Of the many ways of expressing how British politics has changed in my lifetime, one is that during the first fifty or so years of it there were seven Prime Ministers and in the subsequent ten years there have been the same number. I also happen to be exactly the same age as Nigel Farage who, for about half our lives, since he became a founder-member of UKIP in 1993, has been a major figure in anti-EU and populist politics.
This week, the seventh of those more recent Prime Ministers was installed whilst Farage’s political career is facing perhaps its greatest threats. So this will be another very long post but, unless something particularly important or interesting happens, it will be my last until September.
Burnham’s government and Brexit
Andy Burnham’s political orientation is now becoming clearer and much has already been written about it, including good discussions of his ‘politics of place’ by the Observer’s editor Ceri Thomas and of the idea of ‘Manchesterism’ by the BBC’s Economics editor Faisal Islam. Especially interesting, and less widely discussed, is Burnham’s commitment to the Cooperative Party and movement, as explained by Professor Colin Talbot in Civil Service World.
His first words and decisions as Prime Minister have also begun to give a sense of the nature of the government he will lead, although inevitably much remains unknown. One important signal is the appointment of John Healey as Chancellor which, amongst other things, implies that there will a serious commitment to increasing defence spending. The importance of that was underlined by the latest aggression in Russia’s undeclared war with Britain, with its Navy undertaking live-fire exercises a few miles off the British coast on the very day Burnham came to office. Now would be a good time for the government to investigate the many pressing questions about Russian interference in British politics raised by the recent Open Britain report.
In terms of the focus of this blog, the key issue is what Burnham’s government means for Brexit and Brexitism. This can be considered in the narrow sense of how Burnham’s administration will approach UK-EU relations. On that, Joël Reland of UKICE has provided a good summary of how things look at present. In essence, he argues that Burnham will be less interested than was Starmer in closer trade relations with the EU, but also less interested in regulatory competition (e.g. as regards AI and technology generally), whilst being at least as interested as Starmer in closer security links. Reland also suggests that, if this is so, in many ways it will make the Burnham’s Britain a more congenial interlocutor to the EU.
It is significant that Ed Miliband, the new Foreign Secretary, has already publicly committed to deepening and strengthening the UK-EU relationship (his predecessor, Yvette Cooper, showed little interest in doing so, although her own predecessor, David Lammy, had been vocally pro-European). As ever, though, the question is what this means in practice. Specific Ministerial responsibility for relations with the EU moves from Nick Thomas-Symonds to Hamish Falconer who, like his predecessor, will attend, though not be a member of, the Cabinet (but unlike his predecessor will partly be located in the Foreign Office). There has been some speculation that this appointment betokens a softening, or abandoning, of Labour’s ‘red lines’, but speculation is all it is.
Also highly relevant is the post of Northern Ireland Secretary and the Cabinet reshuffle saw the departure of Hilary Benn, who from all accounts had been highly accomplished both in navigating Northern Ireland’s complex politics and in improving relations with Dublin, so strained by Brexit. However, there’s no reason to think that his replacement by Chris Bryant implies any substantive change of approach, and both of them were strong opponents of Brexit. Indeed, more generally, the construction of the new cabinet seems more to do with to do with removing those most closely associated with Keir Starmer than with redefining Starmer’s approach to Brexit. Nor, for that matter, is the EU’s approach to post-Brexit relations likely to change as a result of Burnham’s arrival.
Burnhamism, Brexit, and Brexitism
The wider question is where Brexit and Brexitism sit within what is already being called ‘Burnhamism’. One part of the answer is that, as I wrote briefly after he won the Makerfield by-election, there is a strong current of nostalgia in Burnham’s politics. It’s no coincidence that in his acceptance speech as Labour leader he spoke of heeding the call of voters “for a return of the Labour they once knew”. That vision of the party is inextricable from his analysis of politics as a whole. For in that speech (and on numerous other occasions) his argument is that deindustrialization and the “four decades of … neoliberalism that began in the 1980s” are at the core of Britain’s economic and political problems, and he links this directly to the history of the Labour Party, in a passage which I will quote at length:
“And let us never forget: these are the very same places that built this Labour movement, this trade union movement, where we are today… Those are the places, but they were the places that were done down. This Labour movement, the trade union movement, was forged in the steelworks and iron works of Sheffield, Scunthorpe, Port Talbot, and Teesside, in the coal fields of South Wales, Central Scotland, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, in the mills across the Pennines, west and east, in the shipyards on the Clyde and on the Tyne, and in the dockyards of Liverpool, and here in London, the people of these proud places made Labour.”
In itself, none of this is necessarily connected with Brexit, but in a crucial phrase in that same acceptance speech Burnham suggested that it is:
“The right used the phrase ‘take back control’, but they are the ones who gave it away in the first place. If we want an economy and a country that works for all people and places, which to me should always be at the very core of Labourism, then it requires a new path to the one we’ve been on for the last 40 years.”
The invocation of the Vote Leave slogan in this way makes it clear what Burnham’s view of Brexit is, and it is a view which has been a common one amongst many on the left since the referendum result. In essence, it sees Brexit as having been a response, albeit a misguided response, by the working class, especially in the north of England, to the damaging consequences of neo-liberalism and (although it is hardly the same thing) London-centrism. On this view, the instinct to ‘take back control’ was right, but Brexit was the wrong way to go about it. Nor is such a view confined to the left. A version of it is what informed Theresa May’s argument that the Brexit referendum had revealed that too many people had been “left behind” by economic liberalism and globalization, and, subsequently, Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda.
There may be an element of truth in this view, although it has always had limitations, as any mono-causal explanation of Brexit is bound to have. In particular, Professor Danny Dorling’s influential analysis has shown the importance of middle-class and southern English support for ‘leave’ in delivering the referendum result. There are difficulties with that analysis, too, but my point here is not to re-hash debates about the causes of the vote to leave, it is that Burnham adheres to a particular view of it, which is imprinted on his Prime Ministership. Specifically, it means that his position is that Brexit was a symptom of a deeper malaise and, therefore, tackling that deeper malaise, rather than tacking Brexit, is the primary task.
This explains why, whilst there is no doubt the Burnham was opposed to Brexit and campaigned against it, and he has said as recently as last September that he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU in his lifetime, his position now it that he does not intend to “re-run Brexit arguments” or to propose rejoining. In short, he wants to treat the illness, not the symptom. In this sense, Burnhamism represents the latest iteration of Labour’s attempt to respond to the challenges which Brexit created for the party.
The nostalgia problem
One obvious difficulty with his response is that, if his policy agenda is to revive manufacturing industry, then the barriers to trade created by Brexit are a major obstacle. But, with or without Brexit, Burnham invokes a world which no longer exists. The industries he cited in the speech quoted above – coal, steel, textiles, shipbuilding, docking – have largely disappeared and will not come back. And the places where they existed developed because of the presence of things like coal, water, humidity, or, in other cases, clay or minerals, which were necessary for them (or, in the case of docking, because of pre-containerization technology). Those reasons have also gone.
It obviously bears saying that the speech I’ve quotes was to the party faithful, on the occasion of becoming party leader, so some nods to Labour’s history were inevitable and to some extent ritualistic. Even so, it is significant that he chose not to use an important opportunity to frame his leadership of Labour in a future-oriented way. That points to him being wedded to a political psychology within which the Labour Party as inseparable from heavy manufacturing industries of the past or, at the very least, within which workers in those industries are the template of what the ‘real working-class’ looks like. This is the Labour Party voters “once knew” and which he has vowed to revive. Yet, leaving aside for a moment the economics of this, it is at odds with the political realities of a party whose membership and voting base are now much more fragmented and with the demographic realities of a class structure which is far more complex than in the past.
As for the economics, I don’t suppose for one moment that Burnham is proposing that the traditional industries he referenced will return. It must surely be the case that his vision for re-industrialisation is based on the kinds of modern manufacturing which do still exist and could be developed much further, such as aerospace, biotechnology or pharmaceuticals. He may well also include service industries within this vision.
But, assuming this is so, it is again notable that he is choosing not to frame his narrative in this forward-looking direction. Equally, if the geography of re-industrialisation is to be mapped on to the communities created by old industries then the key drivers of it will need to be infrastructure connecting those places and the education and training available within them. That may well be within the ambit of his policy agenda but, if so, it means creating new kinds of communities, not fetishising those of the past.
The significance of Burnham’s nostalgic framing of both the meaning of the Labour Party and the meaning of industry is, I think, that it replicates at least some of the politicised nostalgia of Brexitism. As with Brexitism, the ideas that the country has lost its way, that globalization has eroded traditional communities, and that centralized policymaking has caused the decline of the local high street, all speak to the inchoate resentment of something having been not just lost by, but taken from, ‘ordinary people’. Moreover, whilst there may be good arguments for Burnham’s strong commitment to devolution from London, there is within it more than a whiff of the Brexitist resentment of the metropolitan elite or just of those who live within the circumference of the M25.
One of the many difficulties of this kind of nostalgic resentment is that, by presenting contemporary Britain as having taken a form which has been inflicted on its population, it ignores how it also reflects the preferences of that population. It is true that globalization has removed many jobs and industries that used to exist here, but it is also true that British people have chosen to buy cheaper imported consumer goods and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that high streets have declined, but it is also true that people have chosen to buy cheaper goods online and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that people say they want decisions to be made by locally rather than by ‘remote Whitehall bureaucrats’, with, as Burnham puts it “power returned to every postcode in the land”, but they also strongly object to ‘postcode lotteries’ in, for example, public service provision. And whilst ‘four decades of neo-liberalism’ may have been every bit as damaging as Burnham claims, voters gave Margaret Thatcher three big election wins and, subsequently, many accepted the proposition that any party advocating a major departure from what her governments bequeathed was ‘unelectable’. And many of those same people voted for Brexit.
The biggest question about ‘Burnhamist’ nostalgia is how far its overlap with Brexitism extends to immigration policy, and continues with the false proposition that it is possible to have economic prosperity and thriving public services as well as draconian immigration controls, and that this is necessary to see off the threat from Reform. The retention of Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary might suggest that this is just what is in prospect. If so, that is going to make Burnham’s (highly laudable) aspirations to reform the social care system undeliverable. It will also undermine his ideas of regional re-industrialisation since central to any realistic possibility of this are universities, which are currently being immolated on the altar of ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration.
I’m aware that all this may sound too dour, or too sour, or both. I’m also aware of the fault to which many politically-minded people are prone, whether on the left or the right, of demanding purity of political leaders, or of making the perfect the enemy of the good. In some ways, Keir Starmer suffered from the reluctance of ‘progressives’ (broadly conceived) to accept his imperfections and the compromises that all political leaders have to make. Indeed, with tedious predictability (yes, that is a link to an article by Owen Jones in the Guardian), there are some on the liberal-left who have already written Burnham off.
So it’s worth noting that there is a case for optimism. Burnham has already shown an ability, which it was widely agreed that Starmer lacked, to articulate an optimistic narrative and a sense of purpose. He has an engaging manner and he’s politically savvy. He has provided some simple, understandable priorities around devolution and regeneration and if he sticks to them that will be a contrast not just to Starmer’s flip-flopping on policy decisions but his tendency to say on any given day that this, that, or the other was his government’s ‘number one’ focus.
Farage’s fortunes
It might also be argued that it is precisely the way that Burnham’s political philosophy speaks to the nostalgic resentment of Brexitism which provides the basis for him to see off the electoral challenge of Reform. And, given events of the last few weeks, that challenge may be ebbing anyway. I wrote about this in my previous post, discussing Nigel Farage’s ill-judged resignation in order to re-fight his Clacton seat but since then there have been some developments.
One is just that his contest with Count Binface is already being spoken of as a national joke, and social media rage about the failure of the main parties to contest it seems to have had little cut-through with the general public. Perhaps more importantly, the stream of stories about the source of Farage’s and Reform’s funding continues apace, including its relationship to the murky world of cryptocurrencies. On this, Sian Norris’s article for Open Democracy is particularly eye-opening but it is probably of greater political significance that it is now being extensively reported by the BBC, and that there has been a spate of revelations in the Times/ Sunday Times (£) leading to several public [warning: link to X] and, reportedly, private attacks from leading figures in Reform on the Murdoch-owned media group. Even more remarkable has been a surge of negative stories in the Mail, including coverage of Reform’s various actual or alleged financial links to Russia.
Much of this is not exactly news, of course, and has been exposed for many years, not least by the indefatigable work of Pulitzer Prize finalist and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr, in the face of massive abuse and intimidation. But, as she herself has recently written, it has been largely unreported and the reason, she says, is “Brexit. For years, investigating Farage was off-limits to Britain’s rightwing print media because ‘challenging’ Brexit was off limits. That included reporting on the money behind it.”
Quite what has shifted in the media establishment, and why it has done so now, is unclear (to me), but it is an observable fact that it has happened, and that marks an important political change.
The alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe
Within this changed environment, the other recent development has been the alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe. Much about this is, for the moment at least, unknown, beyond the facts that the injuries sustained were horrific and that a man has been charged with her murder and has appeared in a Magistrates’ Court where he did not enter a plea to the charge. It should go without saying that any such killing is repugnant, and that politically-motivated killings, if that is what this was (which has yet to be established), have an added repugnance. Beyond that I’m not going to comment or speculate about the case itself, but what is a legitimate subject for comment is the way in which it has been discussed.
That said, I can hardly bring myself to write about that in any detail by giving quotes and links to people whose conduct is contemptible. But, in summary, from the moment the news broke, there has been a frenzy of social media activity. Some of that has been mawkish and prurient, some of it conspiratorial, some of it frankly insane. Almost all of it was rancid and some of it may have prejudiced the fair trial of the accused man.
A recurring theme was denunciation of the police for disclosing that an initial suspect (who was subsequently released without charge) and the man who was eventually charged with murder were white Britons. This was presented as being in some way suspicious or ‘woke’, ignoring the fact that such disclosures arise precisely because failure to do so in previous high-profile cases has led to accusations of cover-ups from some of the very same people now complaining, and sometimes to riots as a result.
In response to their demands, last year the police were issued with new guidance encouraging disclosure in such cases. That they did so this time was undoubtedly because so many social media posters were fairly obviously salivating at the prospect of the perpetrator being an immigrant or an asylum seeker, and the danger of public disorder that represented. Inevitably, once that prospect seemed to disappear the on-line mob switched to speculating, or simply claiming, that the perpetrator must have been a left-wing extremist.
More generally, there have been constant demands to be given immediate information, before the facts were known, with the nonsensical assertion that the public had the ‘right’ to be told everything about the case, and, even, ‘to debate’ it, whilst it was still being investigated and/or whilst the judicial process is underway. When this prompted the police to state that, in the early stages, they had found “nothing to suggest” that it was a politically-motivated or terrorist act this, itself, was denounced as a cover-up, just as it would have been had they said nothing. The level of stupidity and irresponsibility displayed, not just by pseudonymous social media posters but by some public figures, politicians and supposed journalists, was the latest example of the increasingly disgraceful nature of, especially, on-line public discourse.
Alongside all this, there were, as the Times (£) and other newspapers reported, several accusations that Farage and Reform, specifically, were exploiting the alleged murder for political purposes, accusations made by, amongst others, the former Tory MP Harvey Proctor who had been a close friend of Ann Widdecombe. This was furiously denied by those accused, but what is certainly true is that, without knowing anything about the facts of the case, Reform immediately used it to claim that its MPs, and Farage in particular, needed more security than they receive from official sources.
In particular, there seemed to be an attempt to suggest that the alleged murder in some way justified the idea that Farage needed the £5 million gift he received from Christopher Harborne in order to provide him with security (although, at other times, he has said that it was unconditional and could be used to “buy Ferraris” and, anyway, the issue in dispute is the declaration of the gift, rather than the gift per se). So all of this stank of hypocrisy, as did numerous accusations that ‘the left’ had created this atmosphere of political violence by its use of intemperate language even as many of the same people making these accusations continue to laud Lucy Connelly as a free speech “martyr”.
Much of this replicated the ways that the murder of Charlie Kirk was exploited, both in the US and the UK, last year. However, repellent as this attempt to make use of Ann Widdecombe’s killing in this way has been, it does not seem to have dented the sense that the Farage/ Reform bubble is bursting, and it is hard to see how, whatever its outcome, the Clacton by-election can do anything but add to that. There was a telling headline about Farage and the by-election recently, to the effect that ‘when voters start laughing at you it’s over’. Even more telling was that it appeared in the Mail.
A new chapter?
Changes in Prime Minister do not automatically portend new eras in politics. It is only with historical distance that their significance or otherwise becomes clear. This makes it foolhardy to anticipate what that significance will be, but I will risk the guess that Burnham’s tenure will come to be seen within the common frame of the post-Brexit period as much, or more, as having an identity in its own right, if only in the sense of being another attempt to ‘make Brexit work’.
Even in the more immediate term, it is difficult to know whether the opinion poll bounce Labour has recently enjoyed, and the decline in support for Reform, will continue. Within the fates of these two parties are nested other questions, which will have a direct effect on how Brexit now develops.
One is whether the Labour government finds that an industrial renaissance is incompatible with its existing ‘red lines’ on UK-EU relations and comes to pursue some version of rejoining. The other is whether the prospect of a Reform government (or a Conservative one, given that party’s present positioning) remains realistic since, for so long as it does, that renders any version of rejoining impossible to negotiate with the EU. These are likely to be the main Brexit-related questions for the coming political period.
With that, I will now take a break from posting over the summer.
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