Burnham: new style, but what’s the substance?

Andy Burnham’s swashbuckling takeover of power in July reminded the British public of what the art of politics can look like. First elected as an MP in 2001, Burnham became a minister – never mind a shadow minister – in 2006 under Tony Blair, nearly a decade before Keir Starmer was first elected to parliament.

Two decades later, Burnham’s first month in parliament has brought home for all of us just how bad a politician Starmer was. Burnham smiles while being filmed on camera or making a speech – something his predecessor never quite got round to doing – and his first weeks were filled with popular and populist policies, never mind what comes next. Bus prices have been reduced, pubs have received a tax cut and so too have live music venues.

This makes a successful first pitch from a smiling prime minister on the backs of a ruthless ministerial reshuffle that marks a factional realignment within the Labour party.

Voters, markets, donors – who is the audience?

Labour under Keir Starmer was haemorrhaging electoral support, losing 1,000 councillors in local government elections in an apparently annual ritual. Burnham’s ascendancy seemed to offer to reverse this, marking a shift to the centre-left that could shore up Labour’s core electorate while also reaching out to other progressive and working-class communities. Rent controls and a revolution in council house building were floated as potential policies that could form part of this realignment.

However, talk of rent controls was quickly abandoned and housebuilding is to be achieved by cutting regulations for builders – a policy already initiated by Starmer. Furthermore, Burnham has promised to maintain Rachel Reeves’s self-imposed fiscal rules on public spending, which will curb any aspirations of wealth transfer or investment-for-growth.

Why do Labour leaders apparently devoted to electability readily abandon popular policies in favour of the famous fiscal rules? Voters are not the only audience for political parties vying for power. The premiership of Liz Truss in 2022 (blink and you missed it) showed that British bond markets are highly sensitive to any increase in spending or fall in revenue from tax cuts that could increase the public deficit. Any costed long-term programme for investment will therefore fare badly against the short-term reaction of financial markets.

For Labour, there is a further concern with retaining large corporate donors. The Conservative party has an historic advantage in this field, meaning that it can routinely outspend Labour in elections. Jeremy Corbyn built a rival financial model for Labour, using subscriptions from a mass membership and trade unions to compete electorally. Under Keir Starmer, Labour returned to wooing corporate donors and achieved considerable successes winning business backing during the car crash premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

However, business support comes at a price, which is the rhetorical devotion to fiscal rules. The lack of public investment and domestic demand might be crippling the British economy, but no matter – pay what you earn and not a penny more. For this reason, Reeves, Burnham, Farage and others posing as candidates for high office always endorse the fiscal rules while in opposition as a necessary step to keep markets and donors onside.

Devolution: Radicalism on the cheap

Outside of parliament from 2017 until 2026, Burnham built his brand as the ‘King of the North’ while serving as Mayor of Greater Manchester. Burnham adeptly piloted Manchester as the alternative northern capital to London and he provided a voice for England’s regions in the doldrums of Boris Johnson’s Covid lockdown and Keir Starmer’s growing electoral disconnect from historic Labour heartlands. A radical devolution of power to “every postcode in the country” is now a key promise of Burnham’s new administration.

However, Burnham’s Manchester model is not marked solely by success and it cannot necessarily be replicated across all parts of the country, as others have already pointed out. Manchester’s recent economic dynamism has been driven by heady real estate investment, with large investors noting that yields were higher in Manchester than in London.

This was good news for building contractors and local homeowners seeking to cash in on rising real estate prices; however, it was bad news for everyone else, with working-class communities priced out the city centre and neighbourhoods transformed by skyscrapers and building developments. In this regard, Manchester has not been the anti-London, but a second London, the capital’s younger sibling in the north (just).

Real estate investment twinned with advocacy by a dynamic metro mayor is a model that can be replicated in some places, but not all places. Devolution without more money on the table risks being a transfer of blame, not a transfer of power, and Burnham in this regard would be doing nothing new. During the premiership of David Cameron (2010-16), the burden of the government’s policy of austerity fell heavily on local councils, who were then punished in the ballot box for cutting local services due to support being withdrawn by the central government.

Paradoxically – or perhaps not – while cutting funding to local authorities, Cameron’s chancellor George Osborne brought about a so-called ‘devolution revolution’, transferring powers to new elected mayors bypassing existing local government councils. This created the position of mayor of Greater Manchester to which Burnham was elected as the inaugural office holder.

What model of local government?

Elected mayors bypassed existing structures of local government with powers vested in councils rather than a single personal executive. To be sure, local government had long seen its power hollowed out by voter disengagement and a loss of funding leading to the loss of in-house expertise and capacity. But with minimal political debate, the new ‘metropolitan mayor’ model was rolled out, introducing local plebiscites for an individual whose role was to cheerlead for external investment in their region.

The result has been a hodgepodge of bespoke devolution agreements across Britain, undermining the ideal of universality in public service provision. The results have included the unique circumstances of Greater Manchester where Burnham rode the wave of corporate investment to cement a national political brand; the quiet successes of Jamie Driscoll in North of Tyne building an integrated local transport network and prioritising well-paid jobs to retain wealth in the region; and serious allegations of corruption levelled against Ben Houchen in Teesside, where a lack of oversight by elected councils led to financial and environmental scandals in the Teesside Freeport.

A new ‘Number 10 North’ in Manchester is strong on symbolism, but it builds on established practices of governments sending Whitehall departments north in search of cheaper rents.

In conclusion, a change in style backed by popular and populist policies has been achieved in Burnham’s first weeks. However, the Labour party and the British government are locked into a path dependency of self-imposed fiscal rules and dreams of devolution on the cheap. The so-called ‘soft left’ that is now in the driving seat of the Labour Party will need a vision, a strategy and determination if it seeks to rewrite these rules.