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A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the UK held an election for local authorities, in which Labour were soundly trounced, losing a whopping 1,375 seats. Almost immediately, Labour back-benchers began clamouring for incumbent prime minister Keir Starmer (he of "two-tier" fame) to resign.
This morning, he followed that recommendation.
Starmer is expected to be succeeded in the role by Andy Burnham, former minister for health under Gordon Brown. I was unfamiliar with him before this morning, but those more familiar with his political career are generally unimpressed:
Similarly, Spiked characterises him as "just Keir Starmer in jeans".
Get ready for the UK's sixth prime minister in a decade. I wonder if he'll stick around until the next general election. At least he'll last longer than Liz "Lettuce" Truss.
Both your links about why "people familiar with Andy Burnham's political career are unimpressed" are to articles by London-based right-wingers. They may be correct on the merits about Burnham's character (and I think Leslie is), but they are not familiar with the facts on the ground in Greater Manchester.
Burnham's constituents in Greater Manchester are impressed - he has won three elections with 60+% of the vote in territory which while Labour-friendly is not that Labour friendly - Labour only won 43% of the vote in Greater Manchester in their 2024 General Election landslide. And then he wins the Makerfield by-election comfortably, beating Reform in one of the to 10% most Reform-friendly seats* in the country with a campaign that focussed on bringing out his personal vote. And the rest of the left are impressed with Burnham precisely because he is popular in his turf. You can't do what he did without being either a more effective governor or a dramatically better communicator than your opponents. Part of what he has done is allowed Manchester proper to get richer** - there is a common cynical view that the structure of local government in the North of England was deliberately set up by Thatcher to encourage northern cities to fight with their suburbs rather than allying with them for regional prosperity (and potentially against London-based Tories). Burnham has managed to convince the rest of Greater Manchester that a successful Manchester is good for places like Makerfield, and delivered on this.
I don't think anyone can fix Labour's problems now - the Tories left the country in enough of a mess that the only workable approach was to double down on (mostly correctly) blaming the Tories (similarly to the tactics used by the incoming coalition in 2010). Within the first 100 days there should have been a big speech with the gist of "Sorry. The Tories ruined the country more than I thought. I am afraid you are going to be suffering the consequences of Tory failure for the next few years while we try to fix the problems". To do that now requires Burnham to turn on Starmer as well as the Tories.
And I don't think Burnham is the kind of politician who would do that if he could, for similar reasons to Ian Leslie. I think there is a "Burnhamism" that could improve the UK in the same way it has improved Greater Manchester (see the writings of Tom Forth for an idea of what it would look like***), but it isn't the left-populist message that Burnham is selling to London-based lefties, and in any case would need a full term without getting blown off by events to deliver benefits on a national level.
* Makerfield isn't just the kind of seat Reform need to win if they want to form a government after the next election, it's the kind of seat Reform need to win if they want to remain politically relevant. On uniform national swing, it is the 29th Reform target seat.
** Opponents of Burnham say that credit for the economic improvement in Manchester should go to Richard Leese who led the City Council in Manchester proper from 1996 to 2021, not Burnham. This is mostly correct, but it is significant that Burnham supported Leese rather than sabotaging him in order to appeal to left-idiotarians who don't like sensible pro-business local politics and pensioners in the burbs who don't like change.
*** Short summary: A diagnosis of the British Problem as "the potential of the North of England, and particularly cities like Manchester proper, is being wasted" and a programme of promoting local and regional initiative in the North (including normal pro-local-business boosterism from local Labour politicians like Burnham who might otherwise be business-sceptical, although Burnham personally won't be the face of this any more once he is PM), soft YIMBYism (you don't need to "crush the NIMBYs" in the North - they are a lot less organised and powerful than in the Home Counties), and targetted investment in fixing the biggest transport problems in the region. But even though this sounds milquetoast, it isn't compatible with low-energy managerial politics in a geronto-democracy.
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Andy Burnham is 100% a "vibes" politician, and it's worked well for him. He's very popular as the Mayor of Manchester, heading up a flagship bipartisan project (devolution to the North), and his absence from Westminster has left him untainted by both the bitterness of internal feuding and the failure of Starmer's government. He hearkens back to an older Labour that working-class voters felt cared about them. It's nostalgic anti-Thatcherism, but with a sense that if you took him round yer nan's for a cuppa she'd like him. "What a nice lad!" I wouldn't underestimate how sticky this could be with the elderly voters who dominate UK politics. If he can avoid substantive disasters like the one that sank Truss, he's Labour's best candidate to fight Reform. "Aw listen luv, it was always that Thatcher, it's like we're back in the old days, Nigel wants to bring 'er back 'e does..."
He does have a basic problem with governing, though. Well, two. The only critically important issues in British politics are the economy and immigration (healthcare and housing being downstream of economics). Burnham wants to be, and sells himself as, different from Starmer on economics. Lots of soft-soap pieces in the New Statesman about him bringing back "communalism". But British economic policy is hitting the hard constraints of the bond markets. Burnham's voters and MPs won't accept anything less than more spending, he's committed to following Starmer's fiscal rules limiting borrowing - rating agencies are saying things which, translated from econspeak, are serious warnings not to break those rules - and there's just not much fiscal room to squeeze the rich without hitting boomer homeowners and thereby committing electoral suicide. Many ways this can go wrong and few ways it can go right. On immigration, I'm sure Burnham is a true believer, but so was Starmer, and organized mobs burning down buildings tends to scare the hell out of politicians. I actually suspect he's more likely to keep tacking softly to the right on immigration, to avoid being on the unpopular side of both issues and to give himself breathing room on economic policy.
This comes to a broader, more speculative point: the UK (not just the YooKay) has become structurally ungovernable. In order to get elected, you have to match the other party's wildly unrealistic promises. When you get elected, you can't deliver, because your room to carry on down the safe path of procrastination is running out, there's no room to give the voters what your promised, and any path that would deliver real growth in the long run carries electorally unacceptable short-term pain (maybe an advantage of a Presidential system which at least gives you two years to act without an immediate leadership challenge). In the words of 2010's outgoing chief secretary to the Treasury to his successor, "Dear chief secretary, I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left." In taking the Blairite road, where perception management is the chief tool of government, and all that matters is the next news cycle, for 29 years, the UK is coming to the end of that road. We're seeing the harbingers: every PM since Cameron's followed the same trajectory, where they get elected, popularity bump, polls crash faster than a shitcoin launch. I see no way out except slamming into whatever reckoning is at the end of it.
That is absolutely hilarious. The Thick of It is a documentary, proven again.
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I mean, from a political perspective are you going to throw up a connected nonentity or someone with a promising career ahead of him to be a company man PM for an unpopular government?
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Keir Starmer was an underrated PM. Wokeness was scaled back under Keir Starmer. The great awokening happened under the Tories and the UK is in many ways less woke now than when then tories left office. Immigration has declined immensely since Keir Starmer took office. He kept the UK out of the Iran war, he started the construction of new nuclear power and he revitalized the UK armed forces.
As a rightwinger Keir Starmer has been far more successful than Boris Johnson.
None of this had anything to do with them or Starmer. The UK has no cultural sovereignty because it doesn't control the internet: the Americans do. To the extent wokeness has receded in the UK, it's because it's receded in the United States.
And I don't think it's actually receded: I think woke power centres are coyly biding their time while the right clowns itself in the most ridiculous ways imaginable. Never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake.
Mark my words, next election, woke will return with a vengeance, and they will go Nuremberg on the right.
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I think the best diagnosis is that Starmer has allowed things to drift. Some things were drifting in the correct direction under Sunak and have continued to drift in the correct direction under Starmer. In particular, gross immigration is falling back to a pre-Boriswave normal and net immigration is falling further (and possibly negative) due to remigration of EU citizens post-Brexit. Some things were drifting in the wrong direction under Sunak and have continued to drift in the wrong direction under Starmer. In particular, the minimum wage is drifting upwards faster than the productivity of unskilled workers (Counterintuitively, this was a Conservative policy dating back to the 2015 election) and the construction industry is drifting into overregulated paralysis.
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Unbelievable how worthless the tories are. I can't think of a single thing they even made motions towards conserving.
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How long after Starmer's replacement is installed until the "not directly elected - no mandate - not legitimate - call an election" drums start beating?
The media always run a "the new PM needs to call an early general election to seek a personal mandate" campaign because general elections are good for business. The only PM to listen was Theresa May, and look how well it worked out for her. Burnham will ignore them.
We don't have a presidential system of government in the UK, and the media wanting one is not a reason to change the constitution, let alone a process for changing it.
Not related to the UK situation but I wonder if anyone else has given thought to just outright banning all sorts of op-eds from any media that pretends to be purveyor of news?
It appears to me that a lot of media outlets use the prestige from running news stories to elevate their opinion columns over that of some random guy ranting on the internet.
They'll just slip their opinion pieces into their news stories, partially just via editorializing, partially via which interviewees/quotes they choose to include (with or without pushback/context, as desired).
So basically, what's being done now, but without the pressure relief valve of being able to have op-eds.
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We're seeing a lot of caretaker governments by nonentities in Europe these days. They get these unstable coalitions to try to keep the "far right" (usually the center left actually) out of power, which are unpopular and constantly lose elections, but always staple together the ruling class to keep the troglodytes out. Meanwhile parties on the actual right are forming to outflank the relatively liberal (Reform, AFD, FN etc) opposition parties.
The opposition becomes steadily less controlled.
I think Labour might have done better under a coalition government actually.
They got a large but brittle majority based purely on the Tories collapsing and then had to square what they had to do for the economy both with the promises they made to sweep into power (no broad tax rises which meant trying to squeeze taxes everywhere else which both pissed off specific segments of the population and may have caused employment issues) and with the ideology of the backbenchers (who want to do things like lift the limit the cap on benefits for children during a moment when they need every pound they can get, there was a bit of whining about Mahmood's immigration turn but it seems to have gone through)
If they couldn't get anything done without some other party those people could be the bad guys and take the blame.
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Has to fight tooth and nail to take and hold ground while maintaining popular support, finding enough people willing to get themselves ostracized for them, and walking a tightrope to not be banned, and it's taking just about all the right-wing anti-establishment energy in Germany to do so. There exist no "actual" right-wing parties in Germany that are actually right-wing and actually political parties that have the slightest chance of doing a similar or better job within the forseeable future.
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