Andy Burnham prepares to take Keir Starmer down

The 'King of the North' aims fire at Starmer's clusterfuck government.

Is Andy Burnham, aka ‘King of the North’, about to topple Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour party? The Mayor of Greater Manchester is very clearly on manoeuvres, and so are certain Labour MPs who are utterly despairing of this big flaming motorway pileup of a government.

That’s not just being by the government’s calamitous record in office, which is more than bad enough, but by a scandal which is enveloping Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney - who should be considered the real prime minister, yet the media has helped conspire to hide him from scrutiny.

Burnham has publicly declared that Labour MPs are privately urging him to challenge Starmer to take the top job. That’s not entirely straightforward because Burnham stood down as a Labour MP back in 2017 in order to become Mayor of Greater Manchester

Starmer definitely fears Burnham. I can tell you as a fact that when Labour lost the Hartlepool by-election back in May 2021, and the party leadership was in deep trouble, Starmer privately remarked ‘thank god Andy isn’t on the back benches.’ That’s because he feared Burnham would then have been able to take him out.

I want to talk about Burnham’s prospects and what he’s been saying in advance of Labour party conference - and in line with tradition we will be there filming our annual video next week.

But first a potted history. Burnham was someone very much associated with the Blairite faction of the Labour party. When he stood for leader of the Labour party in 2010, that was his pitch. Under Ed Miliband’s leadership he became Shadow Health Secretary and shifted more towards what is often called ‘soft left’.

He won a lot of support from the grassroots by opposing Tory privatisation and cuts - obviously the NHS is Labour’s most treasured achievement. After Labour’s defeat in 2015 he was seen as the overwhelming frontrunner, but then veered off again towards a Blairite pitch. His leadership launch took place at an accountancy firm associated with tax avoidance schemes. His campaign manager was a particularly unpleasant Labour right-winger.

That’s the context in which Jeremy Corbyn stood and won massive support for straight talking and having a clear vision. The right-wing faction of Labour were totally ideologically bankrupt, they had no ideas relevant to post-crash Britain, and Corbyn was talking about an alternative to austerity, demanding the wealthy paid fair taxes, public ownership - that kind of thing. And so Burnham sank.

He then went off to become Greater Manchester Mayor and has unquestionably been a popular triumph, promoting popular and successful policies like public ownership of buses, free travel for 16 to 18s, cheaper integrated travel, that sort of thing.

Starmer’s team in the meanwhile lied through their teeth to deceive the Labour membership into voting for their frontman - by promising public ownership, investment, taxing the rich, scrapping tuition fees, defending the welfare state, defending migrants’ rights, promoting peace and justice abroad - we could go on. They reneged on the whole lot. His coterie then tried to make party a hostile environment for anyone who believed in the very things Starmer claimed to believe in when he stood for leader.

Starmer and his team were apologists for Israel’s genocide in opposition, and continue to arm it in government - as well as refusing to impose sweeping sanctions.

Starmer’s faction backed themselves into a corner during the general election by adopting Tory fiscal rules and ruling out hiking taxes on the rich. They then sucked demand out of the economy by talking about a black hole they needed to fill, and then because of their self-defeating tax policy, ended up hiking the worst possible one in the circumstances - National Insurance employers’ contributions, which means higher prices, as we are seeing, as well as less people being hired.

And instead of taxing the booming rich, they decided to kick elderly people, by scrapping the universal winter fuel payment, children, by keeping the Tory two child benefit cap, and seeking to drive hundreds of thousands of disabled people into poverty, which blew up in their faces.

Because of their love of the rich, and of power for its own sake with all its trappings, they were embroiled in scandals over freebies from wealthy donors.

And because Starmer’s goons are obsessed with Tony Blair, they decided to appoint Peter Mandelson as UK Ambassador to the US, despite it being extremely obvious he was unsuitable for the job given his ties to the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which they knew about - and then that blew up in their face.

We’ve seen Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, resign over a stamp duty scandal. We’ve seen a leading advisor, Paul Ovenden, resign over disgusting sexualising text messages about Diane Abbott, the first Black female MP ever elected who has been treated disgustingly by Starmer and his awful goons.

Unable to actually address people’s problems, the government instead keeps trying to raid the rhetoric and policies of Nigel Farage, but as we’ve seen everywhere, where mainstream parties adopt this strategy, they just legitimise the radical right and shift the political conversation on their turf, which is exactly what has happened here.

And Starmer’s goons have ruled through fear - threatening anyone with being purged if they step out of line. For example, several Labour MPs were suspended when they had the temerity to vote against Tory benefit cuts which drive kids into poverty and squalor.

Earlier this year, a book revealed that Starmer’s advisors were briefing that he wasn’t really in charge - that he thought he was driving the train, but they’d put him in front of the driverless District Light Railway.

The real person running the show is Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff who was the driving force behind his deceitful leadership campaign.

And there’s a new scandal - which is all based around how these people sought to destroy Corbynism and the Labour left.

A devastating new soon to be published book by Paul Holden - called The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy - has a massive treasure trove of revelations. And from the book has emerged massive questions about how Morgan McSweeney ran a supposed think tank, called Labour Together, which plotted to get rid of Corbyn and settled on Starmer as their man to do it, which was funded with £700,000 of secret donations which were only declared months after Starmer became leader - they say this was an “admin error” - with massive questions about its role in the leadership campaign and how that wasn’t declared, with Starmer’s team claiming it played no role in the campaign despite all the evidence to the contrary.

There’s lots more to come on all of this - stay tuned and obviously get a copy of Paul Holden’s book.

So amidst all this, only 14 months after winning a landslide - albeit on only a third of the vote, and the lowest turnout in democratic history - 72% disapprove of the government. Just 11% approve. Starmer’s own approval rating is minus 50. More than half of Brits want Starmer to resign. No government has sunk so far so fast.

That’s where Andy Burnham comes in. In interviews with the New Statesman and the Telegraph, he calls for public ownership of utilities, higher council tax on expensive homes, borrowing to invest in council homes, cutting tax on low earners and increasing it on high earners. He also says “We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,” says the government rules with a “climate of fear” and doesn’t rule out working with Jeremy Corbyn.

The government has been briefing against him, saying he had “A Boris-sized ego, but without the strategic thought.” And all I have to say there is…. do you have no self-awareness at all? We can’t all have your proven record of strategic genius, lads! Interestingly, polling shows that Labour would hypothetically retake a lead over Reform if Burnham was leader, though hypothetical polling is very flawed. Certainly you’d think Burnham is Labour’s best bet to combat Farage, to stop Labour bleeding support both to the left and to Reform. But what’s best for Labour and what’s best for the awful people who run the Labour party is not the same thing.

What do I think of it all? Firstly, I think Andy Burnham is a one of the few nice guys in politics - that’s certainly been my impression the times I’ve met him. But that should never be what matters above all else in politics, of course.

I think there are big question marks about whether Starmer’s goons would ever let him stand as a Labour MP because they know he would then challenge the leader. A Labour MP would also need to stand down to trigger a by election. Burnham would need to be confident of not being defeated by Reform.

And then my questions would centre on Burnham’s past of shifting political allegiances. Has he definitively changed - now with an iron clad vision for the country? He would come under huge political pressure from a parliamentary party full of soulless right-wing hacks, as well as the Tories, Nigel Farage and the business elites. Does he have new found steel to face that down? He mentions pressure from the bond market - well he needs a strategy to deal with that, so what is it? Who would he make Chancellor of the Exchequer who would stick to a clear coherent agenda? And what would his foreign policy be - would he end British complicity in Israel’s genocide and more broadly persecution for the Palestinian people?

I left the Labour party last year, and my mental health has vastly improved ever since. I want the left to get their act together, and will back a pact between the Green Party and whatever Your Party becomes: like many of you, I’ve been very depressed by the whole saga with Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. My view is that whatever happens we need to build a strong left. I don’t think Labour and particularly its MPs can be trusted - but I will nonetheless be carefully watching what happens to the leadership and feasting on much popcorn.