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.