As it gathers for its annual conference in Liverpool this weekend Labour is in the grip of a low-level civil war which threatens to erupt in the coming months into open hostilities, ripping it asunder.
No fake warm words of loyalty, no insincere expressions of unity, no hollow displays of amity on the banks of the Mersey will manage to disguise that blunt reality.
The soul-sapping election for deputy leader to replace Angela Rayner (remember her?) has already exposed the surly, fractious mood of the party.
The dire poll ratings of Labour and its hapless leader – with the party struggling to hold on to 20 per cent of the vote and Keir Starmer‘s personal standing in the tank – indicate that about 270 of its current crop of 400-plus MPs (including half the Cabinet) could be wiped out come the next election.
This has fanned rebellious talk on Labour’s backbenches of the need to dump Starmer, sooner rather than later, if they’re to have any hope of saving their political skins. Former Cabinet minister (under Gordon Brown) now Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has eagerly donned the mantle of rebel leader and willing Starmer successor.
The self-styled ‘King of the North’ (Jacobite ‘King Across the Water’ would be more appropriate given his pretensions as an usurper) has openly sought to undermine Starmer in the run-up to the conference. Even Michael Heseltine was never so blatant when he was on manoeuvres to depose Margaret Thatcher in 1990.
Burnham has given print and broadcast interviews to all and sundry (even the Tory Telegraph) this past week. There’s a 6,000-word profile of him on the cover of Labour’s weekly bible, the New Statesman (whose editor was given every access to him) and which will be prominently on display at the conference.
Labour wags are already dubbing Liverpool (from whence he hails) the ‘Andy Burnham Show’. Starmer’s folk are fuming.
Former Cabinet minister (under Gordon Brown) now Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has eagerly donned the mantle of rebel leader and willing Starmer successor
Burnham has accused the PM of having no ‘transformative’ vision, calls aspects of his welfare policy ‘absolutely abhorrent’ and says that, under Starmer, Labour faces the ‘existential threat’ of obliteration
No wonder. Burnham has taken every opportunity to say how underwhelmed he is by the Government. ‘Where is our plan to turn the country round?’ he unhelpfully asks, clearing implying Starmer has none, while offering a left-wing blueprint of his own.
He accuses the PM of having no ‘transformative’ vision, calls aspects of his welfare policy ‘absolutely abhorrent’ and says that, under Starmer, Labour faces the ‘existential threat’ of obliteration. Unlike the more circumspect Hezza all those years ago, there is nothing coded in Burnham’s critique.
Over the years I have interviewed Burnham quite a few times. I have always found him smart, engaging, authentic. Unlike Starmer, he has a personality and speaks human. There’s more to him than just a politician. His natural instincts, I believe, are moderate centre-left.
But over the years he’s been as ideologically promiscuous and politically opportunistic as Starmer. ‘A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite go into a pub,’ goes the joke currently being recycled by Team Starmer. The barman asks: ‘What do you want to drink, Andy?’
Currently, there is no doubt where he stands: in his unbridled ambition to be Labour leader he is shamelessly appealing to the ‘soft’ Left and further Left of the party, where disillusion with Starmer is endemic.
As a result, he is saying things and espousing policies which range from the vacuous to the downright dangerous.
‘We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,’ he wails. It’s hard to know what he means by this. Left-wing British politicians always end up ‘in hock’ to the debt markets because they think they can build socialism on borrowed money.
They don’t have the guts to go for the harder but more honest route of far higher taxes, probably because they figure voters would be less keen on their socialist schemes if they did. Burnham would be no different. Indeed, he’d even be worse than the current lot.
No sooner had he lamented an over-reliance on the bond markets than he proposed a £40billion national council house-building programme, centred on Greater Manchester (naturally), to be financed by, errr, more borrowing.
I said Burnham was smart. But he clearly hasn’t thought this through. Even the dimmest year-one economics student could pick holes in it. But Burnham doesn’t stop there. He is for ‘rolling back the [Thatcherite] 1980s’ he declares, in a clear kowtow to the Labour Left, which still dreams of such nonsense. Exactly why any sane person would want to do this beggars belief.
Britain under Labour in the decade before Thatcher was universally recognised as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ and had to be bailed out by that global lender of last resort, the IMF.
But Burnham is like a latter-day Bourbon, the French royal house which was said to have ‘learned nothing’ from the French Revolution. He wants to renationalise all ‘basic services’ like energy, water, buses, housing and rail (Starmer’s already doing that last one). Just where he’d get the tens of billions needed to buy back these companies is a mystery.
He hints that it could be partly covered by reclaiming dividends already ‘siphoned out’ to shareholders. It’s hard to imagine a bigger signal to companies not to invest here, other than constructing a large neon sign atop the white cliffs of Dover, saying in Labour red: ‘Don’t Invest Here’.
In truth, Burnham would have to dip yet again into those bond markets he’s so down on. I calculate the Burnham blueprint would require roughly an extra £100billion in borrowing on top of the £460billion the Starmer Government is already officially projected to borrow during the lifetime of the current parliament. So much for not being ‘in hock’ to the bond markets. Of course, the bond markets wouldn’t wear it. Investors who lend to us are already murmuring about Burnham’s ‘financial naivety’, warning that his plans would quickly lead to them dumping British bonds, pushing up the cost of servicing the debt in the process.
We’re already paying more to borrow than any other G7 major market economy and the £110billion cost of debt service this year is twice our defence spending.
The Burnham blueprint is not serious politics. Any attempt to implement it would immediately provoke a financial crisis – almost certainly followed by a recession as interest rates soared and investment collapsed.
That’s what Starmer’s people think too. The gloves have come off in 10 Downing Street, which is much ruder about Burnham than bond market investors. One senior aide to the PM says Burnham is ‘economically illiterate’, ‘cheap’ and ‘desperate; another that he is ‘unserious and irresponsible’; a third is even blunter: ‘most of the Cabinet just want him to f*** off.’
Team Starmer is now depicting him as ‘Labour’s Liz Truss’. Just as she spooked the bond markets almost exactly three years ago with tax cuts financed by more borrowing, so Burnham, they argue (correctly) would send the economy into a tailspin with his borrowing binge. As they head to Liverpool, Starmer loyalists are sharing WhatsApp mash-ups of Burnham morphing into Truss.
Whether any of this will undermine his popularity with the Labour faithful is moot. Labour conferences, after all, are as much strangers to sound economic sense as an alcoholic is to sobriety. The rank-and-file are lapping up the Burnham blueprint.
But Starmer’s apparatchiks are now playing hardball. There will be many more briefings on the usurper’s ‘economic illiteracy’. Moves are now afoot to deny Burnham the Labour candidacy in any by-election.
Sitting Labour MPs in the Manchester area mulling over standing down to make way for him have been told to stay put. So the King of the North may yet be vanquished, at least for now.
But that still leaves a deeply unimpressive and increasingly disliked Starmer in charge of a rudderless and unpopular Government. His plan to use Liverpool for a major reset is unlikely to give it the fresh purpose or momentum he hopes for (and which Burnham’s shenanigans risk overshadowing).
Labour’s low-level civil war will continue. Starmer’s days will still look numbered. And Labour will leave Liverpool not refreshed and renewed but asking itself: If not Burnham, who?
