If Starmerism sought to present the Labour government as more rightwing than it is, Burnhamism seeks to do the opposite. The change in rhetoric is certainly stark. Unlike his sulking predecessor, the new prime minister offers both an analysis and a vision.
British stagnation and decline, Andy Burnham correctly told the House of Commons, can be explained by a series of “wrong turns” taken from the 1980s onwards: the privatisation of economic power, the deindustrialisation of the country and the ruinous austerity that followed the 2008 crash. The solution, Burnham suggests, is public control of the essentials, the devolution of power and the rebirth of industry – to rebuild living standards and the economy and give long-abandoned communities a future. Keir Starmer, by contrast, had no vision, relying instead on a technocratic image of competence that was swiftly shattered by one fiasco after another.
That left him defined by his opponents, and the electorate baffled as to where his government was headed. The Starmer project foregrounded all of the government’s reactionary elements and buried its social-democratic features. Stringent fiscal rules, the assault on the winter fuel allowance, the attack on disability benefits, the construction of one of Europe’s most punitive asylum regimes, the arrest of pensioners who opposed Israel’s genocide: all became headline policies by design.
Now consider what they shouted least about: the semi-nationalisation of the railways, the creation of the publicly run Great British Energy, modest improvements to workers’ and renters’ rights, and some progressive taxation measures, such as hiking capital gains tax. That was for a reason: defining itself against the left was the core strategy of Starmerism. When, in opposition, Starmer committed to retaining the Tories’ two-child benefit cap – even though it plunged hundreds of thousands of children into poverty – his advisers believed, as the journalist Andrew Marr put it, that “the public will notice him standing up to the left”.
Starmer junked the radical policy commitments he made to become leader and claimed Labour had gone “from a party of dogma to a party of patriotism” and “from a party of protest to a party of public service”. Labour voters defected en masse to Zack Polanski’s Greens, first in the Gorton and Denton byelection and then in June’s local elections. Starmer’s strategy of insulting progressive voters and their values succeeded in plunging Labour into an existential crisis.
Burnham, then, takes the opposite tack, having understood that, in the Britain of the 2020s, the left is a significant political constituency that Labour must appeal to, rather than wilfully alienate. He bemoans the Starmerite purge of leftwingers, such as economist Faiza Shaheen and former Labour mayor Jamie Driscoll. He sells himself not as a factionalist but as “a Labour politician that’s about unifying people”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
