Inside Labour there might not be a vacancy but there is always a contest. The government’s early unpopularity means this is even truer than usual. Over the past fortnight – via her leaked memo to Rachel Reeves – Angela Rayner’s alternative vision has become clearer. MPs believe both the Deputy PM and her more Blairite rival Wes Streeting are monitoring their support within the parliamentary party. But it is Andy Burnham who is most clearly positioning for a post-Starmer world.
Critical interventions by the Greater Manchester mayor are hardly unheard of. During Keir Starmer’s difficult early years as Labour leader, Burnham regularly advertised himself as an alternative. His speech to the soft-left group Compass on Saturday afternoon (31 May), however, was qualitatively different.
It was the most wide-ranging critique of the government from any senior Labour figure since the general election and ultimately resembled a leadership manifesto (Compass’s director Neal Lawson opened the day by hailing Burnham as “by far and away the most popular person to be the next leader of the Labour Party”). In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, Tony Benn championed his “alternative economic strategy”; Burnham hailed what he described as his “popular left programme”.
His 17-minute address – which avoided any mention of Starmer or Reeves – was filled with rebukes to the Labour leadership. “I believe you do have to take on the right,” Burnham told a crowd assembled on the dancefloor of the Ministry of Sound in south London. “But what’s the best way to do that? Definitely not by aping their rhetoric” (an implicit reference to Starmer’s recent speech on immigration). He added: “We see from Canada and Australia that a strong, confident left, which leans into what we believe, rather than tilting the other way, can win and can win well.”
Burnham, who has had a historically fraught relationship with Starmer’s office (once declaring: “leave me alone”), demanded a “move away from the factionalism that has bedevilled us on all sides of the party” and condemned the “infantile” belief that it was “disloyal” to “talk to other parties, particularly on the centre or the left”.
It’s traditional for mayors to speak out on issues related to their administration – such as devolved funding – and occasionally to intervene on national policy (as Burnham and Sadiq Khan did when they backed a ceasefire in Gaza in 2023). But Burnham went far beyond this, calling for a “substantially new offer for the public”.
Though he praised “good policies” such as the renationalisation of the railways, he repeatedly outflanked the government from the left, criticising “too much timidity in our offer, too much reluctance to show the courage of our convictions”.
He called for Labour to abandon cuts to health and disability benefits, to impose higher taxes on wealth (Reeves’ aides repeatedly point out that she has already done so), to announce “the biggest and quickest council and social housing building programme the country has ever seen”, to reverse spending cuts to local authorities, to introduce free transport for teenagers in England, to replace first-past-the-post with proportional representation and to abolish the party whipping system (“which makes you vote for things you don’t fully agree with”).
In its fusion of economic and constitutional radicalism there were echoes of the programme once advocated by Benn (another former cabinet minister who moved left with age). One left-wing Labour MP described Burnham’s speech to me as a “full-blooded rejection of the politics of Reeves and Starmer” and an “extremely interesting development”. Another MP commented: “What’s he got to lose? But they [the leadership] are not going to let him come back into parliament.”
The event marked the most significant gathering of the soft left – the group which often determines Labour leadership results – since the election. Though Compass has allowed members of other parties to join since 2011, this was a Labour-focused affair: other speakers included the energy minister Miatta Fahnbulleh (who spoke alongside Burnham), the former cabinet minister Louise Haigh, the former Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford, and former New Labour ministers Clare Short and John Denham (who described Starmer’s administration to me as “the most intellectually incurious Labour government that has ever been elected”).
Fahnbulleh, a key ally of Ed Miliband, used her own address to call for Labour to transform the welfare state into “a well-being state”, which offers “guaranteed access for all who need it” to “social care, to education, to childcare – a proper safety net to catch people when they fall on hard times”.
A distinctive soft-left critique recurred through the course of the day: Starmer’s government, it was said, has not done enough to amplify policies such as the Employment Rights Bill, rail public ownership and GB Energy, and has made avoidable errors like the winter fuel payment cuts and overly rigid fiscal rules. Fahnbulleh urged activists to “tell the story of the wins that a progressive government is making” and to “hold us to account when we get things wrong”.
There were almost no references from speakers to Starmer – treated by some as a bystander in his own government – with ire focused on Reeves and the wider leadership. Lawson denounced the old-right group Labour First, which I profiled here, as “a party within a party” that “now runs Labour in its rather dull, sectarian interest”.
Who will emerge as the soft left’s candidate of choice? Among Labour members, as polling by Survation shows, Miliband and Rayner are the most popular cabinet ministers (with approval ratings of +65 and +46, respectively). But Burnham’s speech was an attempt to position himself as the soft left’s standard bearer – a claim to Labour’s moral leadership.
“If the next election is going to be a binary choice between two world-views and the opposition is going to be the divisive populist right then we must be the unifying popular left,” Burnham declared. He did not say whether he hopes to lead this movement – but he didn’t need to.
[See also: The British left is coming for the government]
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