Alex Croft

This is very interesting, although by the end of Starmer's time in office pretty much every Labour MP was under threat. I do think Burnham's government will be Reform-facing, but their strategy for dealing with Reform will be different. McSweeney and Starmer thought they could win Reform voters by indulging in crass anti-immigrant signalling like producing videos of deportations, but without any policies that would materially improve the average Reform voter's life in the short- term. Without sugar-coating Burnham (I think he'll keep the same anti-immigrant policies and is likely to lean into law-and-order stuff with Mahmood) it is clear he's thought through this more carefully and he at least intends to use the state to make immediate differences in people's material well-being and in the texture of their day-to-day lives. It won't be perfect, it will likely be uneven and involve crap trade-offs, it won't be as thorough-going as our poly-crises demand, but it won't be the insane doom-run of Starmerism that pursued status-quo economic orthodoxy, which inevitably increases inequality, combined with inflammatory rhetoric that dignified the right-wing diagnosis of society. Starmerism was guaranteed to produce a massive Reform majority under these conditions. Starmer was the ultimate gift to Farage. Burnhamism will be more disruptive to Reform in the long-term, and is likely a much more serious electoral threat to Farage. That's at least in part what has driven Farage into mad ventures like calling a by-election. But it will also leave lots of space to the left to articulate lines of difference with Burnhamism. The crap trade-offs will likely include new oil & gas drilling, absurd defence expenditure, continuity on foreign policy and implied (rather than explicit) social conservatism on issues like trans rights. This will allow the Greens to consolidate a core left-leaning and younger vote in the cities. The upshot of it all is that if Burnhamism disrupts Reform with interventionist economic populism aimed at older voters in traditional Labour strongholds, and still be pressured by the Greens, the net result is that the political window has been yanked left. And that's at least in part because the Greens inflicted serious loses in the May local elections.