What Burnham’s northern fixation says about tomorrow

As Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership neared its end, an unassuming social club on the outskirts of a former mining town became the nerve centre for a reboot of the Labour Party. The Stubshaw Cross Community Club at the north-east of Ashton-in-Makerfield was home to Andy Burnham’s by-election campaign at the start of the summer.

The choice of a traditional Labour club as his campaign headquarters illustrated what the then-mayor of Greater Manchester wished to achieve as he sought more than just the Makerfield seat. It represented what would soon become his Labour Party getting back to its grassroots, reconnecting with voters who have traditionally been the core of its electoral coalition but abandoned it in their droves at the local elections just weeks before.

The club is a far cry from Islington’s now-lost Granita restaurant, where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were said to have struck a gentleman’s agreement about leadership and set about rebuilding the Labour Party in their image in 1994.

“He does politics and he does symbolism very well”, Patrick Hurley, Labour MP for fellow North West constituency Southport, said of Mr Burnham’s campaign base.

“Running the most consequential by-election campaign for the past 100 years out of the hatch of a Labour club in Lancashire — that just speaks volumes, and it speaks volumes to where the Labour Party goes next,” he told The Independent.

“It speaks volumes to the fact that under Andy, we’ve got our groove back a little bit. The people who we were set up as a political party and a movement to advocate for and to work on behalf of, I think they realise that.”

Mr Burnham used his first week in office to announce a series of policies designed to offer “breathing space” for people and hospitality businesses, such as the Stubshaw club, from the cost of living crisis — a move which has unsurprisingly been welcomed by the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Polling has suggested that the party is enjoying something of a ‘Burnham bounce’ as well, narrowing the gap with Reform to two points in More in Common’s latest figures. The new prime minister, who has set out his stall to “rewire Britain” and move power out of the nation’s capital to its regions as he promises the most significant political change for almost half a century, has seen his own personal approval rating rise to plus 13 — higher than Sir Keir’s ever was.

“What Andy has put his finger on is that you can’t just manage a country from Westminster and Whitehall”, Mr Hurley said. “You can’t just sign a bit of paper in your office in Downing Street and suddenly the country has changed for the better. It’s painstaking hard work from the grassroots up.” The Stubshaw Cross club is the representation of those grassroots, according to Mr Hurley, and he believes Mr Burnham is far more comfortable among them — and understands them better — than his predecessor.

He said: “One of his campaign slogans in Makerfield was ‘Things will get better if we stick together’.

“It pinpointed to me the difference between Andy’s approach and the approach of Labour governments over the past 30 years.

“In ‘97, the slogan was ‘Things can only get better’. There’s a sense there that things are going to get better, there is going to be this guiding hand of progress whether you like it or not, and all you need to do, the working class of the Midlands and the North, is sit back and progress will be done to you.

“Whereas Andy’s vision of things getting better is very much contingent on the collective, very much contingent on saying things will get better if we stick together.”

A northern cabinet and a northern outpost”The London set have run it for too long”, Mr Burnham said of his party in an interview with The Observer during his by-election campaign. He has since, perhaps pointedly, appointed a cabinet stacked with MPs from Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Yorkshire. About Mr Burnham’s overtly northern reset of the Labour Party, Liverpool City Region mayor and close friend of the prime minister Steve Rotheram told The Independent earlier this month: “There’s no doubt about it — it’ll wind some people up.”

But the new leader is only utilising the “broad church” on which Labour prides itself, according to his former mayoral colleague. “It doesn’t matter whether you’ve left school at 16 with few formal qualifications or you’ve been lucky enough to go to Oxbridge,” he said. “The party should attract everybody if they have the same values.

“Andy’s got Labour values. He wants the best for people and he wants the country to prosper, but he wants to take people with him and tackle some of the thorny issues.”

Central to his northern revolution is Number 10 North — the prime minister’s Manchester outpost, which he has said will be the “conduit” through which he redistributes power across the UK.