MAKERFIELD DRAGS BRITAIN INTO BURNHAM'S BODY BAG

In the damp, dispirited terraces of Makerfield, where the ghosts of pitheads still murmur grievances to the wind, one beheld last night a spectacle as quintessentially British as warm beer and cold feet: a by-election. 

Andy Burnham, that genial Mancunian mayor who styles himself the King of the North (a title one suspects he awarded after a particularly successful session with the focus groups), sauntered into Parliament with 24,927 votes—54.8% of the turnout, no less. Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon trailed some 9,231 votes behind, a result greeted in certain quarters with the sort of hollow cheer usually reserved for a football team that has avoided relegation by the skin of its teeth. Turnout, at a giddy 58.8%, represented the highest by-election participation since the days when Maggie was still terrifying the unions. One almost expected bunting. 

Yet beneath the modest statistical uplift lurks the true story of our benighted polity: voter apathy so profound it makes a Trappist monk look like a gossip. Millions of eligible souls simply could not be roused from their sofas, even with the prospect of sending a message to the Westminster circus. They stayed home, these noble abstainers, presumably to binge-watch box sets or contemplate the rising cost of central heating while muttering that “they’re all the same.” One feels a certain dry admiration for their consistency. At least they are reliably useless. 

This, dear reader, is where the Australian model beckons like a stern but fair-minded relative. Compulsory voting. Yes, the very notion sends shudders through the libertarian wing—those delicate flowers who prize their 'freedom' to do nothing above all else. But imagine it: every citizen frog-marched to the polling station under pain of a modest fine. The ballot boxes would overflow not merely with ticked boxes but with the glorious effluvia of a truly engaged electorate. Millions of comedic cocks and balls, exquisitely rendered in biro. Crude caricatures of party leaders. Shopping lists. The occasional heartfelt poem about the price of bread. Democracy, in short, laid gloriously bare. Far better this riot of vulgar self-expression than the silent, sullen void we currently endure. At least the nation would be heard, even if in the language of the urinal wall. 

The centre-right, meanwhile, continues its time-honoured tradition of self-immolation. Conservatives scraped a pitiful 997 votes. The right-wing vote, such as it is, splinters like a cheap wine glass at a wake: Reform here, some Restorationist splinter there, a few lonely Lib Dems wandering in the wilderness. One pictures a dozen well-meaning chaps in tweed arguing over doctrinal purity while Labour’s machine simply hoovers up the disaffected. It is less a political strategy than performance art for masochists. If the right wishes to win again, it might consider ceasing to treat electoral politics as an exercise in purist fragmentation. But old habits, like bad hangovers, die hard. 

And what of the victor? Burnham, the change candidate who promises—oh, how he promises—to be the final chance for Labour to alter course. The irony is thicker than a Wigan pie crust. Here is a man who has long positioned himself as the authentic voice of the North, the antidote to metropolitan slickness, the fellow who actually gets the post-industrial heartlands. Yet one suspects the change he delivers will be largely cosmetic: fresh slogans, perhaps a more northern accent in the dispatch box, but the same creaking machinery of high taxes, open borders, net zero zealotry, and cultural lectures from people who have never changed a fuse. No fundamental reckoning with the failures that produced Reform’s strong showing. No serious course correction. Just more of the same, served with a side order of regional pride. 

One watches the prospect of Prime Minister Burnham with the queasy fascination of a man observing an oncoming bus. The country, already wearied by one set of managerial progressives, may soon exchange them for another who knows the words to “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” The blind Labour voters—those tribal loyalists who would support a lamp-post if it carried the rose—will cheer. The apathetic will continue not voting. And the rest of us will be left pondering whether compulsory voting, cock-and-ball doodles and all, might at least force the polity into something resembling honest confrontation with itself. 

Makerfield has spoken, after a fashion. The question is whether anyone in Westminster is capable of listening through the fog of their own complacency. One rather doubts it. The circus rolls on.

THE PLUCKY PLUMBER & THE PROFESSIONAL DRIP

In the damp, dog-eared corners of British public life, where politics has long since traded the honest sweat of the workshop for the synthetic sheen of the focus group, one occasionally stumbles upon a figure so refreshingly unvarnished that he seems to have wandered in from an Ealing comedy that somehow survived the Blair era. Enter Robert Kenyon, plumber, Army Reservist, ex-NHS hand, and now Reform UK’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election. A man who, according to his supporters, has already weathered the ritual scourging of modern democracy: those awkward social media posts from yesteryear, exhumed and brandished like medieval relics by the righteous. Cancel culture, they call it. More like the political equivalent of your mother finding your teenage diary and reading it aloud at Christmas.

One looks at Kenyon—rifle in hand in his reservist uniform, the very picture of a man who has fixed boilers and served Queen and country—and feels a pang of nostalgia for the species of politician that Britain once produced without thinking. The Mr Smith Goes to Westminster type: local, rooted, slightly rumpled, possessed of the dangerous notion that representing one’s neighbours might involve understanding how their drains work and what time the buses actually run. These were men (and occasionally women) who had done something before they did politics. They had calluses, not just position papers. They had met a payroll, or missed one. They knew the price of a pint and the weight of a grievance.

Alas, that sturdy breed has largely been culled. In its place we have the professional politician: smooth as a Teflon-coated conscience, fluent in the dialect of the think-tank, and about as connected to the daily realities of Makerfield as a management consultant is to the concept of honest toil. They glide from student union to special adviser to safe seat with the effortless grace of a ballroom dancer who has never had to worry about the electricity bill. Their idea of working-class authenticity is remembering to drop their aitches during the local radio interview.

And here lies the deeper irony, for while we in Britain lament the disappearance of the authentic local candidate, it has somehow become even harder to find one across the Atlantic. America, that great noisy republic once famed for sending farmers, shopkeepers, and the odd war hero to Washington, now finds itself largely governed by a different sort. The bored urban housewife who decamped to the countryside for 'the lifestyle' discovered that parish council seats were available, and decided public service would make an amusing hobby between Pilates and sourcing the right shade of Farrow & Ball for the guest cottage. One pictures her arriving at the town meeting with a reusable coffee cup and a sheaf of notes about 'community cohesion', while the local mechanic quietly wonders who will fix the potholes that have been swallowing his customers’ suspensions since the last ice age.

Britain has not quite sunk to that level of genteel amateurism, though we are trying our best. Our own version tends toward the career activist or the quangocrat who has spent decades being paid by the taxpayer to worry about the taxpayer. Andy Burnham, the opponent in this particular bout, is a polished specimen of the breed: telegenic, articulate, the sort of man who can deliver a soundbite about 'levelling up' without once betraying the suspicion that he knows what a spirit level actually looks like. He has the professional politician’s greatest gift: the ability to look deeply concerned about problems he helped create, or at the very least, failed to notice until the focus groups rang the alarm.

Against this backdrop, Robert Kenyon stands as a minor miracle of the sort that gives one cautious, qualified hope. Not because he is perfect—perfection in politics is usually the first warning sign of a coming tyranny—but because he is gloriously, defiantly imperfect in all the right ways. A man who has wrenched pipes and worn the uniform. Someone who might, just possibly, view a constituent’s complaint about housing or jobs through the prism of lived experience rather than the latest briefing paper from the Institute for Sounding Plausible. One hopes his working-class credentials prove more durable than the inevitable barrage of metropolitan sneers that will come his way. The commentariat will no doubt dismiss him as 'populist', that favourite slur of people who believe democracy should be restricted to those with the correct opinions and the right accent.

Whether the voters of Makerfield will choose the plumber over the professional remains to be seen. But in an age when politics has become a branch of performance art for the credentialed classes, the mere presence of a candidate who looks like he could unblock your sink while discussing defence procurement is something approaching revolutionary. It may not be Mr Smith Goes to Washington. But in today’s Britain, Mr Kenyon Goes to the By-Election feels like the closest thing we have to a plot worth following. One can only hope the audience still has the good sense to cheer for the man with the wrench rather than the man with the script.

STARMER'S DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP

In the grand tradition of British political theatre, where the appearance of doing something must always substitute for the substance of achieving anything, Sir Keir Starmer has alighted upon his masterstroke. With the quiet desperation of a man who has watched his poll numbers sink faster than a lead balloon at a children’s party, the Prime Minister has announced that the nation’s under-16s shall be banned from social media. Age verification, he assures us, will be rigorous. Facial scans, presumably. One pictures the scene: some spotty adolescent, hormones raging, forced to present his acne-ridden visage to the benevolent gaze of the state before being permitted to post a meme. The nanny state has rarely looked so literal, or so creepily intimate.

This is not governance; this is the reflex of the control freak who, having failed at every tangible responsibility of office, decides instead to police the daydreams of the young. While Britain’s housing stock moulders, while NHS waiting lists stretch into the next geological epoch, while schools limp along on goodwill and sellotape, and while the streets exhibit all the civic order of a particularly unambitious riot, Starmer has fixed his beady eye on the real enemy: TikTok. It is the sort of bold, decisive leadership that makes one wonder whether the man ever met a problem he couldn’t solve by inventing a new form of paperwork and a fresh layer of bureaucracy.

The timing, of course, is pure coincidence. The Makerfield by-election looms like an awkward family obligation, and what better way to distract the punters than by wrapping oneself in the flag of concerned parenthood? Starmer, that great moralist, has discovered that social media can be addictive and occasionally ghastly. One gasps at the originality. Next he will reveal, with furrowed brow and trembling voice, that chips contain calories and that rain is, on balance, somewhat wet. The consultation—over 100,000 responses, 90% of parents in favour—sounds impressive until one remembers that frightened parents will endorse almost any measure that promises to keep their offspring from becoming the next cautionary tale on the evening news. Politicians have always been adept at harvesting parental anxiety; Starmer merely does it with the added frisson of biometric data collection.

Let us be clear about the man. Keir Starmer is not a bumbling incompetent who means well. That would be forgivable, even endearing in a peculiarly British way. No, he is something rather nastier: a spiteful authoritarian with the soul of a middle-management enforcer who has finally reached the top floor. Having spent years presenting himself as the reasonable, suit-wearing antidote to the excesses of his predecessors, he now reveals the iron fist inside the Islington gauntlet. Ban this. Regulate that. Scan the faces of children because the state knows best. One half expects him to announce that teenagers will henceforth require a licence, countersigned by two responsible adults and a representative of the local constabulary, before being allowed to experience unmediated boredom.

The policy itself is a masterpiece of performative futility. Australia tried something similar; the results, like most Australian exports, have proven noisy but of mixed nutritional value. Social media does indeed harbour predators, pedlars of nonsense, and algorithms engineered by people who understand dopamine the way a medieval torturer understood joints. Yet the notion that the British state—currently incapable of deporting failed asylum seekers or keeping the trains roughly on time—will elegantly thread the needle between protection and surveillance is the sort of touching faith one usually associates with children or cult members. The same government that cannot house its citizens or heal its sick now proposes to become the final arbiter of what the young may see and say. The mind boggles at the sheer cheek of it.

There is, naturally, a deeper comedy here. Starmer’s Labour Party, once the tribune of the working class, has become the party of the lecturer, the diversity officer, and the anxious metropolitan parent who wants the state to perform the parenting they find too exhausting. The working-class child in a post-industrial town, already failed by schools that teach everything except how to read, will now be shielded from the algorithmic wasteland by facial recognition software administered by the same people who turned those schools into therapeutic playgrounds. It would be satire if it were not already policy.

One admires the sheer brass neck required to stand before a nation groaning under the weight of Labour’s failures and declare that the urgent priority is banning Jimmy from scrolling. It is as though a doctor, having botched the surgery, lost the patient’s notes, and set fire to the waiting room, should then gravely inform the relatives that the real problem was the patient’s choice of reading material. The sheer spite of it: when your record on housing, health, education, and public order lies in ruins, attack the one area where private enterprise has undeniably created problems—and do so in a manner that expands state power. Authoritarianism dressed as compassion is the oldest trick in the progressive wardrobe, but Starmer wears it with the self-satisfaction of a man who believes his own press releases.

Future historians, thumbing through the records of this unhappy period, will pause at Starmer’s digital crusade and recognise it for what it was: not leadership, but displacement activity by a man who discovered that actually running the country was rather harder than criticising those who tried. In the meantime, the rest of us are left to contemplate the exquisite irony of an administration that cannot secure the borders or the balance sheets now proposing to secure the smartphones of the young. One almost pities the man. Almost. But then one remembers the facial scans, the by-election timing, and the unctuous certainty, and pity evaporates like dew under the withering gaze of reality.

Keir Starmer: saviour of the nation’s timelines, scourge of the nation’s problems. A dictator for our times, not with jackboots but with login screens and a pious expression. God save us from men who know what is best for other people’s children.