ANDY BURNHAM

Andy Burnham is due to take over as Prime Minister of Great Britain during next week from the hapless Keir Starmer, who rode to 10 Downing Street on the radical agenda of Jeremy Corbin’s Labour Party, then promptly ditched it, having first helped to raid Corbin out of the leadership. In the 2024 general elections, contested on the basis of the programme devised by the Corbin leadership, the Labour Party won 412 seats and a 33.7% share of the popular vote in the 2024. But in the 2017 general elections, on the same programme, having raised Labour Party membership from 201,000 in 2015 to 504,000 in 2017, the largest in Europe, the Labour Party increased its electoral vote to 40 percent, the largest vote share increase since 1945. Missteps by the Labour Party over Brexit at the elections in 2018 caused it to badly lose the elections, which provided the impetus to ditch Corbin, but to maintain his programme. Starmer’s abandonment of that progressive programme, the policy of abolishing Tory austerity, the radical upgrading of social services and benefits, substantial reforms of the health service, nationalizing of the services, and return to neoliberal solutions, caused his downfall. This brief review demonstrates that left and progressive policies attract support, as they do in diverse places such as New York.

There is general agreement that Britain’s main economic problems stem from the contraction of its economy by about 6 percent since Brexit. Its growth rate, if non-existent, is dismal, its debt is high, and a wide reduction of social benefits affecting senior citizens and children have cascaded form these structural deficiencies in the economy. Starmer’s government had no answers to these problems except the imposition of more hardships on the British people. As expected, support for Starmer and the Labour Party in two short years evaporated. This was reflected in the results of local government elections in May. About 5,000 seats were up for grabs across 136 council elections. The Labour Party won just over 1,000 of the seats that were contested, losing more than 1,100 seats that it had previously held. The NPR of 10 May stated: ”U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour Party suffered major losses in local and regional elections held across Britain last week, resulting in multiple calls for Starmer to resign.” The appointment of Lord Peter Mandelson as the U.K. Ambassador to the U.S. despite Mandelson failing security vetting and having known ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein intensified calls for Starmer to resign. The Labour Government’ support of the genocide in Gaza was another major reason for Labour’s unpopularity. It is estimated that thousands of members have left because of it. But the most compelling factor was the surging popularity of the right- wing Reform Party which, according to the polls, is commanding roughly equal support in the mid-20s in the polls. The grave danger to Labour’s defeat by Reform and the latter’s electoral ascendency made it necessary to dump Starmer.

Andy Burnham has carefully cultivated a populist image on the centre-left (whatever that means) of the Labour Party with strong ties to Israel, being a member of the Labour Friends of Israel Group. His main claim to fame as Mayor of Greater Manchester is to improve bus services, but not much else. But he is essentially engaged, at this stage, in empty sloganeering, like ending factionalism, undoing Thatcherism, fixing social care, devolution and support for the private sector. He promised to lay out a more detailed programme later.

Burnham is populating in key positions relics of the Tony Blair administration, which took Britian into the Iraq War, which Burnham supported, and former officials of the Starmer. Sue Gray, a former chief of staff, outlined some main problems, such as easing the cost of living, funding defence, which will presumably cancel each other out, fix the water issue, the EU reset, the UK-US relationship. These identified problems of the British bureaucracy and Labour Party aristocracy appear to have little relationship to the agenda developed by the Corbin-led Labour Party and which attracted so much support and offered so much promise to really and truly demolish the Thatcher legacy of neoliberalism.

The great dangers that are facing Europe, especially its largest countries, Britain, France and Germany, are the growth of right-wing parties, some of which have close ideological affinities to Nazism. The dangers are more insidious than thugs roaming the streets. They will emerge when countries occupied politically by the right, seek to solve economic problems by imposing the burdens of European economic decline not on the rich, which can bear them, but on the poor. These actions will have their own dynamics, and no one knows what they can lead to. Those of us in the developing world must not assume that these developments will bypass us. We can assume that they will be deeply harmful to us by limiting resources and damaging our economies. Our destinies are tied to what goes on in the developed world.