The first 24 days of Andy Burnham

Polling averages show a rise for Labour of around eight percentage points since the Makerfield by-election on 18 June. Since mid-July most polls have been placing Reform behind Labour, ending a 15-month period of Reform leading the polls created by the increasing popularity of the Starmer government.

Reports from activists around the country suggest that there has also been a small uptick in Labour Party membership since Burnham assumed leadership, but it leaves us a long way off Labour’s most recent peak in 2017, and may well not yet be enough even to reverse Labour’s loss of over a fifth of its membership in 2025 alone.

Burnham’s first few days in office saw several high profile policy announcements to indicate a shift from the priorities of the Starmer government. In scale these are in reality more symbolic than material, even though they aren’t things anyone would have expected if Starmer was still in office: VAT off electricity bills (in reality worth about £45), reinstating the £2 bus fare cap, a drive to “end” rough sleeping (with £340 million announced to go towards acquiring homes: but then even Steve Reed announced £3.5 billion, widely criticised as a made-up figure, to "end rough sleeping", back in December 2025).

That Burnham has declared for a "change of direction" in the government is an opportunity for socialists in the Labour Party and unions - if it is taken up with concrete campaign demands.

Burnham says, “Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s: political power was centralised, and economic power was privatised. The country surrendered control of the essentials: housing, water, energy, transport, and left people exposed to higher costs, that in turn led to the concentration of more wealth and power in the hands of fewer people and fewer places”.

This is in reality an argument for public ownership of housing (through an expanded council housing programme), for the public ownership of water (as called for by the big unions and at least one Labour Party region), for the gas and electricity companies to be taken back into public ownership, and for public transport to be publicly owned (including rail freight and the trains themselves - currently leased at profit to rail operating companies).

Burnham does not mean public ownership. He talks about “public control” without public ownership, and the "public control" in Manchester he talks of is based entirely on privately-owned bus companies and privately-owned trams.

Such issues - housing, public ownership - should be key policy debates at Labour’s forthcoming annual conference at the end of September. Conference motions being passed by CLPs on housing (drafted by the Labour Campaign for Council Housing) and on public ownership of water (drafted by Mainstream, among others) are important. Campaigning like this openly in the grassroots of the party and the unions is the way to build pressure on Burnham, not the union leaders' ususal reliance on back-room conversations and "persuading" him.

It remains to be seen to what extent - or whether at all - Labour’s 2026 conference will be any more democratic than those of the Starmer era, where numerous CLP motions were "ruled out", delegates were denied sight of motions until the morning conference opened, and composites passed were often ignored by the party leadership. Burnham does say that he will not be “seeking to suspend or punish members who have principled views that may be different from mine”, and the return of the Whip to Diane Abbott appears to symbolise this, at least as far as the parliamentary party goes.

But he has said nothing about ending bans and proscriptions for party members, or increasing the role of the party’s democratic structures - let alone respecting the decisions of party conference, enabling CLPs to send meaningful motions to conference, and scrapping the undemocratic National Policy Forum’ His own record on party democracy is not strong; when he became Greater Manchester Mayor, the GM-wide party structures established under his predecessor (interim mayor Tony Lloyd) simply ceased to operate and were quietly shelved. And of course he became party leader with no contest, vote, or involvement of party members.

That Labour is again ahead in the polls is of course good news for all those concerned about the risk of a far right government taking office at the next election. The progress is fragile still, and only half way to the polling in the summer of 2024. Burnham not being Starmer is a good thing, but not enough.

The opportunities presented by Burnham’s disavowal - in words, if not in policy - of the Blair and Starmer leaderships are important too. They are important particularly for revolutionary socialists in the Labour Party who aim to revolutionise the working class movement as a whole to fight for a subordination of the market to social control, and the abolition of wage slavery. For Marxists, the work of explaining and educating about the need to abolish capitalism goes hand in hand with intervention to help the broader labour movement to grow, organise, and develop in that political direction. It is important to understand both the opportunities and their limitations in order to intervene actively.