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NEW🚨: Andy Burnham reportedly asked 26 MPs if they’d give their seat up before asking Josh Simmons.

If you vote for a man when he’s basically going to be appointed prime minister you’re basically voting to not have an MP. You think he’s going to care about your missing benefits payments when he has to be negotiating a trade deal or visiting the site of the latest atrocity?

NEW 🚨: Makerfield voted 65% Brexit, 68% Christian seat that ranks Prime Reform territory. ⚠️➡️🇬🇧 If they throw the kitchen sink into it it will be a record %

@DPJHodges Pretty simple really. VOTE Reform, kick Labour OUT! x.com/Alexarmstrong/…

@DPJHodges Vote reform get Labour out, let’s face it if they win, what will Labour do 😂

Still not entirely clear what Nigel Farage's message is going to be in Makerfield. Having spent the past month saying to everyone who will listen "Vote Reform to get rid of Starmer!!!" how does he now say "Vote Reform to save Starmer!!!".

The Labour Party is full of corbynites, it was inevitable this would happen at some point. Labour was finished years ago.

🔔 East Ward (Dunstable Town Council, Bedfordshire) By-Election Result: ➡️ Ref: 885 (41.5%) - ELECTED 🌳 Con: 334 (15.6%) 🌹 Lab: 303 (14.2%) 🟢 Grn: 246 (11.5%) 👤 Ind: 142 (6.7%) 👤 Ind: 124 (5.8%) 🔶 LD: 101 (4.7%) Congratulations to Cllr Steven Collins

Thing about Andy Burnham is he ain’t Boris. His charisma won’t fool anyone. The good little people of Wigan won’t be rushing to hoist again Yoke of Servitude on their backs just because LP tell them to. Wigan has taste of freedom in its mouth, hard won, it’s for keeps.

Far too many people on this site seem to be just assuming that Burnham will win the Makerfield by-election?!?

Quick summary: Out of 400 Labour MPs, there isn't even ONE strong enough to topple the worst ever PM. So they call on a lefty lightweight who's already lost 2 leadership elections? If @UKLabour was a horse, they'd shoot it.

Let’s not forget what Andy Burnham and the Labour Party said and did to the Tory Government after the Leadership election. This included routinely demanding a General Election, because Rishi Sunak ‘had no mandate’.

What rubbish. Burnham’s whole pitch is that he’d be so different from Starmer. Try to keep up.

Burnham’s Manchester authority has been accused of suppressing a report into £1bn of controversial skyscraper loans. GMCA may have breached its “duty of candour” by failing to disclose a document for 13 months during a legal battle. Hmmmm!! 🤔 telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/…

When considering Andy Burnham as prime minister.. just remember his wife always seems to be perfectly placed to gain from any of his projects, firstly she was connected to the company that marketed all the failed clean air zone in Manchester, and now she sits on the board of Be.Ev, The car electric charging company that is winning contracts all over Manchester.. Cronyism at its finest..

The people of Makerfield deserve so much better than to be used and abused for the ego and career aspirations of a single person.

Ambition Before Accountability. The Pattern Burnham Hopes You've Forgotten Andy Burnham is positioning himself as the man who will change Labour for the better. The outsider who understands working people. The mayor who got things done. Before Westminster accepts that narrative it should examine the one thing Burnham has been consistent about throughout his career. When institutional failure has required a reckoning, he has commissioned a review, expressed anger and moved on. The reckoning never comes. Start with Mid Staffordshire. As Health Secretary from 2009 to 2010 Burnham personally recommended the trust for Foundation Trust status on the basis of four lines of information. Between 400 and 1,200 more patients died at Stafford Hospital than would have been expected. He and his predecessor Alan Johnson rejected 81 requests for a full public inquiry sitting in public across their combined tenures. The Francis Inquiry, which Burnham resisted, found systematic failures. David Nicholson, the NHS chief, told that inquiry that the level of detail Burnham required before recommending Foundation Trust status was surprising because usually ministers would expect much more. The HuffPost analysis published at the time concluded that looking at the witness statements it was difficult not to reach the conclusion that Burnham was guilty at best of incompetence, at worst of gross negligence. Burnham's response was to stand before Parliament and accuse the government of failing to respond adequately to the Francis Report. The report he never wanted. About the trust he had recommended. Then comes the Augusta inquiry. Operation Augusta was a Greater Manchester Police investigation into a grooming gang of up to 100 members who abused at least 57 children, some as young as 12. It was closed before Burnham's mayoralty. But when MPs wrote to him challenging him on the failures documented in the subsequent review, his response was described in Hansard as supine. He accepted the lack of resources argument without challenge despite Greater Manchester Police having gained over 1,000 additional officers in the years the operation ran. There was, in the words of MPs who examined his reply, no sense of injustice. The minutes from the GMP meeting where the decision to close Augusta was taken had disappeared. The minutes from Manchester City Council had disappeared at the same time. The IOPC subsequently concluded it could not determine who took the decision or why because records were missing and former employees were unwilling to cooperate. The Rochdale review he commissioned identified 96 men still deemed a potential risk to children who remained at large. Nobody has answered the question of what his mayoralty did to locate and prosecute them. Not Burnham. Not any of the MPs now championing him for Downing Street. The pattern is not accidental. Mid Staffordshire. Augusta. Rochdale. In every case the same structure. Institutional failure. Review commissioned. Parliamentary challenge answered inadequately. Unanswered questions buried under the next announcement. The man presenting himself as the antidote to institutional evasion has spent his entire career practicing it. Now he seeks to represent Makerfield. Reform is ahead in polling for the seat by 46 to 35 percent. Labour lost 20 councillors in Wigan last Thursday while Reform gained 23. The seat being handed to him is no longer the safe Labour fortress it once was. If he loses it his leadership bid ends before it begins. If he wins it the questions above will follow him to Westminster. The political class preparing to crown him has not required him to answer those questions once. It will not start now. Changing the leader without changing the culture of institutional evasion reproduces the problem with a more popular face attached. Britain has been here before. It knows how it ends.

Reform should hammer this home

Crazy bi election ahead.. Reform won all 8 seats up for grabs in the Makerfield area, at council elections last week in the old mining stomping ground of trade unionist Joe Gormley. The Labour stronghold was sunk by Reform ... Now career politicians seem to have turned Makerfield into a chessboard, using Makerfield as a stepping stone for Andy Burnham to get to number 10. If I lived there I'd see it as a career move for good old Andy, not necessarily a move to benefit my home ground who already had a Labour MP🤷 Burnham tried a couple of months ago to weasel his way back to Westminster but got shot down by Starmer in a vote of 8 to 1 at The NEC against him standing when he attempted to stand in Denton and Gorton. Clearly Starmer didn't want the formerly popular Labour figure back in the big house. Now Andy is at it again! This to me is nothing more than a shameful display of career before constituents from both sides of this Labour clash, as Andy just wants a chance to be PM and has turned into a hopeful vulture around the carcass of the fading And decidedly unpopular Kier Starmer . The good souls of this former active industrial heartland stripped bare by successive uniparty governments deserve better than this charade of self serving politics. Looks like the residents agree after a clean sweep at council level by Reform.

Are there any decent journalists left who will listen to Raja? Or can Andy Burnham just dodge proper scrutiny?

🚨FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Independent Press Gallery condemns Starmer government for banning foreign journalists and commentators from UK independentpressgallery.com/independent-pr…