Why the Press Needs Burnham to Fail

Five commentators, writing in four papers, disagree on almost everything about Britain’s new prime minister. What they agree on, without ever saying so, is that his failure has already been decided

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Five writers want Andy Burnham to fail. It is not the same argument made five times over. Each of them needs his failure to mean something different.

Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times is the clearest. He needs Burnham to be sincere, a “true believer in tax-and-spend paternalism.” Why? Because only a sincere Burnham can fail in a way that discredits the politics rather than the politician. Bad government has to be “tested to destruction,” he argues. Only then will voters accept the alternative. We have seen all this before, of course: Thatcher and Reagan after the 1970s, Hawke and Keating, Mitterrand’s 1983 U-turn. And where did it take us? Market liberalisation, every time. Ganesh presents this as the rhythm history takes. In reality it is a carefully selected sample. He knows this, and later apologises for how “mechanical” and “Hegelian” his argument sounds. Not that this stops him.

Allister Heath in the Telegraph dispenses with that hesitation altogether. He can smell the reds under the bed. His Burnham is a Jekyll and Hyde: on one side the business-friendly prime minister, cautious and in tune with the markets, on the other the socialist, “currently repressed” but waiting to be “fully uncaged.” A bus fare cap today, a mansion tax tomorrow. As night follows day. Heath has Burnham all worked out, and nothing Burnham does will convince him otherwise.

Jeremy Warner, also writing in the Telegraph, is not playing that game. Here are facts rather than vibes. His piece has actual research behind it, Broadberry and Leunig’s verdict on decades of failed industrial policy, and it is not looking good for Burnham’s reindustrialisation plans. Warner also cites a National Audit Office estimate of the cost of keeping the renationalised Scunthorpe steelworks running to 2028: over half a million pounds per job saved. That is a genuine problem for any government promising a return to heavy industry.

But Warner treats the money itself as the constraint, as though Britain simply ran dry, when what actually happened is forty years of decisions about where the money sits and who gets to keep it. His own figures give this away without him noticing. Manufacturing’s collapse as a share of GDP, the numbers laid out plainly, and then straight to productivity and international competitiveness, never to who gained from the shift into services and finance. The research he leans on is solid. Which makes it stranger that he never asks the obvious next question.

After the Telegraph, it is a relief to pick up The Times, always subtler in its thinking. Daniel Finkelstein makes the most effective argument of the four. For a start, he does not deny the neoliberal settlement. Better to embrace it. He has Blair and Brown up his sleeve, both travelling to Washington, breathing in the language of the New Democrats and Reinventing Government, and returning with the secret sauce: good government steers, it does not row. Finkelstein can now argue that Burnham is rejecting the most electorally successful settlement Labour ever built. That may be partly true, but it is worth remembering the same settlement delivered PFI, stagnant wages and Iraq. Its most poisonous legacy, I would argue, is the identity Labour still has not recovered. New Labour “self-confidently shaped the consensus,” Finkelstein writes. He never asks what that consensus cost the people who had no say in shaping it.

Ethan Croft does something different in the New Statesman choosing to report on the new Labour chancellor rather than comment. The interesting point is not Healey’s personality. It is that a cut in VAT on energy had already been settled before the incoming Chancellor knew he would be Chancellor. And however slapdash the last few days have seen, much of the summer programme had been written before the Cabinet even existed. Whatever Burnham intends to do, No. 10 has already built an economic operation that does not entirely trust the Treasury to police itself. That tells us more than another column about hidden reds under a bed.

For all their differences over Burnham, the four opinion pieces, each share the same blind spot. They do not treat the past forty years as a political settlement that produced winners as well as lots of losers. Debt, deficits and the collapse of manufacturing are presented as if the figures speak for themselves. They do not. Someone benefited from the way the economy was remade, and someone else paid for it.

None of the four asks why the deficit is concentrated outside London and the South East, or why the tax burden fell where it did. The figures appear, and the questions about who gained and who lost quietly disappear.

That is the real consensus on display. Burnham will fail, they all agree on that much. What they cannot agree to entertain is that the last forty years failed first. So Burnham becomes the test case, not for what he has done, but for what his success would say about the settlement that came before him

* Copy edited using Claude.

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Thanks for reading Anti-Capitalist Musings. It is a small operation, and I hope it offers something worth your time. There will be no premium subscriber content here: everything published will remain free to read. If you value these pieces and want to support the writing, buying me a coffee helps fund media subscriptions and the books that keep the analysis grounded. Every contribution, however modest, is genuinely appreciated.