How Gen Z fell for Andy Burnham

We are often dismissed as a politically apathetic generation, supposedly more interested in refreshing our social media feeds than casting a vote. But that misses the fact that modern politics increasingly lives in those feeds. Political engagement and online culture are no longer separate activities; for many young people, they are one and the same.

To see that, look no further than the Makerfield by-election.

Traditional Labour campaigning still relies on the familiar machinery of canvassers, leaflets and door-knocking. But Makerfield has featured a second front, the air war. Labour has recruited the TikTok editors.

Over the past few years, increasing numbers of young people have been producing political edits: highly stylised videos set to trending music with enough slow-mo to make a middling frontbencher look sexy. 

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The phenomenon began largely with New Labour figures (often imagining them in romantic scenarios, but if you want to know more about that, listen to this episode of Touching Grass, the podcast I co-host with TNW’s James Ball) before gradually spreading to contemporary politicians. 

Among the most prominent of these editors is 18-year-old Ellen Stewart, better known online as politicsprincess. Her videos have amassed hundreds of thousands of views, and she forms part of a loose network of Labour-supporting Zoomers who have, in recent months, dedicated their time to making Andy Burnham edits.

“The Andy edits started very organically,” she told me. “We were all making them alongside our other politics edits since December or so, and when [former Makerfield MP] Josh Simons resigned, Andy’s digital comms people reached out to see if there was anything they could do for us to make our edits better.

“So they gave us access to high-quality footage and b-roll [supplemental clips that help build a narrative] but the edits were still organic and not dictated by them… It was super helpful and really well coordinated; it was really encouraging to be supported and recognised in that way, as in the past it has sometimes been almost the opposite!

“I can’t speak for the other editors, but I am personally drawn to Andy because of his vision for Britain. We are definitely lacking big ideas and vision in the party and government right now, and reading Andy’s book made me realise there was someone out there who had actually thought very deeply about some big changes our country needs to go through.”

To be clear, Ellen and her fellow editors are not simply sitting at home making TikToks. Over the past week, they have been campaigning on the ground in Makerfield, where several got to meet their political heroes in person, resulting in the surreal sight of Burnham signing BuzzBalls (highly alcoholic, very cheap drinks sold in a spherical container) in a local branch of Wetherspoons.

But this is more than a funny story about politically obsessed teens. It distinctly tells us two things. First, Burnham’s team understands how young people engage with politics. Second, young people are not merely tolerating Burnham as an alternative to Keir Starmer; many are actively enthusiastic about him.

Since his ascension to the throne of the King in the North, Burnham has cultivated a political identity that seems unusually coherent. To Westminster veterans, familiar with Burnham’s long career, the Manchester branding can occasionally feel contrived and performative. To plenty of less cynical people, it mostly feels authentic and it works.

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The reason that many are willing to accept Burnham as a politician who understands ordinary people is that he projects that image with a naturalness that Starmer has never managed.

An avid Arsenal supporter and active five-a-side player, Starmer is the biggest football fan we’ve ever had in 10 Downing Street. Yet when discussing the topic, he manages to sound like he just looked it up on Wikipedia five minutes ago. 

Burnham does not suffer from this problem: he has shown time and time again that he is a good orator, he can speak with passion and authority without sounding like he is reading off an autocue. That matters more than many political professionals would like to admit.

In some ways, Burnham resembles the kind of political figure currently emerging elsewhere on the centre left. He is 22 years older than Zohran Mamdani, but like the New York mayor, he combines institutional experience with an ability to appear culturally fluent. 

Neither man is remotely anti-establishment in any meaningful sense, but both understand how to communicate as though they exist outside the political class. Both have a culturally rich city that sits at the centre of their political mythology, and both attract a form of support that takes a light, playful form online, at least amongst young people.

Burnham’s willingness to work with the TikTok editors only reinforces that image. Crucially, his team appears to understand that authenticity cannot be manufactured through centralised messaging. They also seem to understand that being a figure for youth to gather around (as Jeremy Corbyn was) is the most important thing in securing their vote,  rather than woolly promises about a ‘youth guarantee’ or whatever the current government is currently trying to flog. 

Anecdotally, I remember the outrage when Burnham was blocked from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election. People my age  — people who could not tell you what NEC stands for let alone what the NEC does, and have never willingly consumed internal Labour drama — were sharing memes about “Justice for Andy Burnham” and circulating mock posters advertising school walkouts in his support.

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And I do not think younger people just see Burnham as a slightly more palatable Starmer. At a recent World Cup watch party, I asked a group of Labour-voting twentysomethings whether they genuinely believed in Burnham or had simply lost faith in Labour altogether.

The overwhelming sentiment was that Burnham excites and inspires much more than Starmer ever has. They remember how he stood up for Manchester in lockdown. He seems ‘cooler’ than other politicians. And crucially, most of them had committed themselves to voting Green in 2029, but said if Burnham was Labour leader, then they’d stick with Labour.

Conversations I’ve had with people who’ve worked in and around politics, though, do not share this same sentiment. For months, we have snarked and eyerolled at suggestions that Burnham was some kind of magical saviour when he couldn’t even beat Corbyn in 2015, or that he is in any way an ‘outsider’, considering he went to Cambridge and served under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. 

But perhaps we all need to take our politico hats off for a minute. Politics has long since entered the age of optics. The average voter is not conducting a forensic audit of every MP’s biography or Hansard record before deciding whether they feel represented by them. 

For example, smarmy ‘insiders’ like to write things like this: “How can all these working class people support Farage? Don’t they know he went to private school?” Spoiler alert: they do know, and they do not care. 

Likewise, young people do not really care that Burnham is more middle class, more Westminster bubbly, and more of a political chameleon than Starmer – because he can sell a political message, a political idea, that much more effectively. 

In an era where people seem to love nothing more than complain about being disappointed by those in power, Andy Burnham may have stumbled upon the most valuable electoral asset of all: people genuinely want to believe in him.