Barely hours after Sir Keir Starmer resigned as Prime Minister with an emotional Downing Street statement, Andy Burnham was sworn in on Monday as the new MP for Makerfield — the constituency that delivered him to Westminster with a warning: “This is a final chance to change.”
At the count, Burnham’s acceptance speech was a pitch-perfect warning to his party. “This is what people said directly to me on the hundreds of doorsteps that I stood on,” he said. “We must hear it, we must act upon it and we must get it right. There will be no second chance. But there is a chance now from this result tonight to build a new politics based on unity and hope. Turning away from the path that takes us to a divided, dark politics of the kind we see in the United States.”
“Andy Burnham sworn in as MP after Starmer resignation, faces call for 'British revolution'.”
The result, which saw no mention of Labour on his campaign leaflets — only “VOTE ANDY BY 10 PM” — capped a historic shift. The constituency that gave Labour a 73 per cent majority in 1997 saw its tribal loyalty severed after two years of political turmoil. Turnout, once 75 per cent in the 1980s, now reflected a deeper disillusionment that Burnham has pledged to overcome.
Now the clear favourite to succeed Starmer, Burnham is widely expected to enter No 10 by mid-July if no other leadership contenders step forward. But the fight for his cabinet has already kicked off, with allies of rival contenders manoeuvring for the most senior jobs before the would-be prime minister even has the keys to Downing Street.
Burnham’s political direction is unambiguous. He has spoken of “40 years of being on the wrong path” — a path of “deregulation, privatisation and then austerity” that “all adds up to 40 years of neoliberalism.” He has called for a British revolution, echoing the two great shifts since the Second World War: Attlee’s 1945 social democracy (the NHS, public housing) and Thatcher’s 1979 neoliberalism, later humanised by New Labour. Both revolutions succeeded because of historic appeals to the public, and both had developed strategic direction — which, as the New Statesman notes, Burnham does not have, at least not yet.
His task is to forge that strategy while answering the question that confronts him on the threshold of his premiership: No more Mr Nice Guy? In a country where “disillusionment and resentment, if not hate, hang in the air,” his videos convey “one of genuine, rooted enjoyment and serious commitment.” But the spirit of his campaign — “HE’S ONE OF US” — must now translate into what he calls a “new politics based on unity and hope.”
Burnham has previously told LBC that “we overtax people’s work and we under-tax wealth,” raising the idea of a land value tax. But as he prepares to take office, the question remains: can he build a revolution without a blueprint?