The Crystallisation of a Forgotten Paradigm: Dissecting Burnham’s Cabinet

In the Spring I picked apart the shifting sands of the Labour Party’s power dynamics. In that article I made the distinction between the soft left faction that the media seem so desperate to carve out, and the actual soft left. I argued the media’s imagined soft left, epitomised by figures such as Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham, is actually just the left-leaning element of the faction descended from New Labour Brownites. The actual soft left is the faction that can trace its roots back to the Michael Foot wing of the left that opposed the Bennite split in 1981, and though heavily damaged by the all-engulfing wave of pro-market forces and progressive neoliberal ideals of New Labour, retained its collectivist, trade union and socialist principles to today be led by figures such as Angela Rayner and Louise Haigh. 

My article concluded that the post-Brownite faction and this actual soft left have formed a coalition within the party that has successfully shut out both Blairism and hard left Bennites, thereby mirroring the old right-soft left power dynamic that dominated the party before the Venn diagram model (to be explained) led the party on the road to Blairism. The prompt for writing that article was the reaction across the party condemning Tony Blair’s May intervention in which he marketed a cocktail of conservative, populist and neoliberal ideas to Labour’s leadership. All Blair’s intervention did then was to confirm that the faction of the party he represents has become unpopular and enfeebled within the party, and that Labour has indeed returned to an old right-soft left coalition. The cabinet reshuffle that accompanied Andy Burnham’s ascension seems to confirm this theory. 

Exploring this theory of a back to the future power dynamic within the Labour Party demands one travel back to the past. The paradigm within Labour thinking since Neil Kinnock (soft left) took the leadership in 1983 was that the Labour Party had to move to the right if it wanted power. On the Venn diagram of principles vs power, the overlap was minimal. This school of thought took Labour from Neil Kinnock and socialism to John Smith and social democracy and then to Blair and New Labour. It took Labour from soft left and socialism to old right and social democracy to new right and progressive neoliberalism, and with it from a civil war deep in the trenches of opposition to three election victories and thirteen years of power. The irresistible rise of new Labour within the party and the promise of power led to the Labour Party’s leading lights, through a mixture of personal convincement and factional marginalisation, to sacrifice ideological commitment and historical values on the altar of Blairism. Smith’s old right and Kinnock’s soft left enjoyed a bonfire of principle fuelled by landslide victory followed by landslide victory. The Venn diagram model of the Labour Party, of sacrificing left-wing principles for power on a centrist platform, became gospel, and the battle within the Labour Party shrank from a wide battle of ideals ranging from social liberalism to hardcore socialism to one of Blairism vs Brownism, a battle of personality as much as ideas. Blairism represented uncompromising new left labour and both radical and liberal principles whilst Brownism encompassed a mixture of new left and old left, of social liberals and reformed social democrats. The soft left, through the convincement of its members to abandon principle in the name of power, and the marginalisation of those who couldn’t be convinced, faded into obscurity.

The sixteen years that followed New Labour, however, witnessed the slow resurfacing of those historic ideological battles. Whilst the 2010 leadership election was a Blairite v Brownite affair, with the Brownite Ed Miliband triumphing over his Blairite brother, the party took a sudden and unexpected detour to the hard left in 2015 (partly because the soft left had become all but non-existent, leaving the hard left as the sole left-wing option). In 2020 Keir Starmer emerged victorious on a platform that represented a short-term concession to soft left principles, though quickly and efficiently replaced by an undercooked mimicry of New Labour politics.

It is this post-New Labour journey of opposition that reinvigorated the soft left. The tribulations of the last sixteen years have pushed the Labour Party membership into a soft left position. New Labour mimicry did not work under Miliband or Starmer and a hard left detour left the party internally ruined and pulverised by the electorate. A faction that was virtually non-existent even ten years ago has now emerged as a key power broker in the Labour Party, crucial in orchestrating Andy Burnham’s rise to power.  

Burnham’s cabinet reshuffle has purged the faction that can trace its roots back to Blairism. Liz Kendall, Darren Jones, Peter Kyle, David Lammy, Lord Hermer, all gone. Of the centrist Brownites only Healey, Cooper, Campbell and Douglas Alexander remain. The left-leaning strand of this post-Brownite faction, and here I include Burnham, enjoyed the reshuffle. Ed Miliband and Jonathan Reynolds were both promoted whilst Heidi Alexander remained in her post. Alex Norris, Angela Eagle, Chris Bryant and Stephen Kinnock all enter (or re-enter) cabinet whilst a few soft left MPs also enter/return. Louise Haigh and Angela Rayner both return, Miatta Fahnbulleh enters cabinet for the first time as Energy Secretary and Annaliese Midgley becomes Chief Whip. Two unmentioned cabinet ministers, Lucy Powell and Lisa Nandy, both exist somewhere between the left-leaning post-Brownites and the soft left, and both have been rewarded for their role in the coup that has substituted Starmer off for Burnham at half time.

On first glance then it would seem like the real power is held in the post-Brownite faction, with Burnham flanking himself with figures on his right and his left. But don’t be fooled. Whilst the total number post-Blairites (Mahmood, Streeting, McFadden) and centrist post-Brownites in cabinet outnumber those from the soft left, the devil is in the detail. All four of the soft left cabinet ministers hold significant sway within the party. Two, Midgley and Haigh, were the most instrumental figures in the bloodless coup which delivered Burnham like a Manchester Messiah to Downing Street. Rayner is the most popular politician within the party and Fahnbulleh is the up-and-coming star of the 2024 intake. 

Burnham’s reshuffle has therefore not only formalised the power balance within the Labour Party back to its old right/soft left tradition (now post-Brownite/soft left), he has managed to tinker with the post-Brownite faction in a way that concentrates power to its left flank. Burnham’s Manchesterism straddles the undefined and difficult to pinpoint border between the left of the post-Brownite faction and the soft left, with many of its leading figures existing in these murky borderlands. The Manchester Magic Circle, the figures who were instrumental in Burnham’s rise, are found mostly wandering around these borderlands, and it is here that power has become concentrated in the Labour Party. This crystallises a trend that has been ongoing for a decade. The soul of the Labour Party exists somewhere in the mists of the left-leaning post-Brownites and the soft left. Burnham has placed himself and his Manchesterism ideology right in those borderlands, meaning that for the first time since 1983 the Labour Party leadership does not see a tension between principle and power, the question is of course, are they right?

Image: Flickr/No 10 Downing Street (Lauren Hurley)

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