The starting gun has been fired on a new Labour leadership contest. Starmer is now a lame duck Prime Minister. He is clearly too weak to block his main rival, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, who now has a viable path to Downing Street.
But while the Prime Minister is fatally wounded, it currently seems likely he will cling on for a few weeks at least, hoping against hope for a reprieve.
Burnham will now have to lay out his stall and fight off Reform to win a by-election in Makerfield. This is a make-or-break political gamble for a veteran politician. It will either make him Prime Minister or end his career. Undoubtedly his campaign’s unofficial slogan will be vote Burnham to oust Starmer. But even this is not guaranteed to be enough to beat Reform, who just performed exceptionally well in the local elections in Wigan, within which Makerfield is located.
Meanwhile, Wes Streeting has resigned as Health Secretary, but his own support in the party has been exposed as extremely thin. He was unable to get the 81 MP nominations needed to trigger a leadership contest. If he were to face Burnham as an opponent he would surely lose. Indeed, some polling has suggested even Keir Starmer would beat Streeting in a leadership contest, suggesting an uphill struggle for him to look like a credible candidate.
Other potential runners, including Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband have kept their cards closer to their chests. Increasingly, it looks possible that Burnham will be Starmer’s only viable challenger, and that all wings of the party may even unite behind him. Burnham is a rare politician in this period in that he has a net positive approval rating. This is an advantage he has gained primarily by staying out of Westminster politics for the last few years. He has cultivated a ‘man of the people’ image in Greater Manchester, though the substance of this has been very thin.
Burnham’s Record
Burnham was a government minister under both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. He stood for Labour leader against Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 and was largely indistinguishable from the other right-wing candidates. He voted for the Iraq war and as health secretary was responsible for implementing New Labour’s privatisation policies in the NHS. He has also been a member of Labour Friends of Israel. Burnham is not a figure of the left.
Of course, none of this means Burnham as Prime Minister would take an identical approach to Keir Starmer. It seems likely that he would shift Labour’s rhetoric to the left, particularly on economic questions. But the fact that he is so widely supported in the deeply right-wing Parliamentary Labour Party is a strong indication that he is not going to be prepared to push for the kind of substantial measures needed to redistribute wealth and turn around almost two decades of declining living standards.
Doing this would require preparedness to face down the bond markets and the capitalist class, which are already in a state of minor panic at the instability a leadership contest creates. British capitalism is in a state of deep and persistent crisis and decline. Any politician who is pro-capitalist is ultimately taking responsibility for managing that system. This requires preparedness to make workers pay the cost of capitalist crisis – ‘balancing the books’ on the backs of the poor.
System in Decline
This kind of chaos in Westminster has become a painfully familiar spectacle. It is almost seven years to the day since Theresa May stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street to give her resignation speech. Already we are looking at a fifth new Prime Minister taking residence at that address. This fact alone is a striking illustration of the crisis-ridden nature of British capitalism and imperialism, and the built-in instability that inevitably comes for any capitalist government seeking to dutifully manage this absurdly unequal system in decline.
It’s in this context that the two-party system that has dominated British politics for the last century has finally exploded. The ‘centre’ has collapsed. The biggest winner at the local elections was Reform. They cynically pose as anti-establishment, yet we now know Nigel Farage recently took £5 million off a crypto-billionaire in an undeclared “gift”. What better illustration could there be of the real interests this party represents?
Equally important in those elections was the surge of the Greens and increasing support for other parties positioning themselves to the left of Labour. This underlines the huge appetite that exists for an alternative to austerity, racism and war, however imperfectly the available national political forces reflect this (something that has been compounded by the criminal squandering of Your Party’s potential).
Socialist Alternative
Whatever the outcome of the latest Westminster drama, the political alternative to capitalism and austerity is something working-class and young people must organise to fight for. We need mass, coordinated trade union action to demand a proper, above-inflation pay rise across the board, and a minimum wage of £20 an hour. We need to get onto the streets against racism – linking this to the struggle for rent controls, mass council house building, and job security for all.
We need to organise to fight for an alternative to the capitalist system of war, poverty and chaos. We stand for socialist change, based on public ownership of the biggest monopolies, democratic economic planning and solidarity across communities. If you want to help organise to fight for this, join us.
