The Labour Party under Andy Burnham

[TravelDream]

Well... looks like it won't be the Labour Party under Keir Starmer for much longer.

In many ways, KS has been a good prime minister of the UK. However, he has a lot of shortcomings and is certainly a poor communicator and poor at taking people with him.

For the country's sake, lets hope we have a more effective new PM.

And let's see if more than one candidate gets enough nominations as the requirement is quite high. Could be a Burnham coronation. Could be Burnham vs. Streeting which Burnham should easily win or there could be another candidate.

As for Burnham, a 56 year old is not what it was; people look so much younger nowadays (the same goes for Starmer too).

I know exactly how old Starmer is, but would never guess that age looking at a photo of him.

On age, it's really quite silly to put limits.
Pitt the Younger is seen by historians as one of Britain's greatest prime ministers. He first became PM at the ripe old age of 24.

 

[brad465]

Didn't wait long (maybe because of the heat). And it confirms that biannual event I'm doing today is happening for the second time on the day of a PM resignation, after May in 2019.

 

[DoubleLemon]

I think even a "labour largest party" arrangement is now implausible. It is very rare that governments recover from a polling situation like this.

I think Burnham just has to treat this as three years which will be the last labour ever get in majority government, at least for a generation or two. The hard part would be convincing the PLP of this (a lot of careerists in denial even recently), but if he can do so he can probably do quite a lot.

Three years from the 1997-2001 term got a lot of big stuff through, even though I disagree with a lot of it, the volume and impact cannot be denied.

Burnham can't leave PR for the next labour manifesto, because the next labour manifesto is almost certainly not getting implemented.

Russan and Inidan content farms paid for by the far right in Russa can't vote. (nor can the huge number of bots online) - a lot of polling is done online now and there is no real checking if they are a person or not. You can sign up to Ipsos and there is nothing to stop bots.

Social media outrage gets a lot of prominence in the news and media, but usually its fake, not based in the UK, lies or just one or two people. With journalism being cut and the requirement for fresh content to get the ads, plus AI. Bots are flooding social media, the ai generated articles are picking up on quantity, not quality or fact checking - BOOM - its in the news. Other sources pick it up and it becomes fact.
There is a HUGE disconnect between what's being artificially amplified online with reality.
It doesn't cost much money to create bot farms, backed by basic AI and scripts to flood places.

I think all socal media sites should list the country the user is based on all posts as a way to combat this.

 

[RichJF]

Sick and tired of people thinking politics, policy & generational issues can be solved in 5 minutes. Clickbait politics & the CONSTANT desire to keep changing leaders & PMs will not work.

My instinct is Burnham will be even more unpopular with other people and another leadership challenge will take place before the next GE. It's getting tedious chopping and changing now.

 

[DarloRich]

how a narrative that Starmer is the worst PM ever has been allowed to run is beyond me. It is preposterous nonsense. Burnham will be subject to the same agenda.

 

[Bletchleyite]

how a narrative that Starmer is the worst PM ever has been allowed to run is beyond me. It is preposterous nonsense. Burnham will be subject to the same agenda.

Starmer is largely competent but has been dragged into a desire to be popular despite this not being necessary this early in a Parliament. He could and should have stuck to his guns on stuff like taxation as there is plenty of time until the next General Election for him to prove he was right (or otherwise). Otherwise he lacks charisma a bit like John Major (who was also competent, bar the rail privatisation decision). Burnham has charisma, almost the "man you'd have a pint with in the pub" as Farage pushes, so he may do better but his policies are in practice unlikely to be wildly different.

 

[martin butler]

Russan and Inidan content farms paid for by the far right in Russa can't vote. (nor can the huge number of bots online) - a lot of polling is done online now and there is no real checking if they are a person or not. You can sign up to Ipsos and there is nothing to stop bots.

Social media outrage gets a lot of prominence in the news and media, but usually its fake, not based in the UK, lies or just one or two people. With journalism being cut and the requirement for fresh content to get the ads, plus AI. Bots are flooding social media, the ai generated articles are picking up on quantity, not quality or fact checking - BOOM - its in the news. Other sources pick it up and it becomes fact.
There is a HUGE disconnect between what's being artificially amplified online with reality.
It doesn't cost much money to create bot farms, backed by basic AI and scripts to flood places.

I think all socal media sites should list the country the user is based on all posts as a way to combat this.

And that is why i'm hoping that when parliament returns after the summer break, there will be measures announced to clamp down on fake news sites, on the ability of bots and faceless firms, often not in UK to dictate policy

 

[DoubleLemon]

how a narrative that Starmer is the worst PM ever has been allowed to run is beyond me. It is preposterous nonsense. Burnham will be subject to the same agenda.

Social media, bots are already flooding social media with boilerplate posts.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 22 Jun 2026 ==

And that is why i'm hoping that when parliament returns after the summer break, there will be measures announced to clamp down on fake news sites, on the ability of bots and faceless firms, often not in UK to dictate policy

How though. Even reddit, which used to be alright is full of bots and content farm posts. When you call them out, they delete the account and pop up with new ones.
The twitter changes where they started showing the country the user was from seemed to have an impact. To an extent.

 

[BAFRA77]

First thing Burnham should announce on his first day (if he gets the job) is Leveson 2

 

[Thirteen]

The Starmer Government actually has done some good but it's mired with scandals, what is needed until the next GE is boring politics where things get done with a few grumbles.

I don't expect the GM Mayoral by election to go to anyone but Labour but the next set of Mayoral elections in 2028 will be interesting, London in particular is a case of whether Sadiq Khan wants to do a fourth term or if there is an opportunity for someone else to come in.

 

[dosxuk]

First thing Burnham should announce on his first day (if he gets the job) is Leveson 2

Why would he do that? The media have helped him personally get to the top job without much effort.

 

[oldman]

Why would he do that? The media have helped him personally get to the top job without much effort.

And now they will work to ensure he loses it.

 

[dosxuk]

And now they will work to ensure he loses it.

Yes, but they will want to get their timing right. It's no good to them to end up with a populist in charge of Labour just as they start gearing up to a general election. Like with Starmer I'd expect the pattern to be a long slow boil to attempt to make his position untenable in about 2 years. That will open the door to a Reform coronation, just as long as they can keep the lid on Restore.

 

[Broucek]

Well there you have it.

All he had to do was be more sensible than Boris, more relateable than Rishi and more competent than a lettuce.

That's such a low bar even a caterpillar would have struggled to get under it.

When will the Labour Party ever learn? Government is hard. Opposition is easy. It isn't the media's fault, it isn't a conspiracy of the super rich, and it isn't anything to do with the character of white British people.

It is not us, it is you.

Wake up and smell the coffee already.

This

 

[DarloRich]

Well there you have it.

All he had to do was be more sensible than Boris, more relateable than Rishi and more competent than a lettuce.

That's such a low bar even a caterpillar would have struggled to get under it.

When will the Labour Party ever learn? Government is hard. Opposition is easy. It isn't the media's fault, it isn't a conspiracy of the super rich, and it isn't anything to do with the character of white British people.

It is not us, it is you.

Wake up and smell the coffee already.

really? You think Starmer was worse than Johnson, Truss (!) and Sunak? You really think the media, and especially social media, have no part to play in this? You think the super rich, especially those who own the media, want a Labour government?

 

[Tetchytyke]

how a narrative that Starmer is the worst PM ever has been allowed to run is beyond me. It is preposterous nonsense. Burnham will be subject to the same agenda.

It is preposterous nonsense, but Starmer only has himself to blame for it.

Starmer's followed a policy of chasing the votes of people who won't ever vote for him at the expense of the people who actually did vote for him. He and Morgan McSweeney seemingly made the calculation that those on the left had nowhere else to go and so could be safely ignored.

The trouble is that playing on the fear of the Farage Bogeyman only works if you don't go around copying the policies of the Farage Bogeyman.

The consequence of all of that is that, once the brickbats started coming in- as any politician should have expected them to- he'd alienated his voter base so much that nobody at all wanted to support him. When the left held an anti-far-right counter-protest in Bristol called 'we hate Starmer more than you do', the writing was on the wall really.

This is where Burnham can bring in a clean slate and hopefully persuade the Green voters back into the fold. Burnham was able to motivate the left and centre-left into voting for him- only 300 people voted Green and only 160 voted LibDem. Keeping the left on side is where the next General Election is going to be won or lost, Labour are going to need everybody on side.

 

[SargeNpton]

it was also screamingly obvious that Gordon Brown, for all his achievements as Chancellor, was not suited to being PM and nobody stopped that either….

I didn't rate him as a chancellor either. The man who sold off half the country's gold reserves when the gold price was low, and the man who destroyed final salary pension schemes. His only redeeming decision was to keep the UK out of the Euro.

 

[Magrar]

For all those blaming social media, consder this.

A man stands at a podium, and with sincerity, emotion, anger, tells the working clases that for years, social media, American tech billionaires, have been making money off the back of how easy it is to make them angry by telling them lies, and it's time it stopped. It's time the government took action. It's time the British people had a say in how American owned tech companies behave in this country.

Which one of Burnham or Starmer do you think most suits such a speech?

Which one of them was probably too much of a coward or a flake or completely detached from the daily lives of "hard working families" to have even dared to consider even making such a speech, let alone making it a key plank of a wider, fixing broken Britain, policy agenda.

Starmer was an absolute joke of a Prime Minister. It's a scandal that we didn't learn about things like how weak and slow he was to act on stuff like preventing children sharing intimate images of themselves on social media, until we got to the point his own Ministers, who jad spent years in opposition banging on about issues exactly like that as a clear differentiator between Labour and Tory values, were deserting him in utter exasperation.

 

[DarloRich]

Starmer's followed a policy of chasing the votes of people who won't ever vote for him

So he and Labour shouldn't have tried to get the millions of former Labour voters who have gone Reform back? They shouldn't try to address why people in Darlington or Sunderland or Newcastle are flooding away from Labour.

You seem to think Labour should just tell these people they are wrong/evil and focus on every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England (as Orwell said)

You have got to try and get them back surely? OF COURSE some will be tempted back with more leftist policies. However, I would say most will be tempted back by "common sense" centre ground polices. That's tough on crime, tough on immigration, improving living standards, keeping inflation low, fair taxation and showing an improvement in public services. ( Cynically: at least giving the appearance of this!)

Which one of them was probably too much of a coward or a flake or completely detached from the daily lives of "hard working families" to have even dared to consider even making such a speech, let alone making it a key plank of a wider, fixing broken Britain, policy agenda.

Starmer was an absolute joke of a Prime Minister.

possibly a slightly one eyed statement!

 

[Tetchytyke]

The man who sold off half the country's gold reserves when the gold price was low

He did that to bail out Goldman Sachs.

Revealed: why Gordon Brown sold Britain's gold at a knock-down price – Telegraph Blogs

A great deal of Gordon Brown’s economic strategy would strike a sane man as troubling. Not a great deal was mysterious. The orgy of consumption spending, frequent extensions of the cycle over which he would “borrow to invest”, proclamations of the “end of boom and bust”: these are part of the...

web.archive.org

t seemed almost as if the Treasury was trying to achieve the lowest price possible for the public’s gold. It was.

One of the most popular trading plays of the late 1990s was the carry trade, particularly the gold carry trade.

In this a bank would borrow gold from another financial institution for a set period, and pay a token sum relative to the overall value of that gold for the privilege.

Once control of the gold had been passed over, the bank would then immediately sell it for its full market value. The proceeds would be invested in an alternative product which was predicted to generate a better return over the period than gold which was enduring a spell of relative price stability, even decline.

At the end of the allotted period, the bank would sell its investment and use the proceeds to buy back the amount of gold it had originally borrowed. This gold would be returned to the lender. The borrowing bank would trouser the difference between the two prices.

This plan worked brilliantly when gold fell and the other asset – for the bank at the heart of this case, yen-backed securities – rose. When the prices moved the other way, the banks were in trouble.

This is what had happened on an enormous scale by early 1999. One globally significant US bank in particular is understood to have been heavily short on two tonnes of gold, enough to call into question its solvency if redemption occurred at the prevailing price.

Goldman Sachs, which is not understood to have been significantly short on gold itself, is rumoured to have approached the Treasury to explain the situation through its then head of commodities Gavyn Davies, later chairman of the BBC and married to Sue Nye who ran Brown’s private office.

Faced with the prospect of a global collapse in the banking system, the Chancellor took the decision to bail out the banks by dumping Britain’s gold, forcing the price down and allowing the banks to buy back gold at a profit, thus meeting their borrowing obligations.

Sadly he didn't learn the lesson and bailed the bankers out again just a few years later. Our reward for our largesse to our financier friends has been fifteen years of stagnant wage growth.

 

[Magrar]

really? You think Starmer was worse than Johnson, Truss (!) and Sunak? You really think the media, and especially social media, have no part to play in this? You think the super rich, especially those who own the media, want a Labour government?

On day one of his term, Starmer chose to talk (gloat!) about Labour's stopping small boat policy, not Labour's stopping social media disinformation about small boats policy.

So on day 1, he already proved he was not smarter than Boris, was not more relateable than Rishi, and would (as we have seen) be as effective in meeting the promises he delivered on that day about small boats, as a lettuce would have.

On day 1 he proved that if the super rich owners of media and social media really are intent in denying the British public a Labour government, they really don't have to try very hard at all. Not when the Labour Party itself, willingly chose such a poor leader to be their first Prime Minister in 14 years.

 

[johntea]

Wes Streeting has just backed Andy Burnham so I guess that'll mean no leadership contest requirement

 

[DarloRich]

Sadly he didn't learn the lesson and bailed the bankers out again just a few years later. Our reward for our largesse to our financier friends has been fifteen years of stagnant wage growth.

I am not trying to be argumentative ( honestly!) but the risk side of that equation was another wall street crashesque depression, high street bank failure and loss of personal savings, investments and financial standing. I think that was best avoided.

Now, happy to agree the bankers should have been strung up by their bonuses for what happened and letting them off was a massive own goal!

On day one of his term, Starmer chose to talk (gloat!) about Labour's stopping small boat policy, not Labour's stopping social media disinformation about small boats policy.

So on day 1, he already proved he was not smarter than Boris, was not more relateable than Rishi, and would (as we have seen) be as effective in meeting the promises he delivered on that day about small boats, as a lettuce would have.

On day 1 he proved that if the super rich owners of media and social media really are intent in denying the British public a Labour government, they really don't have to try very hard at all. Not when the Labour Party itself, willingly chose such a poor leader to be their first Prime Minister in 14 years.

you have lost me. Sorry. Are you saying that the number one priority of the incoming labour government should have been social media regulation?

 

[Bantamzen]

Starmer is largely competent but has been dragged into a desire to be popular despite this not being necessary this early in a Parliament. He could and should have stuck to his guns on stuff like taxation as there is plenty of time until the next General Election for him to prove he was right (or otherwise). Otherwise he lacks charisma a bit like John Major (who was also competent, bar the rail privatisation decision). Burnham has charisma, almost the "man you'd have a pint with in the pub" as Farage pushes, so he may do better but his policies are in practice unlikely to be wildly different.

I'd agree with this. If Farage was not around on the scene, then perhaps Labour could have got away with Starmer being leader for the full term. But frankly his optics are just weak, he can make Farage seem (emphasis on seem here) competent & in touch with people's concerns, which I think gave Reform at least some momentum. Burnham, assuming he launches a successful leadership campaign is just more confident, and probably a little more likely to stick to his guns than Starmer. It shouldn't be the primary reason for selecting a leader, but these are the times we live in, where the leadership contests are as much about personality and visibility than policies. If Burnham is successful in holding off Farage by the end of this term, then I predict Farage will slink off or be chased off by Reform, and perhaps politics can get back to the boring stuff around form policies & legislation.

 

[DarloRich]

Wes Streeting has just backed Andy Burnham so I guess that'll mean no leadership contest requirement

Streeting wont win a contest with labour members so will have done a deal with Burnham for a decent position in the new administration. ( plus his majority is wafer thin)

 

[SuspectUsual]

Wes Streeting has just backed Andy Burnham so I guess that'll mean no leadership contest requirement

Shades of Blair and Brown’s dinner at Granita here?

 

[JamesT]

Wes Streeting has just backed Andy Burnham so I guess that'll mean no leadership contest requirement

I think Labour Party rules mean they will have to at least start the contest process. But if nobody else gets nominated then it would end early in the same way Brown succeeded Blair.

 

[Tetchytyke]

So he and Labour shouldn't have tried to get the millions of former Labour voters who have gone Reform back? They shouldn't try to address why people in Darlington or Sunderland or Newcastle are flooding away from Labour.

Not Newcastle. Newcastle is economically successful and has remained Labour, even despite Labour's best efforts in ostracising Jamie Driscoll.

But a lot of them are too far gone, to be quite honest. The people of Bishop Auckland, which is 98% white, do seemingly genuinely believe that their town is being overrun by migrants. What can you do with that? They are wrong.

These people seemingly now care more about their socially-conservative culture war issues than they do about the economy. That's why Reform try as much as possible to keep the political debate on the culture war issues rather than on basic economic competence.

Labour's fundamental issue is that they have tried to take on Reform in Reform's playground. Whatever Labour offer, Reform will offer more. Labour will round up immigrants, Reform will round up immigrants and move them all to Brighton. Labour will remove the right for refugees to permanently settle here, Reform just won't let them in at all. Labour have tried to portray trans people as dangerous sexual deviants, Reform agree but then suggest that we should just do away with all of this rainbow flag crap and you also better watch your back when the gays are around, you know what those woofters are like.

Labour have achieved success in reducing the small boats arrivals, last winter there was a period of about two months with no arrivals at all- and that wasn't just weather-related, either. But Reform voters don't see that as success, they see that as failure. Reform wouldn't be happy with reduction, Reform say they'd be out torpedoeing dinghies and machine-gunning the survivors.

But yes, if you chase after Reform voters by offering pub covers band Reform then don't be surprised if "every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England" goes and votes for someone else. Don't be surprised when those lost votes are the difference between you winning and losing, as we saw in Runcorn and as we saw in Gorton and Denton. And don't be surprised that those people will be just as glad to see the back of you.

 

[brad465]

Wes Streeting has just backed Andy Burnham so I guess that'll mean no leadership contest requirement

I think Labour Party rules mean they will have to at least start the contest process. But if nobody else gets nominated then it would end early in the same way Brown succeeded Blair.

Nominations open on the 9th July and close on the 16th July. If Burnham is the only one, and the timetable doesn't change, Burnham will take over on the 16th. I imagine Starmer has got his way on attending the EU summit among a couple of other things (although I don't think the date has been confirmed for the summit yet).

 

[Magrar]

This is what's so crazy about the Labour Party.

Their and Andy's best move right now would be to call a general election today. Farage is clearly on the back foot, but it's not likely to be for long. Now is the time to capitalise on Andy being seen to be able to beat Reform, without having yet potentially shown anyone he might be a complete dud who wilts under the pressure of being PM just like Starmer did.

But no, their internal rules lock them into a situation where there will be an even longer delay than there would by having an election, for an outcome that will be more damaging to Labour, since Andy the PM will be forever dogged by the accusation he's just yet another career politician who schemed and plotted his way to power, is afraid of the voters, and he will only have 3 years to prove he is not that man.