Keir Starmer is out but Andy Burnham is no friend of the British people.

Good day, spectators,

And I predicted Keir Starmer would resign no less than eight times in the past year and somehow, like a limpet, he hung on, stubbornly stuffing his inevitable demise under the bed until there was no more space. Yet today, I can announce, he is going. This is the sixth prime minister in a decade to stand outside 10 Downing Street and deliver a speech announcing their premature departure, and he will remain as caretaker until a new Labour leader is chosen in the coming weeks.

Fun.

And the man the media is already anointing as the saviour of the Labour Party, the figure who has been waiting patiently in the wings, is Andy Burnham. The so called ‘King of the North.’ He is currently the belovéd, charismatic mayor of Greater Manchester and recently won a by-election in Makersfield with 55% of the vote, making him a Member of Parliament (MP) and immediately triggering a leadership crisis. He speaks well. He talks about ‘unity’ and ‘hope’ and a ‘new politics’ and warns against the ‘poisonous politics’ of the United States. He is also, by all accounts, extremely likeable. Even I had a soft spot for him before learning about him

So, before anyone gets too excited, let us look at what Andy Burnham actually stands for.

Starting with the most immediate and visceral issue. Burnham has said, explicitly, that he would cut the welfare bill in order to fund higher defence spending.

‘I am not squeamish about saying that the plan would be to reduce the welfare bill,’ he told the Times. This is. of course, at a moment when food bank usage is soaring, when the cost of living crisis is still grinding working families into the pavement, when the most vulnerable people in Britain are already choosing between heating and eating.

His answer to that crisis is to cut the safety net further. One might reasonably ask: why not tax the wealthy? Why not close the loopholes that allow billionaires to pay less than their cleaners? Why not ask those who have hoarded the most to contribute the most? Those questions are not on Burnham’s agenda. Instead, he reaches for the same austerity playbook that has failed Britain for fifteen years and produced the conditions he now claims to want to fix.

He has also fully ruled out reversing Rachel Reeves’s fiscal reforms if he becomes prime minister, which means he is not offering a break from the economic programme of the Starmer years. He is offering its continuation, with a friendlier face and a northern accent. This is not a Labour socialist position. It is the position of a man more concerned with reassuring financial markets than with protecting the people who vote Labour out of desperation rather than conviction.

On immigration, his record is no better. He has backed Shabana Mahmood’s plans to end permanent refugee status and retreated from his previous calls to allow immigrants without settled status to claim benefits. He has aligned himself with a Home Secretary whose immigration agenda amounts to little more than pandering to the far right Reform enthusiasts. There is a joke that makes me giggle, it goes:

‘A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a pub. The barman says, “What’re you drinking, Andy?”’

It lands because it is essentially true. Burnham has spent his career being whatever the Labour Party needed him to be in a given moment, and right now it apparently needs him to be tough on immigration.

Now, this is the part that should concern every spectacle reader most directly, because it is where Burnham’s record is most damning and most carefully obscured by his public image.

As far as I can tell, Burnham has been a member of Labour Friends of Israel since at least 2015. In that year’s leadership campaign, he pledged that his first state visit as prime minister would be to Israel. He called the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement ‘spiteful.’ He praised ‘Israeli democracy.’ He described the Balfour Declaration, the document that set in motion the dispossession of the Palestinian people, as ‘British values in action.’ He voted for the Iraq War, which killed over a million people, and while he has since expressed regret, the fact remains that when it mattered, he sided with the Empire.

On Gaza, he has since signed letters calling for a ceasefire and for the recognition of Palestinian statehood, which represents the absolute bare minimum of decency and not a great deal more. But he has refused, repeatedly and under direct questioning, to describe what is happening in Gaza as a genocide.

When pressed, he said he ‘can’t judge things of that enormity from where I am as mayor of Greater Manchester.’ This is not a man who is genuinely uncertain. This is a man who has calculated that the word ‘genocide’ carries political costs he is not willing to pay, and who has dressed that calculation up as epistemic humility. spectacle readers will not be fooled by it.

Burnham is not radical new blood. He is not a socialist. He is a career politician and a shape-shifter who has spent decades triangulating his way through the Labour Party’s internal factions and emerged, somehow, as everyone’s second choice and no one’s enemy. He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the sheep — the working class, the poor, the marginalised, the Palestinians — will be the ones to pay the price when the costume comes off.

Keir Starmer is gone. Andy Burnham is coming. And if you think things are about to change, you have not been paying attention.

And on that thought, I’ll let you go,

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