A Turn to the Left in Britain?

[Celerity]

Today on TAP: Even if progressive Andy Burnham becomes the next British prime minister, will global hyper-capitalism allow him to succeed?

https://prospect.org/2026/05/18/turn-to-the-left-britain-labour-prime-minister-andy-burnham/


Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham delivers the keynote speech at a Centre for Cities event at the British Library in Central London, March 4, 2026. Credit: Jonathan Brady/Press Association via AP Images

After the governing Labour Party’s catastrophic losses in recent local elections, the dam has burst and several major party leaders have called for the resignation of the feckless prime minister, Keir Starmer. The only question is whether Starmer will agree to an orderly transition or will have the added humiliation of being the first Labour prime minister to be voted out by his own party. In the local elections, Labour lost a record 1,498 municipal seats, while the far-right Reform party, under Nigel Farage, with virtually no experience governing and only eight MPs in Parliament, gained just over 1,400. The Reform party has become the prime instrument of British voter grievances, despite massive cognitive dissonance. It was Farage more than anyone else who promoted British exit from the European Union, yet Britain left the EU in 2020 and since then the economic circumstances of the people who voted for Reform only got worse.

It’s tempting to invoke Tolstoy. Happy center-left parties are all alike. Each unhappy center-left party is unhappy in its own way. Except that today there are no happy center-left parties. And while the collapse of the center-left in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and even Scandinavia displays national variations in the details, there is a common through line. For at least a generation, working people have suffered downward mobility, exacerbated by neoliberalism and symbolized by the cosmopolitanism of the center-left. Most social democrat and labor parties are simply no longer credible champions of working people, economically or culturally. (The only partial exception is Spain, where Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists are doing well with a minority government.)

In some cases, like Britain, a dismal leader like Starmer only makes things worse. Not only is he a leaden speaker, but the essence of his program is to appease capital rather than to promote a growth program that would benefit working people. In those circumstances, the plain contradictions of a Farage (or a Trump) are forgiven. Angry voters want an avenging angel, the more destructive the better. The few exceptions to this sad saga are leaders who demonstrate the power of a politics and a narrative of restraining the excesses of capitalism and fighting to deliver practical gains for ordinary people. One such leader is Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York. Another is Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, who is likely to be Britain’s next Labour leader and British prime minister.

In his nearly ten years as a popular mayor of Manchester, winning re-election twice with around two-thirds of the vote, Burnham has presided over an economic renaissance rare for Britain’s depressed north, emphasizing economic development, jobs, housing, and public transport. While other northern cities are mired in slow growth and out-migration, Manchester has been growing at an annual rate of 3.1 percent, more than double that of Britain as a whole. Center-city Manchester, with virtually no residents in 2010 (the census showed 300—not a typo), now has over 100,000. Burnham enjoyed some tailwinds coming in, including the fact that the Greater Manchester city government was a poster child for municipal devolution, which gave greater fiscal power and autonomy to regional governments headed by newly empowered mayors, beginning in 2011. However, Burnham is widely credited with combining economic development strategies friendly to business with a healthy dose of municipal socialism. He proposes to bring the same approach to Britain.

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