Labour’s Last Chance

Labour’s Last Chance Labour’s Last Chance Years of underinvestment in energy, infrastructure, and public services now weigh on Andy Burnham’s premiership. Is he ready for what the fight for an alternative will entail? Over the summer of 2026, Britain’s governing Labour Party contemplated its own extinction. In the May elections for devolved and local authorities, it suffered near-annihilation in Wales, deepening marginalization in Scotland, and a precipitous loss of council seats across its erstwhile heartlands in Central and Northern England. With the party in disarray, the popular Labour mayor of the Greater Manchester city region, Andy Burnham, spied an opportunity to realize his long-held ambition to take office as prime minister. The ease with which he has done so is a testament to Keir Starmer’s weakness as much as to Burnham’s political gifts. Josh Simons, an MP who was not just a former loyalist of Starmer’s but was central to his ruthless purge of Labour’s left wing, resigned his position to allow Burnham to fight a by-election in Makerfield, a former coalfield seat on Manchester’s peri-urban fringe, and return to Westminster. Victory initially seemed unlikely: In local elections just a few weeks before, the far-right Reform party, led by Mar-a-Lago courtier Nigel Farage, had a historic surge. Yet Burnham won a comfortable majority of the votes in a high-turnout contest fought entirely on his personal brand. With the Labour logo nowhere in sight, placards and campaign materials bore the slogan “Vote Andy: For Us.” Burnham consigned Reform to a distant second, in a constituency that it had every expectation of taking in the next general election. Victory in Makerfield was a much-needed proof of concept for the idea that the right leader would be able to reassemble Labour’s base and stave off a Reform victory in 2029. Yet Labour’s rush to embrace Burnham is also a sign of the party’s desperation. A single by-election victory, in a district where Labour has been dominant for a century or more, was enough to make Burnham seem like a savior. It catapulted him into a swift coronation as party leader and prime minister ahead of some 400 sitting Labour parliamentarians elected in a broad but shallow landslide victory just two years earlier. For all that some international observers have treated him as an obscure novelty—Donald Trump called him the mayor of “some town”—Burnham is a far more senior and experienced figure than his predecessor. A political lifer, he played rough games of amateur soccer on a team of New Labour staffers in the 1990s, was first elected as MP in 2001, and held a string of cabinet posts in the dog days of the Gordon Brown administration (2007–10). He came in second to Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 party leadership election; absent a rule change that abolished the disproportionate weighting of parliamentarians’ votes, he might have won. Wisely refusing to participate in the putsch against Corbyn that followed the Brexit referendum in 2016, Burnham gave up his Westminster constituency to run for the newly created office of mayor of Greater Manchester the following year. It was here that he finally came into his own. Burnham ditched the slim-fit suits and focus-grouped slogans (“aspirational socialism,” anyone?) that had limited his ascent to date and developed an authentic persona as the face of England’s coolest (and most self-regarding) city. As a Gen Xer, Burnham, who grew up not far from his current constituency in the borderlands between Liverpool and Manchester, experienced both the economic decline and the cultural ferment of the English Northwest during the 1980s. Coming to Cambridge to study English at the end of that decade, his love for Manchester bands like New Order and the Stone Roses offered a way of turning a peripheral, working-class identity into a form of cultural capital. The contrast with Burnham’s predecessor is instructive. Starmer’s more straitened working-class upbringing was in Surrey, the outer London stockbroker belt, with nothing to rival the pop-cultural status of the Northwest. He was formed by law, not politics; in office, his alternating bouts of indecision and ruthlessness seem in retrospect to have been the products of a sudden vertigo induced by rising to the very top, with no brief to follow and no expert witnesses to call in. Personally hostile to any form of political definition, Starmer floundered hopelessly in office. Legislation on questions great and small was delayed, botched, and withdrawn; advisers, ministers, and civil servants were fired and moved around with callous abandon; and a large, inexperienced cohort of Labour MPs were hectored and threatened rather than humored and managed in the usual fashion. The promise of “stability” that anchored the government’s cautious policies swiftly proved illusory. By the end of his tenure, Labour’s vast majority was no longer a working one, capable of implementing a consistent legislative program. Starmer’s failure was also, however, symptomatic of the fundamental incoherence of British statecraft and political economy since the financial crisis of 2008. Riding a wave of frustration with the hated Tories, Labour in 2024 vaguely promised “change” while disdaining the intellectual and political work necessary to bring it about. Years of underinvestment in energy, infrastructure, and public services will now weigh on Burnham’s premiership as much as they did on Starmer’s. The Whitehall machine is underpowered and underpaid, obsessed with narrow cost-benefit analyses and hollowed out by consultants and outsourcers. Many essential services are privatized and in foreign hands. The United Kingdom is a heavily indebted importer of energy, food, and investment capital, facing down its third major inflationary shock of the decade. Its government can’t just wish away financial constraints. Nor, however, can it pretend that orthodox policies can break the country’s doom loop of collapsing living standards, political instability, and rising borrowing costs. The pursuit of alternatives—progressive tax reform, expanded public ownership, a radical constitutional overhaul—demands pugnacious optimism, combined with an appetite for risk and confrontation. There can be no doubt that Burnham is up for the fight. But is he ready for what it entails? And whose side is he really on? Burnham has described his premiership as a “circuit breaker,” but also as Labour’s “last chance.” Coming in mid-term, his room for maneuver will be limited by the messy, contradictory agenda his predecessor pursued in office. Labour’s efforts to boost private investment have been stymied by harsh immigration restrictions, which constrain labor supply across the vital health and care sectors and foreclose any serious revision of the post-Brexit settlement with the European Union. Welcome, albeit compromised, improvements to workers’ and tenants’ rights have been offset by welfare cuts, increased payroll taxes, and a dependence on private developers for desperately needed housing. Workerist rhetoric coexists uneasily with AI boosterism, as the government rolls out the red carpet for energy- and water-hungry data centers built by the U.S. tech giants. With the retail and hospitality sectors struggling in the face of depressed living standards, unemployment—especially among the young—is creeping up. Despite the piecemeal reconstruction of a publicly owned rail network, investment in transportation infrastructure continues to languish outside the capital. The rolling financial crisis decimating universities is studiously ignored. Labour’s fiscal policy has meanwhile been panicked and reactive. Starmer refused the chance to seek an electoral mandate for the radical tax changes needed to put public services on a sustainable footing in 2024. Temporary cash infusions for the military, the National Health Service, prisons, and public schools have consequently been financed by a grab bag of targeted levies and accounting tricks. These stopgap measures aggravated a range of political constituencies without generating the funds needed to make a tangible difference in how the electorate experiences public services. An egregious attempt to raise extra money by cutting disability benefits was sunk by a major backbench rebellion, saddling Labour with the political costs of cruelty without securing any fiscal benefit. The same dynamic unfolded when the government sought to cut winter fuel payments for pensioners and maintain a Tory policy limiting child tax credits for large families. Because the government’s fiscal policy has been both improvisational and deeply unpopular, it has failed even in its primary task of reassuring the bond markets: interest rates on government borrowing have crept upward throughout Labour’s time in office. The one glimmer of structural transformation, an ambitious agenda to drive the decarbonization of electricity generation using a state-owned clean power firm, has been hamstrung by Treasury-imposed funding constraints. UK energy costs remain the highest in Europe, while the government’s efforts to drive electrification in domestic heating and transport are restricted to underfunded subsidy programs and tax breaks. While renewables now account for around half of electricity generation, fossil fuels, mostly imported gas and oil, still supply nearly three-quarters of Britain’s final energy consumption. As a result, the country is unusually vulnerable among its European peers to the price spikes and shortages caused by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. That feeds into higher government borrowing costs, which tend to track inflation expectations. While Labour has been cautious about pursuing economic reform, it has been strikingly determined when it comes to upholding the interests of the UK foreign policy and security establishments. The Home Office is fighting a quixotic legal battle to proscribe the activist network Palestine Action under anti-terror legislation. Sharp restrictions on jury trials are planned to get through a backlog of criminal prosecutions caused by the budget cuts of the previous administration. Increased military spending, sold as a means of boosting sovereign autonomy, deepens the country’s dependence on unreliable U.S. suppliers and contractors. Following a wave of anti-refugee riots and Reform’s polling surge, the government proposed legislation curtailing the right of asylum and a radical tightening of the criteria for permanent residency. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood—the first Muslim woman to hold the position—insists that such measures are necessary to protect “people who look like me” from street violence. “White liberals” who don’t agree with her analysis, she told a live podcast audience a few weeks before the May elections, could “fuck right off.” Many of them, it seems, did exactly that. The Greens picked up hundreds of council seats from Labour in urban England, while the Scottish National Party (SNP) dramatically recovered from its 2024 Westminster drubbing to win a fifth consecutive term at Holyrood. Ironically, defections from Labour to the Greens also lay behind many of the party’s losses to Reform, with Farage’s party winning seats in tight five- or even six-way contests. The most devastating result for Labour, however, came in elections for Wales’s devolved Senedd, which unlike the English councils uses a system of proportional voting. Labour was reduced to a rump of nine representatives, with the left-nationalist Plaid Cymru forming its first ever administration. An immediate push for independence, however, is not on the cards. Instead, Plaid has taken over from Labour as the guardian of a distinctively Welsh social democratic identity, based on a shifting amalgam of class and linguistic allegiance. Wales’s tradition of Brexit-supporting, authoritarian unionism is meanwhile represented by Reform, which holds more than a third of the seats in the Senedd while flirting with its abolition. Reform also succeeded in corralling a portion of the unionist vote in Scotland, profiting more than Scottish Labour from the travails of an exhausted and scandal-ridden SNP government. It is the party’s strength in small-town England, however, that has placed Farage within striking distance of the premiership. The core of Reform’s current appeal on the right is the claim that the Tories betrayed Brexit by engineering a surge in legal migration. Yet Farage seems aware that immigration is not the only issue where Reform could set the agenda. In 2025, he assiduously cultivated older working-class voters in Wales and Northern England, pledging utility renationalization and the reopening of coal mines and steel mills. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was the period when the party reached its polling peak of around 30 percent—enough, in a fragmented political environment, for an outright majority next time. Since then, however, its support has slipped back. Emboldened by a series of Tory defections, the party has returned to its neo-Thatcherite comfort zone, promising radical spending cuts in an effort to secure elite consent for a Reform-led government. Its proximity to Trump, once seen as a strength, has become a heavy liability since the attack on Iran; so too is its reliance on dodgy donations from offshore crypto and hedge fund billionaires to fund its increasingly slick campaigning operation—not to mention its leader’s lavish lifestyle. With the election of eco-populist Zack Polanski as leader of the Green Party in England and Wales in September 2025, meanwhile, Reform has lost its monopoly on the anti-system vote. Benefiting from widespread revulsion with Labour’s support for Israel and its broader authoritarian drift, the Greens have made a direct ideological pitch to key Labour voting blocs like younger women and Muslims. As with Reform, however, there are factors in play that could set limits to the Greens’ appeal. Its policy demands are still works in progress, and a loosely organized party structure has yet to metabolize a sudden influx of members, ideas, and campaigning energies from the formerly Corbynite left. Refusing to accept that fragmentation and polarization are the new normal in politics across the West, Labour under Starmer sought to build a hegemonic centrist position by triangulating with Reform and largely ignoring the Greens. In so doing, they failed to offer a distinctive agenda of their own, focused on what their lost voters all share: deep frustration with Britain’s political and economic settlement, and with the rising cost of living. Burnham’s greatest political strength is that he seems instinctively able to link the tangible symptoms of British malaise—boarded-up high streets, squeezed wages, poor health outcomes (by European standards)—to fundamental problems with the state and the economy. He has long been an outspoken advocate for expanded tax-raising and investment powers for regional governments, which are likely to be the centerpiece of his governing agenda. Early supporters of his shadow campaign for the leadership touted his re-municipalization of Greater Manchester’s transit network, which has enabled fare-capping and other social measures, as a successful test case for the cost savings that might be possible if water, gas, and energy were nationalized and public housing were built at scale. As prime minister, Burnham has made popular early moves to cut taxes on electricity bills, cap bus fares nationally, and end street sleeping, while promising a “10-year plan” to “put life’s essentials back under stronger public control” (unpublished at the time of writing). He also proposed a classically social democratic expansion of the welfare state by reviving plans for a free elder- and social-care service, potentially financed by a progressive levy on property values, that he first developed as the health secretary in 2010. As of late July, his leadership had already improved the government’s opinion poll ratings, which have pulled level or even ahead of Reform’s. Where Starmer was bedeviled by the choice between winning back metropolitan liberals from the Greens or small-town social conservatives from Reform, Burnham’s genial brand of economic populism seems capable of doing both. The swift and uncontested manner of his ascent, however, has given him ample scope to ignore demands from what is still—thanks to Starmer’s purges and the rise of the Greens—a shrunken and demoralized party left. Mahmood and her immigration bill have been kept in place, with vague assurances that the cruelest aspects of the reforms will be revisited. While Burnham has apologized for the government’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza, there have been no immediate moves toward more extensive sanctions on Israel, still less a suspension or downgrading of prosecutions for pro-Palestinian activists. If new taxes on wealth or high incomes are planned, the government is keeping them quiet. His appointment of a bland party functionary as chancellor of the exchequer suggests they are unlikely to be forthcoming. Instead of being elevated, as many hoped, to the Treasury, the veteran progressive Ed Miliband was moved from his successful tenure as energy secretary to the Foreign Office—a paper promotion that could allow Burnham to water down Labour’s commitment to banning new oil developments in the North Sea. These early decisions have already suggested to left-wing critics that Burnham is Starmer 2.0: a deceitful candidate who successfully manipulated Labour’s gullible base before unmasking himself as a thorough reactionary in office. Long-term observers of his tenure in Manchester have rightly questioned the self-serving narrative that he built an alternative to neoliberalism in the city. Its booming yet heavily unequal economy is based on a mix of nightlife, higher education, music, soccer, TV production, and real estate, with dollops of foreign investment from dubious U.S. and Gulf vehicles. The very office Burnham used to burnish his left-wing credentials was the product of the thoroughly neoliberal vision of regional development implemented by the Conservative finance minister George Osborne in the 2010s. A bootstrapping strategy for local authorities devastated by his swinging cuts to government spending, Osborne’s “city deals” sought to concentrate power in elected mayoralties covering the economic zones surrounding England’s second-tier cities, Manchester foremost among them. Burnham’s real, if limited, successes in inflecting this neoliberal project in progressive directions point to the limits of evaluating his politics on an oversimplified ideological axis. Burnham’s engagement with the concrete problems of regional development in the English Northwest has led him to what at least sounds like a radical critique of Britain’s overcentralized, outsourced state, and of the decades of privatization and asset sell-offs that have squeezed investment, depressed productivity, and rendered everyday life unaffordable for most workers. More than any of his recent predecessors, Burnham seems to grasp that something close to a developmentalist political economy, focused on capacity and ownership at national and regional scales, is the only way the political class can seriously answer the Brexiteers’ still-resonant demand to “take back control.” Burnham will struggle to make headway, however, if he continues to ignore the global conditions for the UK’s malaise. Tinkering with local government finance will only get you so far when climate chaos and imperialist warfare are driving up inflation, and open-ended commitments to increased military spending are eating up government budgets. It also won’t generate the kind of large-scale infrastructure spending needed to improve the country’s resilience in the face of recurrent shocks. Rejoining the European Union, or at least its single market, is also, strangely enough, an imperative for the reconstruction of a viable national capitalism, capable of sustaining a revived social democracy. A decade on, it’s clear that Brexit has disproportionately harmed smaller, locally owned businesses and manufacturers. As in Trump’s America, it’s the globalized behemoths that have the scale and profit margins to eat the increased transaction costs created by new trade barriers. Entertaining doubts about the Labour government’s agenda nonetheless feels, at this point, like a pleasure and a luxury—because it finally seems to have one. Burnham, unlike his predecessor, is an interesting and authentic politician, with a hinterland, beliefs, and priorities, right or wrong. With the right divided between a stubbornly resilient Conservative Party and a stalled Reform, he has the potential to remake the political landscape, breaking Farage’s hitherto unstoppable momentum. Whatever comes next, there is something to work with here. It’s the hope that kills you. James Stafford teaches modern European history at Columbia. He co-edited Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy from 2015 to 2020.