Luke Hurst

national coordinator @mainstreamlbr. views my own!

[Luke Hurst @lukewillhurst]

Great to be out in Makerfield for our Mainstream campaign day with @MarkDrakeford and later on with @labourlewis! 🌹

[Luke Hurst @lukewillhurst]

The people who make this argument never seem to have anything to say about the pitfalls of a small group of elites electing party leaders

[Oliver Kamm @OliverKamm]

Labour made a fateful error when in 1980s it widened the franchise in elections for party leader. This delivered a poor leader in 2010 & a catastrophic one in 2015, neither of whom MPs wanted. But the system described by Philip Cowley is especially absurd. https://t.co/tOwOZaLqbh

[Luke Hurst @lukewillhurst]

When I worked in the NHS + was a @unisontheunion rep I raised concerns about a particular clinic where we used heavy machinery and which was often 27+ degrees, but because there is no upper limit in law, only vague ‘thermal comfort’, it was basically impossible to force action on

[Trades Union Congress @The_TUC]

BREAKING 🚨 | As Britain's first heatwave of 2026 begins, the TUC is calling for a maximum working temperature to protect workers.

Workers should be able to stop work above 30°C, or 27°C for those doing strenuous jobs.

With heatwaves becoming more common, we need new laws on maximum working temperatures, cooler workplaces, and climate action to reduce global heating.

[Jon Stone @joncstone]

also, once the water is cleaned up, reinstate the Tower Beach (which was open 1934-1971) https://t.co/Oi18yBY4JN

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

Politics isn’t working for places like ours.

I will change that.

#AndyBurnham #ForUs

[Luke Hurst @lukewillhurst]

@LeftieStats You’re peddling a non sequitur, and I think you’re aware of that.

Basic media literacy also involves understanding this interview in the context of every other intervention on democratic reform that Andy has made in the past several years.

[Luke Hurst @lukewillhurst]

Praising SV in GM ≠ wanting SV for national elections

But that was obvious, wasn’t it

[Stats for Lefties 🍉🏳️‍⚧️ @LeftieStats]

🚨BREAKING | Andy Burnham confirms he will NOT scrap first-past-the-post before #GE2029

Burnham said electoral reform must be "in a manifesto", and revealed he does NOT back proportional representation, instead praising the non-proportional Supplementary Vote (SV)

Via @itvnews

[Luke Hurst @lukewillhurst]

@LeftieStats Can you explain how that equates to Andy wanting SV for parliamentary elections…?

[Luke Hurst @lukewillhurst]

😍😍😍

[Daniel Hewitt @DanielHewittITV]

Exc: Andy Burnham sits down for the first time since announcing his Westminster bid

There’s a lot on this interview, as he lays out a plan for a ‘new economy’, how him and Keir Starmer have different visions and he ‘100%’ gets why people have voted Reform https://t.co/Ckux93PV7L

[Peray Ahmet @perayahmet]

This is why we need Andy back in parliament.

He’s been outside the Westminister bubble and is ready to bring that learning back for the good of the country.

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

I can confirm that I will be requesting the permission of the NEC to stand in the Makerfield by-election.

I grew up in this area and have lived here for 25 years. I care deeply about it and its people. I know they have been let down by national politics.

Ten years ago, I decided to leave Westminster. Why? Because, after 16 years, I came to the conclusion that our national political system does not work for areas like ours. I learnt this fighting its failure to invest in the Wigan borough, for justice for the Hillsborough families and against its treatment of Greater Manchester during the pandemic.

Over the last decade, I have been challenging this failure from the outside and building a new and better way of doing politics. We have built Greater Manchester into the fastest-growing city-region in the UK and put buses back under public control, introducing a £2 fare cap to help people with cost-of-living pressures.

However, there is only so much that can be done from Greater Manchester. Much bigger change is needed at a national level if everyday life is to be made more affordable again. This is why I now seek people’s support to return to Parliament: to bring the change we have brought to Greater Manchester to the whole of the UK and make politics work properly for people.

Millions are struggling and they need the Labour Government to succeed. It has already made changes to make life better for them in its first two years. After this week, we owe it to people to come back together as a Labour movement, giving the Prime Minister and the Government the space and stability they need as the by-election takes place.

I want to recognise the difficult decision taken by Josh Simons and the sacrifice he and his family are making. I have worked closely with him as Mayor on issues like flooding and illegal waste dumping and have seen first-hand how effective he has been. He has put the communities of Makerfield first, made a real difference for them and should take great pride in that.

Finally, I truly do not take a single vote for granted and will work hard to regain the trust of people in the Makerfield constituency, many of whom have long supported our party but lost faith in recent times. We will change Labour for the better and make it a party you can believe in again.

ENDS

[Luke Hurst @lukewillhurst]

Verdict is in from my very northern Dad on Josh Simons’ announcement

[Josh Simons @joshsimonsmp]

For decades, Westminster has overseen the managed decline of towns like mine. We have talked big, then acted small, stuck in a politics of incrementalism that cannot meet the moment. We have lost the trust of those our party was built to serve.

It is my unwavering belief that nothing short of urgent, radical, courageous reform will make a difference. That must start with a change in leadership.

Today, I am putting the people I represent and the country I love first and will be resigning as MP for Makerfield. I am standing aside so that Andy Burnham can return to his home, fight to re-enter Parliament, and if elected, drive the change our country is crying out for.

This has not been an easy decision. This is my family’s home, where only a few weeks ago, doctors and nurses at Wigan Infirmary saved our newborn son’s life.

But we all must make choices and in recent days I found myself with a difficult one: defend the status quo or step forward and act. I have made my choice.

I am in politics because politics is how you change lives for the better. My party has one last chance to do that: deliver for the people and places I represent, drive economic growth, secure our borders, reform our state and politics, and change a status quo that is not working.

That is the fight. I believe Andy is the one to lead it.

[Miatta Fahnbulleh @Miatsf]

This morning I sent my letter of resignation to the Prime Minister.

I urge the Prime Minister to do the right thing for the country and the Party and set a timetable for an orderly transition.

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding.

If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life.

That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.

Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival.
But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible?

Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there?

The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them.

Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact.

Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source.

This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes.

This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself.

I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state.

The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends.

The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act.

Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity.

Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them.

The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety.

That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.

[ITV Granada Reports @GranadaReports]

He shoots...he scores!

While the Labour Party didn't have much to celebrate in the local elections, Andy Burnham celebrated scoring twice in a charity match in Manchester 👀

https://t.co/tE2fX996Co

[Luke Hurst @lukewillhurst]

watched The Devil Wears Prada 2 with absolute fear that it would be yet another botched sequel last night but was pleasantly relieved. recommend !

[Co-operative Party @CoopParty]

Power belongs in your hands, not just in Westminster.

Today, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill finally passes into law, featuring a landmark Community Right to Buy.

This is massive win for community power and for the co-operative movement. 🐝

[Solomon Hughes @SolHughesWriter]

(1)A "now they tell us" moment- Starmer's rise is 100% dependent on McSweeney and Mandelson- but its only now that the Guardian admit what we all knew, Starmer was a plan to "crush the left" while pretending to be something else, creating a vicious but rudderless govt

[Emina Ibrahim @Emina_ibrahim]

I think Mick Lynch is saying something very simple. The Labour Movement is worth fighting. He is right because in my humble opinion the language of social justice is not enough it’s just words, a politics that is rooted in the workplaces and daily lives of the working class is something worth saving and fighting for.