Makerfield by-election: Has Andy Burnham united the left?
6/19/202634 min
It wasn’t so close after all. Andy Burnham achieved 9,241 votes more than the second place Reform candidate, Robert Kenyon. Even talk of Restore Britain stealing votes from Reform mattered little in the end. The reality of the Makerfield by-election is it’s a thumping win for Labour’s Andy Burnham, and a disappointing night for Nigel Farage, whose attempts to dial up division in recent weeks didn’t pay off.
In this bonus episode we react to this week’s two Westminster by-elections where voters in Makerfield and Aberdeen South went to the polls. The latter is an interesting case study of single issue campaigning and a sign of a possible Tory revival in Scotland. We also reveal what our advice to Andy Burnham would be as efforts to oust Keir Starmer from No 10 heat up.
Find the best clips from the podcast and more from Helen and Cleo on the show's Instagram page here.
This podcast is part of The Independent Podcast Network and is produced in association with Next Chapter Studios
Executive Producers: Olivia Foster and Carrie Rose
Producer: Sam Durham
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAndy Burnham· Soundbite0:00
And I do hereby declare that Andy Burnham is duly elected. Thank you.
Helen MacNamara· Host0:04
[cheering] There Andy Burnham is between a bin and a fox. You've got to love British politics. So welcome to In the Room. We're gonna talk a bit about what we think we've learned from the by-elections last night, not just Makerfield, which we've been banging on about for weeks collectively, but also Aberdeen South. There's two quite interesting by-elections happened last night in two seats where only six weeks ago the same electorate effectively voted really differently for Reform. Uh, so perhaps the death of two-party politics has been proclaimed a bit too early. I've got my own in-house guru on all things elections. So Cleo, where should we start?
Cleo Watson· Host0:44
So it's been a stonking, stonking win for Andy Burnham, and I know that everybody wants to get into the juice of Makerfield, but we're just gonna put that juice on hold just for a minute because I want to talk about a couple of other by-elections first. And I'd like to start with Aberdeen South, which, you know, being terrible Westminster bubble types, we've perhaps neglected a little bit, but I think it's really worth discussing.
Helen MacNamara· Host1:06
Do you wanna remind us why we have a by-election in Aberdeen South at all?
Cleo Watson· Host1:09
Yes, that is because Stephen Flynn, who was the SNP Westminster leader, won a seat in Holyrood, uh, last month. Yes, last month, May. And so you can't hold two seats at once, and so that seat was vacated. And the Conservatives threw the kitchen sink at Aberdeen South,