Hope back on the agenda with sketchy plans to deal with the cost-of-living crisis. Is it enough? Don Flynn argues the long years of right-wing domination of Labour politics have created divisions which need to be overcome.
Burnham’s performance at this year’s Labour conference was aimed at whipping up a storm of hope to carry party activists through to the next general election. For the machine running the party, this hope can seem like little more than increasing the chance Labour will win the next general election, currently expected to take place in 2029.
But the change of leaders must amount to a lot more than increased poll ratings and positive feedback from focus groups. Labour needs to set out a realistic programme for the change it promised the country in 2024. This means a lot more than the uninspiring message of “trust my competence” which Keir Starmer offered to voters.
Aside from the “hope” message, Burnham’s speech has been scrutinised for evidence of actions needed something to deliver change. The sense of being under the heel of gigantic forces that are beyond the control of people, communities and perhaps politics in general extends across the world. Stagnant economies are no longer generating sufficient jobs offering decent wages and rewarding careers. Housing is a money-making racket which lines up developers, private equity investors and landlords against the interests of renters and young people trying to purchase their first homes. Public services struggle to meet the level of service that people had once accepted as normal. Transport costs, whether by rail or bus, take an ever-bigger chunk out of take-home wages. The earliest fruit of Burnham’s change promise – the £2 national bus fare – is a welcome first step in the right direction. His declared intent to roll out more cost-of-living mitigation measures is welcome, but it will be challenged by the surge in inflation expected to come in the next few months because of higher fossil fuel prices.
Critical policies
Burnham is fully aware of the ways in which public moods are being shaped by anxieties about the future. His speech showed that he is working to craft a message about the “common good” and the role that government can play in carrying through policies which get the process of change underway. Measures up to and including outright nationalisation of companies and sectors acting against the public interest are now looked on with a high degree of approval by citizens who also want to see strong regulation aimed at curbing excessive profits and rent-gouging.
It is not just in Burnham’s speeches that a mantra is repeated: Homes. Water. Energy. Transport. Care is chanted out. The programme of the Burnham administration is being structured around these headings, with policies promising results that voters can expect to see in incremental slices from now onwards.
The net effect is the sense that Labour is returning to being what many believe Labour was in the past – before the years of Blairism and its neoliberal enthusiasms – when council houses were being built, and wages policy did its best to ensure living standards were at least able to keep pace with inflation. (Labour supporters who lived through these decades might remember these so-called good times a little differently, but let’s not spoil the mood for the moment.)
There are many reasons why the task of rebuilding Labour as a party that consistently acts in the interests of working-class people – the “common good” in Burnham speak – now looks so formidable. It splits into two major segments, both of which are uneasy partners in any task of working together for positive objectives. On one side there are transnational corporations working on plans formulated in overseas headquarters and agile enough to pack up their operations in GB if government policies run counter to their interests. The second segment is the myriad of small and medium-sized businesses, many answering the description of zombie firms, cash-strapped and running on profits so narrow that even modest changes to national insurance, living wage regulations or energy costs can wipe them out. Given these facts, it must be asked whether the foundations even exist for a productive economy capable of generating demand for labour and the expansion of manufacturing which Burnham is aiming for with his hopes for the reindustrialisation of Britain.
Class divisions
Another problem that needs to be addressed is the cleavage which divides the people who would benefit from a radical Labour government into two parts – the so-called “traditionals” and the “progressives.
This division if a constant theme of labour movement history and has shown itself in different forms across the ages. E.P. Thompson’s classic account of the making of the English working-class explained how a fraction he designated “artisans” learnt how to make common cause with the fraction of “labourers” during long, militant campaigns for change. The two came at the political issues of the day from different angles and often had agendas which did not wholly coincide with one another. The skilled tradesmen who made up the Radical camp from the 1790s to 1820s had priorities directed against the “Old Corruption” which ran in the country and were somewhat apart in terms of social status from the wage-earning manual workers experimenting with trade unionism and cooperation during this period. But the collaboration they learned over these decades flourished in the Chartist Movement in the 1830s and developed into the socialist labour movement into the 20th century. Much the same can be said about the coalitions built from class fractions in the middle years of last century, fighting fascism the priority of one group, resisting the poverty arising from global economic collapse with a programme of economic reforms on the other.
If the drive towards achieving change is maintained, Burnham’s speech can be read as a rough first draft of a political programme aimed at forging unity across the class fractions of the present day. The measures listed in his liturgy of Homes, Water, Energy, Transport and Care form the basis for the “cost-of-living” prime minister which he wants to be from now until 2029. It is aimed at households dependent on earning a wage or salary – encompassing all the “traditional” working class plus the greater part of the “middle” class – and bringing their economic interests into alignment.
It has a chance of success providing it anticipates the places where tension exists between the camps and comes up with a response which will hold an alliance together. The areas where friction will be generated are likely to be around the relative importance of welfare benefits for the one and property assets “owned” on the precarious basis of mortgage by the other. Once a symbol of the social and economic chasm that lies between the two groups of wage earners, its significance today has been greatly by the sense of crisis that now extends into households in the middle-income brackets. The “common ground” message has to be articulated and read in the government’s basic promise to citizens: progress beyond the precarity that is now the reality of life for the majority of the population requires action from a government which uses its powers to promote the well-being of all.
Rebuild a Labour Movement
Building unity across the various fractions of wage-earners needs to start with a reforging of the alliance between the political party of labour and the trade unions. This has been strained to breaking point over the course of decades because of the embrace of neoliberalism by successive generations of Labour politicians. The commitment to strong trade unions was eroded during these years as the party’s leadership took to preaching about the growth of free markets as the way to improve living standards. With more than twenty years of wage stagnation now behind us, that misconception of the way the world really works has surely been exposed.
The objective here needs to be renamed as the rebirth of the Labour Movement – that capitalisation underscoring the fact that the political party and the trade unions are wings of a larger and more diverse social movement that works together for social and economic justice.
Burnham needs to make the rebirth of the Labour Movement one of his key tasks. In 2026, the movement we need to build will need to project equality, justice and democracy as its core values. A horizon for achieving change has been fixed by the climate crisis which has fixed the 2050s as the point at which we have to demonstrate the turning of a corner on this period of history. Ending dependency on fossil fuels is not just a technical matter on how energy is generated for communities, but also a matter of determination to break the economic interests with have profited from the reckless promotion of carbon saturation in the planetary atmosphere. Dealing with this urgent task raises the need for a just transition to centre place in the policy agenda – which opens to a discussion about the standing of currently marginalised interests when considering the measures needed to bring about change. The Labour Movement of the rest of the twenty-first century has to be a movement for women, for children and young people, for the global ethnic majority, and the ending of poverty across the developing world.
What is Burnham offering?
Has Burnham got a strategy in mind that will counter the faltering alliance which once sustained a unified labour movement? There were moments in his speech when his approach to the issue of cross-faction alliance began to seem clunky, with cost-of-living amelioration measures in one place and the concerns of progressives in another. Better relations with the EU were flagged up, along with the reform of the first-past-the-post voting system. Yes to both of these, but we need a narrative which integrates both into a programme for change which explains their relevance to his “common good” agenda. Not mentioned in the speech was the looming threat posed by the development of AI under the aegis of the Trumpite tech bros, and all that this threatens for the well-being of populations, including the mental health of children, the threat of mass surveillance crowding out privacy and civil liberties, and the subordination of human needs to a technology that is making its own demands of planetary resources.
We will get more clarity about what Burnham is aiming for with plans for change which, in their present form, are promising but sketchy. In particular, how will he reach out to a large swathe of citizens who have been alienated from Labour by its orthodox stance on Atlanticism, the Gaza genocide and plans to continue a hostile environment directed against migrant and refugee people? These have been bringing people out on street protests for the last three years and more, in numbers in the hundreds of thousands, only to be repulsed by a Labour leadership which has preferred business as usual. It is not just the narrow electoral interest needing to curry favour on these issues which is at stake here, but the fundamental capacity of Labour politicians to act with moral integrity.
Hope is a good resource to stock up in quantities that will get us through the bad years. But events in Britain, in Europe, in the United States, and across the world, are rapidly moving us to the point where hope translates into positive action. Andy Burnham is getting people hopeful again, and we think, ready to get back into campaigning, fighting, and action.