Alex Callinicos: Burnham will need more than words

Burnham’s “Manchesterism” amounts to neoliberalism with a more human face (Pic: Wikimedia Commons)

Good riddance to the whining, lying Keir Starmer as prime minister. But will Andy Burnham be any better?

He’s certainly a much more skilful politician (not that this is hard).

It was shrewd of him to bow out of Westminster in 2017 and run successfully for mayor of Greater Manchester.

This distanced him from the vicious internal warfare that destroyed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership and installed Starmer in his place.

Burnham repeatedly attacked “factionalism” in his speech to the Labour special conference last Friday–though he wouldn’t have been there if he didn’t know how to wield the knife.

Manchester also gave him an independent base and a record of claimed successes.

But what Burnham’s much touted “Manchesterism” really amounts to is neoliberalism with a more human face.

He fronted up a well-established policy to attract businesses to central Manchester and reinstated public control of the city’s buses.

The Financial Times newspaper’s northern correspondent, Jennifer Williams, who has followed his career, has a telling story about “Burnham’s signature manifesto pledge in his first campaign” to “end rough sleeping by 2020”.

“As Burnham’s first term wore on, his language shifted from ‘ending’ rough sleeping by 2020 to ‘trying’ to end it. In his subsequent mayoral terms, he moved on to focus more on other things. Last November, rough sleeping figures were back at 2016 levels.”

His promised drive for affordable housing also faded away.

Burnham repeated both pledges outside 10 Downing Street on Monday.

Burnham’s rhetoric conjures up the promise of more radical change.

In his speech to the Labour special conference, he invoked the working-class communities that formed the British labour movement and then said, “Four decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s have not been kind to the places that built our party, nor to the communities across the UK in rural and coastal areas.”

This is a condemnation not just of the Thatcher era, but also of the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown–in which Burnham served finally as a cabinet minister.

Does his promise of “a new politics” mean a break with Blairism–which Starmer sought to continue with such catastrophic results?

Burnham’s capitulation to the intense lobbying campaign by the City and the Labour right not to make Ed Miliband chancellor of the exchequer invites the ringing answer, “No!”

Not that Miliband–a feebly centre-left Labour leader in 2010-15–would exactly have been a Trotsky in the treasury.

In the event Burnham avoided the widely touted choice of the most powerful reactionary in Starmer’s cabinet, Shabana Mahmood, as chancellor.

But putting the solid Labour right winger John Healey, who resigned as defence secretary in protest at Starmer’s failure to boost military spending, in charge of the treasury is a vote for warfare not welfare.

Starmer and his hopeless chancellor Rachel Reeves were too weak to get the cuts to the welfare budget they sought through the House of Commons.

But Burnham’s ascent to the Labour leadership has been greeted with a deluge of demands from the media and big business for him to make the “hard choices” that Starmer and Reeves ducked.

In other words, a self-proclaimed opponent of neoliberalism should use his political capital to slash welfare.

It’s hard to tell exactly how these pressures will play out.

Burnham is clearly searching for some headline-grabbing measures to address the cost of living crisis.

And he may try to offer the impression of change through measures of devolution and electoral reform.

Pushing for proportional representation would mean drawing closer to the Lib Dems and Greens, which might prove useful electorally if Reform UK regain momentum.

But the causes of the political instability that has laid so many prime ministers low lie much deeper than any constitutional failures.

The British state is deeply embedded in a fracturing Western imperialism whose ability to manage global capitalism is diminishing by the day amid wars, wildfires and heatwaves.

Addressing this systemic crisis requires a critical analysis and a radical politics that far exceed Burnham’s cosy rhetoric.

Reality is likely to test him just as brutally as it did his hapless predecessor.