Two by-elections held on 19 June 2026 have redrawn, at least provisionally, the contours of British politics. In Makerfield, Andy Burnham — outgoing Mayor of Greater Manchester — defeated the Reform UK candidate in a contest widely treated as a referendum on Labour’s direction, winning a seat that Keir Starmer’s government had reason to fear losing. Burnham’s victory margin was substantial enough to generate immediate leadership speculation: he used his acceptance speech to demand that Labour take its “final chance to change,” a phrase that resonated far beyond Wigan. Multiple Labour MPs and at least one cabinet minister have since called publicly on Starmer to set a timetable for his departure. Meanwhile, in Aberdeen South and Arbroath, the Scottish Conservatives won their first Westminster by-election in Scotland since 1973, defeating the SNP in a result that Kemi Badenoch called a “historic message” to both Labour and the nationalists. Nigel Farage, for his part, attributed Reform’s Makerfield defeat to anti-Starmer tactical voting rather than any rejection of his party’s core message. The British political map is in motion.
The received wisdom
The dominant narrative on the centre-left is straightforward and not without merit. Burnham’s win proves that Labour can beat Reform at the ballot box when it fields a candidate with genuine working-class credibility, a record of delivery in office, and the willingness to speak directly to voters rather than through the managed language of government communications. Makerfield was the test case; Burnham passed it; Starmer, who has overseen a sustained collapse in polling since taking office, manifestly has not. The calls for Starmer to go are therefore not a coup — they are a recognition of political reality by MPs who face the electorate. Burnham represents something Labour urgently needs: a politician who combines progressive values with the instincts of a community mayor, someone who has actually built things, fixed transport networks, argued for homeless people at 2am outside Downing Street, and looked comfortable doing so. The question, under this reading, is how quickly and gracefully the transition can be managed before further damage is done.
A different read
The coronation narrative moves faster than the evidence supports, and the underlying story is considerably more interesting — and more alarming for anyone invested in stable British governance — than the leadership-contest framing allows.
Start with Burnham. His Makerfield performance is genuinely impressive. Henry Zeffman’s BBC analysis notes that Burnham is now the most obvious leadership contender, and the political logic is clean: he beat Reform in their own territory, he has a popular regional executive record, and he carries none of the ideological baggage that sank Corbyn or the managerial blandness that is sinking Starmer. But Burnham’s own victory speech contained the seed of the problem. He did not say “Labour is fine, it just needs different management.” He said the party had a “final chance to change” — a formulation Andy Burnham himself used explicitly — which implies a fundamental critique of what the party has become under Blairite and post-Blairite management. That is not an endorsement of a leadership swap; it is a demand for programmatic renewal, which is a much harder and slower thing.
The nature of that renewal is worth examining. Burnham’s political identity was forged in the post-industrial North, in places where community infrastructure — local NHS services, bus routes, social housing, physical civic buildings — matters more to people’s daily lives than the culture-war battles that animate Twitter and the commentariat. His politics is anti-technocratic in a very specific sense: he distrusts the managerialist tendency to replace local knowledge and relational politics with targets, metrics, and Whitehall-designed solutions delivered from above. In this respect, his critique of Starmer is not a left-wing critique in the traditional sense — it is a communitarian critique that would be recognisable to any One Nation Tory from 1965, or, for that matter, to any Burkean conservative interested in the health of organic social institutions. Farage’s claim that anti-Starmer voters handed Burnham his margin may be self-serving, but it is not implausible — and if true, it suggests that the Makerfield result reflects a generalised rejection of the current government rather than an endorsement of Burnhamite Labour.
The Scottish result complicates the picture further. The Scottish Conservatives winning Aberdeen South — their first Westminster by-election gain north of the border in over half a century — is not a blip. The SNP won its commanding position in Scottish politics partly through the failures of Scottish Labour and partly through the emotional energy of the 2014 independence referendum. Both of those tailwinds have weakened considerably. Scottish Labour has begun to recover ground. The SNP’s Holyrood government has accumulated the kind of competence-questions that inevitably attach to any party that has held power for nineteen years. Into that space, the Conservatives — under Badenoch’s sharper, less apologetic leadership — appear to have found some oxygen. Whether this translates beyond a single by-election is genuinely uncertain, but the structural conditions for a multi-party competitive Scotland, rather than a nationalist monoculture, are more present than they have been in a generation.
What ties these two results together is this: the British electorate is not moving left. It is moving away from incumbent managers of all stripes. Burnham won not by offering more progressive policy but by offering more authentic politics. The Conservatives won Scotland not by shifting leftward on devolution but by being credible critics of a government that had run out of ideas. Starmer faces a leadership clock that Labour MPs are now winding loudly in public, but the real problem is not Starmer’s personality — it is that the managerialist model of politics, in which professional politicians move metrics and communicate policy through careful media management, has exhausted its public credit on both sides of the border.
The irony is that the solution Burnham offers is essentially conservative in its temperament — local, relational, anti-managerial — delivered from within Labour. Whether the Labour Party as an institution is capable of internalising it, rather than simply swapping a face on the front of the same machine, is the central question of British politics for the next two years.
What to watch
Watch whether Starmer announces a departure timetable in the coming weeks or digs in — his public combativeness suggests he intends to fight, but the internal arithmetic may not support survival beyond the summer. Watch Burnham’s first major national policy speech: will it be fiscally credible, or will it consist of the kind of distributional promises that sound generous in a victory rally and terrify the OBR? Watch Scotland: the Aberdeen South result is the most significant Scottish Tory performance at Westminster in decades, and if the SNP’s polling decline continues, the 2029 election map looks very different from 2024. And watch Reform: Farage lost Makerfield but his characterisation of the result as an anti-Starmer protest rather than a pro-Burnham vote is exactly the framing he needs to keep his movement relevant through a Labour leadership transition.
— J