Kmflett's Blog

At the June 1983 General Election Tony Benn was defeated in his Bristol East seat. There had been boundary changes and Benn was not selected for a more winnable Bristol seat. He declined to move to a more winnable Constituency and duly lost.

When the first post General Election By-Election in a Labour seat came around, at Chesterfield in March 1984, far from being blocked as a left-winger Benn was selected as the candidate. Prominent Labour right-wingers such as Denis Healey spoke up for Benn at pre-election meetings. He duly won and served several terms as the MP.

There is a strong contrast with the Labour NEC’s decision to block Andy Burnham from putting his name forward for possible selection as a Labour candidate at the Gorton By-Election. Labour subsequently lost to a Green candidate whose politics probably weren’t that different from Burnhams.

Burnham is not Bennite and indeed has recently styled himself as an exponent of Manchesterism (something Engels was critical of in 1890, although Burnham uses the term differently!). In short he is personable but after a long political career also comes with a lot of baggage, some of it good, some of it not so much.

He is a well-known figure in Labour who it might be thought would at least give Labour a good chance of winning what might well be a difficult election at Makerfield, now that NEC objections have ceased.

It might be argued with some truth that Labour in the 2020s is more authoritarian than it was in the 1980s (when nevertheless it was still expelling socialists) but perhaps a bigger point is the left does not have the weight within Labour to stop attempts at Head Office control freakery.

It will be interesting to see how engaged senior figures from Starmer’s Labour are in Burnham’s campaign, if indeed he thinks that will be a good idea…