The Democracy Man

Andy Burnham is ascending the leadership of the Labour Party, and Britain without an election or even a contest. Remarkably he is doing so on a wave of rhetoric about ‘local democracy’, which he will, apparently, impose from above. Centralised Decentralisation.

It’s all very strange and strangely familiar.

It is a very British, and a very Labour response to a crisis of their own making. Unable to articulate an alternative narrative to the tsunami of racism and bigotry unleashed by the Brexit meltdown, and incapable of upholding the most basic standards of decency in foreign policy, the Labour party have now turned on their own disastrous leader as his popularity plummets.

But at the heart of Burnham’s core message is a contradiction. He is lauded for championing local democracy but one of his first pronouncements was to declare that he would oppose any referendum on Scottish independence.

Burnham has said he is committed to decentralising power away from London, but has no answer to the question: if this is a Voluntary Union, what is the means to leave it?

As the Green MSP Patrick Harvie noted that the Scottish Parliament currently had the largest pro-independence majority in its history. He said: “If that’s not a mandate, what is? It’s a simple question and one that no Labour leader has been able to answer.

“Andy Burnham is perfectly entitled to argue against Scottish independence. What he shouldn’t do is block the people of Scotland from having the choice.”

Manchesterism

If there’s this dark hypocrisy at the heart of Burnham’s vision, there’s also the feeling that ‘Manchesterism’ is a wafer-thin political project. “We have retaken public control of our buses” is one of its core claims. There is also the overwhelming feeling that Labour are dismantling the devolution settlement they themselves created because they have become unelectable within it.

At the new No 10 North in Manchester, the prime minister himself will be in charge of “reform of essential utilities, reindustrialisation and the regeneration of places”.

But in Burnham’s political project the ‘regeneration of places’ doesn’t include Scotland. Democracy stops at the border. This vision relocates Scotland to limbo, somewhere ‘north’ of the North but also absent. Dislocated. Under Burnhamism Scotland is re-understood as a region, with cities that need empowered by Mayors, just like Manchester.

Having said that what Andy Burnham does have is a story to tell beyond that of Keir Starmer, possibly a low-bar, I know.

Burnham is right to say: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit.”

He is trying desperately, and more articulately than others, to reclaim the narrative of decline from the far-right. He is focusing on housing, youth and austerity and challenging the story of declinism that the far-right thrive on. He is right to say:  “We need to safeguard sovereign manufacturing and production capability across the country in critical sectors like steel, defence, energy, food and farming, rather than just being prepared to let it go, as we have sadly done in the past,” even if this statement whitewashes Labour’s own role in this process.

In this sense, Burnham has something to say about contemporary capitalism in a way that the SNP does not, even if he gets immediately mired in his own contradictions, hypocrisies and confusion. It remains to be seen whether his social and economic plans will be as shallow and contradictory as his plans for ’empowerment’ but he at least has a language and a political story in mind in a way that Keir Starmer never had.

On his election night Burnham made a speech in which he declared: “I am going to give Britain the circuit-breaker it needs, by building a more collaborative politics in Westminster, by taking power out of the centre and putting it in the hands of the people and places who can use it best and, in so doing, creating a new sense of agency, possibility and hope flowing around the country.”

Except the country is England and the new sense of agency does not include us. Power is being relocated to “the people and places who can use it best”, but that does not include Scotland.