Of Fictions and Factions

The media response to Andy Burnham's first week as Prime Minister has been both positive and sniffy. His communication skills have drawn praise, though doing a better job than Keir Starmer in this regard is just walking and chewing gum at the same time, to coin a phrase. His early announcements around the cost-of-living have been eye-catching but also small-beer in the grand fiscal scheme of things, while his willingness to start disappointing the left over defence spending and support for America's wars has brought a warm glow of contentment to Atlanticists everywhere. The Financial Times delivered a typical school report: "But so far, the parts of Burnhamonomics that are bold are not concrete, and those that are concrete are not bold." Meanwhile, the Grand Panjandrum of centrist opinion, Andrew Rawnsley, was prepared to be indulgent: "If the aim was to get off to a positive start, before pivoting away from sticking plasters and towards fixing the underlying problems, then perhaps some sketchy short-termist policies with sketchy funding is a price worth paying."

The most interesting response has focused on the reaction of those members of the Starmer cabinet who were promptly relieved of their duties on Monday. By Tuesday, Peter Walker in the Guardian reported that "Allies of Keir Starmer have questioned Andy Burnham’s pledge to end factional infighting after he removed or demoted more than half of the outgoing prime minister’s cabinet in his first reshuffle." The jarring detail here is the suggestion that Starmer had allies, as opposed to the contingent support of career opportunists. The man was promoted as a clean-skin who could gull the membership, but that just made him a willing (if ignorant) tool, not the intellectual pole around which a party tendency would coalesce. By Wednesday, this freshly-conjured grouping was being described by an unnamed Labour MP in a Politics Home report as "an incredibly powerful phalanx of skilled political operators who intimately know the government’s fiscal position", which sounded both delusional and threatening

Thursday was relatively quiet on the faction fabrication front but by Friday the Guardian had decided to go all in on the call-to-arms. According to Kiran Stacey, "Keir Starmer’s leaving party had been planned for some time. But in years to come it might be seen as the birth of a new Labour movement." By Sunday, Andrew Rawnsley had got with the programme: "Having previously said that he wanted to “move beyond” the “infighting” and “factionalism” that has “bedevilled us”, he sacked 11 cabinet ministers, many of whose common offence was declining to call for Sir Keir to quit. He then carried out a purge of Starmer loyalists in the junior ministerial ranks." Stacey's explanation for this sudden emergence was not the petulance and sense of entitlement of the likes of Darren Jones and Steve Reed but Starmer's own curious path to power: "One of Starmer’s biggest problems in government was that he did not have an identifiable faction of people who were willing to defend him at all costs – a symptom of both his late entry into politics and of his relative lack of ideology."

Given the ruthless purge conducted against the left of the party, the idea that Starmer lacked ideology or factional muscle is ridiculous, and that's before you consider his record in office, from unnecessarily persisting with austerity to backing Israel's "right" to murder civilians. For the last two years you would struggle to find anyone who would willingly identify as a "Starmerite", but now we are asked to believe that they are a disciplined army that could threaten a government majority of 158. The political press have a long tradition of inventing Labour factions, usually in order to isolate the socialist left - most notably the ever-useful and mutable "soft left", the Play-Doh of social democratic aspiration - but they've excelled themselves in conjuring a "movement" around the cypher of Keir Starmer and the totem of Rachel Reeves' fiscal rules. Stacey eventually concedes that this novel faction may only be the result of musical chairs: "But many of those whom Burnham sacked or demoted after entering office did have one thing in common: they were close to the former prime minister and had not called for him to resign."

Since Burnham won the Makerfield byelection, there has been a noticeable shift in the Guardian's use of the term "factionalism". During the Starmer era, it was rarely mentioned in the context of the expulsion of the left, despite that being a textbook factional operation that many participants were only to happy to brag about publicly, for example in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's tell-all book Get In. It is axiomatic to centrists that they are not factional, with the implications of blind loyalty and a refusal to face facts, while their critics are. Unsurprisingly, Rafael Behr now compares those disappointed opportunists with the "radical left", essentially to dismiss them as not serious people: "Labour’s radical left is always on a hair trigger, poised to denounce compromise as betrayal of socialist principle. Now there is also a small but aggrieved band of Starmer loyalists in exile poised to highlight (or relish) missteps and vulnerabilities." It's bad enough to lose your cabinet job, but to be expelled from the ranks of the sensible must really hurt.

The whining of Starmer's supposed "allies" is a return to the faux-factionalism of Blair/Brown, in which ideological congruity is obscured by personal hatred. The attempt to conjure the soft left as part of Ed Miliband's threat to market stability was shortlived, but you can expect that notional faction to reappear when the need once more arises. Andy Burnham was always going to get rid of the higher profile Starmer appointees to the cabinet, if only to emphasise that he was a new broom, so I don't think too much can be read into Reeves, Lammy, Reed, Kyle, Kendall, Hermer et al getting the elbow. None particularly distinguished themselves in office. Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood have offended many, at either end of the ideological spectrum, but they've also proved they can get stuff done, and Labour badly need tangible results by 2029. The same rationale explains why John Healey is now the latest Iron Chancellor: butter rations will be halved but we will definitely have more guns.

Insofar as the reshuffle advanced one faction over another, it was in the geographical rather than the ideological sense, with a noticeable shift to more Northern MPs in cabinet and particularly those from the North West. This is not just a symbolic attempt to push the narrative of devolution, reinforced by the launch of "Number 10 North" this week, but a reflection that Starmer was very reliant on a London core for his support, both in terms of MPs, party apparatchiks and the media. Whether this will impart a genuinely different flavour to the government is moot. It's notable that none of the MPs aligned with the Mainstream grouping, set up to counter the drift to the right under Starmer, got a sniff at a junior ministerial post. So far, Burnham does not look likely to diverge from the post-Thatcher consensus despite his early talk of an end to Neoliberalism and regrets over privatisation. A tilt towards Ordoliberalism, which historically valued devolution, seems more likely, which means there will be little challenge to property rights and little that is recognisably socialist.

In this context, the creation of factions serves to substitute court politics for the clash of interests that might have a more profound, and therefore destabilising, impact on policy. Though there have been the usual "warnings" from union leaders directed at Number 10, the discourse has barely featured the concerns of organised labour (outside of oil and gas jobs) any more than the particular concerns of civil society organisations. As usual, we've heard more from think-tanks than protest groups. Of course this is manna from heaven for political journalists and commentators, for whom ideology is a dirty word. Of the current political caucuses at Westminster, Blue Labour and the Labour Growth Group are likely to be absorbed into the main body of Burnham's support, while the soft left will remain quiescent. This leaves the for/against dichotomy familiar from the New Labour years but with those resentful of Burnham lacking any obvious champion, leading to the current absurdity of the Starmerite resistance. 

Looking back over the last 16 years, the PLP lacked the talent to succeed Blair and Brown, hence the Miliband(s) debacle and the runaway success of Corbyn. The result of that was the decision to import a leader from outside Westminster: first the unknown Starmer conning the membership; and then a recycled Burnham avoiding the need for an election through PLP discipline. What few are prepared to acknowledge is that this underlying dearth of talent, as much as the shenanigans, reflects the slow death of the Labour Party as an organic product of civil society, a process accelerated by the purge of the left. Burnham's municipalism (a more accurate label than Manchesterism) is a desperate attempt to reconnect with society through revitalised local government, even as it requires central government to mandate capped bus fares. The acid test will be council housebuilding. She wasn't central to the week's discourse, beyond ruling out rent controls, but the success of this government will probably now rest on the shoulders of Angela Rayner, the new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. She will no doubt shortly be awarded her own faction.

Burnhamesque

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." No shit.

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.