The symbolic moment of the handover of power between Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham this week was not the former's maudlin PMQs session but the leak that the latter is thinking of appointing Shabana Mahmood as Chancellor of the Exchequer. This may not actually come to pass, but what matters is the public emphasis placed on the need to keep the bond markets happy, and the private reassurance that it is the party right that remains firmly in charge, not the battalions of the soft left (once more conjured into existence by the media) massing behind "Red" Ed Miliband. Mahmood is not known for heterodox thinking on economics, while her stint as Shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury lasted all of 4 months, ending when she resigned from the Shadow Cabinet the day after Jeremy Corbyn assumed the party leadership. It is that action that clearly commends her both to the PLP and to the media.
In some ways it is remarkable that we have moved so quickly from the expectation that Andy Burnham would bring down the curtain on "40 years of Neoliberalism" (it was only in May) to a resigned acknowledgment that little will change. In June in The New Stateman, Michael Jacobs commended the sentiment but worried that Burnham might be fighting the last war, while Karel Williams and David Edgerton characterised the coming administration as likely to be "more of the same, with added vibes", a theme promptly picked up by Owen Jones in the Guardian as part of the campaign to get Miliband promoted. Since then, Burnham appears to have been speed-running Starmer's trajectory, caveating previous statements and rowing back on his assumed intentions, albeit having had the sense to not put much in writing. He is obviously not a man of cast-iron pledges but of cheery vibes, and that will probably help avoid repeating those tricky situations where a shifty Starmer was confronted with his bald lies. So far, Burnham has disappointed the left on Gaza and defence, and shows every sign of intending to disappoint them elsewhere too.
Central to cartel politics is the idea of the markeplace of ideas, in which policy entrepreneurs compete to attract the admiring gaze of the political class in a sort of intellectual beauty contest conducted through the medium of slide-decks and chunky PDFs - i.e. in the manner of a business pitch. The ideological frame is clear enough, but so is the idea that politicians themselves have no fixed beliefs and are merely pragmatists interested in "what works". Burnham's victory in the Makerfield by-election prompted a rash of ideas that quickly coalesced under the title of Manchesterism. Matthew Lawrence and Alex Williams paper on The Productive State, subtitled "A Framework for Manchesterism", is perhaps the most substantial offering to date, largely because it has been long-gestated at the Common Wealth think tank (someone must have been very pleased with herself for coming up with that name). The problem is that these ideas have been knocking around among progressives for some years now but, outside of the Corbyn/McDonnell interregnum, there has been litlle interest in them from the Labour Party.
Chris Dillow made the point that while Lawrence and Williams recognise the central issue of power - "The fundamental problem is ownership, not conduct. It is impossible to regulate away a problem created by ownership" - they offer little in the way of practical advice on how power can be acquired beyond noting that "Postwar nationalisations used government debt as compensation" and that "compulsory acquisition would typically require compensation based on fair market value, and acquiring assets materially below prevailing market valuations would likely require primary legislation and could face legal challenge." Given that public utilities and the NHS have been systematically looted for decades now, we surely need to question whether we want to re-enact the prim and proper approach of the Attlee government. Instead, the advocates of nationalisation today have been at pains to emphasise this pragmatism. Thus Larry Elliott in The Guardian noted that "Compensation to the owners of the mines and the big four rail companies was actually quite generous, which is why the nationalisation programme was relatively trouble-free."
This timidity is the consequence of the marketplace of ideas as much as ancestor-worship: the elevation of theory over practice, unless the latter is in the form of "reforms" to existing services and regulations - i.e. within the boundaries of neoliberal practice. Nobody at Common Wealth or the Resolution Foundation is going to put up a slide saying we need a general strike, a mass boycott or a refusal to pay. Revolutionary methods cannot be expected from the "radical realists" of Labour's latest grouping, Mainstream (just typing these labels is depressing), any more than we can expect them to invoke democracy and the people except at the most abstract level, hence the popularity of the phrase "public control", which is less about masking the preference for regulation over ownership than making the public a mere fetish. The competition for Andy Burham's ear is about securing influence over the mechanisms of the centralised state. For this reason, we should be sceptical about the talk of devolution.
The Productive State came out in June. I doubt many people still have much hope for its recommendations to be taken up by the new administration, or even for many of them to make their way, however heavily diluted, into the manifesto for the next general election. The media have focused their attention on the promise/threat of a wealth tax, the "debates" over whether we should junk Net Zero and the ECHR, and the need for more crackdowns on immigration and welfare. This is not simply a case of media-owners pursuing their own interests in those areas but a conscious attempt to narrow the government's bandwith, by "flooding the zone with shit", such that more radical ideas will be squeezed out. The debate over who should be Chancellor has similarly been conducted as a distracting and tedious contest between "Chaos with Ed Miliband" and whichever Labour politician looks most likely to continue Rachel Reeves' good work and do nothing to frighten the horses.
By July, the progressive end of the media was focused on prodding Burnham to consider practical solutions, such as Larry Elliott urging him to mandate the Bank of England "to provide a flow of low-cost, patient capital needed to fund the reindustrialisation strategy", an idea that obviously isn't going to survive contact with Shabana Mahmood, while Andy Beckett was insisting that "Overcoming Britain’s aversion to fundamental reform is not impossible. In the last century, David Lloyd George, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher managed it, for three very different governments in three very different contexts". What Beckett didn't note was that the political context that gave them the authority to make radical change was actually the same: the kudos arising from a successful war, but also the recognition that the decades prior to the conflict could not be returned to. Burnham has made that acknowledgment, but he doesn't have the goodwill engendered by wartime sacrifice and victory.
Meanwhile, the helpful suggestions continue to come in from outside government, from rationalising the tax code to devolving power and finance to the regions. But when we turn to the ideas emanating from within government, we find a call to stop "simply writing a cheque" for health and disability benefit claimants, which sound awfully like a return to workfare. The other symbolic moment of the week was the passage of the Hillsborough Law - the Public Office (Accountability) Bill - in the House of Commons after much foot-dragging by the government over the security services' duty of candour (a major issue in respect of the Manchester Arena bombing). Burnham has been a sincere champion for this cause, at least since he was publicly booed at a memorial ceremony held at Anfield in 2009, but the long delay in the passage of the bill indicates the limits of state reform, as much as the resilience of the campaigners. Burnham claim that the bill is "truly a rewiring of the state" is hyperbole.
In summary, there is little reason to believe that Burnham will be the social democratic saviour of the country that some were pining for back in May, but his deft media footwork and his willingness to cast greater regulation, whether by Whitehall or local authorities, as populist activism may be enough to save the Labour Party from electoral oblivion. The creation of some new public corporations, an emphasis on the common good, and an unabashed promotion of the state as a regulator of markets, all intended to help alleviate the cost-of-living through an attack on rentierism and private monopolies, may be enough for many voters. The irony is that the man promising an end to Neoliberalism may turn out to be the first truly Ordoliberal Prime Minister of the UK.
