Why the contest in Makerfield matters

On Thursday 18th June, voters in Makerfield, Greater Manchester, go to the polls in one of the more unusual by-elections of recent years. Sitting Labour MP, Josh Simons, stood down in May specifically to clear the seat for Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, so that Burnham can return to the Commons and become eligible for the Labour leadership. It is the first time since the 1965 Leyton by-election that a contest has been engineered to hand a seat to someone outside of parliament.  

That framing has dominated much of the media coverage, and understandably so. But beneath the Westminster manoeuvring sits a quieter and, for anyone interested in climate and energy, more consequential question; what kind of climate politics can win in a working-class, former-industrial seat?  

Two visions on the doorstep

Makerfield is a Labour-Reform marginal. At the 2024 general election Labour took 45.2% to Reform’s 31.8%, a majority of just over 5,000. National polling has moved against Labour since, and recent constituency polling points to a tighter race than those numbers suggest, with Burnham ahead but Reform’s Robert Kenyon firmly in second.  

What makes the seat interesting is that the two leading candidates are not offering different shades of the same climate policy. They are offering opposed accounts of what the energy transition is for.  

Burnham arrives with a record. Greater Manchester has committed to carbon neutrality by 2038, twelve years ahead of the national target, and his flagship achievement, bringing the region’s buses back under public control through the Bee Network, has been explicitly tied to that goal. Roughly a third of the fleet is now zero-emission, cutting tens of thousands of tonnes of CO2 a year, while areas breaching legal air-pollution limits have fallen sharply. His pitch is that climate action means warmer homes that cost less to run, cheaper public transport and local jobs, rather than sacrifice. It is net zero framed as something people receive, rather than something done to them.  

Reform make the opposite case. Scrap net zero, scrap VAT on energy bills, return to drilling in the North Sea. In this telling, climate targets are seen as a cost imposed on households that can least afford it, and the honest thing to do is to stop pretending otherwise.  

It would be a mistake to wave that argument away. In a place where bills are high and incomes are not, ‘this is making you poorer’ is a powerful message, and the backlash it taps into is real. The transition so far has too often felt like something arranged in London and presented to places like Makerfield as a finished bill. Dismiss that grievance and you concede the seat. But taking that grievance seriously is not the same as accepting Reform’s answer to it, and on substance, that answer does not hold up.  

Disputing Reform

The central claim, that net zero is what is making people poorer is backwards. The bill shocks of the past few years did not come from heat pumps or wind farms but from exposure to volatile global gas markets, which still set the price of electricity even when electricity is generated cheaply at home. The 2022 crisis was a gas crisis. The things that reduce a household’s exposure to those swings, insulation, home-grown renewables, cheaper public transport, electrified heat, are precisely the things that net zero is meant to deliver. Scrapping it does not protect people from the next price shock but rather locks them into the fossil dependence that caused the last one.  

‘Drill the North Sea’ fares no better. Oil and gas pumped from British waters are sold at the global market price, not at a domestic discount, and new fields are small, slow, and largely destined for export. It is a Trumpian slogan rather than a credible plan to lower anyone’s bills. And the promised savings from tearing up climate commitments tend to evaporate on contact with the books: where Reform has taken control of councils, low-carbon programmes that were already saving authorities millions a year and unlocking grant funding have been scrapped as ‘virtue-signalling’, with nothing cheaper put in their place. 

The deepest flaw is the framing itself, that climate action and working-class living standards are a trade-off. The opposite is true. The people of a former coalfield like Makerfield are among the most exposed both to volatile energy costs and to the physical effects of a warming climate. They have the most to gain from a transition done well, and the most to lose from no transition at all. Reform offers them the warm feeling of having someone to blame and a policy that leaves them more exposed, not less.  

Tony Blair steps in

Reform makes this case with a wrecking ball. But a quieter more nuanced version of it now comes from inside the Labour tent. In late May, days before nominations closed in Makerfield, Tony Blair published a long essay warning that Labour’s approach is failing, and singling out the ‘acceleration’ of net zero and the phasing out of British oil and gas for particular criticism. His argument is more sophisticated than that of Reform; not that climate change is a hoax, but that voters in wealthy countries will not accept financial sacrifice and changes to their way of life when their own share of global emissions is small, and that the real solutions lie in technology and the decisions of large emitters rather than in Britain limiting its own consumption.  

Yet, Blair’s argument rests on the same faulty premise as Reform’s, that climate action is a sacrifice to be minimised. Accept that framing and you have already lost, because there is always a reason to ask someone else to go first.  

The premise is wrong. The cheapest new power in Britain is now wind and solar, and the most reliable way to cut a household’s bills is to stop heating the street through an uninsulated wall and to come off a gas price set on a global market. None of that depends on what China does. Even if Britain’s emissions vanished overnight and the global picture were unchanged, home-grown energy, warmer homes, and cheaper transport would still be the better deal for the people of Makerfield. The ‘our impact is minimal’ line answers a question about moral obligation but says nothing about the economic case which now stands on its own.  

And there is a revealing omission, which Burnham himself put his finger on. Blair’s essay runs to thousands of words without mentioning inequality once. Blair reads voters’ discontent as refusal to bear the costs of transition, when much of it is refusal to bear costs that other people are escaping. Most are not rejecting cleaner energy. They are rejecting a version of it that asks them to pay while the gains land somewhere else and increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Answer the distributional question and the ‘voters won’t wear it’ problem looks very different.  

The case to be made

The discontent Reform harvests, and the discontent that Blair misdiagnoses, is best understood as a symptom rather than a solution. It is what grows in the gap left when the transition is experienced as imposed, expensive and owned by someone else. The answer is not to abandon climate policy to neutralise the attack but to fix what is generating the grievance in the first place.  

This is where Burnham’s wider politics matters, and where it needs to be held together rather than pulled apart. His arguments against inequality and against privatisation are not a separate track from his climate record, the Bee Network is exactly the point of overlap. Bringing buses back under public control delivered cleaner air, lower fares, and a public asset in one move. That is what a just transition should look like in practice; decarbonisation, public ownership, and lower bills delivered through the same policy. Done properly, climate action is not a line on the cost-of-living ledger to be weighed against everything else, it is one of the few levers that pulls the cost of living down while spreading its wider benefits, cleaner air, warmer homes, better transport, secure and skilled work, across a whole community rather than concentrating its cost on it.  

The mistake the centre-left keeps flirting with is to make its case on living standards while quietly downgrading climate, hoping to dodge the line of fire from Reform and now from Blair. That concedes the framing and loses both arguments. You can see the same slip in the way the policy is too often defended, as a cost the country can bear, rather than as the cheapest energy strategy on offer. The anti-inequality case and the anti-privatisation case only work if they are fused with strong climate policy and the serious delivery of a just transition, bringing cheaper bills, secure and unionised green jobs, and benefits that stay in local communities. Throw net zero under the bus to win a news cycle and you are defending living standards with the one tool that most reliably improves them removed. 

Burnham is honest about the limits of this. A mayor can demonstrate the model, but funding a just transition for a whole region needs national government. That is the harder, less glamorous work, and it is the work that actually answers the grievances that both Reform and Blair are feeding on.  

Whatever Thursday’s margin, the task is the same the morning after. The danger is that a strong Reform showing, with Blair’s essay ringing in minister’s ears, spooks Labour into treating net zero as ballast to be dropped at the first sign of trouble. The lesson should run the other way. We need to make a better, clearer case for a just transition, and politicians need to get far better at communicating the link; that decarbonisation done through public ownership, fair costs and local benefit is the cost-of-living answer, rather than bargaining it away for a short-term point. The votes in Makerfield will be counted by Friday, the argument they turn on will be with us for a long time yet.