Makerfield by-election shapes up as a Starmer-future referendum as Andy Burnham faces Reform UK on 18 June

A by-election in a single northern English market town has become the immediate test of Keir Starmer's premiership. Voters in Ashton-in-Makerfield will pick between Andy Burnham -- the popular Mayor of Manchester running for Labour after MP Josh Simons' surprise late-February resignation opened the seat -- and Reform UK's Robert Kenyon on 18 June, Al Jazeera reported. Burnham, three times re-elected as Manchester mayor and nicknamed "King of the North," would have a route to Parliament and a potential challenge to Starmer if he wins; Reform has promised to "throw everything" at the election to block his path.

Makerfield has been a safe Labour seat since its creation in 1983, but the political ground has moved underneath that record: Labour lost all eight of its local council seats in the constituency to Reform in May's local elections. Sir John Curtice, the UK's best-known polling academic, told Al Jazeera the two broad political blocs are now level. "If you take the combined progressive parties and the combined right-leaning parties, they are broadly level," he said. The exception is Burnham personally. "Burnham is very popular among the 2024 voters," Curtice said, referring to those who delivered Labour's overwhelming majority two years ago. "If you take a poll of that group with and without Burnham's name on it, the difference is around 9 percent, which might just prove enough to win Ashton," he added, while cautioning the election was still some way off.

Reform faces a complication of its own. The newly established far-right Restore Party, which received the endorsement of US-based tech billionaire Elon Musk at the weekend, is polling around 7 percent in Ashton -- "the 7 percent Reform really need," Curtice said. The Conservative Party, which selected Michael Winstanley as its candidate, has been left struggling for relevance after 14 years in power.

Local voices captured the volatility. Tracy Walker, 61, who works in a charity shop, said: "I want Andy Burnham. ... I think we should give him a go. He's from the north," contrasting Burnham with the long line of premiers from the south. She referenced the National Executive Council's earlier move to block him from a nearby by-election in February: "I think they need to give him a break." Peter Thompson, 78, who runs a vinyl record shop, said he would vote Reform. "I'm 78, and all my voting life, there's only been two parties running this country, Labour and Conservative. Just look around now at what the state of the country's in. It needs a change," he said. "All the people in my age group who I drink with feel the same. We want a change. It's not desperate [support for] Reform. ... It's against the establishment." Edna Conliff, 84, said she would vote Burnham because "he's local, very local. And he's done such a lot for Manchester while he's been there."

A local activist who identified himself only as Malcolm, handing out anti-Reform leaflets in the town centre, traced the disillusionment to the Conservative austerity of the 2010s. "Austerity has really hammered Ashton, and there's a lot more inequality. People are struggling more," he said. "People are angry, and they're diverting it towards migrants. People are angry about austerity and everything else, and what Reform are cleverly doing is saying it's migrants' fault." Manchester University political scientist Rob Ford wrote on his blog last week that Makerfield was best understood as "a place in-between," an "archipelago of separate and often poorly connected towns" that feel only partly like Manchester or nearby Wigan, partly like Merseyside, partly like Lancashire. Resident Peter Thompson put the constituency's stakes more plainly: the voters of Makerfield, he said, were the country's "kingmakers or, given Burnham's nickname, the king destroyers."