Andy Burnham set out his stall to lead Labour today as Keir Starmer braces for a make-or-break party conference.
The Greater Manchester Mayor pitched a lurch to the Left in an interview, backing a huge nationalisation of housing, energy, water and rail to ‘roll back the 1980s’.
He also told the New Statesman – often seen as Labour’s inhouse ‘bible’ – that he wanted a proportional representation voting system so the government could resist any market panic about spiralling borrowing.
The intervention came amid mounting doubts about Sir Keir’s future, with polls showing his popularity plumbing new depths after a disastrous month. Labour’s annual gathering kicks off in Liverpool at the weekend and is expected to be dominated by jostling for the top job.
Mr Burnham has been touted as a potential replacement for the PM, although there are major obstacles – including that he is not currently an MP.
The former Cabinet minister laid out his vision of ‘Manchesterism’ spreading across the country as he delivered a brutal critique of the Labour leadership and the ‘existential’ threat from Reform.
Andy Burnham pitched a lurch to the Left in an interview, backing a huge nationalisation of housing, energy, water and rail to ‘roll back the 1980s’
The intervention came amid mounting doubts about Sir Keir’s future, with polls showing his popularity plumbing new depths after a disastrous month
Complaining about ‘hostile briefing’ against him by No10 allies, Mr Burnham swiped at the way Sir Keir was running the party. ‘This kind of challenge we’ve got in front of us cannot be met by a very factional and quite divisive running of the Labour Party,’ he said.
Mr Burnham said: ‘To me, the issue of the conference is not who is the deputy leader of the party, who is the leader of the Labour Party. The issue for the conference is: where is our plan to turn the country around?’
‘We are trying to fix things here,’ he says. ‘But, you know, if you look at it more broadly, it doesn’t feel like there are… the political system doesn’t feel like it works for people, does it?’
Burnishing his own credentials with the Left, Mr Burnham said ‘it can’t be just a changing of the guard: you have got to change the whole culture’.
‘I’m going to put the question back to people at Labour conference: are we up for that wholesale change? Because I think that’s what the country needs,’ he said.
He added: ‘Can we agree on a plan to turn this country around by retaking control of those essentials and being bold about it, and then helping to reduce the cost of living for people and helping control public spending as a result?’
The mayor put renationalisation at the heart of his offer, saying: ‘To me, if you’ve not got control of housing, you’ve not got control of the costs the country is facing…
‘When you’ve lost control of housing, energy, water, rail, buses, you’ve lost control of the basics of life, but you’ve also then lost control of costs and public spending.’
Spelling out the ‘aspirational socialism’ he has been developing to speak to ‘working-class ambition’ in the North, Mr Burnham said: ‘I’ve described what we’ve been doing here as rolling back the 1980s.’
Pressed on his own ambitions, Mr Burnham pointedly refused to rule out another tilt at the leadership – after he was defeated by Jeremy Corbyn in 2015.
‘If you’re asking me, am I attracted to going back into my old world and the old way of doing things in Westminster with minimal change, well no, I wouldn’t find that attractive,’ he said.
‘[But] am I ready to work with anybody who wants to sort of put in place a plan to turn the country around?
‘I’m happy to play any role. I am ready to play any role in that. Yes. Because the threat we’re facing is increasingly an existential one.’
Mr Burnham told the magazine that he wanted to see Labour make ‘a stronger argument about Brexit having been a mistake’.
And he made clear that a switch to a proportional representation electoral system was a core part of his platform.
‘The idea of a government elected on a minority of the vote is untenable,’ he said.
Mr Burnham said he believed working with other left-wing parties including the Lib Dems under a PR system could enable the government to resist pressure from nervous investors.
‘We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,’ he said.
