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’ ...