Andy Burnham is just Keir Starmer in jeans

Following his resounding victory in the Makerfield by-election, former New Labour hack Andy Burnham is set to return to Westminster next week. Unless something remarkable happens, this will be the prelude to the former Greater Manchester mayor assuming leadership of the Labour Party and becoming our next prime minister. The only question, it seems, is whether Our Andy will be allowed into No10 as part of an ‘orderly transition’, with the current incumbent, Keir Starmer, being forced to step aside, or be made to enter a leadership contest against the wildly unpopular Starmer, Wes Streeting and an assortment of non-entities we’d all struggle to pick out of a line-up. Either way, all roads point to a Burnham premiership in the very near future.

Labourites and their party’s legion media cheerleaders seem delighted at the prospect. ‘He has delivered hope’, says one Labour old hand. Another has written of the ‘excited anticipation’ leaving the red side of the Commons positively tumescent. Across the board, they all seem gripped by the same delusion – that Labour’s plummeting popularity is all down to the supernaturally unpopular Starmer. Their thinking runs something like this: get rid of the weird robotic man at the top, and replace him with Andy ‘average bloke’ Burnham, and, just like that, Labour will be able to reverse its slide. A normal pre-Reform UK state of affairs will resume. Status quo Andy.

This is desperately wishful thinking. Labour doesn’t have a Keir Starmer problem. It has a Labour problem. It is organisationally and ideologically estranged from its working-class support base. Labour today is a deracinated, hollowed-out vehicle for the professional managerial class. The only politicians it can produce are different brands of the same technocratic, managerial product.

Burnham is a case in point. There is nothing to suggest that his premiership will differ markedly from what has gone before. An Oxbridge-educated, political-class protege of the Tony Blair years, Burnham cleaves to the same globalist, technocratic worldview as his soon-to-be predecessor. He favours expertise and rules over democratic decision-making, ‘progressive’ and transnational governance over national sovereignty. He may be famous for changing his mind, but his countless u-turns take place within a political-class project heading one way.

Hence, he is openly pro-EU, and told the Guardian last September he wanted Britain to rejoin – although, like Starmer, he has since said he’s not going to formally push that as policy this parliamentary term.

It’s the same story on the economy. Having briefly flirted with challenging the government’s ‘fiscal rules’, he has now pledged his fealty to those self-same rules. He’s even announced he is ‘not squeamish’ about tackling the UK’s huge welfare bill in order to bring spending down to within the permitted levels. Although, like Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, Burnham may find Labour backbenchers, whose welfarism is the closest thing they have to a cause, just as resistant to reforming the benefits system.

And, of course, he remains committed to Net Zero, that grandest of technocratic causes. Indeed, it’s worth noting that one of his key Labour allies is Ed Miliband, the climate-change secretary and Net Zero zealot. Some even expect Miliband to be appointed Burnham’s chancellor.

Like all good members of the modern political class, Burnham is also broadly ‘progressive’ in outlook. Which means he’s likely to continue with Starmer’s clumsy culture-warring tendencies and unthinking embrace of ‘woke’ – ‘I call it respect for other people and basic decency’, as he put it to Byline Times last year. He’s even set to follow in Starmer’s footsteps on transgenderism. While he’s never proclaimed that ‘99.9 per cent of women haven’t got a penis’, he certainly seems to struggle with the biological reality of sex, as he demonstrated in an agonising interview with LBC last year. He’s even come out in support of allowing men to access women’s toilets.

Those building Burnham up as Labour’s Great Red Hope point to his vague talk of taking ‘public control’ of water and energy companies, and the ‘municipal socialism’ of his Manchester mayorality, as proof that he really will be different to what has gone before. But it’s all smoke and mirrors. ‘Public control’ is very different to public ownership. At most, Burnham might attempt to do to water or energy companies what he did to Manchester’s bus network, taking disparate still-private-sector companies under a public umbrella. As Fraser Myers has pointed out, this is more Transport for London than ‘the common ownership of the means of production’. It is a species of managerialism, not socialism.

Just about the only area in which a Burnham premiership might diverge from a Starmer one is immigration. In mid-May, he did appear to back ex-deputy PM Angela Rayner’s criticism of home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s plans to curb immigration as ‘un-British’ – especially the plan to extend the period after which migrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain in the UK from five to 10 years. Even so, just days later, the Guardian reported that Burnham intends to back Mahmood’s plans. This really just shows how spongy Burnham’s day-to-day politics is, absorbing whatever is closest to him at any given moment. An ally called him a ‘people pleaser’. In that regard, at least, he is very different to Starmer – a man with a talent for inspiring near universal dislike.

In almost every area, Burnham promises more of the same. The same no-growth economics, further strangled by immiserating Net Zero policies. The same surreptitious re-embrace of the EU. And the same culture-warring ‘progressivism’. There will be plenty of flip-flopping on particular policies and specific statements. But this will all take place within the broad technocratic, ‘progressive’ consensus of the political class.

Burnham promises to be just as visionless as predecessor. Just as incapable of rising to the profound challenges of our moment. If Starmer is an empty suit, Burnham is an empty Paul Smith knit. He’s a friendlier, smart-casual upgrade on the adenoidal chatbot currently squatting in No10. But in substance, he’s of the same political-class stock. He offers nothing.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.