The UK’s Right-wing press is being driven into apoplexy by news of “the most Left-wing government since the Seventies”. Fears abound of spendthrift ministries, mass nationalisations and economic turmoil. But so far there is little to suggest Andy Burnham will do much more than continue in the footsteps of his post-Brexit successors, managing Britain’s unfavourable demographics and near-unique exposure to deglobalisation and inflationary pressures with yet more statist fudges that attempt to disguise market failure.

In fact, while Burnham woos the Left with talk of a new political economy, he is already governing with more caution. Pat McFadden’s status as one of the few Starmerites to have survived Burnham’s “afternoon of the long knives” signals that he is attempting to ride two horses at once: a radical, progressive social democrat, but one who is also serious about welfare reform. The favourite homilies from the Left’s old catechism aside, Burnham is no bleeding-heart, free-for-all liberal when it comes to benefits. But then at the same time he might say that reciprocity, mutualism and simple fairness are “Labour values, lad” — and essential ones if the legitimacy of a compassionate welfare state is to be maintained. The Labour leader is playing all the favourite tunes from the anti-Thatcherite jukebox, but in No. 10 there’s a quiet acceptance of the ultimate necessity of reducing the Department for Work and Pensions’ ballooning entitlements spending, even if Keir Starmer’s botched reform was the beginning of the end of his premiership.

And so it is that Burnham will govern Right and talk Left — an inversion of Starmer’s strategy, which involved a conscious alienation of Labour’s progressive, socially liberal voter base, a direct push of urban graduates and Muslim voters towards the Greens and independents, all while the government implemented some of the most robust Left-wing legislative reforms in recent decades. Where Starmer’s fiscal soft Leftism was conceded almost with embarrassment, the King in the North will paint any kind of policy incrementalism as a victory in an anti-Establishment crusade, the next stage in a long march away from the neoliberal model. Nationalised trains, publicly owned wind turbines, and TikTok-friendly cash transfers will be repackaged and sold more adeptly as progressive wins. But on many issues Burnham will be happy to concede Rightwards. The hardline Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood remains in post. On the North Sea, welfare and migration, the early signals are that the new PM has been persuaded of the need for a more pragmatic approach, more congruent with the views of a restive electorate.

The question is where this all fits with Burnham’s stated agenda of a radical “circuit-breaker” on the Thatcherite consensus, to “roll back to the Eighties”? He calls for a reversal of several decades of privatisation, a ramping up of public investment, and the imposition of stricter controls on the whims of capital. The vision heralds a reassertion of the Leviathan, of a collectivist, muscular statism ruling over globalised, untethered high finance, not least by toying with popular resentments against “that London”.

Yet he may have quietly noticed that such aims are not possible within current fiscal limits. Gilt yields spike drastically at the mere hints of costly policies. Lenders already price in the UK’s vulnerability to inflationary shocks. And what if the government decided to drastically ramp up bond issuance, or to impose punitive wealth taxes, or to intervene in the Bank of England’s hallowed independent terrain, prompting international private investors in sterling-denominated debt or equities to start dumping? For a struggling Labour Party to be able to build “social democracy in one country” by sheer force of good-bloke-vibes alone seems unlikely. The postwar settlement of capital controls, high tax rates, cosy relationships with trade unions and industrial protectionism was built on international consensus and Marshall Aid. There’s no trade union movement left to support such an endeavour today, and no intellectual infrastructure driving a public clamour behind Leftist restoration.

The truth is that in such circumstances, talking Left and governing Right might be the only viable strategy for a Labour government hoping not to act as the midwives of a Reform takeover. So instead of hard Left revival, Burnham’s revolution — setting out to renege on the disappointments of “the last 40 years” — will remain mainly in the rhetorical register, gesturing towards a lost future, laying out a general trajectory, and constructing a vibe. The Burnhamite political-cultural projection will be pure social-democratic nostalgia and rage against the neoliberal machine. But behind the scenes, the programme itself will be piecemeal, proceeding in fits and starts, as the markets allow.

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Jonny Ball is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd. He formerly wrote under the name Despotic Inroad.

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