Glyn Ford argues if Burnham succeeds Starmer allies, policies and approach must be completely different
Now the real fight starts. It’s time to throw the money-changers out of the temple. Makerfield’s storied and solid victory confirms Andy Burnham as the putative next Prime Minister, leaving Keir Starmer marooned to ramble off the stage of history as Labour’s least effective Prime Minister save, possibly, Ramsay MacDonald. Yet Labour’s right is on manoeuvres. The cult, Labour Together, that animated the Starmer puppet and pulled its strings are sloughing off that skin in preparation to intubate Burnham. Of course, their leader of choice, and a true believer in their project to capture Labour for finance capital and austerity, billionaires and bullets, is Wes Streeting. He’s still in their hearts, but their minds worry he’s the next Liz Kendall in the making. His active role and complicity in the farrago that was Labour’s two years of self-harming at the expense of the people of Britain, along with his – as yet not fully explored – links with Peter Mandelson, have placed a dark shadow over his intended coronation.
In the next two to three months, we have a series of battles to fight with Burnham to help him escape from that political cul-de-sac into which Labour Together has driven the Party. They are the juxtaposed issues of people and politics. First, it’s necessary to kill the sacrificial lamb, Josh Simons, intent on leading Burnham to the slaughter. The MP, who seemingly selflessly surrendered his seat to rescue his Party from two years of collective folly, by gifting him the prerequisite office to challenge Starmer, represents the malevolent face of that very project. He should go accompanied by the rest of the coterie involved in those crimes and misdemeanours against the Party, Streeting and Steve Read, in a sharp break with the past and offering absolutely no consolation prizes for failure.
These people were at the heart of the Labour Together conspiracy that subverted the Party using hundreds of thousands of pounds of dodgy donations that saw the organisation under Morgan McSweeney fined by the Electoral Commission for their failure to declare the loot. They weaponised anti-semitism to undermine Jeremy Corbyn, colluding in the mass production of spurious complaints. Simons himself was forced to resign as a Government Minister in March when it was revealed that during his watch in Labour Together, he was instrumental in setting private investigators on journalists like Paul Holden, the author of The Fraud, who were investigating the tawdry organisation. To allow any of them near government again is either idiocy or complicity. Burnham must ensure members take back control.
Others with similar political predilections, along with fellow travellers and useful idiots, have attacked Burnham’s soft underbelly, in opening a second front. John Healey on Defence, Rachel Reeves over the Budget and the bond market, amongst the hopeful “stay behind” agents conniving to coerce and capture Burnham to serve as a patsy for Starmerism without Starmer. Burnham has to refuse to dance to their beguiling music. To be brutal, he must put class back at the centre of Labour’s politics, subverting Reform UK and Restore UK’s simplistic substitution of a race and nation divide on Starmer’s “island of strangers”.
Healey – even as he turned native – and Reeves pose the right questions, but provide the wrong answers. The problem is not money, but management and the toxic soporific pull of delusions of past imperial grandeur. The UK is no longer a global power, but rather a hapless middle power. Nonetheless, Britain and the EU’s combined military spending is between three and five times that of Moscow; far over and above that necessary to cow any further attempts by Putin to resurrect the Soviet Empire. But it’s spent profligately in the wrong way, the wrong places and for the wrong equipment.
A single European market in arms production and common procurement would solve half the problem, while the second tranche comes with breaking the chains that bind to Washington, which sucks the blood out of Europe’s defence budgets. As the European Council on Foreign Relations poll in early June illustrated, now only 11% of Europeans consider Washington a trusted ally. Yet we continue to force-feed the US Military Industrial Complex. Britain leads the way, pouring rising billions into a Trident franchise whose bells, whistles and buttons are exclusively in Washington’s hands. If Putin launched an attack on the UK, we would need Trump’s permission to respond. A joint Anglo-French nuclear deterrent would free billions to fill the Healey gaps – and with change left over – without raiding the NHS, Education and Welfare. If the UK were part of a single market and common procurement for EU military defence, Britain’s expertise would see the creation of tens of thousands of high-skilled jobs in British Aerospace and the like.
Equally, Burnham must break with Reeves and her obsession with the bond market. She has long had Nelsonian sight, blindly ignoring industrial capital to favour the “financiers” – better named “speculators” – that are the cancer at the heart of the City of London. No, Britain will not be able to turn the clock back fifty years and more to before Thatcher and globalisation, but we can look to our high skill, high tech industries to create well-paid jobs at the expense of crypto-currency, prediction markets and the rest of that panoply of horrors in the speculator’s toolbox. Green and Infrastructure projects – and I don’t mean HS2 – can connect our regions, create jobs and pull up living standards, reconnecting Britain’s “left behind” with a new economic contract between government and the public.
We have to recognise that Burnham’s victory is merely a pause for celebration, not a cause for celebration. Two years ago, a by-election with the populist far-right on 40% of the vote would have been seen for the disaster it is. Burnham’s threatened Council for the Progressive Majority, designed to see off Reform UK, Restore UK and their Tory quislings at the next election, must translate into no common programme, but rather an electoral pact stretching across from Your Party through the Greens, Plaid and Labour to the SNP and LibDems. Lowest Common Denominator politics will be the same car crash that was foisted on Labour with the Remain campaign a decade ago; anaemic, bloodless and unappealing. This can keep the populist and far right away from the levers of power while we transform government in the interest of the people in Britain; without such a transformation, the dam will only hold for so long.
Labour’s 2029 Manifesto, apart from offering a total reset close to Europe, must accompany that with a new constitutional settlement. An end to the marketisation of politics where the billionaires buy the outcomes, the abolition of that democratic atrocity that is the House of Lords in favour of a fully elected Upper House, and the introduction of a form of PR that maintains the constituency link rather than a shoddy tossing of top-up seats to the Greens. Such tampering will be seen for the squalid fix it will be, and only serve to further alienate voters from politicians as they continue to distance themselves from the electorate.
If Burnham breaks to the left, Labour can come back from the dead, but if it all ends as nothing more than a re-arrangement of the political furniture and the Cabinet’s seating plan, it will be time to kiss our Party and our futures goodbye!