Labour’s last chance? The people shaping Andy Burnham’s grand plans for Britain

The new prime minister has declared he wants to end 40 years of neoliberalism. But is he really prepared to be that radical?

In May 2025, when Keir Starmer was still prime minister, Labour politicians, campaigners and journalists gathered at the Ministry of Sound in London to watch a series of panel talks and presentations illuminated by the lucid glow of club lights. The day-long event was organised by a campaign group called Compass, and the subjects included child poverty, the Murdoch-owned media and the rise of the radical right.

“We felt as though the Labour government was failing, and needed to be pulled into the 21st century,” Neal Lawson, the founder of Compass, told me. The Starmer government’s support for the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, its equivocating stance on Gaza and its emulation of far-right rhetoric – crystallised in a speech on immigration, during which the prime minister suggested Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” – were causing Labour supporters to rapidly desert their party. “The Starmer project was so obviously intellectually bankrupt. He was personally so disinterested in ideas and big thinking that I thought, this is never going to fly,” Lawson said.

At 4pm, the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, got up on stage to deliver the closing address. “It’s the latest any Labour people have been in the Ministry of Sound on a Saturday,” he joked, cheerfully sweating under the lights. He spoke for 15 minutes, speeding up with excitement. Unlike Starmer, Burnham seemed to have a clear theory about the “dark and divided times” the country found itself in, identifying the long-term cause of Britain’s “modern malaise” as the privatisation of essential services, such as water and electricity, under Margaret Thatcher. Rather than mimicking the rhetoric of the right, he suggested that Labour should take concrete steps to improve voters’ lives, “things that matter to people every single day”.

The prospect that Burnham might replace Starmer seemed distant. He wasn’t an MP, and any route back to Westminster was unclear. But he was the most high-profile Labour politician to eloquently diagnose the causes of Britain’s widespread sense of political disenchantment and economic injustice, something that Starmer had never managed to do. “It wasn’t just the speech of a mayor of Manchester,” Lawson recalled. “It was the speech of someone who looked and sounded like they wanted to be prime minister.”