After Keir Starmer, things could only get better inside Labour. But Andy Burnham’s arrival as party leader and prime minister didn’t just clear that low bar. It was a cause for hope, especially for those of us in the trade union movement.
That’s less because Burnham is streets ahead of his predecessor as a politician – although he is – and more about just how radically the new prime minister has framed his project for the country. I’ve been active in the labour movement for almost four decades. In that time, I cannot count how many times I’ve heard talk of reversing the devastation wreaked by Margaret Thatcher.
For socialists and grassroots trade union activists, this kind of political thinking is bread and butter. But not so much for a Labour prime minister. Tony Blair, between torching the Middle East and taking a hammer to our civil liberties, infamously came to build upon Thatcher’s legacy rather than bury it.
Gordon Brown and Starmer were more set against the Thatcherite fracturing of our society than Blair. But they both continued to inhabit the political cage she built: the idea that there is no alternative. Before now, the only major party leader ideologically opposed to neoliberalism in a remotely serious way was Jeremy Corbyn, who drew up a programme that would have started to undo the rule of the market.
So in beginning his premiership by insisting that there is, in fact, an alternative way of organising our economy and society to the neoliberal one, Burnham marked a historic shift. This kind of talk isn’t cheap. How the prime minister has articulated his vision really matters, both because it has challenged the assumptions that have shaped our politics for decades and because the analysis is fundamentally correct.
Virtually every aspect of this country’s malaise, as Burnham powerfully explained to Kemi Badenoch, can be traced back to the “wrong turns” taken in the 1980s. But the flip side for Burnham is that his diagnosis doesn’t leave any doubt about what Labour must do in government. To measure up to his own ambitions, the party will have to implement changes to the structure of our economy unseen since the immediate postwar period.
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