Resignation and politics

The final U-turn. Within an hour of Starmer’s resignation a good friend of mine, an expatriate Brit who is now a Spanish citizen, writes to me: “The greatest leadership failure in English politics in my political lifetime. Puts the hapless Truss in the shade. I can remember to the minute exactly where I was, and the happiness I felt, when Thatcher went. But today, and for the foreseeable future? I can’t even muster the well earned Schadenfreude.”

I feel no Schadenfreude either, if anything I pity him having to face up to his utter failure. And given that he makes so much of being a family man, I feel for his wife and children, who will have to bear the brunt of it, while the rest of us are rid of him, or soon will be. Anyway, I can’t imagine him setting up a foundation and travelling the world making well-paid speeches.

Meanwhile, with the Prime Minister’s resignation, the country must now resign itself to the nebulous hope of a new leader, in the person of the popular and straight-speaking Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham, following his victory at the Makerfield by-election, when he saw off the threat of Reform by romping home with an absolute majority. However, in actually existing democracy, the citizens choose their MP but have no say in who leads them; cabals and committees run the show. Labour’s National Executive Committee is responsible for running the leadership contest, but events moved fast and within an hour or so of Starmer’s goodbye, the former health secretary Wes Streeting, Burnham’s principle rival, announced he was supporting Burnham and wouldn’t stand against him. Doubtless there have been frantic conversations going on between all the interested parties, but the speed and content of this announcement strongly suggests they’d made a deal and Streeting is in line for a key role in Burnham’s cabinet—Chancellor of the Exchequer seems possible. But would you trust someone who as Health Minister treated resident doctors shabbily and oversaw the incursion of private health into the NHS by the back door? The bond markets seem to think so, and are briefing against the rumoured alternative of Ed Miliband. Doubtless the defence of doing deals would be that it was a case of prioritising ‘the interests of the country’, as the phrase has it, in order to avoid a protracted and potentially damaging internal Party process; this way, Burnham could be in office before parliament rises for the summer. This also raises the question of who Burnham has lined up for the other chief offices of state, especially the Home Office and the Foreign Office.

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In the optimistic scenario, Burnham’s sunny personality infects the country and all turns out well, the economy turns around and the threat of Reform recedes. But personality and friendly speech, however welcome, only get you so far, and his carefully managed campaign at Makerfield nevertheless exposed a politician no less vacillating and slippery than we’ve come to expect. On the positive side are his genuinely impressive achievements as Mayor of Greater Manchester, now framed, in his campaign video, as “business-friendly socialism” or the “end of neoliberalism, the end of trickle-down economics that has left out places like Makerfield.” No matter that “business-friendly socialism” is an oxymoron; it isn’t socialism if it’s business friendly. The model is Manchesterism on a national scale: better public control of essential services, including transport, water, housing and energy, which have been systematically privatised, outsourced and deregulated since the 1980s, in accord with Mrs Thatcher’s neoliberal agenda.

This doesn’t mean full blown nationalisation, whose cost is prohibitive, but public oversight, to be achieved through devolution of powers to local government. Like the centrepiece of Manchesterism, the Bee Network, which brings buses back under local public control and puts a cap on fares by the expedient of placing the franchise operators under the supervision of the local transport authority—as in London—which prevents them from exploiting popular routes and closing down those that aren’t. However, not all services are so amenable to local control and need more decisive action, like Thames Water, whose mismanagement and excessive debts have brought it near to collapse and justify expropriation without compensation. This is radical stuff, and geared to the Labour left. That’s not all. Burnham’s support for electoral reform and his declared intention to include Proportional Representation in the next election manifesto goes further still, intruding on the territory of the resurgent Greens who have picked up votes from Labour’s left just as Reform from the Conservatives on the right, who ironically would also gain from PR. Since the country likely faces continued political decline without radical constitutional reform, one could be induced to root for Burnham on these grounds alone, although that could turn out a costly mistake.

Despite the anti-Thatcherite framing, he has tacked rightward on other issues. To dampen jitters in the bond markets, he declared his approval of Rachel Reeves’ notorious fiscal rules. To suit the Makerfield electorate, he distanced himself from earlier comments about wanting Britain to rejoin the EU, and backed Shabana Mahmood’s plans to deal with the issue of immigration with illiberal measures, rowing back on his earlier position. But would he keep them both in post? Wouldn’t that send a signal that contradicts the change he promises? Doubtless there are ways to re-interpret the fiscal rules, but immigration remains a quagmire, in which Burnham shows signs of populist thinking and the right-wing narrative of migration needing to be brought under control, while correctly criticising the Home Office for sending asylum seekers to deprived low-cost areas instead of dispersing them around the country. While this plays into the hands of Reform, he’s also called for safe routes for those crossing the Channel in small boats. (I have used AI to check this out. My preferred platform is claude.ai, which scours the web and includes sources, though it sometimes gets them wrong. However, it also warns me that one of these sources, GB News, “has its own editorial slant in these matters” so the framing is questionable.) As for climate change, Burnham’s position is also dubious, having apparently said he has an open mind about fossil fuel extraction in the North Sea, which puts him at odds with actual government policy and leaning towards the Conservatives.

The biggest gap in what we know about Burnham’s positions is foreign policy and geopolitics, where there is very little to go on. The chatbot reports him having said that voting for the Iraq war in 2003 was the worst experience of his early time as an MP. What his foreign policy would actually look like as PM, faced with live issues like Russia and Ukraine, European defence cooperation, Iran, and US-China rivalry, is currently unknown, but according to the chatbot, there has already, in just the last few days, been speculation about the key question of how Burnham will deal with Trump, about whom he’s made only a couple of indirect but implicitly critical remarks. The consensus is that there is a real risk of friction. Burnham has pledged to focus on the domestic challenges and unlike Starmer, travel as little as possible, but he won’t be able to avoid being dragged onto the world stage, where any encounter with Trump is an obstacle race.

Trump has already expressed his doubts about Burnham. No sensible person in Britain will worry when they clash, but probably cheer him on. The foreign policy issue that resonates domestically is Israel and Palestine, and here Burnham has a certain track record. This consists in engaging with both sides while supporting a two-state solution. The chatbot tells me he visited the occupied West Bank with Labour Friends of Palestine in 2012, and three years later joined Labour Friends of Israel. He’s described Israeli settlements as illegal, while rejecting BDS as “spiteful”. After October 7, he condemned the attacks and affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself within international law, while becoming one of the first senior Labour figures to call for a ceasefire. He declined to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide,” but called for “a full process of investigation and accountability”. This suggests fence-sitting, not the progressive foreign policy that is needed especially now when Israel is blocking the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding by continuing its attacks on Hisbollah in Lebanon, it demonstrates attention to currents of opinion in the community. It’s based on the ethnic composition of the Manchester population, which has the largest Jewish population outside London, although it’s much smaller than those who identify as Muslim. Accordingly, allies describe him as committed to both Jewish communal ties and Palestinian rights. Following his Makerfield win, he’s promising a “clearer stance” on Israel/Palestine, partly in response to the Green Party eating into Labour’s vote over Gaza—not in Makerfield itself, where the Greens remained in the background, but in acknowledgement that this is a national issue.

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When Burnham moves in to No 10, as one assumes he will do, he not only needs to quickly announce his cabinet, but he and they need to move fast to put words into action, and they must do this on several fronts at once, while rebuffing calls for a general election. These are toothless, since as we’ve seen under the Tories, there’s no constitutional obligation for it, although maybe there should be (this should include MPs switching parties). My advice, for what it’s worth, is that his first measures should include placing the water companies in public ownership, beginning with Thames Water, and strengthening the regulator, to show he means business. He should also repudiate Starmer’s authoritarianism by cancelling the designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation and dropping the cases against its supporters, in response to the dominant feeling abroad in the country, along with banning all exports of war matériel to Israel. Neither of these are costly, and with measures like these he would be given licence to deal with pressing issues like defence, increasing energy costs, the dysfunction of the prison and legal systems and policing, not to mention those that have recently risen in the agenda like youth unemployment. On top of that, he needs to signal engagement in problems that are no less urgent but need medium to long-term thinking, like social care and university finances, not to mention relations with Europe. Add you own favourite issue here.

The first test for the hope he seems to inspire among Labour MPs will be the election for his replacement as the Manchester Mayor, which is likely to turn into an ugly three-way battle between Labour, Reform and Green. Since we won’t have long to wait, the political temperature will remain high. Another test will come when back-bencher Starmer decides its time to quit parliament. If he resigns his seat and forces a by-election, on current reckoning it’s more than likely that his inner London seat would be won by the Greens. Could Burnham stop this trend? I doubt that even if he takes the measures needed to realise his more progressive instincts, this would turn him into an eco-socialist. Besides, he’ll still have to respond to all the external factors, existing and to come, in which he has no experience but only instinct, and his politics of change could yet come undone.

Burnham’s arrival in Parliament brought a moment of levity. As he was being sworn in, he was heckled by a Tory backbencher shouting out “He’s not the Messiah!”. He instantly picked up the reference and fired back “I’m a naughty boy”, echoing the famous line from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”. The chamber erupted in laughter and the clip went viral. If he keeps this up, at least politics might become a bit more entertaining.