Andy Burnham: The Soft Left Answer?

The British left has a habit of recycling the same type of figure whenever Labour enters crisis. A career politician with the soft left label where hope is invested where none exists. Andy Burnham is the latest of these creations.

Frequently described as part of the labour left, Burnham would be more accurately described as left of imperialism. He is now being presented as the man to rival Keir Starmer and return Labour to ‘what it was’ or ‘old Labour’ as the term used off the back of Tony Blairs ‘New Labour’. Old Labour is a falsehood on its own, but that the dream can be created at this point in capitalism in decay, is a fantasy.

We have seen this over and over again. Even in the most recent past, people cried out for Corbyn, a woolly Labour bureaucrat, a pacifist and an expert in failure. Zarah Sultana, another career politician who was groomed to provide a leftist veneer within Labour while still supporting imperialist endeavours such as the overthrow of President Bashar Al Assad in Syria. Sharon Graham’s fist-waving at the powers that be had everyone on their feet, but those threats proved unsurprisingly empty, or perhaps she was distracted by strike-breaking and hiding evidence of her husband’s antics. Mick Lynch dominated the airwaves, supposedly holding the Tory government of the time ‘to account’, only to then tell everyone to vote Labour. Remember when he urged us to trust Keir Starmer because he did? Telling us he had the best interests of the British workers.  More recently, Lynch has appeared on Sky News condemning Netanyahu’s government without mentioning even a single mention of imperialism or Israel’s function in the Middle East. This is precisely why such figures are given airtime: to keep the left engaged but never lead it anywhere close to removing the ruling class.

Andy Burnham himself is a well-versed career politician. He was inducted into the Labour Party system at 15, as a researcher for Tessa Jowell under the Blair government, slowly working his way into safe positions within the party as his career progressed. He was loyal to both the Blair and Brown governments, never voting against the grain. He supported the Iraq war and voted against investigations into crimes committed in Iraq by NATO forces. He backed ID cards, he was for extending anti-terror surveillance and he supported the retention of these draconian surveillance laws long after 9/11. He also voted for stricter asylum laws. None of this is pro-worker. It is the record of a man loyal to the Labour Party, to British capitalism, not to the working class.

One of Burnham’s so-called left victories was the “nationalisation” of Manchester’s public transport system though this was not what it was sold as in the media. Since 1986, public control of transport was stripped from local councils and opened up to competition. Burnham did not reverse this. He merely took a transport network already gutted by government and reintroduced parameters such as council-set routes and fares. Private companies still hold the contracts and, unsurprisingly, still take the profits.

In recent news, Burnham was blocked from running in a by-election for the safe Labour seat of Gorton and Denton. Winning this seat would have allowed him to return to Westminster and, for the third time, give him more standing to place himself in contention for Labour leader. While it is not technically mandatory to hold a Commons seat to become prime minister or Labour leader, doing so provides a larger platform for which to raise his opinions and garnish support. A popular mayor in a safe seat, able to challenge the Prime Minister directly, would clearly boost his standing and a career politician such as Burnham definitely knows this.

As a sitting mayor, Burnham required permission to stand in the by-election. That permission was denied by an 8–1 vote of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), which included the current, and extremely unpopular, Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. There is little doubt that Burnham would see this a route to number 10. He has been primed for decades to occupy senior roles within Labour and was widely viewed as an obvious candidate when Corbyn unexpectedly won the vote for party leadership. Whether Starmer genuinely fears Burnham’s persistence and popularity remains to be seen, but what is clear is that Starmer’s own popularity is fading. A figure like Burnham will have a large swell support from all sections of the population. Tony Blair like figure who will be popular with the regular Labour voters but never offering a difference. Just different aesthetics.

Andy Burnham is undoubtedly popular with sections of the left, but he’s popular to  British capitalism too. He is one of a pool of career politicians with a left veneer, ideal to contain the working class within parliamentarism, where politics is reduced to a tick-box exercise.

We can speculate endlessly about the inner machinations of the ruling class, but Burnham being blocked from Westminster and told to “concentrate on Manchester” will only increase his standing among Starmer’s critics. With his safe voting record and completed education in Labour Party bureaucracy, it will not be long before Andy Burnham is once again competing for the Labour leadership.

One thing is certain: he offers no challenge to imperialism or the ruling class.