Editorial of the Socialist issue 1378
Ten days into Andy Burnham’s reign, on 30 July, Labour won the Greater Manchester mayoral by-election, the position he’d vacated to get back into parliament. Labour’s leaders will hope this victory, keeping Reform in second place, represents a change in fortunes for the party, and the situation that has delivered seven prime ministers in a decade. But a stable base of support is impossible for a party that continues the austerity fuelling that political volatility.
New mayor Bev Craig was elected as a councillor in Manchester City Council in 2011 and became council leader in 2021. In that period the council made millions in cuts, obediently carrying through Tory austerity. By the time of the first budget under Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, Manchester City Council had cut £309 million and planned more that year instead of using the opportunity of a new anti-austerity leader to begin the fight against all cuts. Nothing different can be expected now.
And in its national significance, although Labour won on 30 July, even in Burnham’s ‘heartland’ the results do not represent a transformation of Labour’s support. While Labour’s final vote was 66.3% in a second round run-off with Reform, they did not win an outright majority in the first round and were down 16 points on Burnham’s result in 2024, winning just 251,449 votes (47.1%). In previous ‘two-rounds’ supplementary vote elections for the Manchester mayor in 2017 and 2021 Labour had won in the first round, including in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership with 359,352 votes and a 63.4% share.
But still, Reform fell from its top position in May’s local elections across Greater Manchester, with the hard-right Restore Britain cutting into their support and polling 8.7% ahead of the Tories on 7.7%, and Labour have inched ahead of them in national opinion polls.
Having crowned Burnham on a pledge to ‘end 40 years of neoliberalism’, in his first fortnight in office, Burnham announced a ‘blitz’ of measures, including a VAT cut on electricity bills which amounts to a saving of less than a pound a week at best, a reduction in business rates for pubs, and a £2 cap on bus fares outside London. While these crumbs will be welcome, the context is an estimated £11,300 a year lost by every worker because wages have not risen according to pre-financial crash (2008) trends.
One or two commentators have dared to hope that the declaration of the death of the ‘duopoly,’ the domination by the Tories and Labour who have governed Britain in the interests of the capitalist elite for almost 100 years, was premature. The basis of this hope is that Reform and the Greens, the most recent beneficiaries of rage at the elite, have fallen slightly in the polls.
But the more serious defenders of capitalism know that this hope is in vain. Labour’s poll average is still the lowest for any newly minted mid-term prime minister.
The trigger for the change at the top of Labour was the punishment dealt to Starmer at the elections in May, losing the Welsh Senedd and around 60% of the council seats in England they were defending, while falling further back in Scotland. From the get-go, Starmer’s government pushed for attacks on the working class, including on pensioners’ winter fuel payments and disability benefit cuts. It was a government committed to representing the interests of the big business capitalist class.
Without a political alternative being put forward by the mass organisations of the working class – the trade unions – the right-populist Reform and Nigel Farage have been able to present themselves as a means by which to strike blows against the establishment electorally. Reform offers nothing however, but the dead end of division serving the bosses.
Andy Burnham has now embarked on a ‘listening tour’ to “help inform his ten-year plan to bring back hope and make Britain better off.” But the problems that make people want change are not complicated or hard to see. The bills are too high, the rents and mortgages are too high, the wages are too low, public services need to be funded, and young people need a decent future.
The head of political polling at YouGov, Anthony Wells, said: “He’s obviously closed the gap [with Reform]… In that sense it’s all good news. But I think it’s all good news because he hasn’t tried to do anything hard yet… At the moment he’s just setting out, ‘here’s all the nice things I’d like to do’. It’s only when details come out that you start upsetting people, or when you start paying for things.”
Some details have already come out. Angela Rayner, his housing minister, has ruled out rent control. Raising the threshold when workers start to pay income tax has been floated and ruled out.
Some strong hints have been given of the direction of travel. He has appointed James Purnell as an advisor. As a minister under Gordon Brown, he presented a plan to cut benefits that was so vicious the Tories praised it to the skies. Burnham’s choice for chancellor, former defence minister John Healey, quit over Starmer not increasing military spending enough. He has made it clear he will oversee “strong fiscal discipline” which means cuts to public spending on services.
The Financial Times, the mouthpiece of big business bosses, has made its view clear: “Britain’s new leader has described his philosophy as ‘business-friendly socialism’. If he wants to take the country forward, he needs to lean more on the business-friendly elements than on the statist sentiments he has emphasised around his arrival in Downing Street.”
That approach, of seeking to do the bidding of big business, means that the room for Faragism still exists, even while Farage faces sustained attack from the establishment, particularly over his shady finances. They give the lie to the claim that Reform is a workers’ party. Real representatives of the working class would take a worker’s wage not payments from bitcoin billionaires.
A workers’ political voice must be built, alongside the workers’ movement challenge to austerity and the divisive rhetoric of Reform. It is right that the motion from TUC Women’s Conference to the TUC Congress calls for a “campaign on unifying TUC policy of jobs, homes and services, not racism, to cut across the policies of division of Reform and the far right”.
PCS demands TUC action
The TUC Congress is the annual gathering of the leaders of the six million-strong trade union movement. The trade unions are the force in British society able to build a political party that fights for all sections of the working class, and would be capable of cutting across Reform. In the 2017 general election, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour’s anti-austerity programme won a million voters who’d previously backed Reform’s predecessor UKIP.
Unfortunately, many of the motions to the TUC Congress reflect the approach of the majority of the trade union leaders who want to plead for Labour and to use the change of leader to argue against independent action. Some talk of ‘calling on’ the new prime minister ‘to act’ and welcome his coronation as ‘a new opportunity’.
The motion from the PCS union however stands out. While demanding that the new government reopens “talks on public sector pay for 2026/27 to protect workers from the cost-of-living crisis”, it also points to how the union movement must make its voice heard against those deafening calls on Burnham to ‘lean more on the business-friendly elements’.
Crucially, the PCS motion calls for the TUC to act, “to urgently call a national Saturday demonstration this autumn for investment in public services, against austerity and for pro-worker policies”. Such a demonstration would give enormous confidence to the working class and youth to fight for our class’s interests. The motion also calls for Congress to “urge all public sector unions to join a united campaign on pay, and, if needed, to plan for coordinated industrial action to secure real gains for workers.”
Getting this motion passed and an autumn demonstration actually organised and built for must now be the focus of all trade union fighters who want to see a campaign to end austerity realised, not with hopes or vibes, but by our class stamping our demands on the situation. The National Shop Stewards Network has organised a lobby of the TUC in support of this motion on 13 September as the first step in the fighting strategy that’s still needed.
