June 22, 2026 (Prospect.org)
| KUTTNER ON TAP The stakes for Andy Burnham’s success go far beyond Britain. As expected, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his resignation early Monday in favor of Andy Burnham, the popular former mayor of Greater Manchester. To become prime minister, Burnham made the risky decision to run for Parliament in a swing district in Makerfield, west of Manchester, where the far-right Reform party had outperformed Labour in recent local council elections. Burnham turned the by-election into a national referendum on his leadership and candidacy for prime minister. He won by a smashing 20 points. At that point, the succession became inevitable. What makes Andy Burnham special? First, as three-term Manchester mayor, he turned that depressed city into a national economic success story. Of all English cities, only Manchester has grown faster than London, and has grown at three times the rate of the country as a whole. He defined what he likes to term a business-friendly socialism, which now becomes his model for Britain. Burnham is also a superb retail politician, who invites comparisons with New York’s Zohran Mamdani. One of his signature initiatives was to renationalize Greater Manchester’s bus system, expand light rail, and add reduced or free fares. It was exactly the kind of palpable change that puts money in constituents’ pockets and endears a leader to ordinary people. Burnham comes across as a regular bloke, angry at the same things that anger regular Brits, and competent to put things right. The fact that he is not from the national Parliament at Westminster—which has produced dysfunctional national parties and seven prime ministers in ten years—is a huge source of strength. His charming northern accent serves as a reinforcement. In his campaign video for the Makerfield by-election, Burnham criticizes both Conservative and recent Labour governments alike as neoliberals who have sold out regular working people. “Westminster doesn’t work for people in this part of the world and communities like this across the U.K.,” he declares. “One of the things that made me most proud recently is someone saying on a doorstep, ‘Andy’s all right. He’s for us.’” In a Labour Party riven by factional divisions of old left Corbynites, neoliberal Blairites, and technocrats like the politically inept Starmer, Burnham defines a new practical progressivism. Labour has long been all about redistribution. Burnham is all about producing wealth, in a socially just fashion. |
| Can Andy Burnham succeed? He takes office with huge goodwill among Labour MPs, who faced a blowout repudiation under Starmer in the next general election, which is due by 2029. His method is to consult widely. If his program is plausible, he will win overwhelming support in his party. One shrewd move that Burnham made early on was to make clear that he would not rely on deficit spending. That reassured the City (Britain’s counterpart of Wall Street), and interest rates did not increase as Burnham’s ascendancy became inevitable. The pound sterling also stayed reassuringly stable. As Will Hutton, one of Britain’s leading commentators, recently wrote in The Observer, “The bulk of the Labour party is cohering around the cause of business-friendly socialism while respecting the imperative of keeping the bond markets on side.” But unlike Starmer and his fiscally conservative chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, Burnham will not hold public investment hostage for fiscal balance. According to people in the Burnham camp whom I’ve interviewed, Burnham plans major tax increases, but not on working people or small businesses. Top candidates for tax hikes include raising the tax rate on capital income to that of top rates on wages and salaries, raising taxes on inheritances, and changing the way land is taxed. The proceeds from new sources of revenue could go for everything from improving the National Health Service to reinvesting in public transport to partnerships with industry that play to Britain’s latent strengths. These include niche successes in such sectors as tech and AI, high-end engineering goods such as Rolls-Royce jet engines, and pharmaceuticals. All this represents a long-overdue shift away from Britain’s overdependence on finance as the anchor of the British economy. This began in the late 19th century when Britain started exporting more capital than goods, and was surpassed by the U.S. and Germany. The excessive reliance on finance was redoubled under Margaret Thatcher’s strategy of deregulation and continued under Labour’s Tony Blair. It failed to rejuvenate Britain’s economy or to serve ordinary people. Under Starmer, the Labour Party has been paralyzed on the question of how to rejoin Europe. Brexit has been a palpable failure. EU leaders have indicated that they are open to restoring Britain to Europe, short of full membership. Burnham doesn’t view Brexit as an untouchable third rail and will negotiate details. Burnham now becomes literally the world’s only progressive national leader with a large working majority in the national Parliament. So the stakes are immense far beyond Britain. His success in beating back Nigel Farage’s Reform party demonstrates that the far right doesn’t loom so large when social democrats actually deliver. If Burnham can define and execute an economically successful pro-business socialism, his ideology and program become models for the next wave of other progressive national leaders everywhere.  Robert KuttnerCo-Editor, Co-Founder |
