Pip: There's a by-election in Makerfield on June 18th, and apparently the entire future of the Labour Party has been scheduled to attend.

Mara: lefroggy01 has been working through exactly that question — what the Makerfield result means for Labour's survival, and what economic tools a future Labour leadership would actually need to govern. Let's start with the by-election itself and the longer crisis it's exposing.

Whether Burnham Can Save Labour — or Anyone Can

Pip: The question this editorial puts on the table is not really whether Andy Burnham wins on June 18th. It's whether winning would even be enough — whether Labour as currently constituted can be remade into something its former voters would actually return to.

Mara: The post frames the stakes directly: "This really seems like a last chance for Labour. If a local lad with a commitment to changing Labour is unable to persuade those who voted Reform in the local elections to return to voting Labour in a Westminster by-election then it seems very likely that Reform will emerge as the largest party in the 2029 general elections."

Pip: So the by-election is functioning as a stress test. Not just of Burnham personally, but of whether the Labour brand still has any purchase in a constituency it held for four decades.

Mara: The post walks through the numbers. Makerfield voted 64% to Leave in 2016. Labour's vote share, which sat at 60% under Corbyn in 2017, dropped to 45% in 2019 and stayed there in 2024. In this May's local elections, multiple wards flipped to Reform entirely.

Pip: Burnham is described as a local lad who genuinely lives in the constituency — which is presumably an advantage over most politicians, who tend to live inside their own careers.

Mara: The editorial is measured about him, though. It notes he has a tendency toward accommodation — accepting Reeves' fiscal rules under pressure, avoiding clear positions on Gaza and NATO. The question it keeps returning to is whether he has the mettle to actually transform the party.

Pip: And then the piece pivots somewhere unexpected — into economic architecture.

Mara: Right, and this is where it gets substantive. The argument is that whoever leads Labour in the second half of 2026 will face a wage-price spiral driven by the Iran and Ukraine wars. The post traces how inflation policy became the Bank of England's problem under Gordon Brown in 1998 — Burnham's own political mentor — and how the Phillips curve logic, which treats inflation by creating unemployment, got embedded so deeply it now looks like the only available tool.

Pip: The post is careful to say it isn't.

Mara: Exactly. The alternative it proposes is managing the distributional conflict directly — "through coordinated wage bargaining, sector-level incomes agreements, excess-profit levies on firms that use inflationary cover to expand margins." The post traces attempts at this in the 1970s: the Wilson government's In Place of Strife proposals, the tripartite talks, the Bullock Commission on board-level worker representation — all of which collapsed or were blocked before the monetarist turn of 1979 closed off that path.

Pip: So the argument is that the institutional settlement we have now isn't a technical fact — it's a political choice that can be unmade.

Mara: That's the editorial's closing challenge: whether a Labour Party under Burnham would be willing to make that argument openly, and build the policy architecture to back it up. If not, the post's conclusion is straightforward — Reform wins in 2029.

Pip: The through-line here is that the June 18th result is a data point, not a verdict — the harder test comes when the economic shocks actually land.

Mara: And whether Labour has the institutional imagination to respond to them differently than it did in the 1970s, or than Brown did in 1997. That's the question worth watching.