IT’S a truism that the Labour right would rather see the party lose than win from the left.

But the Starmer clique’s decision to bar Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from contesting the Gorton & Denton by-election shows paranoid factionalism on another level.

Burnham is not even on the socialist left of the party: this is an act of cowardice by a PM who fears a challenge to his leadership, and is prepared to risk a Labour seat falling to Reform UK rather than face him.

For Burnham was certainly the party’s best bet for winning the by-election, in a seat where the context of the last MP’s departure — Andrew Gwynne was embroiled in a scandal over expletive-laden text messages telling elderly constituents he hoped they would “croak” before long — can only add to the stench of out-of-touch arrogance that suffuses Labour.

Burnham is popular, a vanishingly rare quality among Labour politicians now. This fact will not be lost on MPs concluding that Starmer needs to go if the party is to have a hope of avoiding electoral annihilation.

The excuse given for his exclusion — that an early mayoral election to replace him would be inconvenient and costly — hardly matters. Not one person will believe it.

After all Starmer has form: stitch-ups are his stock in trade. Unlike former leaders of the Labour right like Tony Blair — or possible future ones like Wes Streeting — he has no political vision giving him confidence to seek to persuade people of his case. He lied his way to the leadership then excluded its left through expulsions and bans on debate.

He imposes candidates on local parties, and shows total indifference to the local standing of the candidates he blocks: another popular then Labour mayor, Jamie Driscoll, was barred from the shortlist for his own enlarged mayoralty when Labour were still in opposition.

His control-freakery has consequences: directly, as when Tory Iain Duncan Smith clung on to his Westminster seat against the odds after Starmer’s goons blocked Faiza Shaheen as the Labour candidate; and indirectly too. Few doubt that Reform’s march across north-east England has been turbo-charged by the disdain Labour showed for local opinion by blocking Driscoll, or indeed by imposing a right-wing fixer with no connection to the area, Luke Akehurst, on a County Durham seat.

No doubt once it selects some loyalist patsy to contest Gorton & Denton Labour will demand unity behind them in the name of beating Reform. Will anyone listen?

The Reform threat should not be underestimated. The horrific killing of a nurse by Ice agents in Minneapolis on Saturday — the second public murder by Trump’s modern-day Brownshirts — is a glimpse of the terror that could come to Britain’s streets if the far right are not isolated and beaten. Reform remains a cheerleader for Trump, while street agitator “Tommy Robinson” has explicitly called for an Ice agency in Britain.

But Labour under Starmer is not a plausible vehicle for beating the right. The contempt it shows for ordinary people every day — and Burnham’s exclusion is another example of it — feeds the resentment being exploited by Reform. Its grotesque authoritarianism makes it an enemy of democratic rights. And it continues to fawn on the epicentre of far-right violence in the United States — even this weekend reversing a Chagos Islands deal already signed with Mauritius as soon as the US president attacked it.

Richard Burgon’s call for an emergency executive meeting to reverse the Burnham ban is the logical rallying point for unions and MPs who want to change the suicidal course being forced on the party by the destructive faction around the Prime Minister.

It is unlikely to be heeded. Others on the left will be looking now to alternatives who can challenge both Reform and Labour in Gorton & Denton, in the name of democracy and social justice.