Andy Burnham’s long Labour leadership campaign has begun, with interviews in the New Statesman and Telegraph. The Manchester mayor will ramp things up with fringe appearances at the party’s conference in Liverpool, which starts this weekend, and from there his timetable is clear.
In the next six months or so, Burnham must find an available parliamentary seat, and then win it in a by-election. This is harder than it sounds given Labour’s current polling, and though gossip persists that Graham Stringer would stand down for Burnham in Greater Manchester’s Blackley and Middleton South, he would face a serious challenge from Reform.
Once he gets back to Westminster, Burnham could launch a proper challenge to Keir Starmer after the anticipated Labour wipeout at the May 7 elections next year, where over 4,000 council seats will be up for grabs, plus all 129 and 96 seats in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. He would surely find the 80 MPs necessary to challenge a badly wounded Starmer, and would beat him easily in a vote of Labour members.
Imagine Burnham succeeds in all that, and gets a free pass into No.10. What would prime minister Burnham mean for Brexit, Rejoin and Britain’s relationship with Europe generally? As I wrote in June, Burnham’s European credentials are deeply confusing.
He backed Remain at the referendum, then dithered about a People’s Vote (against it, then for it), only to claim in 2019 that he would back Leave if a second referendum were held. More recently, he has declared Brexit to be “a disaster on every level”, and said that Labour must be clearer about tying Nigel Farage to that disaster. OK, but what would he actually do in office?
In his Telegraph interview, Burnham outlined plenty of policies guaranteed to horrify the paper’s readers and its journalists – a “mansion tax” on expensive homes in London and the South East, an extra £40bn of borrowing to build council houses and the return of the 50p rate of income tax for the best-paid. But on the policy that would horrify them most, while restoring some £100bn per year to the British economy – rejoining the EU – he said nothing.
In the Statesman, Burnham says he wants Labour to make “a stronger argument about Brexit having been a mistake”. Yet frustratingly, in a 7,000-word article, there’s no more than that. He has more to say about baked potatoes and the poet Tony Harrison than rejoining the EU.
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Is this a bold and clever politician timing his headline-grabbing intervention on Britain and Europe for the moment when it will have the most impact? Or is he a timid one who is already worried about what the voters of Blackley and Middleton South might think? The old seat of Blackley and Broughton went narrowly for Leave in 2016.
Other potential challengers to Starmer may emerge. But on the current evidence, is there really much gain for Labour in getting rid of one dour, bespectacled white man with little of interest to say on Brexit, and replacing him with another?
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