Putting Andy Burnham in Perspective

Considering the recent change of both the head of Britain's Labour Party and the British government I am more inclined to write here of the fall of Keir Starmer than the rise of Andy Burnham. As I have been saying since the 2024 General Election, Starmer became head of government with only very weak electoral support--the election's outcome not the "landslide" victory of the Starmer-led Labour Party over the Sunak-led Conservatives the illiterates of the press kept talking about but relative to preceding elections a collapse in the vote for the country's two principal parties. The Tories suffered the worse collapse (a significantly worse one), due to their fourteen years in government defined by the assault on working people that was "austerity," the bungle of Brexit, the "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" (mis)management of the pandemic, the good old-fashioned currency crisis instigated by classically neoliberal compulsive, never-mind-the-funding upper-class tax-cutting--and unhelped by the way in which the Tory leadership's ill-timed gestures toward "diversity" went down (however cowardly the British press were about calling out the racism in public). But the collapse was still undeniably a collapse of both parties.

As one may imagine, with the party of government doing so much to alienate the electorate it was no mean feat making the opposition party as unpopular as it managed to become by 2024--and Keir Starmer did work hard indeed to make that happen. Whatever its limitations Jeremy Corbyn had risen from obscure backbencher to leader on the strength of the enthusiasm of the Labour base for his challenge to the centrist-neoliberal-neoconservative-Blairite-New Labour politics as usual that Labour's supporters despised, to the elites' horror that the discontents might actually amount to something (with, bespeaking that horror the Guardian turning viciously on Corbyn, because actually positioning oneself against neoliberalism had consequences now). Professing honest fealty to the old Blairite line was going to get Starmer nowhere, so he instead posed as a socialist with an explicitly social democratic platform of a kind whose abandonment could not be finessed in the usual Establishment politician way. That sufficed to win Starmer the leadership, after which, electability within the party running counter to what the media elite respect as electability at General Election time, he wasted no time in distancing himself from that platform on the way to brazenly casting it aside as he pointed to the pandemic as an excuse, leaving no doubt about his centrist-neolib-neocon--Blairite-New Labour--colors. (By and large a socialist, or even just social democrat, critic of capitalism that they are, sees crisis as a time to double down on reform. Discarding it as an expensive luxury is not what leftists do, but rather what centrists do because an expensive luxury is what they generally regard concessions to working people as being--and friend and foe alike got the message.) And then because that was still not enough to make Starmer carrying-a-Ming-vase-across-a-polished-floor-electable in their eyes, he set about purging the left from the party too.

Meanwhile, just as the Tories' appeals to diversity would seem to have alienated its supporters while failing to draw new voters, so did Starmer's groveling before business, filling the air with the sound of drums as he did his bit to force-march Britain and the world into World War III, and brutalizing migrants and refugees, do nothing to help Starmer with his natural base as he failed to win over the voters abandoning the flailing Tories, not that he could have expected to do so, of course, the issue not winning voters but making himself tolerable to an Establishment whose preferred party of government as an occupant of 10 Downing Street has historically not been his own. And so however unpopular with the public his doing so was, like the good neoconservative he was, Starmer "stayed the course," so that when the General Election finally came he ran with an Election Manifesto in which his promises of four years earlier had been kicked to the curb, replaced by open fealty to the Blairism Britons had rejected again and again. Given that support for the Tories was collapsing even faster that sufficed to carry the General Election--it can seem, by default--after which he went from one debacle to another. Indeed, it bespeaks the frailty of Starmer's position that the Not-So-Loyal Opposition's exploitation of his fellow Blairite Peter Mandelson's ties to Jeffrey Epstein, cynical and shabby as it patently was, sufficed to lever Starmer out of the Prime Ministerial residence not just via the approach of sex scandal so beloved by a coprophagic media and political dirty tricks gamesters, but someone else's sex scandal, in an echo of the Profumo affair.

By contrast Burnham's rise seems a less dramatic thing--neither indicating a left turn as Corbyn's ascent did, nor a right turn as Starmer's did, just a lowest common denominator replacement for the fallen Prime Minister of a party in crisis, the more in as he has come in with fewer, vaguer promises in comparison with what Starmer used (very cynically) to see Corbyn to the door. If a certain kind of "liberal" commentator sees grounds for "hope" in Burnham it also seems possible to, extending the Profumo analogy, see in him a passing, soon-to-be-forgotten placeholder figure like Alec Douglas-Home ("Who?" many of you are no doubt saying) between now and the next change of the party of government, except that with the Tories' apparently still-ongoing Strange Death of Liberal England-evoking collapse as a political force it seems far from certain that the Conservatives will be the challenger to beat in an election by the ordinary rules of the game coming no later than mid-2029. After all, the collapse in support for the two big parties meant much of the vote going to "third" parties, with the Nigel Farage-led Reform UK perhaps on the road to replacing the Tories as the preferred "party of the right" in line with the trend all too clear in the ascent of the National Rally in France, and the Alternative for Germany in that country (both of which parties might make their ascent even earlier given France's presidential election next year, and Germany's schedule calling for a general election no later than early 2029). Considering the latter two prospects with the "gender identity" of their leaderships in mind I'm sure our identity politics-obsessed Establishment is gushing Hillary Clinton-style over the prospect of "new" firsts. (The first female French President! The first openly LGBTQ+ German Chancellor and head of any Group of Seven government! And one with a "partner of color" too!) However, the real story is what officially far right governments in Europe's Big Three (counting an Italy governed by the far right since 2022, the Big Four) will mean for those countries, for Europe, and for the world.