Author Archives: Ciaran Morrissey

With Josh Simons’ resignation on Thursday, the starting gun on the 2026 Labour leadership election was (sort of) finally fired. 

There is now a theoretical, if muddy, path for Andy Burnham to re-enter parliament and become the next Prime Minister. The Greater Manchester Mayor, a vocal critic of Keir Starmer, has announced he plans to apply to stand in the by-election. Reform UK, buoyed by a second set of astonishing local election results, including across most of Greater Manchester, have responded in kind to say they plan to throw everything they can at the seat. The question being raised internally, and that will be no doubt raised externally too, is whether we should allow them a straight head-to-head or whether we should put up a candidate.

I think the answer for this contest, as it is in all contests, is that we should give people a chance to vote Liberal Democrat, and I will try and explain why. 

The first and most pressing point is that we do not own the voters and cannot tell them what to do on either a moral or a practical level. Just because someone voted Lib Dem in a previous general or local council election does not mean they are sitting waiting for instruction from us on how to vote in future. Voters are free to make up their own minds and vote how they wish. Us standing down will not guarantee that any votes go the way that we intend them to. Indeed, any Lib Dem votes in Greater Manchester would be tacit anti-Burnham votes anyway, and so there is an argument that in the absence of a Lib Dem candidate they would transfer to the next anti-Burnham candidate, in this case Reform.

But let’s say we could. Let’s say we could direct those voters to vote Labour and us standing down would lower the ceiling for them. Should we do it then? The answer is still no. Andy Burnham still has to win over a plurality of the rest of the voters in Makerfield. He is standing to be the Labour candidate, on a platform that is explicitly opposed to the current Labour prime minister. What is that campaign going to look like? Are Labour organisers and canvassers going to trawl around asking people to vote Labour to give Labour a bloody nose? Will he be allowed to criticise the government? The logistics of it seem totally incoherent. Labour HQ is not going to allow Andy Burnham to run on an anti-Starmer platform, so Burnham will be relying on voters reading between the lines, not taking the Labour campaign at its word, and hoping that he will topple the Prime Minister. This is a campaign relying on a wink and a prayer and Andy Burnham’s supposed personal popularity. It is not a serious, credible proposal that we should step aside for.