Labour barred Andy Burnham from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election — and the fallout starts before polling day. Right, so Labour’s National Executive Committee has blocked Andy Burnham from standing as the party’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, and that decision has already removed one of Labour’s most relied-upon assumptions, which is that if you can clearly win a seat, the party will let you. The NEC is overwhelmingly aligned with Keir Starmer, so the idea that this was some neutral procedural outcome doesn’t survive even a light tap, because committees don’t act like this unless the leadership wants them to. The assumption that electability still outranks internal control is now a total bust, because a leadership confident in its position would not have needed to narrow its own options at this stage. And this doesn’t stop with one mayor or one seat, because once a pro-leadership machine chooses extra electoral risk to avoid potential future rivalry, every claim about local choice, discipline, and grown-up politics starts resting on process instead of judgement. The leadership has now acted in a way that only makes sense if Burnham was seen as a threat. Right, so Keir Starmer has it seems used the Labour Party’s central machinery to block Andy Burnham from standing as the Labour candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, overwhelmingly the likeliest candidate to win the seat you would think. The National Executive Committee has exercised its power to prevent a sitting metro mayor from even seeking selection, not because of misconduct, not because of disqualification, not because local members rejected him, but because the leadership decided that letting him back into Parliament carried a risk they did not want to manage, even though they can hardly say he was an unsuitable candidate. What makes it worse for Starmer is that Andy Burnham is not a radical figure and never has been. His parliamentary record sits squarely in the Brown-era managerial centre of the party, he defended NHS market mechanisms when in office, such as PFI and when Labour members were offered a genuine break from that politics in 2015 they rejected him in favour of Jeremy Corbyn. None of that has changed.