Well, this was heavily rumoured over the weekend, and it looks like he has effectively been forced out as all support from his MPs and cabinet has collapsed. For context, this means he will also...
Well, this was heavily rumoured over the weekend, and it looks like he has effectively been forced out as all support from his MPs and cabinet has collapsed.
For context, this means he will also be stepping down as Prime Minister in due course (i.e. once the party has selected a replacement). It looks likely that there won't be a genuine contest to replace him from within Labour, instead it seems the party will allow Andy Burnham to run uncontested. In all likelihood Andy Burnham will be UK PM by September.
If you're unfamiliar with the UK system, there is no requirement for an election in the case that the PM stands down, as technically speaking they are elected by parliament, not the people directly. In practice this means that the largest party installs the PM, with Labour currently commanding a huge parliamentary majority. Therefore it is an internal Labour Party mechanism that will decide on the next leader and PM.
There is one timeline that many people see as likely: the new PM (almost certainly Burnham) is installed in about two months. The government/Labour enjoys a brief honeymoon period with the people...
There is one timeline that many people see as likely: the new PM (almost certainly Burnham) is installed in about two months. The government/Labour enjoys a brief honeymoon period with the people and the press as people feel optimistic that the country might be turned around. However, continuing economic pressure and deep-set issues within the country mean that over the next ~2 years people do not feel a meaningful improvement in their lives and financial situations, as well as experiencing continuing cultural unrest despite the government touting progress on important economic and social issues. Support for Labour gradually wanes to levels similar to current by the time a general election rolls around in 2029, and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party (our MAGA equivalent) performs well (extremely hard to speculate whether it’s feasible for them to achieve a majority, but they could still wield a lot of power as a large minority party). If we get to that point, it’s fair to say Britain would be in for a similar prolonged spell of far-right agitation, cultural unrest, economic turmoil and broadly “bad situation” that we currently see in the US.
The reason a lot of people, myself included, see this timeline as realistic, is that despite the present government having made credible progress on a number of important issues in this country, it seems that the populace at large finds the pace of this change too slow; but it does not seem plausible that any other leader/government could bring about change much faster, because the country’s finances are so constrained due to a prolonged period of economic decline. Now, that is not to say that the current government has not made several, major mistakes. So it really depends on your view of just why the current government / Keir Starmer are so unpopular: if it is fundamentally due to the dire economic circumstances the country finds itself in, then this problem is not fixable in the short term, and the snake-oil salesmen of Reform can continue to have a field day proposing non-solutions that appeal to a certain part of the population but would leave the country worse off long term. However, if the more important factor in Starmer’s collapse in popularity is his numerous policy u-turns and scandals*, perhaps a different leader could fair better.
*but note that the UK news media is notoriously hostile to Labour, and it’s unclear the extent to which any leader could avoid the negative news vortex.
The UK economy never truly recovered from the ‘08 financial crisis - we’ve just been compounding economic problems since then. In 2010, the Labour government which oversaw the crisis was ousted by...
Exemplary
The UK economy never truly recovered from the ‘08 financial crisis - we’ve just been compounding economic problems since then. In 2010, the Labour government which oversaw the crisis was ousted by the Conservative Party, which adhered to an economic policy called “austerity” until 2019. Austerity meant: the government is broke, so we’re going to try to spend as little as possible so we can get back to a level footing. There are two big problems with austerity: one is that government spending helps to stimulate the economy, so the economy is not as active during this period as it could be; two is that whatever savings made during austerity were pissed away on a series of frivolous policies (the list is endless but HS2, Brexit, and dodgy COVID contracts come to mind), completely defeating the point.
So, economic growth is already suppressed - on top of that we vote for Brexit, which comes into effect in 2020, massively dampening trade with our closest partners, plus the effect is even worse than it could have been because it’s handled so badly that it causes huge confusion and uncertainty.
I would actually say that COVID itself, whilst it has a noticeable short term impact, doesn’t particularly leave the UK worse off than anywhere else. So let’s keep moving. The UK is in a pretty weak financial position when Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine shocks the global economy, and fares worse than most - this is also when we start to hear about a “cost of living crisis”, due to a combination of general inflation as well as particularly severe increases in energy bills hitting the general population. This also has a severe effect on businesses, plus the knock on effect of households on tight budgets spending less, again dampening growth.
In the wake of COVID, the then-prime minister Boris Johnson is forced to resign due to a scandal - what follows is the shortest and most damaging premiership the country has ever seen. Liz Truss is prime minister for only 49 days - and the reason it’s so short is her completely disastrous economic policy.
Shortly after taking office, Truss (and her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng) announce the infamous “mini-budget”, containing £45 billion in tax cuts funded exclusively by additional borrowing. The financial markets are thrown into turmoil by the insanity of this economic policy, the pound collapses and mortgage rates skyrocket. Weakened confidence in the UK economy also means higher interest on debt for the government, and this remains stubbornly high, and exceptionally sensitive to any policy announcements, long after Liz Truss is forced out for her catastrophic decision making.
After this, management of the UK economy turns a corner somewhat - PM Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt keep things fairly sensible for the remainder of the Conservative’s run in parliament, until the 2024 general election, in which Labour win, led by Starmer who brings in Rachel Reeves as chancellor. They continue to run a pretty sensible and fairly fiscally conservative economic policy - they have their work cut out just trying to balance Britain’s books, let alone trying to improve growth. But USA tariffs and the Iran war mean, in the two years since then, although we haven’t been actively declining, things haven’t got much better either. It’s still extremely difficult for the UK - we have very little financial headroom for extra spending on crucial public services (which are suffering from over a decade of underfunding), businesses are hiring less due to economic uncertainty and AI, and this means people have less to spend. It’s all a vicious cycle, and problem and crisis I’ve mentioned has compounded with the next, to leave the Treasury coffers empty, businesses stagnating, consumers with barely any cash to spend, and financial markets jittery at the slightest sign the government might overspend.
I also found the graphs in this Guardian article very illustrative; even overlooking the article’s main focus on Brexit, it paints the weakness of the UK economy compared to its peers in stark colours.
Hard to say. Burnham is a good candidate - better than Starmer IMO, more willing to enact policies that will make an impact people can see and feel in line with Labour’s left wing union-linked...
Hard to say. Burnham is a good candidate - better than Starmer IMO, more willing to enact policies that will make an impact people can see and feel in line with Labour’s left wing union-linked history, but less divisive than Corbyn (who I liked a lot, and who was treated hilariously unfairly by the press, but who did have legitimate concerns around him too). Streeting is worse than Starmer, and I sincerely hope he doesn’t mess things up by running as he indicated he might; it does at least look like we’re safe from that for now.
Burnham has been ineligible to run (he was mayor of Greater Manchester rather than a member of Parliament), and was blocked from running in the last by-election where he could have feasibly become an MP and challenged Starmer. Which led to that previously safe Labour seat switching to the Greens instead - an absolute win in my book (and if we’re honest I imagine Burnham himself wasn’t too disappointed in that one), and a fairly good microcosm of what a lot of people on the left see as the issue with Starmer: he seems to be a genuinely principled centrist, as much as that’s a thing that can make sense, but for whatever reason appears more willing to fight the moderate left within and outside his own party than to fight the far right.
All that said, Starmer was a reasonable PM. Not great, not outstanding, but competent and sensible in absurdly chaotic and difficult times. He made decisions that I disagreed with but acknowledged as principled disagreements. He made a couple that I disagreed with and thought were objectively goddamn stupid. But overall he’s done a decent job, and the fact that he’s been pressured into stepping down for no real good reason concerns me. It’s a reminder of the power of narrative control, and of which direction that is laser-focused. The broader conversation has already flipped from “Starmer is bad for the country and has to go” to “Labour are weak and fragmented because Starmer is going” as we speak.
I think and hope this will work out well, it’s a genuine chance to replace a decent PM with someone who might even be a good PM. But it’s also a perfect example of how the people who talked the world into Brexit and MAGA are still kinda running the show, even if this is a much softer example that ultimately might not go their way.
How do you see Burnham avoiding the same decline in support Starmer has seen? Do you think he will manage to manage to deliver some significantly more impactful policies than we’ve seen in the...
How do you see Burnham avoiding the same decline in support Starmer has seen? Do you think he will manage to manage to deliver some significantly more impactful policies than we’ve seen in the last two years, or will it be more about avoiding the same kind of scandals and image pitfalls that Starmer has fallen into?
I think it’s unlikely he will avoid it, to be honest. Utility nationalisation will play well with people if he manages it, especially water companies, which might be a concrete boost. Voting...
I think it’s unlikely he will avoid it, to be honest. Utility nationalisation will play well with people if he manages it, especially water companies, which might be a concrete boost. Voting reform will be transformative if he’s got both the will and ability to push it through, regardless of his personal popularity, and might be one of the few ways he can really change the path the country is on.
But ultimately what I’m seeing here is maybe a slightly better state of the country going into the next election than we otherwise would’ve had, and maybe a somewhat clean slate for Labour to manage the media better even if they shouldn’t have needed it. It swings my internal barometer a few percent away from the “Reform gets in and I take that as my cue to leave” outcome, but I still see that as depressingly likely.
In short: A lot of braying from the opposition parties about an unelected Prime Minister, and calls for a general election, which the new PM & Co will bat off by saying they're "getting on with...
In short: A lot of braying from the opposition parties about an unelected Prime Minister, and calls for a general election, which the new PM & Co will bat off by saying they're "getting on with the job," while very little meaningfully changes for the population.
In long: There probably will be a leadership contest, but it'll not be drawn out, I don't think. The writing has been on the wall for ages: Andy Burnham is widely tipped to become the next leader of the Labour party, and this whole drama has a strong whiff of kingmaking to it. Wes Streeting is the other possibility for leader, but he's not nearly as popular as Burnham (and thank goodness, as Streeting has been forcing through transphobic policies in his role as health secretary).
Whoever it is that succeeds Starmer, I expect continuity rather than much change. There is little appetite for radicalism among the mainstream parties, despite the public clearly wanting more sweeping changes. NHS waiting lists are falling but still enormous. Small boat crossings are down, but still coming. Wages are up but it's still hard to make ends meet. Starmer's project lacked a coherent philosophy and suffered from terrible messaging. But the real killer was the lack of a great big headline policy. It was all just seen as tinkering around the edges. And while the intent was to portray Starmer as the adult in the room following the mess that the Conservative party made of the previous term, scandals such as the Mandelson/Epstein saga gave him a pretty grubby look.
Starmer publicly complained about the amount of drag on his ability to make any changes at any kind of rate of knots, and that's not a problem with Keir Starmer, or the Labour party. It's a massive, systemic issue with the way that the UK's government operates, and it is not going to be fixed by someone coming in as a continuity candidate. Burnham (or whoever) will come in, and be met with the same lack of agency that Starmer pushed up against, and will instead be forced to tinker around the edges making micro-adjustments that will hopefully lead to large outcomes in ten years' time.
The problem being that the public are impatient for change, and Nigel Farage is waiting in the wings to start banging on about how Burnham was not elected by the country at large, and that a general election should be called. The government will obviously ignore all of this. Farage knows his audience though, and they are a group increasingly angry at a political class that doesn't seem to care about the plight of ordinary people, and are more focused on internal party squabbling than actually governing. Farage has built himself a cosy position as an agitator, and political outsider (despite having been a career politician for most of his life), and has a very healthy following on social media. It's an easy line of attack on an already unpopular government, and it will most likely work, as much of the media are salivating at the prospect of a Reform government.
It's difficult to predict much further into the future, but I think this honestly ends with Nigel Farage in government, either at the next general election, or the following one. There's a chance that Burnham manages to pull things together and give the Labour party a promising direction, but I don't think that's what will happen. They'll get a little bump in polling, and then it'll tail off again. Labour will ride out the rest of their term in office as far as they can, and one of two things will happen at the next GE:
Reform UK utterly demolish Labour, forming a massive majority government and putting Nigel Farage in Number 10.
All non-Reform parties enter into a "keep Reform out at all costs" arrangement, and form a coalition (possibly minority) government that is weak and can't agree on anything. Chaos ensues, and Farage wins the following GE.
I am not filled with optimism for the future of my country.
Well, this was heavily rumoured over the weekend, and it looks like he has effectively been forced out as all support from his MPs and cabinet has collapsed.
For context, this means he will also be stepping down as Prime Minister in due course (i.e. once the party has selected a replacement). It looks likely that there won't be a genuine contest to replace him from within Labour, instead it seems the party will allow Andy Burnham to run uncontested. In all likelihood Andy Burnham will be UK PM by September.
If you're unfamiliar with the UK system, there is no requirement for an election in the case that the PM stands down, as technically speaking they are elected by parliament, not the people directly. In practice this means that the largest party installs the PM, with Labour currently commanding a huge parliamentary majority. Therefore it is an internal Labour Party mechanism that will decide on the next leader and PM.
What does this mean for the future of UK politics in the next year or two?
There is one timeline that many people see as likely: the new PM (almost certainly Burnham) is installed in about two months. The government/Labour enjoys a brief honeymoon period with the people and the press as people feel optimistic that the country might be turned around. However, continuing economic pressure and deep-set issues within the country mean that over the next ~2 years people do not feel a meaningful improvement in their lives and financial situations, as well as experiencing continuing cultural unrest despite the government touting progress on important economic and social issues. Support for Labour gradually wanes to levels similar to current by the time a general election rolls around in 2029, and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party (our MAGA equivalent) performs well (extremely hard to speculate whether it’s feasible for them to achieve a majority, but they could still wield a lot of power as a large minority party). If we get to that point, it’s fair to say Britain would be in for a similar prolonged spell of far-right agitation, cultural unrest, economic turmoil and broadly “bad situation” that we currently see in the US.
The reason a lot of people, myself included, see this timeline as realistic, is that despite the present government having made credible progress on a number of important issues in this country, it seems that the populace at large finds the pace of this change too slow; but it does not seem plausible that any other leader/government could bring about change much faster, because the country’s finances are so constrained due to a prolonged period of economic decline. Now, that is not to say that the current government has not made several, major mistakes. So it really depends on your view of just why the current government / Keir Starmer are so unpopular: if it is fundamentally due to the dire economic circumstances the country finds itself in, then this problem is not fixable in the short term, and the snake-oil salesmen of Reform can continue to have a field day proposing non-solutions that appeal to a certain part of the population but would leave the country worse off long term. However, if the more important factor in Starmer’s collapse in popularity is his numerous policy u-turns and scandals*, perhaps a different leader could fair better.
*but note that the UK news media is notoriously hostile to Labour, and it’s unclear the extent to which any leader could avoid the negative news vortex.
Could you say more about the UK’s financial position? I’m not that familiar with it.
The UK economy never truly recovered from the ‘08 financial crisis - we’ve just been compounding economic problems since then. In 2010, the Labour government which oversaw the crisis was ousted by the Conservative Party, which adhered to an economic policy called “austerity” until 2019. Austerity meant: the government is broke, so we’re going to try to spend as little as possible so we can get back to a level footing. There are two big problems with austerity: one is that government spending helps to stimulate the economy, so the economy is not as active during this period as it could be; two is that whatever savings made during austerity were pissed away on a series of frivolous policies (the list is endless but HS2, Brexit, and dodgy COVID contracts come to mind), completely defeating the point.
So, economic growth is already suppressed - on top of that we vote for Brexit, which comes into effect in 2020, massively dampening trade with our closest partners, plus the effect is even worse than it could have been because it’s handled so badly that it causes huge confusion and uncertainty.
I would actually say that COVID itself, whilst it has a noticeable short term impact, doesn’t particularly leave the UK worse off than anywhere else. So let’s keep moving. The UK is in a pretty weak financial position when Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine shocks the global economy, and fares worse than most - this is also when we start to hear about a “cost of living crisis”, due to a combination of general inflation as well as particularly severe increases in energy bills hitting the general population. This also has a severe effect on businesses, plus the knock on effect of households on tight budgets spending less, again dampening growth.
In the wake of COVID, the then-prime minister Boris Johnson is forced to resign due to a scandal - what follows is the shortest and most damaging premiership the country has ever seen. Liz Truss is prime minister for only 49 days - and the reason it’s so short is her completely disastrous economic policy.
Shortly after taking office, Truss (and her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng) announce the infamous “mini-budget”, containing £45 billion in tax cuts funded exclusively by additional borrowing. The financial markets are thrown into turmoil by the insanity of this economic policy, the pound collapses and mortgage rates skyrocket. Weakened confidence in the UK economy also means higher interest on debt for the government, and this remains stubbornly high, and exceptionally sensitive to any policy announcements, long after Liz Truss is forced out for her catastrophic decision making.
After this, management of the UK economy turns a corner somewhat - PM Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt keep things fairly sensible for the remainder of the Conservative’s run in parliament, until the 2024 general election, in which Labour win, led by Starmer who brings in Rachel Reeves as chancellor. They continue to run a pretty sensible and fairly fiscally conservative economic policy - they have their work cut out just trying to balance Britain’s books, let alone trying to improve growth. But USA tariffs and the Iran war mean, in the two years since then, although we haven’t been actively declining, things haven’t got much better either. It’s still extremely difficult for the UK - we have very little financial headroom for extra spending on crucial public services (which are suffering from over a decade of underfunding), businesses are hiring less due to economic uncertainty and AI, and this means people have less to spend. It’s all a vicious cycle, and problem and crisis I’ve mentioned has compounded with the next, to leave the Treasury coffers empty, businesses stagnating, consumers with barely any cash to spend, and financial markets jittery at the slightest sign the government might overspend.
I also found the graphs in this Guardian article very illustrative; even overlooking the article’s main focus on Brexit, it paints the weakness of the UK economy compared to its peers in stark colours.
Hard to say. Burnham is a good candidate - better than Starmer IMO, more willing to enact policies that will make an impact people can see and feel in line with Labour’s left wing union-linked history, but less divisive than Corbyn (who I liked a lot, and who was treated hilariously unfairly by the press, but who did have legitimate concerns around him too). Streeting is worse than Starmer, and I sincerely hope he doesn’t mess things up by running as he indicated he might; it does at least look like we’re safe from that for now.
Burnham has been ineligible to run (he was mayor of Greater Manchester rather than a member of Parliament), and was blocked from running in the last by-election where he could have feasibly become an MP and challenged Starmer. Which led to that previously safe Labour seat switching to the Greens instead - an absolute win in my book (and if we’re honest I imagine Burnham himself wasn’t too disappointed in that one), and a fairly good microcosm of what a lot of people on the left see as the issue with Starmer: he seems to be a genuinely principled centrist, as much as that’s a thing that can make sense, but for whatever reason appears more willing to fight the moderate left within and outside his own party than to fight the far right.
All that said, Starmer was a reasonable PM. Not great, not outstanding, but competent and sensible in absurdly chaotic and difficult times. He made decisions that I disagreed with but acknowledged as principled disagreements. He made a couple that I disagreed with and thought were objectively goddamn stupid. But overall he’s done a decent job, and the fact that he’s been pressured into stepping down for no real good reason concerns me. It’s a reminder of the power of narrative control, and of which direction that is laser-focused. The broader conversation has already flipped from “Starmer is bad for the country and has to go” to “Labour are weak and fragmented because Starmer is going” as we speak.
I think and hope this will work out well, it’s a genuine chance to replace a decent PM with someone who might even be a good PM. But it’s also a perfect example of how the people who talked the world into Brexit and MAGA are still kinda running the show, even if this is a much softer example that ultimately might not go their way.
How do you see Burnham avoiding the same decline in support Starmer has seen? Do you think he will manage to manage to deliver some significantly more impactful policies than we’ve seen in the last two years, or will it be more about avoiding the same kind of scandals and image pitfalls that Starmer has fallen into?
I think it’s unlikely he will avoid it, to be honest. Utility nationalisation will play well with people if he manages it, especially water companies, which might be a concrete boost. Voting reform will be transformative if he’s got both the will and ability to push it through, regardless of his personal popularity, and might be one of the few ways he can really change the path the country is on.
But ultimately what I’m seeing here is maybe a slightly better state of the country going into the next election than we otherwise would’ve had, and maybe a somewhat clean slate for Labour to manage the media better even if they shouldn’t have needed it. It swings my internal barometer a few percent away from the “Reform gets in and I take that as my cue to leave” outcome, but I still see that as depressingly likely.
In short: A lot of braying from the opposition parties about an unelected Prime Minister, and calls for a general election, which the new PM & Co will bat off by saying they're "getting on with the job," while very little meaningfully changes for the population.
In long: There probably will be a leadership contest, but it'll not be drawn out, I don't think. The writing has been on the wall for ages: Andy Burnham is widely tipped to become the next leader of the Labour party, and this whole drama has a strong whiff of kingmaking to it. Wes Streeting is the other possibility for leader, but he's not nearly as popular as Burnham (and thank goodness, as Streeting has been forcing through transphobic policies in his role as health secretary).
Whoever it is that succeeds Starmer, I expect continuity rather than much change. There is little appetite for radicalism among the mainstream parties, despite the public clearly wanting more sweeping changes. NHS waiting lists are falling but still enormous. Small boat crossings are down, but still coming. Wages are up but it's still hard to make ends meet. Starmer's project lacked a coherent philosophy and suffered from terrible messaging. But the real killer was the lack of a great big headline policy. It was all just seen as tinkering around the edges. And while the intent was to portray Starmer as the adult in the room following the mess that the Conservative party made of the previous term, scandals such as the Mandelson/Epstein saga gave him a pretty grubby look.
Starmer publicly complained about the amount of drag on his ability to make any changes at any kind of rate of knots, and that's not a problem with Keir Starmer, or the Labour party. It's a massive, systemic issue with the way that the UK's government operates, and it is not going to be fixed by someone coming in as a continuity candidate. Burnham (or whoever) will come in, and be met with the same lack of agency that Starmer pushed up against, and will instead be forced to tinker around the edges making micro-adjustments that will hopefully lead to large outcomes in ten years' time.
The problem being that the public are impatient for change, and Nigel Farage is waiting in the wings to start banging on about how Burnham was not elected by the country at large, and that a general election should be called. The government will obviously ignore all of this. Farage knows his audience though, and they are a group increasingly angry at a political class that doesn't seem to care about the plight of ordinary people, and are more focused on internal party squabbling than actually governing. Farage has built himself a cosy position as an agitator, and political outsider (despite having been a career politician for most of his life), and has a very healthy following on social media. It's an easy line of attack on an already unpopular government, and it will most likely work, as much of the media are salivating at the prospect of a Reform government.
It's difficult to predict much further into the future, but I think this honestly ends with Nigel Farage in government, either at the next general election, or the following one. There's a chance that Burnham manages to pull things together and give the Labour party a promising direction, but I don't think that's what will happen. They'll get a little bump in polling, and then it'll tail off again. Labour will ride out the rest of their term in office as far as they can, and one of two things will happen at the next GE:
I am not filled with optimism for the future of my country.
Why is it so hard for political parties in the UK to make more impactful changes?