Who’s afraid of Andy Burnham?

In the wreckage of the neoliberal order they once championed, there are a number of paths available to Europe’s social democrats. Keir Starmer’s Labour has chosen one: a hawkish fiscal policy combined with rearmament, moderate improvements in employment rights and a shift to the extreme right on migration. Labour has consolidated the UK’s harsh border regime while modestly raising the minimum wage, continuing austerity in many areas and insisting on the private ownership of water. Whether you call this ‘national renewal’, as Starmer does, or Blairism without the progressivism or the money, support for it now sits at around 20 per cent in the polls. 

Andy Burnham, who was blocked last week from applying to be Labour’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, is a former Blairite minister who voted for the Iraq War, approved Private Finance Initiatives as health secretary, and ran for leader in both 2010 and 2015 with the backing of key figures on the party’s right. But where most of the parliamentary party saw the resurgent Labour left as an existential threat, Burnham made his peace with the Corbyn leadership, remaining in the Shadow Cabinet after the mass resignations that triggered a leadership contest in the summer of 2016. 

As mayor of Manchester, Burnham has the record of a common sense social democrat rather than a radical leftist. He donates 15 per cent of his salary to the fight against homelessness and supports a ‘housing first’ approach, offering vulnerable people an unconditional right to secure housing. But Manchester, like many other local authorities, has also been a bonanza for private developers, who have built more luxury flats than council houses, often with the help of loans from the public purse. Quotas for affordable housing have been suspended in some developments under ‘viability assessments’.

Burnham was one of the first major Labour figures, along with the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, to break ranks with Starmer in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. He touts ‘Manchesterism’ as an alternative to the economic orthodoxies peddled in Westminster. ‘The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse,’ he wrote last week, ‘are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit.’ 

Manchesterism is a clever branding exercise, giving geographical roots to a broad political vision. For the establishment centre-left, it represents an alternative to Starmer’s bond market orthodoxy and accommodation of Reform UK, Emmanuel Macron’s muscular centrism or Mette Frederiksen’s hardline anti-migrant politics. It is clearer about the need to break with neoliberalism, and more welcoming to forces on its left. In these senses, it has much in common with the approach of Iberian social democrats, who have defied the broad decline of European parties of the centre-left.

Pedro Sánchez has been prime minister of Spain since 2018. His leadership of the Socialist Workers’ Party has been punctuated by clashes with centrist factions in his own party, as well as the rise of radical left alternatives in the form of Podemos and, more recently, Sumar. Sánchez’s governments have delivered hikes in the minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich, rent controls and regularisation for undocumented migrants. Just as Sánchez formed coalitions with Podemos and Sumar, it is possible to imagine Burnham’s Labour entering a pact with an insurgent Green Party, reducing the chances of a Reform UK government. 

But without the prospect of a seat in parliament, Burnham will not become Labour leader, at least for now. The party is going to be crushed in May’s local, Scottish and Welsh elections. Starmer will almost certainly be forced to resign. With no clear challenger from the party’s soft left, Wes Streeting stands a good chance of becoming prime minister. For the small team of advisers and Cabinet ministers who made the call to block Burnham, this makes sense as factional strategy, but it comes at a cost. The fragility of the Labour right has been exposed, its outriders unable even to agree on the pretext: was it Burnham’s status as a sitting mayor that was the problem, or his maleness or whiteness? 

Labour’s moderates style themselves as laser-focused election winners, with their fingers on the pulse of the public mood. Now, presiding over the most unpopular government in British history, they have prevented Burnham, the only major Labour figure with a net positive poll rating, from running for parliament. Without him as its candidate, the party looks guaranteed to lose Gorton and Denton to either the Greens or Reform.

Shortly before she chaired the meeting that made the decision to block Burnham, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, accused the Labour leadership’s opponents of indulging in ‘psychodrama’. ‘My clear message to all colleagues everywhere is just calm down,’ she said. But if every accusation is really a confession, it’s the Labour right that’s having a breakdown.