25.06.2026
Two letters for Andy
Can he halt long-term British decline with his Manchesterism magic? Within the confines of the present political system, can anyone? Paul Demarty examines the prospects for the ‘king of the north’
To be fair to Andy Burnham, he made it look easy in the June 18 by-election in Makerfield. In a seat where Reform had run rampant in the recent local elections, he achieved a triumphant majority; turnout somehow increased, compared to the general election - a rare thing with by-elections.
This was the first real test of his personal popularity on his return journey to Westminster. Before it, there was always the chance (not insignificant) that it would turn out to be mostly Westminster bubble hype. He benefited from the Reform/Restore split, but did not in the end need it; those new voters may have been attracted to him personally, or merely repelled sufficiently by the far-right threat to vote for him. In either case, he passed the test; at issue is the question of whether he can lead Labour to victory when the time comes, and presumably to victory over either Reform or some kind of unified Tory/Reform bloc. On that front, he made as strong a case as can be made in such a bizarre off-year election.
So now, with Sir Keir Starmer’s exit, Burnham truly is the heir apparent to this flailing Labour government. The question is: what can he do with it? He is not in the worst possible position, of course. He inherits a large majority, courtesy of the freakish electoral arithmetic of 2024. Having been out in the provinces, he is more or less untainted by the government’s various scandals, though frankly we do not expect that to last.
Nonetheless, even the narrow electoral measure of success is hardly a freebie. The British economy is stagnant. Nationalism is riding high in Scotland and Wales (and, for that matter, England, since that is one legitimate interpretation of Reform’s success). Many municipalities are bankrupt or near-bankrupt. Successive prime ministers have promised to unleash new waves of development, to solve the housing crisis and other things - all have failed to deliver anything meaningful. The one serious state project of the last 10 years, the HS2 railway, is an ever-more absurd basket case.
We take it that this is not because Starmer or Rishi Sunak, or even Boris Johnson, were simply idiotic incompetents. Nor is it a matter of insincerity. Even if we take them only to be seeking glory, glory comes with big-ticket achievements. The truth is that each have found that they have no feasible levers to pull. Sooner or later, goodwill has to run out; and, when it does, scandals become ever harder to survive. That is how you get seven prime ministers in 10 years.
Headwinds
What are these headwinds? There are some immediate examples. The hardline ‘remainers’ are no doubt correct that Brexit has been a drag on growth, and they are correct to bemoan official dishonesty on this point, which serves only to patronise the people who voted for it. The end of the zero interest rate era has increased the cost of government borrowing, and thus reduced financial headroom for government investment.
Yet that is too small a canvas in the end. As we argue constantly in this paper, modern Britain is a dependent of the United States - its dependency takes the form of acting as an offshore financial centre and secondarily in occasional military support in American adventures. What prosperity this nation has enjoyed, especially since the end of the cold war, has required not rocking the boat. So long as things were generally on the up and up, this was a good enough deal to bring to voters; statecraft disasters like the Iraq war were survivable - if not by every individual politician, at least by the political class as a whole.
The financial crash of 2008, however, entailed the rescue of the financial sector at the expense of layers of the popular classes. It increased the number of zero-sum conflicts between sections of the general population, giving fresh impetus to hopeless endeavours like Brexit, and exacerbating anti-immigration sentiment (when our low-wage economy depends on bringing migrants in). It pushed the world into a new phase of great-power conflict, carrying with it the demand from the American overlords to increase arms spending and producing the usual ‘guns or butter’ dilemmas.
So the question of Burnham’s prospects is an instance of the general problem of the power of the individual at this point in history. It is, I think, possible to imagine some bourgeois government beginning a real shift in Britain’s world role: let us say, pivoting to Europe, joining a stronger cartel of states at the core of the EU, building strategic military cooperation on that basis rather than hub-and-spokes through US-controlled initiatives like Nato; weathering sanctions and capital flight with trading relationships on the continent and with friendly states further abroad; leaning on European partners for assistance with infrastructure, while state capacity is rebuilt; and so on. Central bank independence could be ditched and monetary policy put at the direct service of all this.
I am not saying that this would necessarily be good from a communist point of view. Doing so would still require massive remilitarisation and the cuts to service provision that would entail. It would also require ruthless and dictatorial action - imprisoning Nigel Farage, Tony Blair and most press owners as agents of a hostile foreign power, for a start (and purges of the secret state along the same lines). Union activity and far-left political activity would face the same kind of counter-subversive interference. In short, it would be a kind of total military mobilisation, albeit without an actual ‘hot’ war to fight (yet), and it would come with severe short-term economic costs.
I come up with this illustration to indicate the scale of changes required to accomplish a breakout from US dominance on a sheerly bourgeois basis. Yet we can already see problems - not least that it would require political co-thinkers on the continent to alter European politics, weaken the dictatorship of the judiciary within the EU, abolish the Germans’ beloved debt brakes, and so forth. Even at this level, the required levers are not in Burnham’s hands and - for all the occasional huffing and puffing from Emmanuel Macron, especially about European sovereignty - there seems little grasp there of the scale of the task either. Wolfgang Streeck was surely right to dismiss Macron’s “notorious inconsequential self-promotions” a few months ago.1
Plans
What does Burnham plan to do? We have very little to go on. He has said no more about policy than he thought prudent on the Makerfield campaign trail. Mathew Lawrence of the public-ownership think-tank, Common Wealth, has published a longer version of his big idea - the ‘productive state’, under the banner of the Mainstream caucus in Labour. We discussed an earlier version, published in the New Statesman, recently, so will not rehash that here.2 Yet this is hardly an official statement of Burnham’s camp.
Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’ is less an ideology or a programme for government than a projection screen for various incompatible hopes. What else could it be? His job as mayor of Greater Manchester was a relatively cushy one. He received and disposed of specific central government grants; it was his job to give things out, and the council’s job to take other things away. This is a job that can be mostly delegated, and the rest carried out strictly on a vibes basis. Does that work in No10? Just ask Boris Johnson.
It will not come as a great surprise to any readers that our answer to this bind is an international movement of communist parties, if such a thing can be built. That, a critic will say, is your answer to everything - while not quite true, it is true enough that we will take it on the chin.
The problem at hand, however - that some devious prankster seems to have snuck into No10 and replaced the toilet with an ejector seat! - highlights a particular aspect of our perennial solution. The communist movement, even in its rather straitened current form, is international. We are no great fans of tankie-ism, but it is at least a kind of international perspective. Now look at the dilemma of the poor souls doomed to become British prime minister: this is essentially a coordination problem. One either needs the consent of the US or a defensible bloc opposed to it to get out of the fiscal and geopolitical straitjacket that ultimately ensures that potholes go unfilled, houses go unbuilt and rivers get flooded with effluence.
Because the communist project exceeds the national frame of action, it has potentially far more traction on this problem than routine bourgeois governments. It does not need to engage in foolish and complacent delusions that things are so bad because of the last guy’s ‘incompetence’; it can face the real constraints head-on. And, by disciplining its public leaders, it can avoid absurd and demeaning spectacles like the slow-motion car crash of Starmer’s premiership.
What goes for Starmer and Burnham, of course, goes equally for Zack Polanski, or ‘left populists’ like Podemos in Spain, and similar organisations. It is not enough to break with treasury-brain: one must see the rational kernel in it. To do so just is to dispense with the idea that ‘I alone can fix this’, or that some cocktail of targeted political messaging can build an impregnable electoral coalition among passive and atomised voters. (It is not so much a problem for Nigel Farage, since he is nothing more than a Renfield to the Dracula of the American right, and promises national independence only from America’s perceived enemies.)
In the meantime, Burnham gets to take his turn at being the man of the moment. It all recalls a few lines from Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, spoken by a retiring ‘war on drugs’ official to his successor:
You know, when Khrushchev was forced out, he sat down; he wrote two letters and gave them to his successor. He said, “When you get yourself into a situation you can’t get out of, open the first letter, and you’ll be saved. And when you get yourself into another situation you can’t get out of, open the second letter.”
Well, soon enough, this guy found himself in a tight place, so he opened the first letter, which said, “Blame everything on me”. So, he blamed the old man. It worked like a charm. He got himself into a second situation he couldn’t get out of, and he opened the second letter. It said, “Sit down and write two letters”.
Perhaps someone should make sure there’s a DVD copy at 10 Downing Street. It could save a lot of time and heartache.
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See ‘Burnham rolls the dice’ Weekly Worker May 21: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1586/burnham-rolls-the-dice.↩︎