Keir Starmer has gone. In announcing his departure, he claimed his greatest legacy was a Labour Party in parliament without a left wing.
He set out to erase Corbynism, reassure the City, the state, the generals and Washington, and prove that Labour could run Britain without threatening property, profits or imperial alliances. On those terms, he largely succeeded. What failed was the parliamentary party’s confidence that Starmer’s lifeless son-of-a-toolmaker-turned-technocrat schtick could win another election.
Labour won office with a huge majority of seats, though with nearly a million fewer votes than under Corbyn, then governed as if the country could be repaired without confronting the forces that led us here. Wage rises did not meet the cost of living, services were starved, councils bankrupted, housing made unaffordable. Migrants were scapegoated. Gaza exposed Labour’s loyalty to imperialism. Reform fed off anger that Starmer could neither answer nor organise against.
The government tried to drive through deep cuts to disability benefits and retreated only under a major backbench revolt. It proscribed Palestine Action under terrorism legislation, criminalising expressions of support, with police arresting thousands and charging hundreds, before the ban was upheld by the Court of Appeal. It moved to restrict jury trials for offences expected to attract sentences of three years or less.
Burnham’s reboot
Andy Burnham has a political style Starmer lacked: regional roots, a mayoral record and an instinct for the language of place, pride, buses, towns, high streets, housing and public control. He can speak to grievances Starmer barely recognised.
But his pitch is not a return to Corbynism. It is another way of preserving the post-Corbyn settlement: the same Labour government with a regional accent, softer edges and a social-democratic wrapper.
His Manchester speech on 29 June was written for that purpose. Burnham promised a ‘No. 10 North’, the ‘nerve centre’ of a ‘rewired Britain’. He denounced the broken Westminster model, promised ‘good growth in every postcode’ and set out a 10-year mission to rebalance power and living standards.
There would be more public control over water, energy, transport and housing; a major council housebuilding programme; education, youth employment and technical training; business rates reform; procurement in favour of British firms; and reindustrialisation in steel, energy, food and defence.
Its appeal is obvious. Britain is disfigured by centralised rule, regional inequality, collapsing transport, dead high streets, insecure work, unaffordable housing and social abandonment. But Burnham’s claim that Labour must mainly win back voters drifting to Reform rests on dubious assumptions. Reform is a real threat, but YouGov’s local election voter-flow data found Labour’s 2024 voters broke more heavily to the Greens and Liberal Democrats than to Reform. ‘Winning back Reform voters’ can quickly become the rationale for tacking right on migration, policing and national identity—the very ground on which Starmer was beaten.
Manchesterism
Burnham’s radical language runs into the same wall elsewhere. He promises the ‘biggest change in our lifetimes’ while recommitting to Labour’s 2024 manifesto and the fiscal rules: a new direction inside the framework that trapped Starmer.
He wants to redistribute power, but not class power. He wants public control, but will not say expropriation. He wants council housing, but not the fight with the Treasury that building it would require. Reindustrialisation, yes—but within the confines of national competitiveness and capitalist growth, which spell job losses and pay restraint.
There is plenty of public relations in Manchesterism. Its slogans—good growth, ‘No. 10 North’, rewiring Britain, hope in every heart—are elastic where they are not vacuous. They are designed precisely to let everyone hear what they want to hear.
But ‘Manchesterism’ is not completely empty posturing. It is a political form: mayoral managerialism, devolution, local growth coalitions, selective state intervention, civic boosterism and a more empathetic language of leadership. It shifts power geographically, not socially. It attacks Whitehall centralism, not capitalist ownership. It talks about place as a substitute for class. It offers public control without workers’ control.
That is why Burnham is more dangerous for the left than Starmer. Where Starmer had to rely on discipline, Burnham will rely on incorporation. He can appear to be ‘not Starmer’ while remaining acceptable to the Labour right, the state, business, the union bureaucracy and much of the liberal left.
Personnel punctures the rhetoric. Burnham’s intended chief of staff, James Purnell, is a Blair-era minister who introduced welfare-to-work schemes, and former chief executive of Flint Global, a corporate advisory firm whose clients have included BP, Uber and Amazon. Burnham talks about public control over water and energy; but the monopolies will read Purnell’s appointment as insurance against nationalisation.
The unions
The row over the Treasury is already testing Burnham’s coalition. Unison has backed Ed Miliband for chancellor, seeing him as more likely to support investment, public control and a break with Reeves-style orthodoxy. Unite and GMB oppose him over net zero and North Sea licences, fearing for jobs in oil, gas and related industries.
Unite and GMB are right to reject a transition paid for with workers’ jobs. But that cannot mean defending the investment plans of Shell, BP or Equinor. Unison is right to look for a break with Reeves-style Treasury rule. But a green transition managed through markets, subsidies and private energy firms will not deliver justice either.
Union and Labour Party members should say: no job losses, no new private fossil-fuel bonanza, no market-led transition that sacrifices workers or climate to the balance sheets of the energy giants. The whole energy system—oil, gas, electricity, grids, renewables and water, generation and supply—should be taken into public ownership under workers’ control, without compensation.
Workers in affected industries need guaranteed jobs, wages, retraining and union control over transition plans before their jobs are destroyed. A democratic plan should direct investment into insulation, public transport, grid upgrades, renewable manufacturing and socially useful production.
This is what it means to decommodify energy: not price caps, regulation or begging private firms to invest, but taking the assets and profits, placing them under democratic control, and planning our way out of the market.
No blank cheque
Burnham’s favourite phrase, ‘public control’, raises the same issue. Does it mean nationalisation, municipal ownership, regulation, state shareholding, public-private partnership or workers’ control?
Nor is devolution the same as democracy. Moving power from Whitehall to mayors and combined authorities can empower local business coalitions as easily as workers and tenants. The example of Manchester shows Burnham means the former. Any real rebalancing must be based on elected delegates from workplaces, unions, tenants’ organisations, climate campaigns, migrant communities and working-class neighbourhoods.
The unions should give Burnham no blank cheque. Whether Miliband, Streeting or anyone else sits in No. 11, the fiscal rules, the manifesto and capitalist ownership remain unless the labour movement forces a break.
Instead of choosing between ministers, the unions should convene a labour movement conference around a workers’ emergency programme: repeal the anti-union laws, restore pay and services, defend migrants, stop arms shipments to Israel, oppose Nato rearmament, end repression of the Palestine movement, scrap Shabana Mahmood’s anti-immigrant measures, and immediately take energy, water, rail, mail and the banks into democratic public ownership under workers’ control.
Burnham’s rise is a warning, not a solution. Labour is trying to renew itself before the working class renews its own organisations. Socialists should neither sneer from the sidelines nor climb aboard the Burnham bandwagon. Every promise has to be turned into a demand, every contradiction into a campaign, every union argument into a fight for independent working class policy.
Starmer too arrived as the change. Within a year his national renewal had become cuts, repression and retreat. Burnham now sells hope, place and a Northern reboot from inside the same fiscal rules, the same ownership of wealth and the same imperialist alliances. Unless the labour movement forces a break with all three, the new direction will lead back to the old disappointment.
