Labour MP quits seat to clear path for Andy Burnham’s return to Westminster
Josh Simons tells LBC that the Greater Manchester Mayor has brilliant qualities, but won’t fix Labour’s problems in one fell swoop.
The outgoing MP for Makerfield, Josh Simons, says that Andy Burnham "is not the messiah," and warned supporters not to expect him to fix all of Labour’s problems overnight.
Mr Simons, who resigned his Makerfield seat on Thursday to clear the way for the Greater Manchester Mayor to stand in the resulting by-election, was speaking to LBC’s Lewis Goodall on Sunday.
"He is not, in one fell swoop, going to fix all of the Labour Party’s problems and all of the country’s massive problems either," Mr Simons said.
"He has brilliant qualities that I admire in him massively, and that’s why I’ve done this. But people should be quite careful about that."
The 32-year-old, who has three young children, including a newborn baby, said the decision to walk away from what could have been a long parliamentary career was made in just two or three days.
He and Burnham are friends who talk regularly and go for pints together, but the conversation about standing aside only happened in the days immediately before his resignation.
"Me and my wife made the decision together. And the question on the table for us was, can Andy Burnham, if he wins this by-election and then goes down to Westminster, can he stabilize the situation our party is in, which I think is what the country needs."
"But just as fundamentally for me as the MP was: is doing this in the interests of my community?"
When pressed on whether he had simply engineered the situation to get Burnham into Parliament, Mr Simons said: "There’s nothing engineered about it. It’s a resignation. And what happens in an election is the people get to decide what happens next.
"But there’s a bigger thing at stake here. What you cannot do as a local MP is change the systems that are getting in your way in order to get things done for them."
"They’ve got a chance now to shape history and to send someone down to Westminster who’s got an agenda that will put them, their community, and the things they want to change at the very heart of it."
Mr Simons rejected this being described as "noble puppeteering."
"It’s an election. The power is in the hands of my constituents," he said.
"The thing that’s hurt me the most over the last few days is when someone’s come up to me and said, ’I’m really sad to see you go. You were doing a great job. I wasn’t sure about you, but you’ve won me over," he said.
"And that makes me think this is an unfinished journey."
Mr Simons, who was parachuted into Makerfield as a candidate in 2024 while living in Cambridge, said he had been "radicalized" by how hard it was to get things done for constituents even with his own party in government.
He pointed to repeated flooding in Plattbridge, where residents had been warning about inadequate defenses for 15 to 20 years, as an example of a system too broken for a local MP to fix alone.
On whether there was anyone already in the Parliamentary Labour Party who could do what Burnham might, Mr Simons said: "There are loads of great MPs. But the thing about Andy that was different is that he’s left that bubble. And it really is a bubble."
"That does give him a way of speaking, a way of thinking, and, most importantly, a way of feeling his way through issues that is different to the kind of basic way that Westminster almost forces you to be," he said.
Mr Simons, who ran Labour Together, the organization credited with helping propel Keir Starmer to the Labour leadership, said he had barely had a relationship with the man he helped put in Downing Street. "I’ve met Keir less than a handful of times," he said. "I don’t know Keir."
"He said Keir Starmer had been too unwilling to take risks and had struggled to connect emotionally with the country"
"The country’s had a traumatic decade, and there’s a lot of feeling floating about," he said. "If our leaders don’t seem to feel that with the country, it’s quite hard to persuade them to do things differently."
It comes as Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy also told LBC earlier on Sunday that the EU debate, triggered by Wes Streeting’s call to rejoin the bloc, had "missed the point completely."
Mr Simons agreed, calling it "a bit weird" and warning that it risked becoming a London-centric identity argument disconnected from what voters in Makerfield actually care about.
"When you go to Makerfield, it is very, very rare when you’re knocking on a door that someone brings up the European Union," he said. "People want their bills to come down. They want their wages to go up."
If leaders believed rejoining would help with those things, he said, they needed to make that case, but not by rehashing 2016 in ways that meant nothing to communities like his.
Mr Simons dismissed speculation that he had been offered a reward for standing aside, ruling out the House of Lords, saying he was 32 and had no intention of going there, and the Manchester mayoralty, for which he said he did not have the energy.
He acknowledged he and Burnham had spoken about ways he could help in future, but said: "He has not promised me a job."
With Reform vowing to throw everything at the Makerfield by-election, Mr Simons conceded the road ahead for Mr Burnham would be "really tough."
"But if Andy can win this by-election, it changes the story of where the Labour Party is heading and where the country is heading. And a moment like that, which can drive change and make people feel just the tinges of hope, I think that is worth fighting for."
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