For the first time in a while, I feel a sense of hope that is monumental. Andy Burnham has just won the Makerfield by-election, twenty points ahead of his Reform opponent.

At a recent Constituency Labour Party meeting, I told my members that the battle for Makerfield was make-or-break for Labour. Not just as a government, but as a party facing political Armageddon at the next election. This, I said, was where we either stopped Reform at the peak of their popularity, dead in their tracks, or watched them beat us and carry that momentum into their run at government.

In the heat of the moment, I reached for the historical analogy of Stalingrad – the battle where the German Wehrmacht, until then thought unstoppable, had their momentum broken and the whole direction of the war turned.

Perhaps I got carried away. There are obvious limits to any wartime analogy, and I will leave others to judge how far Reform deserves the comparison. But the bulk of it holds, and not in the way people usually reach for these things.

Stalingrad didn’t win the war. The fighting ground on for two more years. What it broke was the myth of invincibility – the sense that their victory was inevitable. After Stalingrad, the momentum shifted.

Here in Makerfield, we held a heartland we were told we were losing, in a seat where Reform initially led the polls, and stopped their seemingly inevitable march. A turning point is not yet a victory. But it is the moment defeat stops being the likely outcome, and victory becomes something once again in reach, if we’re prepared to fight for it.

Because if Reform had won here, it’s hard to see how Labour, and therefore the government, could have recovered – even if Keir Starmer was later replaced by another leadership front-runner. The damage would have been done. The die cast. And with it, the real prospect of a far-right authoritarian government handed power with few constitutional checks to slow it down.

So yes, last night was a moment for celebration. Andy won with 55% of the vote, a majority of over 9,000 votes. He won more votes than the Reform and Restore blocs combined.

Much of this will be chewed over by the commentariat for weeks. Some of it will matter. Most of it will not. What matters now is what Andy Burnham does in the coming months. As the first MP to publicly call for his return, I’ve had more time than most to think about what that should look like.

I won’t get lost in the choreography of who moves when. Let’s assume a leadership challenge against the Prime Minister succeeds. Even if Burnham has secured more than the 81 nominations needed to reach this point, it shouldn’t be forgotten that much of this relatively new PLP was handpicked by Morgan McSweeney and Peter Mandelson. Many will have already forged their own independent paths. But not all will adapt so quickly.

Many will be nervous about a project that is, ostensibly, transformational rather than managerial. That tension will not disappear because we want it to – it will need to be carefully negotiated from day one. One hopes a new political culture of engagement, listening and inclusivity wins enough of them over.

Andy will necessarily have to find the time and space to think through the myriad problems that will come at him fast and furious in the coming months.

The first is legitimacy. Under our near-feudal, unwritten constitution we are technically a parliamentary democracy, but it presents as something close to a presidential system. Sovereignty rests with the Crown, which in turn is handed to the Prime Minister, who parcels out authority to a cabinet across delineated departments. It’s highly centralised and deeply anachronistic. When you change leaders between general elections, you risk losing the democratic mandate that a general election carries.

That charge is political, not constitutional. A mid-term change of leader is perfectly acceptable – the Conservatives managed four prime ministers between 2016 and 2024 without troubling the electorate once. The problem is perception and authority. Changing Labour and ending forty years of neoliberalism is less a gear shift and more an entirely different car. The 2024 manifesto, sold at the time as a “small target strategy,” is vague and non-committal by design, with few binding commitments. It is in effect the physical embodiment of Keir Starmer’s premiership.

At first glance, such vagueness is a gift — it leaves a new government room to fill in the blanks. The reality is more awkward. Compared to 2017 and 2019, the 2024 manifesto promised far less in the way of structural change. It is studded with “Labour will review” “Labour will turn the page” and “first steps,” wrapped around a scattering of retail offers about GP appointments, breakfast clubs and small rises in PCSO numbers. That’s really not in the spirit of the promises he’s made to Makerfield (and the rest of us).

The moment demands he keep fighting as an insurgent. His strength lies in his perceived role as a challenger to a system that has sidelined voters in Makerfield and similar places for too long. To hold that strength once inside the building, two things have to happen.

First, he must stay focused on structural change: the constitution, the voting system, the Bank of England’s mandate, treasury orthodoxy, the fiscal rules, and public ownership.

These big-ticket items answer the questions so many in Labour dance around: why do people vote for Reform at all? What is driving them towards authoritarian populism? Andy has already answered it. They vote for Reform because the settlement of the last forty years has failed to deliver for them. Our party, like the Tories, keeps offering to manage that settlement rather than change it. Structural change – economic or democratic – is not a distraction from the fight against the far right. It is the fight against the far right.

Take water. A privatised natural monopoly where corporate greed pollutes the rivers and profiteers from the bills. Starmer’s instinct – or more accurately, the Treasury’s –was to regulate its way out of the problem. But you can’t regulate away a problem whose cause is ownership. To admit that is to admit the central flaw in Starmerism, which was never a programme of change at all. It was a project designed to stop economic and democratic populism finding expression while the Tories imploded. The illusion of change. As Bruce Lee almost put it, the art of change without change. The trouble with this cunning plan was that the public sussed it within months of the election.

There is a deeper principle here, and it is the one Starmer’s government never understood. In politics, who you pick a fight with tells the country whose side you’re on. It signals your priorities to the electorate, and your base – an important distinction Labour too often forgets – in a way no speech or manifesto commitment can. Pick the wrong enemies, or pick none at all, and the public will draw their own conclusions.

But the choice of enemy does more than signal. It also builds. If you’re going to pick a fight with some of the most powerful vested interests in the economy – corporations, tech barons, billionaires, extractive capital, private equity, landlords, developers, the rentier class in effect – then know they will hit back with all they have. That includes the press, which they largely control; social media; the political establishment and its commentariat; and of course, bond markets. Those with wealth and power will not walk away from it with a shrug. They will dig in and come at us hard.

Secondly, Burnham has to pick his battles with a clear eye on the coalitions that each fight could build. Take on the water companies, and you pick an argument that many will support across party lines. Public ownership of water has the consistent backing of more than 80% of the public, including Reform voters. Small and medium-sized farmers, squeezed by supermarkets and corporate agri-food giants and perceived as disregarded by the Starmer government’s short-sighted inheritance tax changes, are another potential ally. So are university students and the staff whose jobs are now under threat. Ditto the growing precariat with no security and no stake in the system, and the pensioners who have come to depend on the triple lock. The list of potential allies is long, and so is the list of reforms that would bring each of them in.

That’s why sequencing matters as much as substance. Pick the popular fights first. Win them, and use the coalition each victory builds to take on the next – and the harder one after that. That’s how a run of policies becomes a movement, and a movement is the only thing that survives the press, the markets and the rentier class throwing everything they have at us.

So what should the first 100 days look like?

Start with water. The reason I chose this issue for my private member’s bill two years ago was that I could see how it could unite a cross-section of our class. Whether people are worried about pollution, rising bills, droughts, floods, leaks, public health, corporate profiteering or just the general injustice of it all, water unites the public. People instinctively understand it and know it is a binary test of intent.

Day one: signal the public ownership pathway. Name the worst-failing companies, set the Special Administration Regime running, and stop pretending the regulator can fix what only ownership can. Get this right, and every other argument for structural change becomes easier to make, because people can see it working.

Next, change the rules of the economic game. Little of Burnham’s programme is possible while they stand unaltered. Announce a review of the fiscal rules and the Bank of England’s mandate within the first month. Be transparent, be clear, and have a plan. Say plainly that the architecture is up for change, and the rest of the programme stops looking like fantasy.

Next, devolution – where Andy has the one thing none of his rivals can claim: a working model. Greater Manchester is the proof of concept. It’s not perfect, but it exists, and there is a positive story to tell. Extend it. Hand real fiscal and economic power to the city regions and build on the English devolution settlement rather than letting it stall. This is his record, not his promise, and it is one of the most credible cards he has to play.

The abolition of the Lords, replaced with regional assemblies with fiscal powers, alongside changes to the voting system and a written constitution, will need to be signalled early. Without a manifesto mandate, these may not be deliverable before a general election. But clearly articulating a vision, making a manifesto commitment, and initiating citizens’ assemblies and a national conversation in the first 100 days would signal to the public and other political parties that these are core commitments,not optional extras.

Because no matter how well a Burnham government does, we still face an almighty fight to stop Reform, the Tories and Restore Britain sweeping into power on a regressive electoral pact. Signalling radical constitutional intent early prepares the ground for conversations that need to start now, not weeks before a general election.

The last – but perhaps most critical – thing Burnham must do is think carefully about who he surrounds himself with. Speculation is already rife, and in many ways, his hands are tied. The PLP is what it is. Plenty are nervous about the transformational policies he is mooting, above all, proportional representation and public ownership.

Everyone is entitled to change their mind, and many will have done so honestly since 2016. Only time will tell how much of that change is genuine and how much is opportunism; a pragmatic reckoning with the increasingly obvious conclusion that a clean break with the forty-year economic settlement is now the only thing standing between a Reform government and us.

Culturally, Andy has said he wants to end the sectarianism and authoritarian instinct of the last seven years. That has to mean MPs from across the left given real roles and real influence inside a Burnham administration. Because beating Reform and the wider far right will take bold ideas to address a long list of structural problems: ideas the left has been making the case for and organising around for years.

So there you have it. A taste of the problems Andy will face, and some of the ideas he will need to navigate what may be one of the most consequential periods in British politics in the last half-century. And that’s before we even discuss the international pressures over which we have to mitigate: Trump, war, energy crises, climate and ecological collapse, technological upheaval, and the regional and global instability these produce.

This is the perma-crisis. For years, we have discussed it, worried about it and too often ignored it. Well, now it’s here, and set to accelerate. What we do in the next two years will determine whether the UK can weather these shocks as a functioning democracy – or whether it descends into something far darker.

No pressure then.