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. 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.
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. 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 intended to be a campaign organisation for Burnham, Lawson told me, but it was “a happy coincidence”.
Burnham signed its founding statement. As the political momentum for an alternative to Starmer increased, and as Burnham started to look like the only real contender, a small group of economists in London began working together to persuade him that, were he to become leader, he should make the unaffordability of everyday life his focus. For years, Labour had prized economic growth as the main route to improve living standards.
But economists such as Alfie Stirling, the director of policy at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF); Hannah Peaker, deputy CEO of the New Economics Foundation (NEF); and Carys Roberts, a former policy adviser to Starmer who had resigned in October 2025, argued that this approach was mistaken. The government didn’t have long enough until the next election to wait for growth to materialise, they believed, so it should try to improve people’s living standards now by intervening in the market to lower the cost of living. On 14 May 2026, the Labour MP for Makerfield, Josh Simons, announced he would be standing down and cleared the way for Burnham to run in a byelection.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
