This is a perspective from the Left on the end of the Starmer years and the advent of Burnham from Tobias Phibbs – a contributor to the Future of the Left Programme at Policy Exchange
What, and who, is a Labour government for? This is not a question Keir Starmer ever answered. There was no North Star, no purpose, and no plan. All governments must govern for the country as a whole, but each successful government has a different focal point, a different core demographic who stand to gain from the governing project. Thatcher had the petit-bourgeoise and the upwardly mobile working-class; Blair the new middle class. The last government, lacking politics, had no such core; no core loyalists inside of government, no core supporters outside of government.
Andy Burnham has shown his answers in his first week. He is for all those who are struggling with the cost of living, and particularly for the people and places that decades of deindustrialisation and globalisation have left behind. He is not promising the world, but he is showing his orientation and defining the Makerfield test. It feels, in other words, like a recognisably Labour government.
Neither the worst fears of the right nor the highest hopes of the left will come to pass. Shabana Mahmood stays at the Home Office; and John Healey is Chancellor. Immigration levels will continue to fall rapidly and the fiscal rules will remain in place. There might be some relaxation of the restrictions in the North Sea. There will no rent controls.
The task in front of the new administration is enormous, and the constraints it faces immense. For now they hope to inject a little feel-good into the body politic, some temporary respite from the relentless pressure of the cost of living. Starmer and Rachel Reeves’ pessimism didn’t just reflect reality it also constituted it by denting consumer confidence. People like to be governed with strength and optimism, not misery and equivocation.
When Parliament returns in September, the agenda will have to shift gears. Burnham has had a good week, but business rate cuts, bus fare caps and some cash off energy bills will not redress decades of economic stagnation outside London and the south east, nor the righteous political rage swirling in the firmament. Plans for devolution, reindustrialisation and welfare reform will have to be laid out and hard trade-offs confronted.
Despite his achievements in Greater Manchester and his personal popularity, many in Westminster still do not take Andy Burnham either seriously or literally. No 10 North, changing how politics is done, the pints, the chips, the gravy; these illicit only eye-rolls. The commentariat write sneery columns about how there is no such thing as normal and assume his shtick will wear thin pretty quickly. But there is no shtick and their criticisms are a confession. Many on the right in particular, who for years have correctly criticised the left for being wildly out of touch with the ordinary affections and values of the country, could soon be forced revaluate.
Photo by Karolina Bobek on Unsplash