Keir Starmer has defended Labour’s decision to block Andy Burnham from standing for parliament, a move which has triggered a major backlash against the prime minister from sections of his own party.
Starmer said on Monday he and his fellow officers on Labour’s ruling executive committee had decided not to let Burnham quit as mayor of Greater Manchester to avoid triggering a costly mayoral election.
Speaking after a turbulent weekend in which eight members of the national executive committee (NEC) – including Starmer – voted to block Burnham from standing in the 26 February Gorton and Denton byelection, the prime minister sought to calm internal Labour tensions.
Starmer said: “We have really important elections already across England for local councils, very important elections in Wales for the government there and very important elections in Scotland for the Scottish government that will affect millions of people. And we’re out campaigning on the cost of living and they’re very important elections. We need all of our focus on those elections.”
He added: “Andy Burnham’s doing a great job as the mayor of Manchester, but having an election for the mayor of Manchester when it’s not necessary would divert our resources away from the elections that we must have, that we must fight and win. And resources, whether that’s money or people, need to be focused on the elections that we must have, not elections that we don’t have to have. And that was the basis of the NEC decision.”
Speaking during a visit to a health centre in Wimbledon, Starmer said Labour should concentrate on fighting Reform UK rather than internal divisions. Addressing the turmoil within his own party, he said: “Yes, there is a fight, but that fight is with Reform and we all need to line up together to be in that fight, all playing our part.
“I think that everybody in the Labour party, everybody who’s a Labour MP, wants to be in that fight, wants to fight alongside all their colleagues in a fight that matters hugely to the future of our country.”
Burnham said on Sunday he was “disappointed” by the decision, promising to support whoever was selected to fight the seat vacated last week by Andrew Gwynne. But in a later tweet on Sunday, he seemed to predict Labour would lose the byelection.
If Burnham had been selected for the seat, he would have been obliged to give up his Greater Manchester mayoralty halfway through a four-year term, triggering a byelection there.
A Labour statement on Sunday said this “would have a substantial and disproportionate impact on party campaign resources ahead of the local elections and elections to the Scottish parliament and Welsh Senedd in May”.
The decision caused fury among many Labour MPs, not all of them natural allies of Burnham, with one condemning what they called “petty factionalism”.
Andrea Egan, the head of the Unison union, a significant Labour funder, said members would be “disappointed and angry”. A series of unions are understood to be in discussions about what they may do jointly to try to change the decision. “This is blatant gerrymandering,” one union source said. “It will not do.”
Before the decision, senior Labour figures including Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, and Lucy Powell, Labour’s deputy leader, called for Burnham to be allowed to stand.
In another post on X on Sunday, Burnham complained he had first learned of the news from the media, saying it “tells you everything you need to know about the way the Labour Party is being run these days”.
On Sunday, Labour briefed that this was only because Burnham could not be contacted. But Douglas Alexander, the Scotland secretary, said he accepted this might not have been the case.
“It wouldn’t be the first time that what was supposed to be a confidential meeting about internal matters for the Labour party with a large number of people in the room leaked out. So if that happened, that’s wrong,” he said.
