Good Luck Andy!

Can he bridge the Anywhere/Somewhere divide? Why Manchesterism is not a model for levelling up and why a land value tax might be his big idea.

Below is adapted from an interview I gave to Le Point magazine last week on the prospects for the Andy Burnham premiership. I don’t know Burnham but in the late 1990s and early 2000s I played in goal for the Demon Eyes football team of young New Labour staffers that he also sometimes played for. I don’t really remember him. But I do remember James Purnell, now Burnham’s chief of staff, as an authoritative, though technically limited, centre-back, who rightly told me to get back in my box when I got over-excited - Jordan Pickford style - telling off my defenders.

How do you analyse Keir Starmer’s failure as Prime Minister? Is it because of his priorities as a human rights lawyer from North London? Because of his political choices, his inability to connect with voters?

Yes, all of those things. The lack of preparation for government, Labour boxing itself in with their commitments not to raise the key taxes, Starmer’s failure of party management on reform of the welfare state. And the robotic style and voice (we underestimate the importance of voices in politics!).

But there is a bigger context. There should not really have been a Labour Government in 2024. It is a Government out of time. Since even before the Brexit vote in 2016 the biggest voter bloc and most of the intellectual energy here has been right of centre, reaching out for a realignment that would slow down the pace of cultural and demographic change, unshackle the state and parts of the economy from the over-regulation of the past few decades while preserving well-funded public services and decent social support for those who need it. A kind of left conservatism with a whiff of Thatcherite disruption.

This happens to be my preference! But there is plenty of evidence that it is also the most popular direction of travel. It was the promise of the Conservatives decisive victory in 2019. Not just to get Brexit done, and therefore it was assumed to pause immigration for a decade or two, but to return power to politicians from the courts and the regulators and ‘level up’ the many left-behind, post-industrial, parts of the country. There was a coherent centre-right realignment project, led by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, in which part of the lower income electorate which had traditionally voted left moved right, mainly on cultural grounds, but had its economic interests protected by a new kind of popular conservatism. (This is also broadly the approach of the ‘decent populist’ parties across Europe like the RN in France.)

The current tragedy of British politics is that this realignment happened electorally but then failed politically. It was blown off-course partly by the pandemic, which struck just a few weeks after the big Conservative victory in 2019, but also by the capricious personality of Boris Johnson and by the fact that the Conservative party was so divided between liberals and conservatives. The 2019-2024 Conservative Government did get Brexit done but failed to make a dent on levelling up and opened the door to the biggest immigration wave in British history, fearing that the post-pandemic economy and welfare system would suffer from lack of workers.

It is rightly said that the Conservatives talked right but governed left, or at least continued the post-1997 Tony Blair/David Cameron consensus. I supported that consensus at the time and it did some useful things. But we now need a Government that can tackle the failings and unintended consequences of that settlement: the over-regulation, the inability to build houses and infrastructure, the highest energy costs in Europe, the out of control welfare bill which requires excessive levels of tax on the most productive people, the decline of our traditionally respected armed forces, no initiatives in long-standing problem areas like social care and technical/vocational skills, culturally disruptive levels of immigration (and inability to stop the running sore of illegal Channel crossings), a progressive elite that is out of step with the majority on a host of issues.

Starmer himself recognised the over-regulation problem, complaining that when he pulled the levers of power nothing happened. But he is, as you point out, a human rights lawyer whose own career has been dedicated in part to shifting power from politicians to courts and regulators. His own Government has been moderately successful in its own traditionally social-democratic terms. It increased taxes, and borrowing, and public spending, and welfare, it increased the rights of workers and tenants. But it did nothing for economic growth or the feeling that the country is stuck and at odds with itself. This is the Andy Burnham inheritance.

What kind of Labour politician is he? It seems quite difficult to actually tell what he thinks.

Burnham, as you say, is a political chameleon. But there are some important things we do know about him. He’s from a lower-middle class Catholic family and grew up in a suburb of Liverpool. After studying English at Cambridge he moved to London to work as a journalist and then for Labour MPs and then became one himself in 2001, rising to become both culture minister and, briefly, health minister before Labour lost office in 2010. After losing two elections for the Labour leadership to the left-winger Jeremy Corbyn he left Parliament and became the first mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017.

He’s been quite a successful mayor for nearly 10 years. Much of that success is attributed to his predecessors on Manchester council but he reformed the bus and tram system and became an effective norther populist “King of the North” in battles with London during the pandemic. He is good with people and a better communicator than Starmer. There hasn’t been a northern Prime Minister since Harold Wilson in the 1970s and that will give him a short-term advantage, at least in the north itself, but far more people live in the south. And on the negative side being mayor of Greater Manchester is an easy job compared with Prime Minister, the mayor has little power and is mainly handing out money from London. Burnham’s critics say he is a vain, thin-skinned people-pleaser who ducks hard decisions and has little grasp of policy detail, perhaps a left-wing version of Boris Johnson. And it is certainly the case that in all his pre-PM announcements he has been telling different groups what they want to hear and with most announcements adding to the country’s expensive debt mountain.

So what is his big idea and how left-wing is he?

He does have more of an ideology behind him than Starmer. In economics he is a big believer in a more powerful and effective state. In politics he really does believe in devolving more power to regions and big cities, Manchester but with more powers and money. He also wants to move away from the first past the post UK national election system to some version of proportional representation. Given what unrepresentative outcomes first past the post can produce when there are three or four parties all on similar levels of support it is an idea whose time has come but few politicians once they hold power are willing to give it away and introducing PR might not be in his interests.

If his big story is devolution and picking up the ‘levelling up’ baton dropped by the Tories then he has a problem. For the economic benefits of devolution are long-term and not always achievable, look at how poorly both Wales and Scotland have done with their devolution settlements. And seeing good growth in ‘every postcode’ is a utopian and counter-productive goal. There must be some clustering in productive centres, Britain’s problem is that it has too few successful second-tier towns and cities.

The German model is not replicable, that country was formed in the late 19th century out of a scattering of different states and principalities with their own major urban centres and identities. England has been a unitary state for more than 1,000 years. And the redistribution between richer and poorer states in Germany is not very fiscally significant, far less than the redistribution from London to the rest of the country.

There is also the post-code lottery issue. If you are serious about spreading power but also want the same level of national services everywhere then you are seriously constrained in how far you can devolve tax-raising powers. Income tax and corporation tax account for nearly half of all UK public spending and there is a lot more income from both taxes in richer areas. That said there probably is room to incentivise local authorities to promote productive activity in their area if they are able to retain more of the tax generated.

Burnham sometimes sounds very left-wing. He talks about the failure of neo-liberalism and trickle down economics over the past 40 years. But ‘Manchesterism’ has actually been very business friendly. The centre of Manchester used to be half empty but is now full of expensive flats built by private developers and the people who live in them are mainly working in high-end professional services.

Some of his key advisers do talk about more public ownership of the main public utilities - rail, water, energy even housing - but, with the exception of rail, renationalising would be expensive and potentially undermine the Government’s fiscal rules which require it to balance the budget on current spending by 2029-30. Borrowing to invest is still allowed and there may be creative ways to classify investment but the UK is on probation with the bond markets, even more so than France, and we pay proportionately more interest on our borrowing than any other country in Europe. So his room for movement on spending is limited. Also, as I have mentioned, a lot of the blockages in the system are not so much to do with the private or public ownership but with court decisions or environmental rulings that prevent things from happening, I have not heard Burnham addressing this problem.

Does he have any surprises to unveil?

There is one thing that I am hoping he has the courage to grasp and that is a land value tax. He has talked enthusiastically about it. Our property taxes are notoriously economically damaging and unfair. A land value tax is, as it sounds, a tax on land, including the land on which houses are built, which in Britain accounts for about half of the value of most houses. It’s a tax that, unusually, unites economists of right and left, partly because it is hard to avoid - unlike people and capital, land cannot hide itself or move to another country - and it doesn’t interfere too much with incentives. I like it because it allows us to raise more money from the unproductive rich without disincentivising the productive rich. Lloyd George wanted to introduce one at the beginning of the last century but was beaten by the landed interest. The landed interest is much weaker today but there would be losers from it, maybe 20% of home owners would pay more tax on the their properties as council tax and stamp duty are phased out and a land tax is introduced. In order to replace the £100bn that the Government currently raises in property taxes the land tax would need to be levied at about 1.2% a year on the value of the land that a house sits on. Introducing such a big change, that was not in Labour’s manifesto, would be hugely controversial, so if Burnham does go for it I would expect him to phase it in at a much lower level, say 0.4%, and retain some elements of council tax for a period. For a land value tax would also bring downward pressure on house prices, especially at the higher end. It might be beneficial in the long-run to have less of the country’s capital tied up in property but in the short and medium-term it could be disruptive and unpopular with various unintended effects. Less controversially, he should also be thinking about a land value capture tax which would require the Government to receive a bigger slice of the uplift in land values when, for example, farm land gets planning permission for a housing estate. The Government could then use the money to improve local amenities giving people more of a vested interest in developments near them, which might help to kick start Labour’s disappointing house building programme.

Is ‘Manchesterism’ a model, a laboratory, for the rest of the country?

Not really. We do need more devolution. But Manchester’s success has been built on the national model of promoting professional and business services, information technology etc that has generally favoured London and the south-east and created the very regional inequality problems that Manchesterism says it is an answer to. This is not a model for the re-industrialisation Burnham sometimes talks about. There has been precious little re-industrialisation in Manchester. Manchester is not really a Somewhere city, the population is 25% students, it’s more like a smaller London of the North.

Is Burnham a ‘decent populist’ can he represent the aspirations of the Somewheres and win them back from the Farage Reform party?

Well, he did just win an election in Makerfield to return to Parliament which is a strongly pro-Reform area, but it is also mainly inside Greater Manchester where Burnham is relatively popular. I don’t think I would call him a decent populist but he can appeal to Somewheres with some of his anti-London language, his nostalgia for the 1970s and his economic rhetoric on the cost of living and public ownership. People have forgotten how inefficient the old nationalised industries were.

But he will struggle on spreading wealth more evenly. The Somewhere ideal is to be able to live a good, productive, respected life, close to where you come from. Of course, not everyone will be able or will want to do that, there will always be those centres of creativity and higher productivity. But too many bright and ambitious people, like Burnham himself, from small towns and suburbs feel they have to ‘leave to achieve’ and end up in Manchester or London. But the UK’s geographical inequality is now extreme, far worse than France, and if clever, ambitious young people are always leaving the smaller cities, medium-sized towns and the countryside for a couple of big cities we will never level up and spread success more evenly.

In any case, the Somewhere disaffection with a national politics dominated by the priorities of the mobile, liberal graduate Anywhere class is only partly economic it is also cultural. We live in fluid times and so many of the old certainties of religion, family, nation, no longer provide a structure of support and meaning. Anywheres are comfortable with that, even relish it among the progressive minority. But Burnham has said almost nothing about these cultural issues. Like most Labour politicians he has embraced a lot of progressive causes - self-ID for trans people, BLM etc - and then toned down or even abandoned support when speaking to more traditional voters.

He is better at doing the political splits - trying to appeal to the progressive and the traditionalist - than Starmer partly because he has an authentic northern story and an economic story that appeals to many ordinary voters. James Purnell, Burnham’s chief of staff, recently told a newspaper than he is more Blunketty than most people realise (David Blunkett was the most socially conservative leading Labour politician of recent times). He can connect with people who have lost out economically but it is not clear that he can connect with people who feel they are losing, or have lost, their country.

If I was advising Burnham I would tell him that he needs a big symbolic move of a more cultural kind. Saying he wants to speed up and give extra resources to the national inquiry into the Pakistani grooming gang scandal, agreeing with the right-wing parties about scrapping the immigration tribunal system, banning the Muslim Brotherhood, saying he wants to turn one third of universities back into technical colleges, ending the ongoing legal actions against British soldiers for split-second decisions taken in the heat of battle. Something like that.

Of course, if he could stop the Channel boats he would win the next election with ease. It remains an extraordinary failure of international relations that Britain and France cannot agree to stop the boats especially as an increasing proportion of so-called refugees making their way to France are arriving simply in order to hang around near Calais - creating an almighty mess - trying to get to England. It is hugely in France’s interests to agree to accept back any refugee who crosses the Channel because the flow would stop immediately and all those people would stop arriving in France. I was amazed that the Starmer Government seemed to put so little effort into persuading France to act in their own interests. Burnham has almost zero international experience but if there is one issue to focus on it is that running sore in British politics that remains such a recruiting sergeant for Reform. Incidentally, I have heard that Jordan Bardella has expressed an interest in doing such a deal. So perhaps Burnham should be praying for an RN victory next year!

Might he also have lessons for French politicians trying to stop an RN victory?

Possibly, I think he would need to be a more populist, anti-establishment, version of Blair or Macron, able to unite the more moderate RN/Reform voters and the soft, non-Melenchon left. But I think the moment for that is probably past. And the Labour party in the UK and the Macronists/Socialists in France are too deeply progressive to allow Burnham, or a French version of Burnham, the space to peel away enough populist voters. It is noticeable how many people on the centre and centre-left in Britain and France still do not accept the legitimacy of the main populist parties - Reform and RN - even though I would classify both as ‘decent populist’ meaning not racist or ethno-nationalist.

UK politics now seems to be dominated by different kinds of leaders - Andy Burnham, Nigel Farage - trying to appeal to the disaffected Somewheres. But can a coalition of Anywhere voters (Labour, Greens, LibDems) still win the next general election? Is it possible to speak across the divide?

I think this is one of the biggest questions in European politics. I have argued for many years that we are currently lacking a new generation of politicians who can speak across the Somewhere/Anywhere divide. There are still many things that moderate Somewhere and moderate Anywhere voters have in common. The old big parties of centre-right and centre-left were coalitions of Somewheres and Anywheres but they have now fragmented. Burnham is potentially a bridging politician. His primary policy focus and rhetoric would have to lean in a Somewhere direction, partly because Anywheres have been so dominant for so long, but he should be able to signal a sufficient continuing commitment to openness and liberality to retain enough Anywheres in his coalition.

His problem is that there is now a powerful Green party to the left of the Labour party that attracts 10 to 15% of voters and if he moves too far in a Somewhere conservative direction on, say, immigration issues he risks losing voters to them.

So he has little room for manoeuvre - either economically or politically - but the country is very demoralised, angry in some places, and crying out for a reset. Burnham is an adept politician, he understands narratives, he’s a good listener and manager of people, he can potentially use the brief honeymoon he is likely to enjoy (bolstered by a World Cup victory?!) to find themes that bring together Britain’s liberals and conservatives in the more fragmented political climate that all rich countries now experience.

He has been chosen because he is popular with Labour MPs and voters not because he has a coherent plan for Britain. Nevertheless, he will benefit from the fact that his opponents on the right - the reviving Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch, Farage’s faltering Reform insurgents and the new Restore Britain party (a British version of the Eric Zemour party) - are sharply divided. The Conservatives and Reform actually agree on most policy issues but there is enormous personal animosity that makes it hard to see at this point how they can unite to prevent the left winning again, even though - as I said at the start - they should never have won in 2024, let alone 2029.

Burnham would have a much better chance of winning in 2029 if he steals some Somewhere-friendly Conservative/Reform policies - on energy policy, on immigration, on handing power back to elected politicians. We will find out in the next few months whether he might be that Somewhere-Anywhere bridging politician we need.