Over half of voters in Manchester think Labour is wrong to stop Andy Burnham standing as a Labour candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election and 62 per cent say he should be allowed to run as the party’s candidate in the seat.
New polling of Greater Manchester residents, exclusive to the New Statesman, shows widespread public opposition to the decision of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) on Sunday to bar the city region’s mayor from standing in the seat.
Some 54 per cent said it would be “wrong” for the party to block Burnham standing in the by-election while 8 per cent said it would be “right”. Thirty-nine per cent were undecided.
I didn’t think particularly highly of Starmer and his allies before this whole debacle, but now it’s kinda hard to not see them as either completely inept or desperately grasping at power.
Rather than take the fairly obvious boost of simply letting him run as a popular politician and believing the leader they have chosen is good enough to beat a challenger, they have demonstrated they don’t believe Starmer to be the leader the membership (and perhaps the rest of the country) would pick.
For an ostensibly democratically run party, disenfranchising your members is a pretty bad look.