Four days after Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election, Keir Starmer resigned as prime minister. Four days after that, his office posted a job ad for a caseworker, with a closing date of 12 July. The successful candidate was to begin their new role on 14 September: one week today.
So my question is – when, exactly, did Starmer decide to abandon his newly hired staffer, not to mention the voters of Holborn & St Pancras, and instead quit the Commons as quickly as possible? Did he wake up on the first day of the autumn session of parliament, and realise it was simply too painful for him to continue attending the site of his greatest humiliation? Or did he just spot an opportunity to get his own back on the man who’d humiliated him?
If he’s stiffed that poor not-quite-staffer, after all, that might be nothing compared to what he’s done to Burnham. Through a flurry of announcements and much improved comms – helped on by Nigel Farage going around stepping on rakes in the manner of Sideshow Bob – the new Prime Minister managed to haul Labour into first place, and change the narrative of British politics. But as fiscal reality asserts itself, it might soon become clear that the narrative is really the main thing that’s changed. The last thing the Prime Minister needs right now is to lose a by-election to the Greens’ Zack Polanski in a Labour heartland.
This is not, admittedly, the most likely outcome. According to Britain Predicts’ Ben Walker, even in May’s catastrophic local elections, Labour was several points clear of the Greens in the seat, and that was before it switched leaders. On the other hand, Starmer’s seat is inconveniently located in central London, and if there’s one bit of Labour Britain that might prove immune to Burnham’s charms it’s surely there.
Problem number one is branding. The Prime Minister built his reputation as the king of the north by passionately arguing that decent, hardworking northerners were getting a raw deal from a decadent capitalism. There’s more than a little truth to that – on some measures, the north of England has fallen behind East Germany, despite never having experienced communism, only Margaret Thatcher. Nonetheless, this is not a message calculated to appeal to the nine million people who live in that capital.
Burnham, to give him his due, is clearly aware of this risk. In a speech over the summer he went out of his way to praise London as the greatest capital city in the world. On Friday, Time Out broke the internet by reporting the PM’s three favourite pubs in the capital: a Sam Smith’s just up the road from Westminster, a defunct Wetherspoons in Zone 4 he’d once been to after the football, and the Dog House in Kennington which, fair play, is actually good; all safe choices which aren’t going to frighten anyone off by being too interesting and which double as reminders, if any were needed, that Burnham hasn’t lived in the capital for ages. All these things are clearly supposed to communicate that arguing the rest of the country has had a raw deal is not an inherently anti-London stance.
But problem number two is the actual policy options for fixing this. It’s not clear yet what Burnham means with his claim, to the Standard, that he didn’t want to limit London but to set it free to “go further and faster”. But the uncomfortable truth is that – as geographically unequal as our current economic settlement feels, and as much as London benefited from disproportionate investment in the past – the capital currently provides a disproportionate share of the nation’s tax revenues, and is thus subsidising everybody else.
If Burnham has found a way through which he can set London free and more equitably distribute cash at the same time, then that would be incredible, in roughly the same way inventing a perpetual motion machine would be. But if he hasn’t, then a more equal settlement necessarily requires giving London a worse deal, and this could offer his opponents an easily exploited source of resentment: witness the claim, from prospective Tory mayoral candidate James Cleverly, that the government was “stripping hundreds of millions of pounds out of the budget of London councils”.
And then there’s the third problem – which is that, despite the understandable assumption that the money must be going somewhere, London is not in a brilliant state either. Two bridges are closed to motor traffic, while others have restrictions in place, with no obvious plan to fix most of them. Multiple transport projects have been cancelled due to lack of funds. And over a quarter of Londoners are living in poverty, thanks largely to insane housing costs. Throw in Labour’s continuing desire to genuflect to social conservatives and those who fret about immigration, and a demand that the proudly diverse and progressive capital shut up about its values and share the wealth is not an obvious vote winner.
Perhaps none of this is a problem. Perhaps Labour will comfortably win in Holborn & St Pancras, cutting Polanski off at the knees, showing Burnham can see off threats from left as well as right, demonstrating that Manchesterism can find support in London too. All that is possible.
But Labour lost first Scotland, then the industrial “red wall”, by assuming that they were heartlands for which it didn’t need to fight. The party still holds 59 of the capital’s 75 Commons seats. Last May it lost one of London councils to the Tories, three to the Greens and more than half its councillors. Perhaps it’ll be fine. But I can’t help but think Burham might have wanted to wait a little longer before needing to pass this particular test.
[Further reading: Reform conference: scandal rains on Farage’s parade]
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Subscribe here to commentThe problem of London is that of the great wealth divide. Before I went to university I worked for three years in the City and was appalled by the differences in salaries. Many partners in the many Stock Brokers and Bankers were being awarded £1 million in bonuses and dividends while I was expected to live on £500 a year. That was in the 1960’s but I expect the same is happening today. Also, most of these executives do not pay PAYE and have these monies for up to nine months after the end of the tax year. One of them I knew indirectly as he was the son of my dentist and an executive in a bank and bought a house in London every year with his bonus. I doubt if Andy Burnham has any plans to make these people pay PAYE but Zack Polanski will have such plans. Zack is required as a means of keeping Labours feet to the fire and attempt to get some equity into the tax treatment of all workers, including those whose bonus’s enable them to but a London property every year.