21.05.2026

Burnham rolls the dice

Can the ‘king of the north’ complete his royal progress towards Westminster? And, if he does, what then? Paul Demarty explains the limits of Manchesterism

As we predicted, Sir Keir Starmer survives for now.

Only by rallying 81 brave MPs to trigger a contest could any of his rivals truly put his position in question, and the only big beast to really try, former health secretary Wes Streeting, simply did not have the numbers. He bluffed and bluffed, and that bluff was called. He is now out of the cabinet and on manoeuvres. If a contest is triggered, we expect him to sneak in - he has the backing of the residual Blairites, of course, but has also tied his colours to the ‘rejoin the EU’ mast, which may do him some good among Labour’s remainers.

In doing so, he made trouble for Andy Burnham - who was, of course, immediately forced to disclaim any such intention, albeit in the calculatedly ambiguous way that Labour’s career politicians must. Apart from that, Burnham has had a good week. His path back to parliament is cleared, with Josh Simons stepping down as MP in Makerfield and Labour’s national executive committee indicating that they would not block Burnham from standing for selection. Indeed, as of May 19, he is the official candidate. There was a shortlist of one.

It remains treacherous, of course. Opinion polls in the constituency have Labour neck and neck with Reform; the Greens have refused to stand aside for him, to the chagrin of former leader Caroline Lucas. Labour was all but wiped out in contested council wards within the constituency on May 7. It is the first test of his star power in the general population (we are promised by the likes of Neal Lawson of Compass that he can win votes from the Greens, Lib Dems and Reform alike - we will shortly find out).

If he should fail, it is advantage Starmer. If the great pretender does not arrive in parliament, we revert to the pre-existing leadership contest arithmetic. Streeting does not yet have the numbers, clearly (and, it seems, would probably lose a straight fight with Starmer among Labour members). The further May 7 recedes into the past, the worse the conditions for regicide.

If Burnham wins, we can probably expect a leadership contest in short order. Forget all the garbled idiocies from Starmer and Streeting that we need our best players on the pitch and all that. Burnham’s quest for a seat in the Commons is all so he can do a job. The ‘king of the north’ wants to be crowned in Westminster, and certainly has the numbers to start a contest if he makes it that far.

Battle

While the enormous disquiet in the ranks of the Parliamentary Labour Party is above all a matter of people in quite cushy jobs facing the reasonable expectation of the dole queue some time in the next three years, there is nonetheless something resembling a political battle breaking out, which at least offers some much-needed variety to proceedings. Burnham comes, we are told, with a fresh programme for government, which is called ‘Manchesterism’. He talks left (or leftish), regretting the toll of privatisation of essential services (but will not be drawn into promising to renationalise anything beyond the railways and water), and hinting at something like an industrial strategy and a slight loosening of the government’s fiscal rules (hints which he has now disclaimed in deference to the bond markets - more of which anon).

It is strange, however, to find this man somehow leading the left (such as it is) in Labour. Though born in the north-west, Burnham’s career until a decade or so ago was very much that of a standard-issue New Labour clone. His political career began in the army of advisors and wonks around Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He was elected to parliament in the safe seat of Leigh, and eased up the governmental greasy pole, as a parliamentary private secretary, a junior health minister and ultimately health secretary.

With the defeat of Gordon Brown in the 2010 election, he stood in the Labour leadership election essentially as a soft Blairite, touting a rather ill-defined ‘aspirational socialism’, and came fourth in a contest dominated by the battle of the Miliband brothers - the victorious Ed appointing him again to the health portfolio. Upon Miliband’s defeat, he stood again for the leadership; but then Jeremy Corbyn snuck onto the ballot. Burnham’s pitch then was regionalist - “we need to get out of the Westminster bubble,” he repeated. Some were not impressed. “If the Westminster bubble could incarnate itself in flesh and blood, like the avatar of a Hindu god, it would be Burnham,” wrote Harley Filben at the time.¹

Yet you have to hand it to him: after a brief stint on the front benches, he really did retreat to the provinces, standing for and winning the new metropolitan mayoralty of Greater Manchester. He kept himself out of the failed coups against Corbyn, and was already up north when they stitched up the next leadership contest for Starmer. He had, it is generally thought, a good pandemic, challenging the Tory government from afar. He succeeded in returning to public ownership a number of bus and tram routes, aiming for a fully integrated public transit system like Transport for London. He was re-elected twice with handsome majorities.

There is something strange about the way his mayoralty is spoken of by his supporters, however. There is not an awful lot there in the record, when it comes down to it. People are getting very excited about a few buses and trams - nothing wrong with that, but it does not exactly add up to an alternative programme for his majesty’s government. The rest is largely rhetoric.

Burnham is a cannier operator than the average spawn of the Blair years. His leftish posturing suggests that he actually learned something from his trouncing by Corbyn in the 2015 contest - that a performance of sensible, non-partisan technocracy was not quite the ticket to success it may once have been. His occasional grumbles about the tyranny of the bond markets exemplify this: part of Starmer’s problem, and especially Rachel Reeves’s, is that they cannot imagine doing politics without this invisible wall bounding in the available options. They promise ‘change’, but the only change that appears is the replacement of the carnivalesque misrule of the Boris Johnson type by the managed declinism of Rishi Sunak and then Starmer. Sir Keir decries votes for Reform and the Greens as votes of despair; but since he only offers more of the same (but slightly worse), who can blame them?

Programmes

If Burnham’s record does not give us much to go on, there are plenty of people in the wings already trying to give a more concrete content to Manchesterism. One comes from Mathew Lawrence - founder of a think-tank called Common Wealth, which provides wonkish arguments for extending public ownership. Lawrence’s essay in the New Statesman, ‘The case for Manchesterism’, has been much discussed in such circles (though it appears to be mostly a repackaging of his previous arguments, with some light Burnhamite branding added).² There is also Louise Haigh, the soft-left MP who was briefly transport minister, before being forced to resign over a nothingburger scandal, writing for Renewal (associated with the Compass project). Her title: ‘A new fiscal framework to renew Britain’.³

Lawrence’s case is essentially that there are several conditions in which private actors cannot be expected to provide services adequately. Front and centre are utilities, where profit plainly comes from rent extraction, and rents are directly counterposed to investment. He also mentions sectors of the economy where productivity has essentially topped out. The water system exemplifies both of these: “… the core technology has been stable since the Victorian era, and what private ownership has produced is not innovation, but the financial engineering of regulated asset bases.” Also considered are “investment strikes” (turning to financial engineering instead of serious investment in productivity), and “social need” (where service simply must be provided for reasons of social stability, but is fundamentally unprofitable).

These scenarios cannot be dealt with through redistributive mechanisms like social welfare. What is required is a “productive state” (similar, we suppose, to Mariana Mazzucato’s “entrepreneurial state”). By way of systematically investing without quarterly results to worry about, the state alone can cure the protracted malaise affecting economies like Britain, in turn producing an environment where private capital can thrive.

Haigh’s argument complements this by taking on directly the orthodox fiscal and monetary policy of governments throughout the neoliberal era - “treasury brain”, as it is sometimes called. Again, a focus on short-term indicators like gilt yields prevents the kinds of long-term investment that holds the promise of solving the underlying fiscal maladies (getting more people into work, so they can pay taxes, and so forth). Not that Ms Haigh wishes to spook anyone: she is all for fiscal responsibility, and she rejects any incursions on the independence of the Bank of England, except slightly ‘reframing’ its mission to take account of long-term growth.

That caginess concerning the Bank of England and its prerogatives is telling. Burnham and friends are happy to speak ill of the bond markets, and in reply get the example of Liz Truss thrown in their faces. Yet her fate was not only sealed by the bond market. In a whimsical blog post, the celebrity historian, Adam Tooze, compares treasury-brained economists to Harry Potter characters refusing to name Voldemort - ‘that which must not be named’ in this case is, of course, Threadneedle Street. It was the refusal of the Bank of England to intervene that did it for Truss. “‘The bond market’ isn’t an irresistible objective force like the weather or an avalanche. It can appear like that. But that depends on the way it is being handled - or not handled - by the central bank.”⁴

Certainly it is hard to imagine a successful social democratic reorientation along Lawrence or Haigh’s lines with a hostile bank to deal with. It amounts to an attempt to do politics with one and a half hands tied behind your back. It is quite remarkable how entrenched the shibboleth of Bank of England ‘independence’ has become, given that it was only introduced during the first Blair government. A Manchesterism that really did significantly extend public ownership would have to make incursions on the holdings of institutional investors; the bond market would be (on one level, quite rightly) spooked, and monetary policy would have to be ready to hand to counteract the resulting convulsions.

Half of it

Yet that is not the half of it. All participants in the Labour wars want to ‘get Britain building’, especially housing capacity; but the truth is that, for it to make any difference, the cost of housing must fall. Inflated capital values must be destroyed, and the losers will be mortgage-paying homeowners and petty landlords, of whom there are very many. All of which is to say that even the one policy goal that all can agree on in the Labour fracas poses not tweaks to fiscal policy, nor mere investment, but ‘decommodification’ - a move to production for need and planning in kind in at least some sectors. Lawrence acknowledges this, to his credit, but does not seem to realise that this is impossible without fighting a battle of class interests. Is Burnham game? Is anyone?

There is, lastly, the international question. Britain’s prosperity is based on financial services. (As Haigh writes in a bizarre formulation, “industrial strategy sceptics need only look at the strength of our financial services to see what can be achieved” - surely the only time turning a country into a money laundry has been called an “industrial strategy”!) All things being equal, reindustrialising would require competitiveness at the cost level, and therefore driving down wages to Chinese (etc) levels. For all things not to be equal, international action is required, but is out of scope for these doughty patriots.

The Manchesterism debate is interesting precisely because it poses these questions. But we doubt Andy Burnham can do much better than Starmer and Reeves, when it comes to the crunch.

1. ‘A night in the uncanny valley’ Weekly Worker June 25 2015: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1064/a-night-in-the-uncanny-valley.↩︎

2. www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2026/05/the-case-for-manchesterism.↩︎

3. renewal.org.uk/articles/a-new-fiscal-framework-to-renew-britain.↩︎

4. adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-449-voldemort-on-threadneedle.↩︎