Who is the most popular politician among Labour members? It is not Keir Starmer: more party members have an unfavourable view of him than a favourable one, according to the latest poll.
It is not Angela Rayner, although she is favourably regarded by 73 per cent of party members. Nor is it Ed Miliband, the most popular member of the cabinet – even though a remarkable 81 per cent of members have a favourable view of him.
A little-noticed finding of the Survation poll of members for LabourList in March was that 91 per cent of them have a favourable view of Andy Burnham. Only 7 per cent have an unfavourable view of him.
One person who did notice the poll, and its North Korean level of support for the mayor of Greater Manchester, was Burnham himself. It provided the electoral kerosene to power his speech at the weekend to Compass, the “soft-left” pressure group.
It was a speech that sought to put Burnham at the head of the growing unhappiness in the Labour Party at the leadership of Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, without mentioning either of them by name.
“Inside Labour, there might not be a vacancy, but there is always a contest,” as George Eaton of the New Statesman commented.
But how credible is what Burnham calls his alternative “popular left programme”?
Some of it is a call for a change of tone. “I believe you do have to take on the right,” he said. “But what’s the best way to do that? Definitely not by aping their rhetoric.”
This just goes to show the danger for Starmer of being so explicit about seeing Nigel Farage as his main opponent: the prime minister’s “island of strangers” speech wasn’t aping Reform’s rhetoric, but a lot of Labour members think it was.
As for policy, Burnham wants to switch to proportional representation and abolish the party whip system, “which makes you vote for things you don’t fully agree with”. This is what I call putting the “soft” in the soft left, and it is designed to ensure that no government could ever do anything.
But if a Burnham-led government could do something, what would it be? He wants to reverse welfare cuts and launch the “biggest social housing building programme the country has ever seen”, but there is an ambiguity at the heart of his alternative fiscal policy.
Sometimes he talks about having “more flexibility” in Reeves’s fiscal rules; on Saturday, he talked about higher taxes on wealth, which might be a way of spending more while sticking to the rules.
In this, he perfectly reflects the confusion of Labour members and MPs who are unhappy with the leadership. They complain about Reeves’s “self-imposed straitjacket”, but if pressed, admit that they realise that higher borrowing might spook the markets. They don’t want more cuts, and if forced to make a choice, will go for higher taxes on the better-off – coincidentally, the direction proposed in Rayner’s March memo to Reeves that was leaked last month, along with some specific suggestions.
It was notable that Starmer appeared to reject this option on Monday, telling the BBC: “I don’t think you can tax your way to growth. We have high tax as it is.” That seems to set up the Budget in the autumn as the moment that the irresistible force of deteriorating public finances meets the immovable object of the fiscal rules – bearing in mind that the rules merely codify “what the financial markets will bear”.
If the clash of the irresistible and the immovable results in an explosion destabilising the prime minister, we know that Burnham stands ready – although he would have to find a parliamentary seat first. The same applies to Sadiq Khan, the three-term mayor of London, who has recently struck poses – declaring “Brexit was a mistake” and proposing the decriminalisation of cannabis – that would appeal to Labour members. It is notable that the other leading candidate, Rayner, also has a democratic mandate of her own, being directly elected as deputy leader by party members.
None of them has much of a distinctive policy on the central questions of tax and spending. But the discontent among Labour MPs and members is intensifying, and the temptation of the vague and alluring “alternative” offered by the party’s lost leader exiled in the North is growing.
