Andy Beckett: Burnham faces Reform UK gravitational pull

Andy Burnham enters autumn under Reform pressure after Birmingham conference, polls keep Farage’s party near a quarter of voters, Downing Street drifts toward the agenda it claims to resist

Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham on 4 September came with familiar stagecraft: a home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, telling supporters that “power is within our grasp!”, and a message built around immigration, crime, benefits, “wokeness” and net zero, Andy Beckett writes in the Guardian. The timing matters because the UK now has a new prime minister, Andy Burnham, and because Reform arrives at the conference weakened by funding scandals and a run of lost byelections. Yet, Beckett notes, most polling since Burnham took office shows Reform’s support holding steady or only slightly down.

One reason is arithmetic rather than momentum. Beckett puts Reform’s supporters at almost a quarter of the electorate, large enough to shape what gets discussed even when the party loses votes at the margin. He argues that the pressure on Burnham is not simply to defeat Reform at elections, but to govern as if Reform is the opposition that sets the terms: permanent crackdowns, harder lines on welfare, and a politics in which cultural disputes are treated as core state business. In that environment, policy becomes a signal to a volatile audience rather than a plan shaped by capacity.

Beckett points to areas where the constraints are already visible. Britain’s prisons are overcrowded, he writes, and the prison population is unusually large by historical and European standards; promising ever-tougher enforcement collides with the physical limit of cells and staff. Energy policy runs into geology: the North Sea’s oil and gas fields are described as nearly exhausted, even as the government looks increasingly likely to approve further large-scale fossil-fuel drilling. Climate, meanwhile, is presented as “obvious” and worsening, but net zero still functions in the political conversation as a badge of tribal loyalty rather than a set of trade-offs.

The piece also describes how Burnham’s fragile polling recovery has come less from converting right-leaning voters than from taking support back from the Greens and Liberal Democrats. That dynamic creates a second trap: Labour can move right to chase Reform’s agenda and still lose on the left to parties that offer a cleaner alternative. Beckett ties this to the fate of Keir Starmer, who has announced he will leave parliament abruptly. In Beckett’s account, Starmer’s mistake was to follow a Reform-defined agenda in Downing Street, only to find that the voters most animated by that agenda were still unwilling to accept a Labour government.

The by-election evidence Beckett cites is mixed in a way that complicates easy narratives. Burnham beat Reform more decisively than expected in the Makerfield byelection, but Reform’s vote share and total support increased there. Victory, in other words, did not automatically shrink the rival constituency; it simply rearranged the seat count. Beckett notes that Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, is standing as a byelection candidate to try to reverse the drift of progressive votes back to Labour.

On the right, Beckett describes a crowded market: Reform, Restore and the Conservatives competing to be the most rightwing parties. That competition rewards escalation and punishes any retreat into administrative realism. Burnham, Beckett suggests, faces a country more deeply divided than the eras when Labour leaders such as Tony Blair, Harold Wilson and Clement Attlee could attract and hold significant rightwing support.

Birmingham’s conference ended as party conferences usually do: applause, slogans, and a sense of inevitability. The governing side still has to find prison space, energy supply and workable budgets on Monday morning.