Back to the future with Andy Burnham: our next PM?

Media voices are increasingly citing Andy Burnham as the UK’s most promising new Prime Minister. The ‘King of the North’ was ranked 12^th in the New Statesman’s 2023 Left Power List, and graced with the expansive NS Interview in this week’s edition of the magazine. His name has risen to the fore in recent years, his popularity evident in unanimous victory in the 2024 Greater Manchester Mayoral Election. With Labour trailing ten percentage points below Reform UK in the polls, a popular, self-described (and politically unabashed) ‘socialist’ with a reputation for honesty, could be the foil to Starmer that Labour needs. Starmer has alienated Labour’s working class voting base – but a character like Burnham, who has been out of Westminster for eight years, who champions ‘Manchesterism’, anti-austerity populism, and more stringent wealth taxes, could be the antidote to Starmer’s wavering support.

In the New Statesman’s recent Labour Conference, Tom McTague’s extended interview notably centres on Burnham, not the actual PM. He gives a street-view anecdote which illustrates Burnham’s visibility (his lack thereof being one of Starmer’s most criticised flaws); he jokes with ‘a group of lads’ – it is, to McTague, and evidently to many Mancunians, ‘striking just how at home he seems’. Although there are other MPs gunning for the Premiership, Burnham is the stand-out favourite; an IPSOS poll in July saw 35% of the British public backing him, over Starmer’s 27% and Wes Streeting’s 19%. Burnham, if he were to step up the Labour party ranks, would have a sisyphean task on his hands – reassuring and re-appealing to the base of Labour voters who have shifted to Reform UK support, forming a coherent ideological and practical solution to immigration, and delivering on his career-long pledges to raise tax for the wealthy, whilst balancing his own, personal beliefs and priorities (his Mayoral motto ‘place before party’ comes to mind) with the Labour party’s need for co-operation and unity in government.

Burnham’s is a rhetoric of restoration, even resurrection – he wants to ‘roll back the 80s’ – and has persistently been staunchly anti-Brexit. His boldness is laudable, unflinching, and unique: he is brave enough to advocate reversal, to admit to mistakes so systemic that retraction is our only option. In our landscape of rapid technological development and the explosion of AI, Burnham’s seeming atavism is rare. We are not used to seeing revocation promised with such optimism in politics, a refusal to let up on issues such as Brexit, or public ownership – the optics are not trendy, it’s not the reform way. But Burnham's restorative message is progressive: he wants to take us backwards in order to take us to the future. Burnham isn’t trying to be trendy. He is an unapologetic home-bird, admirer of Gordon Brown, proponent of central planning and re-nationaliser.

Perhaps Burnham’s most striking political image comes down to Sheldon Cooper’s alma mater: flags. He ranks his identities to McTague; firstly, he's British, then North West, then Liverpudlian, and finally, he considers himself English. Implicit here is Burnham's distance from Reform’s racist appropriation of the England flag, but also from Starmer’s desperate adherence to a lost English identity. For Burnham, as for many Brits (myself included), the English flag has utterly lost its meaning. The sight of it strung up on trees, bridges and houses speaks only of xenophobic hostility and intolerance. Burnham’s implicit rejection (or at least de-prioritisation) of the St George flag is a far cry from Starmer’s feeble attempts to reclaim it: he ‘encourages’ the flying of national flags, displays an England flag in his flat, and insists he is ‘proud’ of its symbolism.

Burnham: unabashed Brit, Brownite, people’s Boss - will he take us back to the future?