's up from 52.50% in the 2024 general election. Higher turnouts in by-elections are atypical.

This by-election was hotly contested but in the end it wasn't even close. Burnham got 54.81% of the vote while Robert Kenyon of Farage's Reform UK received 34.51%. Analysts described the result as seismic.

A big win for Burnham - we are in for a lively few days and weeks

Andy Burnham couldn’t have hoped for a better result than this. He’s won and won big time. Granted, this is a seat that has elected Labour MPs for yonks, but just a matter of weeks ago, at the local elections, Reform UK were dominant here. So he can make an argument that in the tussle of our time in politics — between the incumbent party of government, Labour and the insurgent party Reform UK, he is a proven winner. [ ... ] And how does the Labour Party respond to his win? Backbenchers, the cabinet? Is there a stepping up in calls for the prime minister to quit? We are in for a lively few days and weeks ahead.

I love watching constituency results being announced in UK elections. Here is how BBC viewers saw the announcement in Makerfield.

By-elections attract colorful fringe candidates. As the totals were being read out, Andy was in between a candidate known as Lord Binface and an independent animal rights activist named Rob Pownall who was wearing a fox costume.

Makerfield, with a population similar to that of Green Bay in Wisconsin, has likely changed the course of British political history.

[memesforfiends]

Watching the Gorton and Denton by-election take place tomorrow is going to be something akin to a major sporting event in my household.

[shelikesthosefunnypeople]

Labour please get your shit together for the love of god 😑

[generalelectionmusings]

Labour loses TWO by-election seats to Tories with 25+ point vote fall in each

Falls and losses define night for Starmer’s drab party as lack of substance and opposition bite, with Labour gains limited to retaking from

[holymolyyikes]

dropping some context for people who don't know. nigel farage is the guy leading the reform party in the uk, which is a far-right anti-immigration party currently leading in the polls to a frankly silly extent. anyhoo he's in the midst of a big corruption scandal - undisclosed funds, all that, look it up - and also the general scandal of being annoying. his plan to fight this is to resign as MP (a Member of Parliament, representing their constituency (location) for a party (they may be independent) and run a by-election, meaning they have another election to determine their MP, of which he is running. the goal here is to theoretically consolidate power - if he gets voted in, he gets to say (with how much legitimacy is something you have to decide) 'the people represent me, i am the rightful MP of my constituency and have the democratic mandate and blah blah blah'. this is annoying because by-elections cost a lot of money, that the taxpayers (the constituency he is running in) have to pay for so he can do his little consolidating power ritual.

all the major (and less major, like restore) parties - Labour, Conserva(tories), Greens, Lib Dems, and so on are not running a candidate so as not to legitimise the by-election. who IS running is 'count binface', a joke candidate (these are quite common in the UK because the cost to be a political entity is a lot lower) with a fair amount of buzz, and as expected, laughable policies like 'build one affordable house'. he is also the most well-known figure running against farage by far, and remember farage is dealing with a scandal and the political cost of causing this stupid by-election. here's hoping count binface wins!

[tomorrowusa]

« We are a democratic country - I don't want us to be like the United States. »

— UK voter Norman Prior quoted by the Manchester Evening News (archived) after attending a forum of candidates standing in Thursday's by-election in the constituency of Makerfield.

Thanks to Donald Trump, the United States is now held up as an international model of what not to be like. This offhanded comment by a UK voter is yet another example of how other countries wish to avoid becoming like us.

I was reading about Makerfield because it is apparently the center of the British political universe this week.

Andy Burnham, currently the popular mayor of Greater Manchester, is the Labour candidate in this by-election. If he's elected, he will almost certainly challenge Keir Starmer for leadership of the Labour Party. Because Labour has a huge majority in Parliament, Burnham would become prime minister if he wins the challenge.

POLITICO has a simple interactive guide showing the steps Andy Burnham must go through to become prime minister. It starts with Thursday's by-election in Makerfield.

How to become Britain’s next prime minister

A lot more on Burnham later this week. But for Americans who are not familiar with him, this is an extract from a 2025 profile of Andy Burnham in The New Statesman.

Since returning to Manchester in 2017, however, Burnham’s politics have taken a clear leftward turn to what we might call today’s “Burnhamism” or, as he prefers it, “Manchesterism”. [ ... ] Burnham describes his “Manchesterism” as neither Blue Labour nor soft left, Blairite nor Brownite, but a form of consensual, business-friendly socialism that seeks to retake public control of all essential services, from housing to transport, in order to make life “doable” for those trapped in the insecure world of Britain’s outsourced Serco economy. Such radical change is necessary, Burnham argues, to bring back the kind of social mobility he and his generation once enjoyed, whose foundation, he believes, was the public provision of life’s essentials. This leftist vision is now winning admiring glances from erstwhile colleagues in London, particularly when coupled with Manchester’s booming economy.

If the US had a president like Andy Burnham rather than the orange pathogen we now have, the country would be an object of emulation rather than derision.