Andy Burnham's conference speech to Labour faithful has reignited the debate about whether the left has won the argument, with the prime minister declaring that "Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time" and listing five villains: "Deindustrialisation, deregulation, privatisation, austerity, Brexit."
The speech was infused with class politics, condemning a society "run for vested interests, not in the public interest, with power held in too few hands." Burnham committed to break with the "flawed thinking of the last 40 years," lumping together Conservative and Labour governments, and has repeatedly labelled the culprit: neoliberalism.
Left's Worldview Embraced by Labour Leadership
This shift marks a significant change from the past, when these beliefs were condemned to the fringes of Labour. Tony Blair himself eventually confessed: "I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them." Now, the left's worldview is embraced by the Labour top brass, including the new foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, who told those who opposed Israel's genocide and were infuriated by Labour's position on Gaza: "You were right."
Burnham only became prime minister because Labour's leftwing voters rebelled, defecting en masse to Zack Polanski's Green party in the Gorton and Denton byelection, then in local elections in England, Scotland and Wales. This is clearly understood by Burnham's team, or they would not be so confidently doubling down on their new strategy.
Substance vs Rhetoric
Winning the argument on a rhetorical level is not the same as substance. Burnham is clearly shifting towards state intervention, taking the form of Great British Grid, a new publicly owned network body, and he condemned privatised water as "a symbol of what has gone wrong with Britain." However, full public ownership of water seems far off, with "public control" acting as a rather flexible label.
Burnham has committed to a large-scale building of new council homes and preventing them from being flogged off through right to buy, but he has already backtracked on a pledge to spend the government's entire £39bn affordable homes programme on council and social housing. Crucially, he remains committed to the suffocating fiscal rules that block the investment Britain's crumbling infrastructure and starved services need, especially given there remains no promise to hike taxes on the well-to-do.
Challenges Ahead
While committing to a national care service is extremely welcome, scrapping the triple lock on pensions is not. Britain still spends significantly less on pensions than other major European countries such as Germany, France and Spain, and about two million pensioners languish in poverty. The Labour parliamentary benches were stuffed with candidates deemed loyal to the Starmer project, and the rightwing factionalists who ran the party may currently be sulking on the fringes, but their capacity to inflict damage should not be underestimated.
A key difference between Burnhamism and what came before may well be expressed by what Miliband told activists attending a Labour fringe event organised by the soft-left pressure group Mainstream. "Too often in the past, we thought that kicking some of our supporters would do us political credit," he said, "and we were absolutely wrong." Offending people "in the progressive community", he admitted, was sometimes done "deliberately".
Because of pressure from the streets and the ballot box, Labour has shifted its rhetoric. The substance is a bit more complicated. Where Starmerism defined itself against the left, could this new government be pushed in a more progressive direction? That question has not yet been answered, but the left should indeed feel emboldened as the winds shift in their direction.
