The cabinet appointments were more a mixed affair. Seeing sackings handed out to Rachel Reeves, David Lammy, Liz Kendall, Darren Jones and "resignations" from others, like Steve Reed, were encouraging signs. Unfortunately, that's where the fun ended. Burnham defied the Fleet Street sages who were forecasting Shabana Mahmood in Number 11, and - rabbit number two - out popped John Healey instead. There are several ways the appointment can be interpreted. Unlike Keir Starmer's last reshuffle, that saw all the powerful offices of state filled by empty suits from Blairite central casting, Burnham's cabinet is poised to be more ecumenical in its political colouration. Healey is well-respected across the PLP, so for the operation it's a good "non-factional" pick. Lots of Labour love the military, and his standing wasn't harmed when he resigned as defence secretary over budgetary allocations. The question is what does this mean for the politics? On the one hand, the "surprise" might be suggestive of Burnham wanting a chancellor firmly subordinate to Downing Street. Which is a definite if one is serious about restructuring British capitalism. But on the other, it can suggest continuity. Healey is no stranger to the Treasury and did five years there under Tony Blair. Treasury brain is a thing in British politics, and one that reproduces its institutional pre-eminence in state institutions. Anyone thinking like this is a safe pair of hands as far as the common sense of British commercial and financial capital is concerned.
More continuity is found in keeping Pat McFadden at the DWP and, most disappointingly, Mahmood gets to stay on at the Home Office. Not what you would call a clean break. Making Ed Miliband foreign secretary gives him a big job that's unlikely to get the unhinged right wing press going. Indeed, this move might convince them it was their pressure that kept him out of the Treasury and ejected from from his energy brief. But it opens that up for someone keen to make a splash. At the time of writing, Wes Streeting hasn't been given a job yet. Yvette Cooper has been shuffled over to health, and room has been cleared for a somewhat triumphant return of Louise Haigh, who was punished under the ancien regime for being too independent and settling the Tory-stoked rail dispute relatively promptly. Taking the reins of the Cabinet Office means she will play a central role in Burnham's oft-floated devolution, including the relocation of some of the operation to the promised Number 10 North. Angela Rayner is back in housing, Jonathan Reynolds is at business, and Lucy Powell - this last year Burnham's representative at the top of the party - is in education. Hard lines again to Bridget Phillipson.
Hoping for the best but prepared for the worst is the mindset of many current and former Labour Party people this evening as the appointments news dribbles in. As Burnham said after winning Makerfield, this is his party's one chance to make everything right. Retaining some key Starmer-era figures in position, and a new chancellor famous for wanting more cash for the military points to the status quo that did the last government in. But, commenting earlier, former Blair aide John McTernan rightly argued that what matters are the first actions the new government takes. Starmer had a disastrous start, all of it self-inflicted. On Tuesday Burnham will set out his immediate decisions, and those will point to what kind of government we're getting. They will affirm whether or not the pre-emptive pessimism a lot of people are feeling is warranted.
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16 comments:
You are being very charitable towards this cynical remix of the same old war-mongering, genocide-denying, cut public services, goons that Andy is filling his cabinet with, Phil. The key appointment is actually the warmongering John Healey as Chancellor. Lots more money will go to preparing the UK , with the rest of NATO , for a suicidal war with Russia by 2030.
Warning: this is about property as usual :-).
«this is his party's one chance to make everything right. [...] McTernan rightly argued that what matters are the first actions the new government takes.»
That is the usual position where "we are all thatcherites now" as to the things that matter so the only things that matters are personalities and PR of which "first impressions" is a big deal.
But the issues with the UK are not personalities and PR but deep economic ones that mean that thatcherism may eventually go away ("populism" is a symptom). The biggest issue that the UK has (and many other "golden billion" countries) is this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadminjobs/comments/1gltmn3/systems_administrator_salary/
"I work as a sysadmin in a small financial organization in one of the economically deprived countries in Africa. Work is good and not too demanding but the only problem is the pay. I am a fairy experienced professional, I have about 2 years experience in systems administration and bachelor's degree in Computer Science. I get around $172 a month after subtracting employee taxes. Life here is not very expensive, living costs like rent, food and transport cost around $114 a month. It leaves me with just over $50 to spare. This is what most people are getting when they start off in any IT career by the way( sysadmin, developers etc...)."
Once upon a time the UK had as main resource sheep (the "Woolsack"), then piracy (the "Golden Hind"), then coal (the "industrial revolution"), and between 1982 and 2007 scottish oil. Now the only resource left is (moderately good quality) workers and they want to be paid 10 times the global market wage. Something has got to give.
In the quote above the big deal seems to be “I get around $172 a month” (probably around $200 before tax) but is “living costs like rent, food and transport cost around $114 a month”: if UK workers could live on $114 a month they could be quite wage competitive.
But they cannot live on $114 a month for mainly one reason: property owning voters and business owning "sponsors" control politics and have had tremendous success in pushing up the rents and incomes they extract from workers and at the same time "moderating" labour costs.
To be sustainable typical wages for graduate IT specialists in the UK should be at most £500-700 a month instead of £2,000-2,500 a month and all living costs including rents should be scaled down and more than proportionally. Otherwise sooner or later a wage level of 10 times the global market wage will be unsustainable and there will be an argentinian style crash and property prices and business profits will also crash as they are all currently built on the assumption of the workers they are extracted from being paid 10 times the global market wage.
There is a giant long term incompatibility between the level of prices and profits that property and business owners have entitled themselves to extract from the lower classes and the sustainable levels that the lower classes can pay given global market wages.
No government can square that incompatibility in current political conditions. Only a deep crash can create a reset that allows that.
The conservative and centrist plan is rather transparently to let the crash happen *outside London* (that is the 1980s will happen in the south East and Home Counties too not just Merseyside and Tyneside etc.) and to continue to run London as a northern Dubai with a small crust of wealthy property owners and finance executives and a vast number of mostly immigrant servants (already 50-60% of employees and 40-50% of residents).
The question is whether Andy Burnham will be able to "foam the runway" for that outcome by slowing down a bit the evolution of the crash by either getting property prices booming again (thus gaining for a while the support of "Middle England") or by giving some minor wage and living costs improvements to the lower classes (thus gaining for a while their support).
«this is his party's one chance to make everything right.»
This is the implicit expression of a point often made by the columnists and bloggers (and Corbyn) that is one of those who has made me think that I live in a parallel world where sometimes the Internet crosstalks with the real world:
* Apparently in the real world there has been a thing called "austerity" and things, in particular government services, are wrong for everybody: landlords, finance executives, dentists, ... are living as precariously as delivery drivers and cleaners and shelf stackers, for no other reason than low-quality personalities in government so fixing things is in everybody's interests and Andy Burnham's task is expected to put in government better personalities.
* In my parallel world there have been since Thatcher and Blair decades of booming living standards for business and property owners and incumbents in posh areas are content with their government services and delighted with how cheap and prompt are private services like deliveries, gardening, cleaning, nursing, ...
So apparently in the real world there has been "austerity" (Which C. Dillow for example attributes to incompetency or biases by the governing class) but in my parallel world there has been something completely different "upward redistribution" (managed very competently by the governing class) which is eventually going to reach levels incompatible with an adjustment of UK wages towards global market wages. Fixing that is going to be opposed ferociously by those making a lot of money from it so far.
How much luckier is the real world than my parallel world!
Yawn.......I can only assume, Blissex, that you personally are well off, in a secure middle class job, so haven't personally suffered from the endless NHS waiting lists for very serious operations , and even endless waits for the local GP appointment, the collapse of most local government services, decades of falling real value wage levels , the endless covering of the old Green Belt with crap but incredibly expensive housing, the huge debt levels that most ordinary people are living with, and the huge growth in insecure zero hour jobs.
Apart from that , and actually so much more, such as the utter transformation of their local community from unprecedented mass immigration (and its resulting unlimited labour supply in semi and unskilled jobs), in a historically unprecedented short timescale,, that afflicts the lives of the majority of our poorer citizenry, everything is just great, Blissex. Give it a rest mate . Your property value monomania is nowadays a satire of itself.
«the endless NHS waiting lists for very serious operations , and even endless waits for the local GP appointment, the collapse of most local government services, decades of falling real value wage levels , the endless covering of the old Green Belt with crap but incredibly expensive housing, the huge debt levels that most ordinary people are living with, and the huge growth in insecure zero hour jobs.»
That happens in both the real world and my parallel world to the working-class and the under-class, the differences seem to be:
* In the real world those happen also to the middle-class and the upper-class ("austerity") and are the result of earnest but incompetent politicians (or "cybernetic issues" as in the work of Dan Davies) and the way to fix them is a change to better personalities at the top which is in everybody's interests, the problem is finding them.
* In my parallel world those issues do not affect or not so much middle-class and upper-class people and have been the result of the competent work of politicians determined to redistribute upwards from the under-class and the working-class to the middle-class and the upper-class; since those issues have been making big profits for the middle-class and the upper-class changing them is going to require a hard political struggle,
You seem to living in the real world and you are lucky because it is much easier to fix some issues if they affect everybody instead of redistributing upwards.
The comments by some chinese LLM:
https://chat.deepseek.com/share/p2kktj9kse882pg7yd
«the Blairite promise becomes not just unfulfilled, but structurally impossible. You cannot educate your way out of a global arbitrage problem when the global supply of educated talent is exploding and the demand for elite, non-automatable roles is finite. So where does that leave the UK? It leaves the UK with a choice it refuses to make:
Option A: Accept that the median worker cannot compete globally and introduce aggressive protectionism, trade barriers, and immigration controls to artificially insulate the domestic labour market (which breaks WTO rules and angers business).
Option B: Radically reduce the cost of living — specifically housing, energy, and transport — so that UK wages can fall to global competitive levels without causing destitution (which would obliterate the property wealth of the "Middle England" voters you rightly identified).
Option C: Embrace a massive wealth transfer (UBI or negative income tax) to subsidise the gap between global market wages and UK living costs, funded by taxing the winners of globalisation (tech monopolies, finance, and property rents).
None of these are on the table. Because, as you originally noted, the core constituencies of both major parties are the very people who would be devastated by Options A, B, or C.
So the political class does the only thing it can do: it pretends that "education, education, education" and "productivity" are still viable answers, because admitting the truth would require a fundamental redistribution of wealth and power that neither party is willing to touch.»
So we are back to 1983 :-(.
Anon 10:10, you have I believe fundamentally misunderstood the pessimism of Blissex's thesis. I do not think that Blissex is describing a politico-economic reality which they have any liking for themselves, but rather one which they believe is upon us anyway. If you are unhappy with the lot of poor citizens now then you'd best hope that Blissex's grim prediction, of a deep crash being required to reset the systemic dysfunctions, is wide of the mark.
You do yourself no favours either by playing into scapegoating bullshit by invoking the far right's beloved spectre, "utter transformation of local communities from unprecedented mass immigration". If you're the kind of nativist who wants to deport all the brownskins and sink fully loaded dinghies in the channel then you will find very few friends here. An awful lot of big changes are presently occurring in a "historically unprecedented short timescale" so you'd better get over the fact that immigrants are living here, and start focusing on more important issues, like the psychopaths running amok at the top of society. Or else go and stand with the Farage and Yaxley-Lennon mob if you are dumb enough to believe that the racist grifters will do anything for you.
I read that praying is like seeking to quench your thirst by drinking from an empty glass. Having faith that Mr Burnham is going to radically alter the distribution of power and wealth in the UK seems another form of magical thinking.
As far as I can tell, Zach hasn't been able to get a word into the media since Makerfield. Probably a good time to lie low and avoid wasting resources for a bit, TBH, whilst it's all positive press for Burnham and negative press for Farage.
But we'll need to hear from him again before too long, since it's up to the Greens to hold Burnham's feet to the fire, and force him to gradually push the remaining Blairites and McSweeneyites out of the party's nervous system (or start collecting voters again, if he fails to do so).
Well done Anonymous 10:10, you have I hope sated your tiresome middle class desire to virtue signal your complete abdication of any empathy at all for the directly resulting impact of essentially uncontrolled, historically unprecedented levels of mass immigration on the working class communities across the UK who bear the negative impact of housing , local services, and job competition . Middle class people mainly gain the advantages of the resulting cheap labour supply from mass net immigration , whilst most of their jobs and housing needs remain unaffected.
Socialists at least should recognise that population numbers PLANNING , alongside economic planning and essential health, education, housing, and other social services planning are vital if a society isn't to be riven apart by intercommunal friction from shortages in supply . Virtue signalling makes you feel good, but unfortunately you and your sort drive ever more working class people into the arms of the fascists every day.
And Blissex's monomaniac obsession with (private)house property prices as the claimed single most important factor in UK voting behaviour is simply nonsense. Even the huge boost that Thatcher (and her later Tory and NuLabour followers) gained in new Tory voters from the great council house sell-off, is now faced with the reality that a huge number of these , temporary. new home owners are now renters again , from the vulture landlord class that has bought huge numbers of those ex council houses as their temporary owners fell into debt , as workers so often do. Unfortunately those ex council house owners aren't returning to the Labour Party , as it has nothing but neoliberalism to offer.
The Greens need to develop their own brand and outreach.
What does DeepSeek think that "both major parties" means in the UK right now...?
We're certainly back to 1983 in the south Atlantic, as the USA is openly threatening to support Milei's regime in staging a Falklands re-match if our government won't kiss the MAGAt ring.
"Anonymous": «The comments by some chinese LLM: [...] So we are back to 1983 :-(.»
Oops the "Comment as:" menu slipped. That was me. BTW with "back to 1983" I was being sarcastic, that was the year when the Labour Party campaigned for “a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families” and what actually happened for the next 40+ years has been “a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of [property and business owners] and their families”.
But hopefully even fundamental shifts may be not irreversible.
«Blissex's grim prediction, of a deep crash being required to reset the systemic dysfunctions, is wide of the mark.»
To be perhaps even clearer: perhaps in the real world there are systemic dysfunctions, but on my parallel world the system has been functioning at redistributing upwards many trillions since Thatcher and Blair and many if not most of the people shafted by this redistribution are well aware that the is the system working well and as intended.
Again people who live in the real world are lucky because when here are systemic disfunction all classes have an interest in fixing it or at least not opposed to fixing it, but if it is working well for the benefit of some vested interest groups hey are going to fight hard to stop any change to a system that has made them so much money for decades.
Anecdotes about IT sysadmins earning 10p an hour in the Global South probably should acknowledge a couple of room elephants:
1. If you bring those workers here, you'll have to pay them a lot more than 10p an hour.
2. If you move the jobs there, then you now have to run your business in the Global South - with worse infrastructure and much weaker rule of law, and a strong possibility of hot armed conflicts happening close by (rising, as climate change progresses).
I'm sure that equation works out OK for some businesses.
There are plenty of incompetent socialists, lacking the self-awareness to effectively fight for their own class interest. It's a category which today includes scolds who harangue about immigration using the exact same language as the far right. If they had an ounce of sense, then they would be far more circumspect in addressing a delicate topic where emotional sensationalism plays right into the hands of their deadliest enemies.
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