23.07.2026

Should not be promoting illusions in Andy Burnham

Cut from the same cloth

Andy Burnham claims he will head a ‘cost of living’ government that will bring back hope and turn the page on 40 years of Thatcherism. But he will do nothing of the sort, reckons Eddie Ford

After the “kissing hands” ceremony and taking the oath of allegiance to King Charles III at Buckingham Palace, Andy Burnham became the fourth prime minister in five years and the seventh since 2016. Some absurdly say this is a sign that Britain has become ‘ungovernable’ (as if anti-government strikes were breaking out across the country), when if anything the reverse is true. Under present conditions, whoever is sitting in No10, the bourgeois order carries on.

In the end, when it comes to cabinet picks, Burnham chose neither Shabana Mahmood nor Ed Miliband to be his new chancellor - going instead for John Healey, the former defence secretary (this surely ensuring more spending on guns and less on butter). Healey was chosen not only to send a reassuring message to the Trump administration, but the money markets too.

As for Mahmood, she stays as home secretary, while Angela Rayner got her old job back as housing secretary, Yvette Cooper became health secretary and Wes Streeting was moved to defence - again something the American cousins will fully approve of. That cannot be said of Miliband who becomes foreign secretary (he is considered wildly untrustworthy what with his ‘crazy’ obsessions about achieving net zero).

Interestingly, Louise Haigh - a key ally, who oversaw Burnham’s preparations for No10 - got the influential new post of first secretary of state and chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, effectively becoming his deputy (amongst other things, she will oversee the forthcoming No10 North in Manchester and parts of the cabinet office. Meanwhile, David Lammy, who was once deputy prime minister and justice secretary, has been consigned to the back benches.

This has been described as a “brutal” clear-out of Keir Starmer’s allies - even a coup - but this is typical journalistic over-statement. In reality it is more like a change in presentation. As one of our Weekly Worker headlines ran: ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ (June 25).

Manchesterism

When Andy Burnham delivered his first speech as prime minister outside No10, another ridiculous fuss was made by the commentariat that he did it without notes, but it only clocked in at just over five minutes - hardly requiring the oratorial skills of a Cicero.

Anyhow, Burnham announced he would “end rough sleeping in our country” - this was swiftly followed by a No10 press release promising an extra £340 million for the task over the next five years from within the housing department budget. This, of course, is a direct echo of a promise he made on becoming Greater Manchester mayor, saying he would end rough sleeping within his watch by 2020. But this did not happen, it need hardly be said. Yes, numbers fell - thanks largely to the impact of Covid-period measures - but then started creeping up again, once the pandemic was officially over.¹ So ‘Manchesterism’ here is not exactly something to boast about.

He also promised a new 10-year plan for Britain, to be unveiled later this year, and to build a new economy putting “life’s essentials back under public control” - and pledged in addition a “circuit breaker” moment, a term from the Covid era.² A model, Burnham declared, “bringing forward the biggest changes in the last 40 years” - when Britain took some “wrong turns” under Margaret Thatcher, such as “economic power privatised” and “large parts of the country deindustrialised”, and still has not recovered. Hence it was Andy Burnham’s mission to “bring back hope.”

But, following his argument that people needed “breathing space now”, the first announcement about tackling the cost of living crisis came on July 21, with the government saying electricity bills will be reduced by an average of £45 from October by removing VAT - at a total cost of £850 million in 2026-27. John Healey said the move would be funded from cancelling the digital ID programme, but that scheme was actually unfunded at the last budget - though the chancellor says he would be setting out detailed costings of the plan, and more “long-term action” to bring down living costs, at the budget later this year.³ In that spirit, Burnham has also announced a reduction in the cap on bus fares by a third from £3 to £2. There is even talk of temporarily freezing rents in the private sector.

We are told too that, as well as bringing down bills, the move will help encourage consumers to replace gas boilers with electric heat pumps, given the gap between gas and electricity prices will now be reduced. Andy Burnham has implored his new cabinet to examine “all possible ways” to confront the cost of living crisis, and telling ministers his would be a “cost of living government” - but all within the existing borrowing rules, including the planned uplift in arms spending. But the £45 per year reduction in energy bills is, of course, risible, as it is less than £1 a week, and will probably get eaten up by inflation anyway.

If Andy Burham ignored the fiscal rules and really tried to tackle the “cost of living” crisis, the first problem he would immediately encounter is the City of London. On paper it generates about 20% of Britain’s revenue, though in reality it is a lot more than that. If Burnham had gone further and adopted the radical or left reformist measure of ‘taxing the super rich’, there would be an instant exodus of capital, with interest rates spiking and government revenues rapidly falling - not that this stops the likes of the Morning Star, The Socialist, Tribune and Solidarity advocating voodoo economics.

Leave aside the ‘blind hand’ of the market. We all remember Mike Pompeo’s remarks that the US will have to “push back” against Jeremy Corbyn if he became prime minister, which it could do by imposing sanctions, promoting think tanks and far right movements and parties. Yes, we have a US imperialism in relative decline - but it is still the hegemonic power, and what it is doing in decline is precisely strengthening its position vis-à-vis its allies. It is demanding more tribute and more obedience. So, even with the most febrile imagination, it is impossible to see Andy Burnham really turning the page on 40 years of Thatcherism, financialisation, neoliberalism, and all the rest of it.

Then there is the unavoidable fact that we are dealing with a cash-strapped Britain that has accumulated huge debts and extremely sluggish ‘growth’. The latest gross domestic product figures from May show that debt is estimated to have increased by 0.6% in the first quarter.⁴ We are also told that economic growth was a princely 0.1%. In other words, Britain PLC is bumping along the bottom. Yet you have economists saying, well, that is not bad - because of the Iran war, a contraction might even have been expected. But, whatever the exact case, you have huge amounts being paid out in terms of interest to the money markets - yet at the same time stagnant revenues, with no sign of that changing in the near future.

Either way, absolutely no-one is expecting another 20-year boom - the last one over 1945-65, of course, followed the destruction and death of World War II, and the US global hegemon replacing the British hegemon.

Integration

A big test that will come for Andy Burnham is over issues like Gaza. The first thing you have to say is that he has been a member of Labour Friends of Israel since 2015, and there is no public evidence that he has changed this association⁵ - he has now chosen LFI’s ex-chair, James Parnell, as his chief of staff!⁶ Burnham has been quite astute in terms of his statement apologising for Labour’s stance on Gaza, saying the party “didn’t get it right” and needs to “do better”.⁷

But then, when journalists ask, ‘Andy, is Gaza a genocide?’, he immediately becomes hesitant, demonstrating a significant silence. Of course, he does not want to come out and say it is.⁸ What he actually wants to do is attract back Muslim voters who rebelled against Starmer and his overt subordination to US foreign policy. Communists do not think for a minute that Burnham is going to break from that subordination, but he wants to put out a message: ‘Come back to the Labour fold’ (whether that turns out to be a successful appeal is another question altogether).

The other taxing issue for Burnham - and Miliband - is clearly the arms supplies to Israel. It is not that Britain is a big arms supplier, but it is locked into the American arms industry. So, for example, we all know that, when it comes to F-35s, the cutting edge fighter bomber in the western arsenal, it is hugely expensive and can do everything: it is stealth, can bomb, fly high, fly low, can take off vertically - you name it. And its ability to take off vertically owes everything to British technology: ie, BAE Systems know-how from the old Harrier aircraft that has been incorporated into the F-35 programme since its inception.⁹

We also have the recent development of the integration of the Israeli Defence Forces with the US military.¹⁰ We might have had a settler colony, which was peopled from all across Europe, but to realise the Zionist aim of taking the whole of Palestine, they were forced to rebel against their British sponsors. France replaced Britain from 1947-48 - it was France which supplied the technology which allows Israel be a nuclear power today - but maybe in the late 1960s, certainly by the early 1970s France had been replaced by the United States.

Today there can be no doubt that Israel is actually an extension of the United States. Israel remains a settler colonial power, of course, but its deep integration with America has been taken to new levels under Donald Trump. So for the UK to end support for Israel would mean breaking with US imperialism, which Andy Burnham will never do - having already stated his commitment to the “special relationship.”

Illusions

This brings up the Gaza demonstration on July 18, in central London. Essentially, many thousands of pro-Palestine protestors were rallied to march in order to call upon Burnham to impose an arms embargo on Israel and to end Britain’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.¹¹ You can see why the organisers called the demonstration, of course, but tactically it was a mistake because it reinforces the illusion that you can pressurise Andy Burnham to break with Britain’s historic subordination to the United States (agreed at Bretton Woods in 1944 and confirmed with the 1956 Suez fiasco).

At the Whitehall rally at the end of the demonstration, Jeremy Corbyn began his speech by congratulating Burnham on becoming Labour leader. Then he went on to say he should remember Palestine and what is going on in Gaza. Of course, Burnham is extremely well aware of what is going on in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. If you pose things in the way Corbyn did, you basically give Burnham a free gift, which we have already seen him spend. If the truth be told, certainly when it comes to foreign policy, Burnham and Miliband will be no different from Starmer and Lammy. We should not pretend otherwise.