Andy Burnham - how can this be allowed?

The constituents of Makerfield are being used as pawns!

A vote was made, an MP voted in and now they think another person can just be substituted.

How bloody dare this Government! With every passing day Labour evidence how totally inept they are. They had 14 yrs to prepare for Government.

But what can you expect of a Government of ex civil servants….. have never lived in the real world, held down a proper job and been yes men to the EU for 40 years. Carrying out EU instructions, nothing more.

They might get a bloody nose here and justifiably so!

Oh for goodness sake, how many times do people have to say that the OP knows exactly how the political system works!

What the OP is saying is that Andy Burnham has a high chance of being voted in to be the next PM if he challenges Starmer, but this could only happen after Burnham is elected an MP by the people of Makerfield. Therefore, in essence, the people of Makerfield will highly likely be voting in the next leader, if he wins there. Got it now?

It's a conspiracy! Infamy, Infamy...They've all got it In For Me!

Dear oh dear!

That’s the process but it’s not necessarily the reality for some people. Some people think “ I want Joe Bloggs to be PM so I’ll vote for that party cos I know the more seats his party wins the more likely he’ll become PM” .

You don't think political parties of all stripes seek to influence the electorate via sites such as this? Oh, sweet summer child.

Makerfield is my constituency. I’m gutted about this. Josh Simons has been an excellent MP and whilst I quite like Burnham, I don’t think he’s going win. Our area was battered by Reform in the local elections and I genuinely think we’re going to lose a good MP to a Reform candidate and quite likely end up with a Reform mayor of Manchester.

What i find odd from someone who takes an outside look at politics is that the labour party, that bastion of morality and doing the right thing outside of power, quickly turns into the tory party when in power. However, the tories do everything in secret and without making themselves look sleazy (in regards to party back stabbing anyway)

If you recall Blair promised to stand down for Brown who put him in power and only did so when the shit was about to hit the fan and the gloss had worn off.

One only has to wonder why someone would walk.away from a job that pays £100k a year after years of working to get there to give the job to someone else.

To the OP, it happens all the time.
When Harold Wilson resigned, we automatically had James Callaghan.
When Thatcher resigned we had John Major.
When Tony Blair resigned we had Gordon Brown.
When Boris Johnson resigned we got Liz Truss, and when she resigned Rishi Sunak.
I am not sure of all the voting procedure, as this has changed over the years, and different from Labour to Conservative.
However, I think we can agree that in each case the party leader, aka the then Prime Minister was chosen by a select few.
In the case of the conservatives, the parliamentary MPs whittled the candidates down to two, of which the party members decided (Liz Truss). In the case of Rishi Sunak, I am not sure there was even a membership vote.

I'm sure they will. So will Labour.

All hype. My mother lives in Old Trafford-she thinks he is a prick and so do many others.

He is just a wind bag, a blow hard, who makes a big puff of fuck all and persuades the unthinking that he has been a big success.

Tin foil hat always prepped and ready to go 😵‍💫

And that's fair enough, but it's not undemocratic. It's an incredibly basic piece of information that MPs not completing a full term is common. By-elections often punish incumbent parties if they've done something the electorate don't like rather than tragically died in office. Albeit usually that's sleaze, criminal offences or similar... but any Makerfield voters who don't like it can have their say.

Well, as PPs have said, if he won he'd just be an MP until and if he won a leadership challenge. Makerfield would be electing a PM in exactly the same way as any other constituency that has a party leader standing to be an MP and govern with the largest party just like Holborn and St Pancras did. Although I get what you mean, it will feel like a coronation - but only if Burnham gets past the many obstacles in his way.

As an aside, I don't think he should be allowed to stand. He's been an MP and chose to resign and I don't think election candidates should get a second go, whether that be carpetbagger Farage, someone like Mary Creagh who lost and was incomprehensibly picked to stand again, or an opportunist like Burnham who has his eyes on any prize going. Other people will make far better candidates anyway and these have had their chance and in Burnham's case thrown it away.

You might do that, but many/most of us don’t.

We do not vote for a PM.
We vote for the party.
Burnham may be voted in as an MP... what happens after that is anyone's guess.
If he wishes to stand as party leader his fellow MP's decide whether to support that or not.... the general public has no say- which is standard.

Reform will throw everything to ensure Burnham doesnt win.
That includes having some posters on here.

In 1997, it was virtually a foregone conclusion that the good people of Sedgefield were electing the next Prime Minister. Was that unfair? I don't recall anyone complaining at the time.

If so, then why can Simons not just hand his seat over to Burnham?

They are the same Party and by this logic, it would be a simple person swap because the Party remains the same. It would still be Labour, just with a different person.

Please. You know damn well that people vote for the person first, policies second. Just because it makes you feel important to claim everyone else is thick, doesn’t make it not true.

It’s completely false to say those voters will be "choosing the next Prime Minister".

They might choose someone other than Burnham, and that someone would not be the next PM. Even if they choose Burnham, there’s no guarantee that he would be chosen by the party as its leader.

I suspect you know that you are talking misleading nonsense but don’t care.

A person who didn’t even stand in the ‘actual’ General Election.

To be fair, he was blocked fron standing in the - naturally occurring - Gorton and Denton by-election earlier this year by Labour's National Executive Committee. The official reason was that it would trigger an election for Manchester mayor which ''would use substantial amounts of taxpayers' money and resources". As dissatisfaction with Sir Keir was already considerable by then, there were a lot of people who didn't buy that 'reason'.

He wouldn't have seen any reason to stand in the GE in 2024 because at that time it was very clear Labour were going to win and he would have been happy with that without giving up the mayoralty. But of course no-one at that point knew what a shit show it was going to turn out to be.

And right now of course, it's a much bigger shit show.

I am old enough to remember Andy Burnham the first time and he was 'average' in parliament. I distinctly remember him literally running away from a journalist asking him questions when he was health secretary. When did he become this 'saviour' of the party/country?

The difference is that Liz Truss was a sitting and elected MP at the previous GE. Andy Burnham is not, and is seeking to become an MP purely to become PM.

But what is wrong with this? He is still following exactly the same pathway as other would-be leaders -- being elected as MP by constituents and then elected as PLP leader by an electorate that includes MPs who themselves have been elected by their own constituents.

What difference does it make that his election as MP occurred in a by-election?

And what difference does it make that "he is seeking to become an MP purely in order to become PM"? For one thing, what makes you think that he has this sole motivation? Presumably becoming PM is a means to an end for him -- the end being a more-effective implementation of Labour values and policies than Starmer has achieved. And for another thing, we have no idea what motivations any other people standing for election as MPs have. Perhaps they too are standing because they want to be PM. So what. As long as they aren't motivated by something illegal/corrupt, such as distorting policy in return for shady money, all is good.

To my mind, what makes these mid-term changes of leadership of governing parties problematic isn't Andy Burham's pathway but the right of party members to participate in the vote for the choice of leader. That means, as with Liz Truss and other Tory party leadership flip-flops, that the PM is partly chosen by activists rather than members of parliament whose authority to choose a PM has been conferred on them by their constituency electorates..

The leadership part is probably easier than the by-election.

The constituents of Makerfield voted for an MP to represent them less than two years ago. Now he is standing down not due to illness or some other adversity but purely to get Andy Burnham back into parliament so he can run for the leadership. I think Josh Simmons is treating the people who elected him with a total lack respect and if I lived there I would be voting for whoever was most likely to beat Andy Burnham.