Can British Premier Andy Burnham find a left answer to the growing populism?

Over the last fifteen years „Larry the cat“ has now seen the 6th British prime minister move into 10 Downing Street where the so-called “Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office” has been residing. From what we can tell the 19-year-old tom cat must be as deeply disillusioned and resigned about British politics as is the island’s population. Now the Brits are wondering if Andy Burnham might be different from the succession of bores, clowns, boneheads and communicative disasters passing through the prime minister’s abode over the last and lost decade. Will Burnham’s policies be a throwback to the Labour Party’s state-centred policies of the 70s or finally bring growth back to a country cursed by Brexit, Covid and a mountain of national debt? Nobody knows. Yet with his attempt to find a left answer to the growing populism of the right - linking his first performative policies to sketches for a wider narrative - the fate of Burnham’s premiership will be a bellwether for the chances of centre-left politics in Europe. 

The path Andy Burnham has taken to Number 10 has been unusual but in the end uncontested. As the popular mayor of Manchester, he had let it be known that he would be prepared to move south if prime minister Starmer became unbearably unpopular. Which is what happened this spring, two years into his premiership. 

But first the 56-year-old Burnham had to become a Member of Parliament for his Labour Party to confirm him as successor to the listless Keir Starmer. He did so with a convincing victory in a local byelection winning comfortably in a constituency where two thirds of the voters had once endorsed Brexit and where the right-wing Reform Party had been clearly ahead in earlier polls. After that sounding success in mid-June any potential contender from within the Labour Party threw in his lot with Andy Burnham. And even the often-raucous Parliamentary Labour Party voted him almost unanimously Prime Minister, which in the United Kingdom can be done without the governing party having to call new elections. 

Now Great Britain has a new prime minister from the same party dealing with the same problems his predecessors failed to grapple with: a lack of growth and productivity increases; a formidable national debt that does not allow additional spending and needs to be reduced to fix the budget; a dramatic housing shortage particularly for young people; a looming disaster in elderly care; unsustainable expenses for the unemployed young and people with disabilities, and a “cost of working” crisis which – due to an unfair and intractable tax system – steadily increases the tax load for many workers. All this together has been creating an acute affordability crisis which has made 40% of adults spending less on food and other essentials. Last summer 86% of adults named the rising cost of living as one of the most important political issues. 

To immediately deal with these challenges Andy Burnham has come out with a series of short-term policy decisions. On day 1 of his premiership he addressed homelessness with the promise of stopping “rough sleeping”. On day 2 he reduced VAT on energy bills. On day 3 he capped bus fares nationally as he had done in the United Kingdom’s second-largest city before. On day 4 he cut business rates for British pubs and clubs which have been closing week by week – all of these highly performative steps but presented with his tested street credibility and compassion to a public eager to be heard. Yet Burnham stopped short of raising the long-frozen income tax personal allowance of 12.570 pounds, which he had indicated but not promised; this to show fiscal discipline to the financial markets just waiting to teach new prime minister his first lesson. For September he promised a 10-point plan explaining the next budget and his long-term reforms. 

Despite being well prepared for his first week in office the criticism of his promise to reverse 40-years of neoliberalism did set in from the moment he entered number 10. Whatever the former mayor of Manchester does, decides or promises, it will be opposed, ridiculed and condemned by critics from every corner of a compartmentalised public who think they know better. In the new world by social media the traditional political honeymoon of 100 days has shrunk to one of 24 hours. 

There are the disgruntled Starmerites who had been ungraciously removed from the cabinet. There is the Labour left which had also wished for more representation. There are the right-wing tabloids which opined on day 3 that his new government was already “in shambles”. And there are the well-meaning defenders of neoliberalism which remind Burnham where he should draw the line: no taxpayers’ subsidies, no accounting fiddles but a balanced budget in three years, no naïve dreams of reindustrialisation, and yes, of course, no wealth tax or similar redistributive measures which would only make the rich flee the country. The snooty and cynical Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh even wondered if “Burnham can be the failure that Britain needs”. Such kind of reactions have been the general fare of British politics, but the speed and viciousness of those attacks are unprecedented. The immediate discourse via social media has hardened the debate even within the political centre. 

Will Andy Burnham withstand this unrelenting wave of prejudgments, suspicions and gratuitous ill-will overshadowing any serious debate about contested policies and political pathways? And how will he address the dilemmas of governing and sell the necessary trade-offs to an aggrieved audience? Is there a larger story behind the proposed measures he has to tell? Something social democrats all over Europe have so conspicuously failed to spin together. 

At least he is trying to link the performative dots to a sketch for a new narrative. Andy Burnham has outlined his story in the book he wrote as the mayor of Manchester, together with the mayor of Liverpool: “Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain”. The book reviews the social and economic damage after 40 years of neoliberalism. It’s nostalgic about the northern music scene from the 80s onwards, and it’s arguing for structural reforms of the health and education system, and a renationalisation of public transport networks. 

If the story behind Brexit was to “take back control”, the big idea behind the government of Andy Burnham is giving voice to people in the figurative “North” where 70 % of the British population lives, feeling neglected by “the South”, that is London, the centralised bureaucracy of Whitehall and the Treasury. Here, the new British government is actively taking on the deep societal rift that is also troubling the political left elsewhere: between the US-coasts and the American Hinterland; between urban France and the large swaths between Paris and the other big cities; between East and West in reunified Germany. 

Thus, it is no surprise that the biggest plank in Burnham’s manifesto is devolution, that it is taking decisions traditionally made in London out into the regions, trying to revive regional and social mobility by devolving power. On Day 5 you saw Andy Burnham opening a “No 10 North” in Manchester from where the country should be partially run now. The big question will be if he manages to turn his story of the North into a national story before the next election in 2029. 

That won’t be easy. Since Victorian times most attempts at decentralisation have not been successful. Then, during the 80s, Margaret Thatcher emasculated town halls further trying to weaken some leftwing councils in Liverpool and in several London boroughs. Yet some proponents of devolution are warning Burnham that it can’t be done top down from a government office in a large city like Manchester, but that it should evolve more from the bottom up. And then there is the question how much radical devolution will cost before it produces gains to the national budget. 

Since the self-inflicted economic damage of Brexit – itself being the result of the feeling of neglect in the hinterland – the task for any government has been to deliver a transformational budget within the fiscal constraints. You could ignore the bond markets at the peril of your political project as the conservative premier Liz Truss found out after losing power in 2022, just after 43 days No 10. Or you could slavishly stick to the fiscal rules set by the markets and hope that some measures to unleash investment would create the growth to save your political skin, a strategy that ended the popular mandate of Keir Starmer’s Labour government after two years in power. 

Now Andy Burnham will have to find out if there is a more courageous third way to address the affordability crises, embark on more radical political reforms and ask the markets and the Bank of England for a small correction to the fiscal framework by extending the time horizon for more public borrowing. 

Everybody knows that this is something close to a mission impossible. The best one can hope for is some compromise, less radical than Labour’s left would wish for and more daring than the liberal marketeers would like. How markets react, we know. But will the politicians and activists of the British Labour Party have the discipline to forsake their political ambitions and ideological stances to support Burnham’s attempt at finding an answer to the growing populism of the right when the going gets tough? Will the left of the party ask for the impossible, turn the remaining three years into shambles and risk a political backlash that could even strengthen the extremists to the right of the Reform Party? Or can Labour turn the vibe shift under Andy Burnham into a convincing narrative for the electorate to give the party a chance to continue its reformist political project beyond 2029? 

This would need to be a project to place the left again on the side of the working people against the rentiers, the rich and the upper end of the middle class in a no growth society. The semi-successful “third way” of Bill Clinton, Gerhard Schröder and Tony Blair during the 90s and early 2000s could rely on a growing economy. Without that precondition today any left project will have to come up with a convincing and realistic pathway to redistribution. And a widely accepted story explaining the accompanying losses and hardships for the common good. In that sense, the fate of Andy Burnham’s premiership will be the bellwether for the political left elsewhere.