This piece by SSP Workplace Organiser Richie Venton first appeared in the Scottish Socialist Voice 03/06/2026 – warning against those who view Andy Burnham as ‘the way forward’ or as a credible alternative to Starmer.
Keir Starmer is finished. Wes Streeting thought he could challenge him for Labour leadership but couldn’t muster enough members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, despite his impeccable right-wing credentials. So now all eyes have been turned on Greater Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, to rescue Labour from the pits of public unpopularity.
Of course, nobody with any principles would want Reform UK to win the Makerfield by-election. But there is a clear and present danger of masses of people – in their desperation for genuine change from Starmer’s capitalist mis-rule – being hoodwinked by the pretend radicalism of Burnham, who is no stranger to sniffing the wind and adjusting his utterances to suit the public mood.
Socialists in the trade union movement will need to show vigilance at moves by some union leaderships using Burnham – should he indeed become Prime Minister – to pacify the growing revolt in their ranks against the unions’ links and funding of capitalist Labour. We need to puncture many workers’ illusions in a man whose political history is riddled with contradictions and shapeshifting, combined with a penchant for words consciously designed to deceive and hide his actual agenda.
Burnham’s Blairite role
Burnham’s earlier career included a stint as a special advisor to right-wing Labour MP, the late Tessa Jowell. He became an MP himself in 2001 under Tony Blair’s leadership. He immediately joined and became a prominent advocate of the Labour Friends of Israel at Westminster, often appearing as a headline speaker at LFI events.
He praised the 1917 Balfour Declaration as, to quote him, “British values in action”. Well, in a perverse sense he’s right, because that infamous document was a prime example of the two-faced imperialist trickery of the British ruling class: promising Zionist leaders a new state while promising Arab leaders a new empire. Classic divide and conquer tactics.
In one of his two attempts to become Labour leader (2010 and 2015) Burnham declared that his “first overseas visit as Prime Minister would be to Israel.” In more recent times, with the floodtide turning decisively against Israeli state genocide in Gaza, he called for “a ceasefire from all sides” before Starmer did so. A man of many shades, according to the prevailing winds.
Support for war on Iraq
Burnham loyally supported Blair’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, voting for it, refusing to join the Labour rebels. He subsequently, on several occasions over the next decade, voted against any inquiry into that blood-drenched war for oil. He only started to express “some regret” when that suited his rebranding as mayor of Greater Manchester, from 2017.
Burnham likes to bask in the nickname ‘King of the North’ but hasn’t been so keen to advertise his other nickname, ‘King of Abstention’, derived from his refusal to vote against vicious, life-
threatening Tory government welfare cuts as an MP, when he instead obeyed the Labour whip and abstained.
As a Cabinet Minister in Gordon Brown’s Labour government – including a stint at Health – he never uttered a word of opposition to the rampant privatisation of hospitals and schools under Labour’s socially destructive, profiteering Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
Manchester’s Bee Network
As mayor of Greater Manchester, he has gained popularity for his reforms to public transport in the region via the Bee Network and Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM).
When first elected as Mayor in 2017, he inherited indescribable chaos on bus services, with more than 30 separate companies operating, and season ticket holders forced to wait at bus stops for the right company to turn up, because their passes were invalid on competing company buses!
Even the Tories recognised the counter-productive chaos of this free-market system gone mad and enacted the 2017 Bus Services Act.
Burnham then used that to introduce, not public ownership, but some degree of public oversight to bus services, operated through franchises run by several private companies sporting a shared Bee Network livery. TfGM have some influence over fares and routes, as well as owning the trams network and subsidising local rail services.
Gentrification… and cuts to bus-workers’ wages
But all is not honey and apples with the Bee Network!
As a longstanding UNITE union activist in the area, Anita Patel, has observed, services are uneven, favouring gentrified areas, “leaving many working-class communities isolated and transport workers battling with private sector employers to protect pay and conditions.”
Indeed, Burnham has applied classic Blairite gentrification with, as Patel wrote, “transport investment targeted at redevelopment zones… driving up property prices and rents, whilst driving out working-class communities. Poorer areas still suffer far fewer bus routes.”
And critically, when in 2024 he responded to Starmer’s announcement of increasing the bus fare cap to £3 by declaring it would remain at £2 in Greater Manchester, Burnham did not take this golden opportunity to argue or campaign for adequate government funding by the newly-elected Labour regime, nor to bring the franchises into public ownership and full democratic control.
This had consequences: the price of season tickets shot up to compensate for the £2 fare cap, robbing Peter to pay Paul and penalising people getting the bus to work.
Alongside that, there have been waves of strike action by bus drivers at Stagecoach, Metroline, First Bus and even those directly employed by TfGM, against real terms wage cuts. Burnham has been known to broker deals behind the backs of the drivers, trying to keep his hands clean of responsibility for attacks on workers’ conditions by their employers, under cover of the use of the franchise system.
‘Trickle down’ capitalism
The gentrification drive is rooted in a neo-liberal belief that capitalist economic growth will “trickle down” solutions.
Beyond transport itself, Burnham’s broader city regeneration plans are based on public-private partnerships, property-led development, and pockets of gentrification. He even signed off a deregulated Special Economic Zone for the city with the Tories.
All of which challenges the outward impression in his current Labour leadership bid that he stands for public ownership, or a clear-cut departure from the austerity-lite policies of Rachel Reeves, Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting, et al.
In fact, Burnham has now openly declared support for Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules – which by definition would mean as Prime Minister he would continue the road of cuts, privatisation and outsourcing.
NOT for water nationalisation
He at first appeared to call for water nationalisation – an immensely popular idea in England and Wales, with 82% of people in the latest polls supporting that amidst the chaos of sewage-infested rivers, water shortages, filthy profiteering, grotesque salaries and bonuses for privatised water company CEOs, and eye-watering bills for households. But far from it!
As with his broader economic prospectus, Andy Burnham has ‘clarified’ – or more accurately, retreated – to say he wants “stronger public control over water services”. But there’s precisely nothing knew about that. For decades the privatised water industry has been allegedly under the regulation of Ofwat, which is supposed to control prices, oversee investment, and protect the public under this regulatory framework within private capitalist ownership. Burnham merely wants a “stronger” version, whatever that means in practise.
Sticking to Rachel Reeves’ ‘fiscal rules’
Promising to continue with Rachel Reeves ‘fiscal rules’ means a continuation of neo-liberalism with, at best, added layers of regional quangos and regulatory bodies under which private capital will still have power over investment, setting the limits to what a government can do.
He has never even hinted at measures like a Wealth Tax on millionaires, or closure of Corporation Tax loopholes, to finance the re-industrialization and mass housebuilding which he has made some reference to. He instead relies on capitalist growth to settle social needs; we all know how that has worked out for the current Labour leadership! Andy Burnham is merely arguing he could do it better.
A deal with Labour’s right-wing?
If he was anything resembling a genuine socialist, prepared to challenge the bond markets and big business in the interests of the working class, why on earth would the former director of the right-wing Labour Together faction – Josh Simons – have stood down from his post as Makerfield’s MP to make way for Burnham to challenge Starmer as Prime Minister? After all,
Labour Together is the vehicle of such anti-socialist creatures as Lord Mandelson, his protégé Wes Streeting, and, yes, Keir Starmer!
Or why would Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, as thoroughly right-wing-dominated as it’s ever been under Starmer, have this time endorsed Burnham as a candidate even before he asked them to do so? The same NEC have blocked 240 other Labour candidates in the last 5 years.
He’s clearly done a deal with Labour’s right, who feel he is no threat to their pro-capitalist agenda, and whose desperation for survival has obliged them to change the captain on the Titanic as it sinks.
Socialist signposts v. opportunist weathervanes
There is no doubt he is a skilled communicator, but the twists and turns in his policy positions is a reminder that in politics there are two types: signposts and weathervanes.
People with firm political principles and ideological understanding, who signpost a way forward – in our case, towards socialism.
Or unprincipled weathervanes who blow hither and thither with prevailing moods, in a cynically opportunist exercise to gain temporary popularity and a place in power for themselves.
Andy Burnham is the latter.
Workers, trade unionists, and their unions should not be fooled by this fakery. They should instead remain steadfast in building a genuine socialist opposition to all forms of capitalist rule, regardless of which Labour Prime Minister is decorating the dictatorship of capital over people’s lives.