The Burnham bounce and beyond

On 20 July 2026, Labour leader Andy Burnham met with King Charles III to be appointed the sixth British prime minister of the past decade.1 Almost immediately, his party rose in opinion polls. For a time, Labour’s support would eclipse that of Reform UK, the far-right party that has dominated polls for the past year.

The fall of Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, and the short-term success of his replacement pose three questions. Why has it become so difficult to survive as a British prime minister? Can Burnham buck recent trends? And can he reverse the rise of the far right? The third of these questions gained added salience in mid-September: even as Reform was engulfed in its latest scandal, denting its popularity, images of black-clad fascists from Patriot Platform, protesting in numbers in Dover and Portsmouth, suggested an emergent threat further to the right.

The fall of Starmer

Starmer, having won a huge parliamentary majority with only a third of the popular vote, survived in office for little over two years. Although Liz Truss’s brief tenure saw a more precipitous collapse in public approval, Starmer plumbed new depths, achieving record unpopularity for a serving prime minister.2

Starmer’s initial rise to prominence had come within the legal establishment during the heyday of “New Labour”, the late 1990s and early 2000s. New Labour resulted from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s efforts to adapt social democracy to the neoliberal policy consensus. The end of the class war was pronounced, a version of corporate globalisation embraced. Biographies of Starmer disagree on the extent of his radicalism prior to this period, and hence the extent of his betrayal of those views, but all paint a picture of someone who became eager to ingratiate himself with senior politicians and the state machine. Once he turned to politics, his route into parliament in 2015 was lubricated by figures close to Blair and Brown, such as Charlie Falconer and Alasdair Campbell.3

By then, Blairism in its purest form had been rendered unpopular through New Labour’s time in office, which saw Blair support the disastrous war on Iraq and Brown preside over the eruption of economic crisis in 2008. Since Brown’s resignation in 2010, every successful Labour leadership candidate has run as a representative of the “soft left” (Ed Miliband, Starmer, Burnham) or the “hard left” (Jeremy Corbyn). The notion of a “soft left” emerged in the 1980s, in opposition to the hard left led by Corbyn’s mentor, Tony Benn, who was narrowly beaten in the 1981 deputy leadership election. Along with opposition to Bennism, the soft left backed Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Trotskyist group, Militant Tendency.4 Representatives of the soft left would later help successive Blair-Brown governments burnish their credibility with union leaders and sections of the party base, but, back then, the Blairite right remained firmly in control.5

By the time Starmer ran for the leadership in 2020, it was essential for him to distance himself from New Labour. However, like the original soft left, Starmer and his chief of staff at the time, Morgan McSweeney, defined themselves against the hard left. The Labour Together thinktank, directed by McSweeney, helped orchestrate the plot to oust Corbyn. Starmer’s attempt to break or drive out the left of the party would remain the single most consistent element of his approach.6 This involved slavish support for Israel as it enacted its genocide in Gaza. Most MP’s quickly fell into line. As Tariq Ali writes: “Not a single Labour MP resigned from Starmer’s government on Palestine or the use of US military bases in the UK to attack Iran. On the contrary: the expelled Corbynites—John McDonnell and Co—disgraced themselves by crawling back into the Parliamentary Labour Party”.7 This made it noteworthy that one of the first gestures of the Burnham government, announced by foreign secretary Ed Miliband, was to impose sanctions on Israeli West Bank settlements.8

The folly of Starmer’s approach was evident by the time of the 2024 general election, when Corbyn, now expelled from Labour, and four other independent MPs were elected on pro-Palestinian platforms. In office, it was clear that, aside from defining itself against Corbynism, Labour’s new leadership had little to offer. Starmer’s personal failings—his wooden presentation; his ties to the establishment, reflected in his title, Sir Keir Starmer; the emphasis on spin—did little to endear him to the public. The chant “Keir Starmer’s A Wanker!” became a feature of sports matches, far-right marches and left-leaning gatherings, such as concerts of the radical Irish hip-hop group Kneecap. There were many missteps from Starmer and his equally loathed chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Particularly noteworthy was the rash decision, three and half weeks into their term in office, to seek to restrict old people’s previously universal access to winter fuel payments. This was followed by attempts to tighten disabled people’s access to Personal Independence Payments, inciting a backbench rebellion. The more the difficulties grew, the more Starmer leant on the Blairite right. This helps explain bizarre decisions, such as making Blair’s former fixer, Peter Mandelson, US ambassador, despite his links with the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Reeves’s economic policies deepened the problems. Insomuch as she grasped that something had changed since New Labour’s heyday, it was through her recognition that support for globalisation had waned and that more authoritarian, statist forms of politics were returning. The resulting approach, dubbed “securonomics” by Reeves, ditched some of Blair and Brown’s adoration of the market, advocating instead elements of nationalism and security. Nationalism also licensed Starmer’s obsessive (and entirely misplaced) belief that Labour could win over large numbers of Reform voters through anti-migrant policies.9 Yet, if securonomics was supposed to project the idea that an active state could protect society from economic malaise, ecological disruption and geopolitical upheaval, such hopes were quickly dashed. The price tag for such measures was far too great.10 Reeves, to the last, insisted on the radicalism of securonomics, but in practice her emphasis was on fiscal rectitude.11

The trend of sluggish growth continued; household disposable income stagnated, as it has since 2008-9; there was no significant upswing in investment. Record levels of taxation did little to improve people’s lives or even reduce public debt. Widespread concern over the economy and the cost of living continued throughout Starmer’s time in office. The long decline among those strongly identifying with electoral parties, evident since the 1970s, has sharpened political volatility, so it is little surprise that support rapidly drained away from Starmer. As it did, Labour MPs, wary that their majorities had rested on the right-wing split between the Conservatives and Reform, and now also facing opposition from the left, including the Greens under their left-leaning leader Zack Polanski, became increasingly rebellious. Once Burnham re-entered parliament following the Makerfield by-election in June 2026, with many voters opting for him in the hope that he would oust Starmer, the writing was on the wall.

Enter Burnham

Burnham’s pitch for the soft-left vote is perhaps even more surprising than Starmer’s. Burnham was a product of New Labour, entering parliament in 2001 and cultivating a friendship with David Blunkett, an arch-Blairite minister. Burnham would support the Iraq War and became a cabinet minister under Brown.12 He was initially unpopular in Labour, placing fourth in the 2010 leadership elections and losing to Corbyn by a margin of 40 percent in 2015. Burnham used his time as Manchester mayor to reinvent himself, emphasising a willingness to deploy the state pragmatically alongside markets and his “pluralism”, embracing the soft left and the Blairite wing of the party.13 Excluded from this pluralism is what remains of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, reduced to just 25 out of 403 Labour MPs, which lacks even a junior minister in Burnham’s government.

Burnham’s chancellor, John Healey, is a Labour moderate, who served under Blair and Brown and later became Starmer’s defence secretary. His elevation to the role was in part a reward for plunging the knife into Starmer, resigning from his role while demanding greater military spending. In his new job, he will have to find that money. Healey is also there to reassure the bond markets, offering a continuation of Reeves’s economic orthodoxy. His successor at defence is the Labour right-winger Wes Streeting. Shabana Mahmood, the architect of Starmer’s migration clampdown, is retained as home secretary. Several other ministers are holdovers from the Blair-Brown years: Pat McFadden, Angela Eagle, Chris Bryant, Douglas Alexander, Angela Smith, Alan Campbell and Yvette Cooper.14 However, Burnham’s most important ally in government is Louise Haigh, who he appointed as First Secretary of State (roughly equivalent to deputy prime minister). Having been pushed out of Starmer’s cabinet in 2022, Haigh would revive the Tribune group of MPs, a soft-left caucus which, together with the Compass thinktank and the Mainstream network it launched last year, helped coordinate support for Burnham.15 As the extent to which Starmer was becoming a liability became clear, the right of the party would also move swiftly to embrace Burnham. Lord Sainsbury, who once bankrolled Blairism, provided funding for Burnham’s by-election bid. Labour Together, now renamed ThinkLabour, offered staff and equipment.16

Those enthusiastic about the new prime minister have made much of his rather ill-defined doctrine of “Manchesterism”. This model offers greater autonomy for local and regional leaders to implement their own approach, as Burnham sought to do as Manchester mayor. Much of the hype surrounding Burnham’s supposed achievements in Manchester rests on his reregulation of the city’s busses.17 Yet, a far more important plank of his approach was enlisting “democratic institutions…to de-risk private capital”.18 This approach has much deeper Mancunian roots, dating back to initiatives launched by Graham Stringer—Labour leader of the city council from 1979 and later an MP, elected in Blair’s 1997 landslide. Stringer’s approach to redevelopment had taken flight during the preceding Tory administrations. Labour’s defeat in the 1987 election, together with tightening financial constraints, undermined any aspiration to build “municipal socialism”.19 Council leaders would instead make accommodations with central government and the private sector, engaging in competition for discretionary funding. For Stringer in this period, the metric of success was what he called the “crane index”, the number of construction sites across the city.20 In some senses, these experiments in “urban entrepreneurialism” from the late 1980s were not so much the product of New Labour as an anticipation of it.21 With Blair in power, Manchester soon would become “New Labour’s favourite city”.22 By 2000, the city centre was run by a private company, chaired by property developers.23 The Greater Manchester Investment Zone, launched in November 2023 by Burnham as a partnership between the mayor’s office and the Tory government of the time, continued this project. It handed £160 million in corporate welfare from the state to incentivise private investors such as Blackstone, an asset manager with a £1 trillion in investments. Mayoral Development Corporations were used to concentrate and lubricate planning decisions, further enriching private investors.

Meanwhile, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority was funnelling hundreds of millions in loans towards property developers who transformed the city skyline, again a model dating back to the 1980s but accelerated under Burnham.24 The property boom was focused on central Manchester, “serving the relatively affluent and offshore investors who bought apartments”, while doing little to address housing shortages or homelessness, despite Burnham’s claims to the contrary.25 Indeed, as central areas became a playground for corporate capital and the wealthy, rent rises further displaced workers, while outlying districts fell deeper into neglect.26 The result was what one group of academics call a “Centripetal City”, with “supply-side, property-led” affluence in the centre, poverty on the outskirts.27 Such an approach to economic growth—the Blair-era Public-Private Partnership on steroids—is now enshrined in government. Burnham’s pick as his chief of staff is James Purnell, until recently the CEO of a lobbying firm, Flint Global, specialising in advising businesses on their dealings with governments and regulatory bodies. Flint has advised giant tech firms such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft; extractive firms such as the Glencore mining giant and BP; and utility owners such as the troubled Thames Water.28

Burnham will benefit for a time simply from not being Starmer. Yet, it is unlikely his government will offer a sufficiently radical break with the past to avoid the decline in popularity afflicting other recent prime ministers. That does not mean that the Burnham bounce, while it lasts, is irrelevant. Labour’s rise in the polls reflects over two million additional people, most of them workers, shifting to support the party. This has some bearing on the tactics of revolutionaries.29 Even though many people, particularly younger people, appear relatively immune to the charms of Burnham and sceptical about Labourism, Burnham can, in the short term, increase the expectation among sections of the working class that the state will be deployed to improve their lives. This can create opportunities to mobilise even those with partial illusions in the new government in struggle, through which revolutionaries can seek to prise workers away from Labourism by advancing more militant ideas and tactics. Such an approach avoids both the danger of sectarian irrelevance and a collapse into simply cheering on Burnham, helping prepare for further struggles among those likely to feel betrayed by the trajectory of the government in the near future.

This is particularly important given the immediate impact of Burnham’s victory on other forces to the left of Labour. The Green Party has seen much of its rise in the polls since Polanski became leader reversed.30 Your Party, the left project that Corbyn had proposed to lead, had already all but collapsed by the time Starmer resigned; a Burnham government may prove its death knell.31 Corbyn’s readmittance to Labour still seems a distant prospect, but one figure previously close to him, Diane Abbott, has had her expulsion reversed. Another former ally, Labour MP John McDonnell, who has called for Corbyn’s readmittance, was captured tearing up with joy on seeing Burnham’s victory speech in Makerfield.

A gloomy outlook?

The major factor limiting the length of Burnham’s honeymoon, though, is not his or his cabinet’s political limitations, but rather the economic outlook. The success of social democracy in stabilising its rule ultimately rests on its efforts to manage capitalism in such a way that it can broaden the scope for reforms. As I argued in our previous issue, the success of the system has today become dependent on colossal investments in data centres and the rollout of generative artificial intelligence.32 However, in the immediate future these investments are unlikely to generate sufficient profits to sustain the firms making them. Because the scale of investment is now drawing in funding from sources beyond the tech giants themselves, this risks not just a slowdown but a potential financial crisis.

Compounding this structural fragility is the growing challenge of inflation. Running down strategic oil reserves cushioned the impact of the Iran war and the restriction on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz over spring and summer, but by early autumn the strain on supplies was showing. Then, in September, Houthi rebels in Yemen captured another chokepoint for oil supplies, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait on the Red Sea. Even as the Houthi offensive was unfolding, a drone attack, probably originating from Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, struck the East-West Pipeline Saudi Arabia had been using to transport oil to its Red Sea port of Yanbu. By this point, inflation from elevated energy and transportation prices was beginning to feed through to the costs of finished goods and services.33 The lack of refinery capacity to turn crude oil into products such as diesel has accentuated this problem. The super El Niño, an extreme version of the warming of tropical Pacific waters every few years, is also likely to increase global food prices.

Fears over inflation raise the pressure on bond markets, where states along with corporations obtain credit. The yields on government bonds, effectively the interest rates states pay to borrow, have been suppressed since the 2008-9 crisis as central banks such as the Bank of England and US Federal Reserve have sought to prop up the economy. By mid-September 2026, yields were back to levels not seen for almost two decades, not high by historical standards but far higher than those to which states and firms have become accustomed. Inflation expectations are a major factor pushing up yields.34 Other factors included the sheer scale of government debt in major economies such as the US, Britain and France, along with the growing issuance of bonds by AI firms, competing with those issued by states.

As International Socialism went to press, rising borrowing costs were already piling pressure on Burnham, with Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist and sometime advisor to the new prime minister, arguing that spending cuts were essential, adding: “The market now suspects that this is a traditional tax-and-spend socialist government with better TikTok videos”.35 Burnham, who has committed to observing the same fiscal rules as Starmer and Reeves, is ill-equipped to overcome such pressures. The return of inflation may also push central bankers to raise their interest rates, as the economic orthodoxy suggests they should. The notion that raising the rate at which the Bank of England lends can reopen the Strait of Hormuz or reverse the super El Niño is magical thinking. Interest rates are a far blunter instrument, bringing down inflation only insomuch as they increase the cost of borrowing and so suppress economic activity. This does not mean a catastrophic slump is inevitable in the coming months, but it does make rampant growth unlikely and recession possible.

Can Burnham kill off the far right?

The forces that will seek to capitalise on any failure of Burnham or any eruption of economic crisis include those on the far right. Starmer’s response to the rise of Reform had been to ape their anti-migrant rhetoric. A few months after becoming prime minister, he made a great show of shaking hands with Reform leader Nigel Farage in the House of Commons.36 By spring last year, he had made his “island of strangers” speech, echoing language infamously used by Enoch Powell in 1968.37 None of this attracted Reform voters to Labour. It merely shifted political debate on to more favourable terrain for the far right and alienated potential Labour voters, who are among the least receptive to racism. Burnham shows little sign of breaking with this approach.

Reform’s support had been in decline before Burnham replaced Starmer, largely due to problems generated internally in the far-right party. This includes controversies over its candidates, and allegations about donations to Farage and his party. Faced with the claims against him, Farage stood down as an MP, forcing a by-election which returned him to parliament. However, rather than this rallying Farage’s supporters against the establishment, it resulted in ridicule: his main opponent was self-styled “intergalactic space warrior” Count Binface, a persona created by comedian Jon Harvey. Such self-inflicted blows, though, mostly just redistribute votes among the right-wing parties. The decline in support for Reform is largely accounted for either by the rise in support for the Conservatives, which under Kemi Badenoch has positioned itself as a party of the xenophobic right, or for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, which presents itself as a harder far-right alternative to Reform.

Britain has also witnessed a new eruption of fascist street mobilisations. Until recently, this scene was dominated by Tommy Robinson’s brand of networked fascism—characterised by large-scale gatherings centred on fascist groups but using Islamophobia, anti-migrant rhetoric and other far-right tropes to draw in wider support. This networked model has the strength of avoiding the creation of a centralised membership organisation offering a target for anti-fascists.38 Now, one of Robinson’s former lieutenants, Daniel “Tommo” Thomas, has sought to overcome a key weakness of the model: its lack of discipline and ideological coherence. On 12 September, Tommo led members of Patriot Platform, dressed in black and donning balaclavas, in blockading the port in Dover in a carefully planned spectacle, with chants of “Stop the Boats” and “Christ is king”. The next day, a rather more chaotic protest in Portsmouth, led by the same group, followed the rescue of 120 refugees who were drowning off the coast.39

It is easy to ridicule Tommo’s supporters. Hitler was also widely regarded by liberal opinion as a laughingstock in the 1920s, prior to his seizure of power, leading him to retort: “It makes no difference whether they laugh at us or revile us, whether they represent us as clowns or criminals; the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again and again”.40 If unchallenged, the current mobilisations will grow, the fascists will gain confidence and harden up those they draw into their orbit, and, before long, they will be targeting not simply desperate refugees seeking to cross the Channel but also Muslims, Palestine activists, trans+ people, feminists, trade unions and the left.41 There are also potential synergies between Tommo’s supporters and a hardening electoral far right. During a TV interview, Reform spokesperson Zia Yusuf, who offered only equivocal support to Patriot Platform, was interrupted by Tommo, who stressed he was building an organisation and claimed his supporters would vote for whichever far-right party was “best” for them.42 Lowe, sensing an opportunity to win over a section of Reform’s base, offered his support to Patriot Platform.

Burnham’s election will do little to contain these threats. Even if his policies did genuinely mark a reversal of neoliberal policies and an effort to grant significant reforms, it would be a mistake to assume that this alone could quell the far right. Episodes of mass social struggle have repeatedly erupted in France since the mid-1990s. In both France and Germany, there are major political formations to the left of traditional social democracy—respectively La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and Die Linke (The Left). None of this has reversed the long-term growth of the far right. In France, the fascist Rassemblement National’s (National Rally) Marine Le Pen, her ban on holding public office lifted in July, is tipped to win next year’s presidential election.43 In Germany, the far right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) swept to victory in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt in early September 2026, before narrowly beating the centre left to win in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania two weeks later. In elections in Berlin, where Die Linke topped the poll, the AfD significantly increased its vote share. In recent years, the AfD has increasingly been dominated by hard ethno-nationalists such a Björn Höcke, the dominant figure in the state of Thuringia. There is a growing cadre of fascists surrounding the leadership, with parliamentarians and party employees linked to or maintaining connections with neo-Nazi groups.

The response from much of the left to the AfD’s success is telling. German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck argued in Sidecar, New Left Review’s online blog, that by protesting against the AfD the left would simply further the interests of the ruling class. We should, he argued, focus on the cost of living instead.44 German economist Isabella Weber’s new book, Anti-Fascist Economics, similarly implies that a left economic policy can reverse the rise of the AfD. This has also been the focus of Die Linke, which campaigns on issues such as housing, jobs and social spending, but lacks a coherent strategy to challenge the AfD as a racist and fascist party. Simply offering left economic policies is particularly useless in Germany, where, as Adam Tooze points out, AfD supporters are often on the right economically—worried about their economic situation but favouring a small state and cuts to social spending. AfD supporters’ desire for “radical transformation” creates a situation whereby the party’s “fixation on migration and the cultural battle for Germany’s ‘soul’, addresses that sense of drama and crisis in the way that none of the establishment parties currently can”.45 The idea that this can be countered by a slightly better version of social democracy is misplaced.

Such debates are relevant to Britain. Breaking the momentum of Patriot Platform and Restore requires that we construct a broad but radical struggle against fascism—one penetrating working-class communities and workplaces and prepared to confront the fascists and the racist parties who help generate their support. That is precisely the challenge that Stand up to Racist has set itself.46 As in the 1930s, such battles have become a key terrain on which the revolutionary left must prove its worth.

Joseph Choonara is the editor of International Socialism. He is the author of A Reader’s Guide to Marx’s Capital (Bookmarks, 2017) and Unravelling Capitalism: A Guide to Marxist Political Economy (2nd edition: Bookmarks, 2017).

Notes