Labour is Burnham’s to lose Blokeish vibes only go so far

What is the point of Andy Burnham? He’s a serial flip-flopper. A chameleon. And he’s a prime example of that most hated of people: a career politician. Take a look at his Makerfield campaign: enough u-turns to make Keir Starmer blush. All style, no substance. You can drop your cheeky-chappy Northerner act, Andy, we remember Burnham the Blairite minister, the bright young thing who wanted balanced budgets and a war in Iraq.

But in the end, none of what the skeptics had to say mattered. Any other Labour candidate would have been trounced yesterday, and we would be writing yet another obituary for social democracy. Instead, today, there’s only one story. The new Makerfield MP has done what seemed to be impossible: he has reanimated the corpse of Labour, depressed and moribund after just two years in power; he has Made Labour Normal Again in a coalfield town where its brand has never been more despised, outperforming his own party’s dismal ratings by several lengths. That is the point of Andy Burnham.

Bound by the same fiscal constraints and without a nationwide mandate for radical divergence from a thin 2024 manifesto, the naysayers have claimed that Burnham would simply be Starmer with better comms. But these criticisms will struggle to be heard within Labour this morning — at least for now. Right now, this is Andy Burnham’s party. The current occupant of No. 10 might be labouring under the undignified delusion that he can defy reality and fight on. But everyone knows the game is up. Whether by bloody contest or smooth coronation, the King in the North will be crowned.

This was Labour’s “last chase to change” Burnham said in his victory speech. And it’s probably no exaggeration. For now, Britain’s gaping political divide has been temporarily bridged with woolly, Northern intonations, with an inchoate normie populism clad in Next blazers: “one of us”; “vote hope”; “coming together”; “changing the way this country is run”. Plenty of pictures with pints. Plenty of chatter about football in front of St George’s Crosses. Plenty of invocations of regional grievance against distant elites.

That vague articulation of a blokey but unthreatening, common-sense progressivism bought Burnham 54% of the vote; that empty signifier united the British Left, from the Communist Party’s Morning Star and the Corbynite Momentum’s diehards, to the most moderate, politically limp frontbenchers lining up to kiss the ring under the flat roof of the Stubshaw Cross Labour Club.

The late Republican campaigning guru Lee Atwater said that you could learn about swing voters by watching WWE. Citing Atwater, Dominic Cummings has remarked that the fake wrestling star the Undertaker understands communication “better than all SW1 pundits combined”. To put it another way, the Undertaker’s secret is that he grasps that character is key, emotion trumps policy, vibes trump detail, and a simple goodies-versus-baddies narrative goes a long way. It’s easy to scoff at Burnham’s “Northern Soul” projections, but the well-honed everyman aesthetic, the five-a-side matches, the morning jogs are the total obverse of Starmer’s buttoned up, pointyheaded anti-spirit. And the voters, in the Northwest at least, are seemingly buying it.

But as the Left’s euphoria subsides, awkward questions will inevitably surface: what about the project? He may have the common touch, but does our PM-in-waiting have a vision? Burnham has waxed lyrical about “business-friendly socialism”, about ending “40 years of neoliberalism”, casting his defining purpose as a reversal of the Eighties. The demographics and political mean of Makerfield voters have dragged him further to the Right on social policy than many of Labour’s more urbane professional liberals would have liked. In the past month, he shifted from a default position of hyper-progressive Remainerism, to voicing support for Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms, rejecting Rejoin, and supporting the Supreme Court’s decision on single-sex spaces.

All this worries Graham Stringer, the Labour MP who for 12 years led Manchester City Council, and who has more of a claim to “Manchesterism” than the upstart King in the North. “I’ve known Andy since he was first elected in 2001”, Stringer told me the day before the vote. “He’s a nice bloke, happy to have a pint with him”, he conceded. “But nothing he has done has led me to believe that he would be a good leader of the Labour Party or the country.”

Activists have taken to calling Makerfield a “proof of concept” — testing a model on how to beat the hard Right’s insurgency: peel off a few Reformers and the Reform-curious with a quietly patriotic soft-Blue Labourism; present Labour’s few Left-wing achievements — nationalized rail, employment rights, GB Energy — as part of a transformative project that is just starting to pay off. Meanwhile, reunite the Left bloc, and bring those freshly minted Greens and Liberals back home. Do it all with a chappie that England’s aggrieved Facebook mums can get behind, and that its footie Dads wouldn’t mind watching the game with. To top it off,  Labour could even lock in a “progressive majority” rainbow coalition for years to come, were Burnham to make constitutional reform and proportional representation a key plank of his platform.

This may well work, in purely electoral terms. But, in reality, the real “proof of concept” isn’t Makerfield. It will be whether Burnham can deliver a new political economy. Reversing a four-decade economic trajectory is easier said than done. Decoupling the Treasury’s decision-making powers from the whims of gilt traders would require a harsh balancing of day-to-day spending and revenues that soft Left, spendthrift Labour MPs are unlikely to countenance. This is, after all, the same parliamentary party that Pat McFadden aptly described as having an approach to fiscal policy amounting to “who can we tax more to pay benefits to others?”

But creating the fiscal space for growth and future-oriented capital projects and infrastructure requires serious curbs on current spending. Renationalizing swathes of our utilities is incompatible with sticking to the fiscal rules. The same goes for a new wave of regional investment. Promises to “reindustrialize” clash at least partly with the country’s pursuit of Net Zero — a project unlikely to decelerate if, as expected, Ed Miliband replaces Rachel Reeves in the Treasury. Even the touted local model of so-called “Manchesterism” is a bundle of contradictions: the city’s recent success has been less about a novel version of municipal socialism, and more the consistently favorable attitude that local authorities have taken towards inward private investment, big developers and speedy planning decisions.

Shadowing a group of Labour canvassers, I heard two local women shout “don’t bother asking us anything, we’re sick of all of you!” Last night’s result has shown this to be a minority view across Makerfield. Yet door-knockers still reported widespread disillusionment and despondency on the campaign trail as this patchwork of outer-Wigan towns and villages was placed under the glare of the media microscope. This was, supposedly, England in microcosm: angry, listless, lacking vitality and in serious structural decline. That Reform has failed to capitalize in this England is a serious failure. But Makerfield is only the 243rd most deprived of Britain’s 650 constituencies. Indeed, many of the journalists reporting on Makerfield as the epitome of broken Britain will go home to places that are, statistically, poorer: Camden, Islington, Hackney.

This speaks partly to Britain’s confusion about class, education and culture. But more significant is what it reveals about how the economy is endured on the streets: we’ve created a country where, beyond the buzzy, dynamic urban citadels, even where people are relatively comfortable, with high rates of home ownership and secure employment, it feels, according to one local at a bus stop like “there’s nowt’ doin’”.

Here, then, is the end result of a half century in which graduate and “knowledge work” has been privileged as the way to make it; smart kids want to leave these streets, go to university and not return home to a place where the industries and the institutions that once gave provincial Britain a sense of purpose are long dead. It’ll take more than platitudes, personal branding and social justice homilies to fix that. What this country ultimately needs is a serious, painful rupture with the dominant consensus — and whether a politician so desperate to be liked can initiate such a breach is questionable.

“The reason Burnham keeps changing his mind on issues,” Stringer tells me, “is because he’s not thought deeply enough about how to apply any set of principles… I just don’t think he’s done the intellectual work which would enable him to be a good prime minister.” Andy the empty signifier will soon have to decide the meaning of Burnhamism: whether it represents the clean break he promises, difficult decisions and-all, with winners identified and losers sent packing; or whether he is content with Starmerism-plus. Andy Burnham may have made Labour feel normal again — but is this new normal enough?

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