The Torture Chamber of British Politics Crushes Its Latest Prime Minister

At the time, the metaphor seemed to work because of the particular dilemmas posed by Brexit. Now it holds for other reasons, too. For the past decade, the British economy has flatlined, while its population has become older, sicker, and no more productive. Any Prime Minister, whatever their personal gifts or inclinations, must contend with the fact that more than half of government spending—some six hundred billion pounds a year—is now allotted to three line items: the National Health Service, welfare spending, and debt repayment. All of these are growing in absolute and relative terms, and together they eat away at other opportunities for the state. Brexit permanently diminished the U.K.’s position in international affairs, and the country has yet to find a comfortable home either outside of or reattached, in some fashion, to the E.U. No one likes any of this. The bond markets hate it. The public is fed up. The Prime Minister is blamed.

Starmer endured his two-year confinement in Little Ease with caution and stoicism, acting as though, if he stayed still, one day the walls would expand again of their own accord. With this approach, he was not dissimilar to May or Sunak, two other basically sensible Prime Ministers who also scaled down their plans in order to survive. (To live in the U.K. is to live in a country that is always scaling down its plans.) Johnson pretended that he wasn’t a prisoner at all; Truss tried to blow up the Tower of London.

The next Prime Minister will likely be Andy Burnham, the fifty-six-year-old, recently departed mayor of Manchester. Shortly before Starmer announced his resignation, on Monday morning, Burnham boarded a train to London to be sworn in as the new Member of Parliament for Makerfield, a seat just outside of the city, and one which he won comfortably in an election last week. Burnham was a young Cabinet minister in Gordon Brown’s Labour government, some nineteen years ago, but he has benefitted from his years away from Westminster, and from Manchester’s feel-good vibes and relative prosperity under his leadership, an approach now known as “Manchesterism.”

Burnham has natural political advantages that Starmer never enjoyed; he comes across as relaxed and comfortable in his own skin. He has a northern hinterland rather than a North London one, which made Starmer seem metropolitan and out of touch. Since becoming Starmer’s most likely successor, Burnham has been careful not to say too much, which is understandable. But this means that he has already chosen not to challenge some of the constraints that will soon bind him. In Makerfield, which voted for Brexit in 2src16 and where Reform U.K. won the recent local elections, Burnham confirmed that he would not seek to lead Britain back into the E.U. And whereas, as mayor of Manchester, Burnham was willing to suggest that the country needed to get “beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets” by borrowing more, to invest in the economy, he has since agreed to follow the same fiscal rules as Starmer’s government did.

On Monday morning, before Starmer’s resignation and Burnham’s arrival in London, Mainstream, a Labour think tank that is reportedly close to Burnham’s team, published “The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism,” a sixty-nine-page policy essay, describing a long-term program to increase public ownership of housing and utilities such as water and energy. It is the kind of aspirational, center-left vision that Starmer would have once endorsed. We won’t have to wait long to discover how much Manchesterism Burnham actually wants, or is able, to put into practice. In his resignation speech, Starmer suggested that the next leader of the Labour Party—the Prime Minister—should be in office by September. Less than an hour later, Wes Streeting, Burnham’s only real rival for the position, said that he would support Burnham instead. Any leadership contest is likely to be a formality. The chamber awaits. ♦