The resignations from the heart of government this week will only deepen the anti-Westminster mood ahead of the Makerfield byelection. The departure of the defence secretary, John Healey, and his deputy illustrates that Sir Keir Starmer’s problem is not just his unpopularity. It is that his claim to competence is being challenged from the inside. When ministers resign saying that the government is too timid and its politics largely performative, they are not just criticising decisions. They are arguing for a different leader.

Step forward Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor and Labour candidate in the most consequential byelection for decades. Mr Burnham has not disguised his leadership ambitions if he wins the seat and enters parliament. His sales pitch is that he is Labour-but-not-this-Labour. He sells himself as a party insider who is outside Westminster; an experienced politician, but not one involved in the present governing mess. He styles himself as plausibly loyal but interestingly dissident.

The country would benefit from Mr Burnham’s return to parliament. His radicalism on constitutional reform, electoral reform, public control and spending would widen Labour’s debate in a good and serious way. Sir Keir says governing is about trade-offs, and those outside it offer just easy solutions. But fiscal rules are political choices, not natural laws. The real choice is between reassuring the Treasury and reassuring the country.

The awful scenes of violent thuggery in Northern Ireland are the political weather in which Makerfield votes. Reform UK’s Nigel Farage and Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe are conduits for a politics of paranoia and racialised resentment in which immigration is cast as an “invasion”. It should not be hard to condemn groups of masked men burning families out of their homes. Yet their responses have been evasive: less a reckoning with bigotry and intimidation than an effort to preserve the grievance politics that feeds it.

The question in Makerfield is not simply whether Labour can hang on to a working-class seat. It is whether Labour still knows how to talk to such a place. Makerfield’s coalmining heyday is far behind it. The Lancashire pits that George Orwell once wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier have long closed, with warehouses and logistics hubs replacing them. Its voters are not only factory workers or trade union members. They are carers, tradespeople, the self-employed and families living with ill health. Many work hard but do not feel secure.

That is why the vote next week is a test of Burnhamism – and one that Labour cannot afford to fail. It asks whether a more rooted, regional, public-service politics can reach people whose lives are precarious but who do not necessarily think of themselves as “workers” in the old Labour sense.

Above all, Makerfield asks whether Labour can recover the language of change in places where Reform and Restore have claimed the language of anger. Mr Burnham’s campaign is not just a personal comeback. It is an argument that Labour can beat the populist right by becoming more emotionally legible while fighting for better public services and a fairer deal for voters. This byelection is crucially both local and national: it is a constituency contest; a leadership dry run; and a test of whether Labour still knows how to speak to voters who once made it a mass party.

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