After Keir Starmer, things could only get better inside Labour. But Andy Burnham’s arrival as party leader and prime minister didn’t just clear that low bar. It was a cause for hope, especially for those of us in the trade union movement. That’s less because Burnham is streets ahead of his predecessor as a politician – although he is – and more about just how radically the new prime minister has framed his project for the country.
I’ve been active in the labour movement for almost four decades. In that time, I cannot count how many times I’ve heard talk of reversing the devastation wreaked by Margaret Thatcher. For socialists and grassroots trade union activists, this kind of political thinking is bread and butter. But not so much for a Labour prime minister.
Tony Blair, between torching the Middle East and taking a hammer to our civil liberties, infamously came to build upon Thatcher’s legacy rather than bury it. Gordon Brown and Starmer were more set against the Thatcherite fracturing of our society than Blair. But they both continued to inhabit the political cage she built: the idea that there is no alternative.
Before now, the only major party leader ideologically opposed to neoliberalism in a remotely serious way was Jeremy Corbyn, who drew up a programme that would have started to undo the rule of the market. But it wasn’t to be. So in beginning his premiership by insisting that there is, in fact, an alternative way of organising our economy and society to the neoliberal one, Burnham marked a historic shift.
This kind of talk isn’t cheap. How the prime minister has articulated his vision really matters, both because it has challenged the assumptions that have shaped our politics for decades and because the analysis is fundamentally correct. Virtually every aspect of this country’s malaise, as Burnham powerfully explained to Kemi Badenoch, can be traced back to the “wrong turns” taken in the 1980s.
But the flip side for Burnham is that his diagnosis doesn’t leave any doubt about what Labour must do in government. To measure up to his own ambitions, the party will have to implement changes to the structure of our economy unseen since the immediate postwar period. At a minimum, that means bringing sectors into public ownership and investing on a huge scale to rebuild a social fabric – our public services, infrastructure and collective life – that has been shredded.
Many of the Burnham government’s measures so far have been welcome. Banking quick wins that don’t require wrangling with the Treasury but signal you are on the side of the people was a sensible approach for the early days. Labour’s steady improvement in the polls reflects that. But four decades of neoliberalism won’t be ended through Google Maps updates of petrol prices, or even with measures to provide breathing room in the face of the cost of living crisis.
Following up a bold, historical diagnosis with piecemeal measures just isn’t politically sustainable. From US wars to the climate crisis, the factors making essentials ever more unaffordable are out of control. Without the radical action the prime minister has called for, then, the lives of our people and communities are going to keep getting worse, rapidly. And the stakes remain high: it’s the far right that will benefit if this project fails.
So the budget must be the moment that the prime minister’s programme starts to match his rhetoric. Unison is clear about that, and so are my colleagues across the trade union movement. We’re not expecting neoliberalism to have melted away by the time John Healey finishes reading out his statement. But we are demanding serious measures that actually begin to improve workers’ lives.
We expect a big, multiyear funding plan to restore investment and wages in our public services – alongside kicking profiteering vultures out of the public sector through bringing services back in-house. These measures should be funded by finally making the wealthy few pay their fair share of tax. It’s imperative that the prime minister and chancellor defy pressure from the business lobby and the rightwing media to reject changes such as equalising income and capital gains tax.
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The decades-long political settlement the prime minister has rightly defined himself against might have impoverished the vast majority, but there were some winners. And those who have profited handsomely from neoliberalism will fight tooth and nail against any attempt to actually break with it.
So, if the prime minister sticks with his historic ambition to remake Britain in the interests of the working class, it won’t be easy. But the trade union movement will be by his side. There’s no dodging a battle with the vested interests committed to keeping things as they are – and the budget is the place to begin.
