Dear Subscribers,
On Monday Andy Burnham offered the public a vision for the future. He sees it taking place over the next ten years in Manchester. His intention to create ‘No. 10 North’, which will be ‘the nerve centre of a re-wired Britain’ made the headlines. But there was much else besides: the call for a politics of national unity instead of party division, the restoration of local government, the ‘re-industrialisation’ of manufacturing, the nationalisation of utilities, housing and transport, and a solution to youth unemployment with apprenticeships. It was wide-ranging; it was also shrouded in the woolly rhetoric of ‘Manchesterism’ with talk of ‘good growth’ and ‘hope in every heart’, characteristic of post-Blair Labour leadership (ie, Corbyn in 2017: ‘for the many not the few’, Starmer in 2024: ‘country first, party second’).
Charles Moore has noted the continuities of Burnham’s economic ambitions with a long line of recent governments – Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse, Johnson’s Levelling Up, Starmer’s Pride in Place – and argues that they never fully work in practice, only expanding the powers of central government. The continuities go deeper still: Tim Shipman has pointed out how Burnham represents a resurgence of ‘Labour’s class of 2001 – the generation of New Labour spads who became MPs that year and went on to become ministers.’ Whether Burnham is committed to Blairism or to socialism is ambiguous, since ‘Manchesterism’ is currently amorphous and rests on Burnham’s character.
The justified interest in Burnham has diverted attention from the last days of the Starmer government. In particular, the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has been trying to develop a sensible approach to immigration and asylum seekers. An initial plan to impose asylum seekers onto a Shropshire village in new-build homes has been shelved. Mahmood has been determined to harden the state’s approach towards immigration, of which the Immigration and Asylum Bill is an expression and will enable the deportation of all foreign criminals.
However, Chris Bayliss in The Critic has noticed how the Bill makes a concession for refugees sponsored by employers, educational institutions and ‘community groups’, suggesting Mahmood is less earnest than she is a cynical politician making herself favourable (ie, liberal) to Burnham. Either way, the Home Secretary’s policy seems a world apart from the mental landscape of the Prime Minister: it is indeed significant that none of Mahmood’s reforms (neither are Ed Miliband’s) are mentioned in Starmer’s reflections on his ‘achievements’ during his two years in government.
Editor’s Note:
After eight years of co-editing BriefingsforBritain (originally BriefingsforBrexit) Graham Gudgin and Robert Tombs are stepping back, although both will remain as members of the editorial board. We are very pleased to announce that Dr Anna Bailey will be taking over as Editor and we offer her every good wish.
Blog
Fiscal Savings from not paying EU Budget Contributions by Ray O’Connell
A present-value analysis of the UK’s direct Brexit fiscal savings from avoided EU budget contributions, 2021–2064. Built entirely on official Treasury and Commission data, the central estimate is £525 billion NPV, discounted to January 2026.
Media
Burnham has a chance to break Whitehall’s grip on Britain. I fear he’ll squander it by Daniel Hannan for The Telegraph
Why Burnhamomics will fail: The Left has abandoned economic theory by Wolfgang Munchau for UnHerd
Ed Miliband and the shady funding of net zero by John Power and William Atkinson for The Spectator
Key Points
What should we make of Burnham?
One of the great historians of modern British politics, Maurice Cowling, said of English socialism that it ‘has always had a problem about expectations arising from the vagueness of the undertaking and the consequent prospect of disappointment.’ Burnham’s speech on Monday would suggest that English socialists continue to suffer from such expectations – and perhaps disappointment, too.
Much like Starmer, Burnham addressed his audience with slogans and generalities. And even when he spoke about policy he remained vague: what exactly does ‘re-industrialisation’ look like? Why must ‘growth’ be ‘good’? why is ‘London’ taken to symbolise the entire south of England? There is also the plain absurdity of his renunciation of ‘division’ (in fairness, there is a cross-party prejudice against acknowledging ‘divisions’: but what else is politics if not settling divisions?) when he insists upon the economic north-south divide and physically dividing the operation of Downing Street thus. But perhaps vagueness here is permissible: Burnham was giving a broad speech that was more about setting the tone as opposed to describing policy details.
And tone with Burnham is important, for it is what distinguishes him from Starmer. Despite what conservatives may say about Burnham’s economic senselessness or exaggerated sense of being a northern outsider, they have been reluctant to acknowledge that he is more likeable than Starmer. For starters, he has a sense of humour – see, for instance, his being sworn in as the MP for Makerfield, where he was heckled ‘you’re not the Messiah’ to which he responded, ‘naughty boy’. The contrast with Starmer in this sense is striking, who would never have responded as such (in fact, he is too dull to have invited such a remark in the first place). Where Starmer is constipated and repressed, Burnham is playful and garrulous, and this came across in his speech.
It is not obvious that likeability corresponds with political success: indeed, some think that Burnham’s desire to be liked will override the necessity of taking hard decisions and precipitate his downfall. But his likeable exterior might make the radical reform he desires easier to affect. In this respect, Burnham resembles Harold Wilson by presenting himself on the side of ‘working people’ (a slogan, not an explanatory concept, of course). Where Wilson smoked a pipe and conducted trade union negations over ‘beer and sandwiches’, Burnham wears t-shirts and talks football and northern pop culture. Wilson was a cynical Labour politician who did what was necessary to win four elections; could Burnham be the same? His political intelligence (again, differentiating him from Starmer) would suggest that he might be.
But this is all speculative. There is, however, a final, more concrete point to be made – about the Labour party and the general electorate in Britain. Two broad misconceptions have for years predominated British political analysis: first, that it is Conservatives who are ‘nostalgic’ about the past (of which Remainers accuse Leavers); and secondly, that the electorate is predisposed to conservativism. Such points are deduced both from caricature and the electoral performance of the Conservative party. Confusingly, these things are at once true and false: true because some Conservatives do idealise the recent (at times the distant) past, and that voters are as conservative as most property-owners are inclined to be. But these are also falsifiable. Labour voters – especially younger voters – are in fact as nostalgic as Conservatives, particularly about the 1990s (Britpop and pre-Iraq Blair) and in their idealisation of the EU; and the British electorate in fact prefers to be spoken to in ‘a liberal, problem-less language’, as Cowling put it, ‘rather than the language that would actually describe things as they are’, which is why it is so fashionable to proclaim unity and deplore division.
Upon these related points should Burnham’s ascendency be understood: it may or may not matter whether he has distinct policies. In British politics it is never clear that personality and policy are distinct, or as distinct as the analysis of think-tanks and the explanations of historians make it seem. More often than not personality is policy. In Burnham’s case, he could be a Trussian implosion upon impact; or he could save the Labour party for the next generation as Thatcher did for the Conservatives. Neither eventuality is as clear as his critics and supporters would think.
