Ask a straight question, get a straight answer. It’s how politics is supposed to work but almost never does, which is why on the rare occasions it happens the result can be faintly chaotic. What did Andy Burnham mean when he said – in response to a question from the Tory MP Harriett Baldwin – that Labour couldn’t partner with the Green party while it remains wedded to the “Zionism is racism” motion its members have just endorsed? Were Green MPs now barred from a future coalition government? If so, what about councils where they are currently sharing power with Labour?
Though Burnham was only confirming what ministers have been arguing privately for days, at first nobody seemed to know: tellingly, it took almost 24 hours for the Labour party chair, Bridget Phillipson, to confirm that unless local Green groups disowned that idea sharpish, “Labour will bring any such local arrangement to an end”. So much for cuddly cross-party Andy, who always seemed so relaxed about rainbow coalitions. Now elected Greens in places such as Sheffield or Lewes must choose between power and members’ wrath, a useful rehearsal for what a hung parliament might feel like.
Westminster is increasingly realising that while nobody knows quite what’s in Burnham’s head except Burnham, unlike most prime ministers he is surprisingly liable just to tell you. He did it earlier this week on a podcast, pointing out that Russia tried to interfere in the Brexit vote (which is true, albeit the sort of truth that for complicated reasons prime ministers don’t generally dwell on). Now the safety catch is off again.
What did he mean with his comments about Labour and the Greens? Most likely just what he said: that the Greens crossed a line and it cannot be overlooked, especially by a party still recovering from its own battle with antisemitism. Green members did not just vote to adopt a policy that would condemn every Jew who believes in the right to a Jewish homeland, including those who simultaneously support the creation of a Palestinian state. The motion they backed advocates turning all of historic Palestine into a Palestinian state, a one-state solution wiping Israel off the map. Much as Kemi Badenoch did recently by insisting that her English-born children have every right to be considered English, no matter what the ethno-nationalists of Reform and Restore say, Burnham was simply showing that he has limits: this far, and no further.
Something has shaken loose over the party conference season. What we are seeing isn’t the return of two-party politics – things are still too volatile for that – but the return of leaders confident enough to set boundaries on what had become an almost abusive relationship with the public. They are no longer quite so terrified of naming extremism when they see it. More surprisingly, neither is behaving like a party needing to beg for coalition partners, whatever the electoral maths says.
After a period shadow boxing a prime minister who never seemed to know what he thought, Badenoch now faces one who does. That has brought drama back to the middle of politics and not just the radical edges, with genuine differences emerging between Labour and the Tories ahead of the budget over tax and spend, national security v social security, public v private ownership and the respective claims of younger and older people.
Her new strategy is not a million miles from the one outlined this week by the thinktank Bright Blue, in a paper on how the traditional European right can combat far-right populism: adopt draconian immigration policies but make the economy the actual focus of your campaign, and hold the line that citizenship can be earned rather than being determined by ethnicity (the chilling line peddled by some of those in Reform and Restore who argue openly that you have to be white to be properly English).
Though the polls still suggest the Tories can’t win without some kind of deal with Reform, the broad message of a conference speech in which Badenoch painted her rivals as aggressive weirdos who “threaten journalists, call veterans traitors and debate whether my mixed-race children are English” was that it would be a cold day in hell before that happened. That decision looks smarter with every passing journalistic exposé involving the kind of Reform councillor who thinks King Charles should be decapitated for supposedly being a secret Muslim.
Burnham didn’t go quite so studs-up on the Greens, but then he doesn’t need to. The party is already openly agonising about that anti-Zionism motion, opposed by four out of five of its elected MPs. The prospect of being politically ostracised for it may now strengthen the hand of Greens who think this freakishly hot summer might have been better spent campaigning on the climate crisis, not swerving questions about Israel’s right to exist. Yet there are risks for Burnham here, all the same.
Research by the pollster More in Common suggests that “progressive activists”, the group most commonly torn between voting Green or Labour, are significantly more likely than the average British voter to think worse of someone identifying as a Zionist. When Burnham called the Green motion antisemitic and wrong, he was confronting people whose support he may need in some Labour seats.
after newsletter promotion
Sanctioning West Bank settlements, as this government has now done, isn’t enough for some of them: they want Burnham explicitly to call the Gaza war a genocide and stop proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. (Polanski was notably quick to leap to the defence of the Irish novelist Sally Rooney, after it emerged her books are being withdrawn from sale in Britain because of her promise to donate royalties to Palestine Action: knowing where the money could be going leaves her publishers open to potential prosecution under anti-terrorism law, just for handing over her earnings.)
It’s technically possible that like some desiccated calculating machine, Burnham has crunched the numbers on all this and concluded that distancing himself from a row that has reportedly made one in three British voters less likely to vote Green (according to Opinium) is mathematically preferable.
But it’s more likely he was just doing the thing that got him here in the first place, and following his gut. If he can’t say what he thinks even now, in what passes for a honeymoon period, he never will. If basic norms are not enforced, they very quickly cease being norms. And if the Labour party can only win by sidling uncomfortably close to the kind of people it was until recently expelling for antisemitism – well, it’s not much of a Labour party. The chaos, in that sense, is probably just beginning.
-
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
-
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
