Burnham Should Appoint a National Government – But it Sounds as if He Wants to Revive Old Labour

Here’s a thought. It is, as you’d expect, a complete fantasy. I have some advice about what sort of government Burnham should set up today. Burnham should suggest that everyone serious — perhaps not Lib Dems and Greens, as they are not serious — be included in a National Government. Burnham, as leader of the majority party, would be Prime Minister, Kemi Badenoch would be Deputy Prime Minister, and they would head a higher cabinet, or senate or Mount Olympus with, say, no more than nine people, working like the nine Justices in the US Supreme Court. Each would have a team of writers, and would form a sort of miniature think tank designed to contribute to achieving a consensus. These nine could be:

• Burnham (party leader)
• Badenoch (party leader)
• Cameron (old hand 1)
• Blair (old hand 2)
• Farage, or Lowe, if Farage, as is likely, opts out (firebrand 1)
• Rayner (firebrand 2)
• Miliband (antifirebrand 1)
• Stewart (antifirebrand 2)
• Glasman (sensible leftist and lord)

We all seem to agree, whether on the Left or Right, that the UK is in difficulty at the moment. Some say wind back to 2016. Some say wind back to 2008. Some say wind back to 1997. (Burnham, for which see below, says wind back to 1979.) Some say winding back is impossible. But if there is a crisis, or polycrisis, then surely we should consider a coalition. Not a mere coalition, a marriage of convenience, as in 2010: but a grand coalition, a National Government.

This thing would have to be established on a 10-year basis. Of course resignations, perhaps even deaths would intervene. But each position would be filled again on retirement or death, as with the Justices of the US Supreme Court. The 10-year agreement would be to bracket out party politics for 10 years, to have a government proof against being voted out, a government that was tasked to:

• make proper sense of what it is necessary to do now that the UK is out of the EU;
• impose a meaningful resolution to debt, deficit, government finances, expenditure, taxation;
• revise the Good Friday Agreement;
• resolve the matter of how to set aside the absurd politics of DEI, ECHR and Net Zero;
• resolve the matter of how to strengthen the armed forces in the era of a newly alerted NATO;
• think seriously about how to deal with mass immigration, demoralisation, civil disorder;
• demolish and destroy all the QUANGOS.

I read a piece by Iain McLean, ‘England Does Not Love Coalitions: The Most Misused Political Quotation in the Book’ (in Government and Opposition 47 (2012), pp. 3-20). It has a very interesting table indicating the nature of our governments since 1852. I put the coalitions in italics. I am trusting McLean here that the details are correct.

• 1852 minority government then coalition government.
• 1857 majority
• 1886 coalition
• 1892 minority
• 1895 majority
• 1910 minority
• 1918 coalition
• 1922 majority
• 1923 minority
• 1924 majority
• 1929 minority
• 1931 coalition
• 1945 majority
• 1951 coalition
• 1955 majority
• 1974 minority
• 1974 majority
• 2010 coalition
• 2015 majority

His point was that the United Kingdom has had quite a few coalitions, and that these are more successful than minority governments (if they haven’t lasted as long as majority governments). Majority politics seems to depend on a strange compromise between crusading politics and a sort of median-voter cowardly politics. Thatcher and Blair, obviously, succeeding in somehow bridging this gap, for a time. Crusading politics, by itself, cannot work (Corbyn), but nor can cowardly politics (Starmer). COVID-19, that era of execrable politics, was, I think, so profound and disgusting because there was a perfect fusion, for all governments, of crusade and cowardice, not to mention ignorance.

If we have a crisis, as we do, and have done since 2016, then I think we have to find some way of not being party-political about it. Normally, party politics is a safeguard against monopoly and mafia. But I am sorry to say that the whole system is infested with pre-established mafias and monopolies. So if we declare an emergency, declare a sort of 10-year dictatorship, and then appoint an over-cabinet of nine wise men and women, then I think we might begin to get beyond the in-built mafias and monopolies that are damaging the British political system at the moment: the mafia and monopolies found in Treasury politics, Civil-Service politics, Labour backbench politics, Great-and-Good politics, Clacton-and-Makerfield-and-Oldham electioneering politics.

This coalition would have to have a bias to the Right. This is because the state has gone so badly wrong because of an inbuilt (New) Leftist bias that is politically incompetent, prone to boycott and filibuster anything sounding like common sense, and far too eager to suck on the teat of the state.

That’s it. We need a National Government.

In fact, truth be told, we should have had one in 2016.

With that said, I had a little look at what Burnham said in his speech.

Oh dear.

These are his five points, so you can see ‘em at a glance.

He wants:

• LABOUR UNITY. He wants a One Labour Team: “We won’t beat Britain’s New Right if we are consumed by infighting and pulling in different directions.” Has a joke about we don’t like “factional politics”. In his mind, Labour isn’t a “faction”.
• A CHANGE IN POLITICS. “I will work to build a New Politics.” He uses the “You know what?” beloved of Farage. “This is a last chance to change.” Asks for more “consensus” between parties, so politics becomes less toxic. Alright. For a brief moment, he seems to be going in my direction.
• A DISTINCTIVE LABOUR DIRECTION. Not being Green or Reform or Tory, but Labour. “Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s. Political power was centralised. And economic power was privatised.” He wants to “take back control”. He wants a “new path” to the one we have been on for 40 years. There’s the winding back aspect of his doctrine.
• ALL OF THE UNITED KINGDOM TO SING HIS SONG. Not just the North. Everyone should be more than they are, he chants.
• TO CEDE POWER FROM WHITEHALL AND WESTMINSTER BACK TO “WHERE YOU LIVE”. Make the railways run on time, etc. He seems to favour technical education, which is a good thing. But the aspiration to surrender power to the provinces might just make the whole country even dimmer than it is at the moment.

But N.B. Burnham ignores Blair and goes back to fight-the-war-against-Thatcher.

This is fascinating. Labour, or Old Labour, was the entire rig from Keir Hardie through James Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee, plus Gaitskell, Wilson and Callaghan through to Kinnock. Then there was New, foreshadowed by Smith, then gladly post-Thatcherite (and post-Clause Four) under Blair and Brown. Then there was confusion as New Labour morphed into a sort of New New Labour, confused by the Edstone, by Corbyn and his deadredheads, hence the ragbaggish Ultraleftism, Antizionism and Wokeism typical of the late 2010s. Keir Starmer was a sort of vast compromise in the form of a struggling sigh: a lawyer struggling to handle the besacked cats of Old, New, Borrowed and Blue Labour. No good. And so Burnham has a plan.

This plan is a tone, a nostalgia, a forceful noise. It is to revive the old battles of that I remember from my childhood: Arthur Scargill, Boys from the Black Stuff, all that. Burnham tells us he joined Labour in 1985 because of “the legend that is Neil Kinnock”. And so the general atmospherics seem to be nostalgia for the solidarity of the 80s. Plus Hatred of Thatch.

There is a problem. This is not New. Not New even in the slightest. It is Old. Burnham seems to be threatenin’ to abandon all the New, Borrowed and Blue Labour stuff. For the sake of “Social homes”, Unity, Renationalisation, “that legend Neil Kinnock”. It is Old, Old, Old.

Though I do believe he even mentioned Growth: which is a sign that he is willing to make one (verbal) concession to Starmer-n-Reeves era Labour-both-waysism.

He says he won’t change. He is pinning his hopes to being authentic. This is also highly unusual, since it disqualifies him from being much of a politician. Hasn’t Burnham been told, or learnt, that politics is work in coalition-maintenance, riding-the-storm, changing-one’s-colours, not-being-too-explicit-about-anything, fudging-and-nudging? (Someone put him in touch with Matt Hancock for some advice.) “I am for us,” he says.  So the point is unity. But, again, the unity suggested is Labour unity. “Labour is for Us.”

There is the usual balls – common to Khan and Starmer ­– of complaining about division – always caused by others, not us. It seems a bit rich for a party leader to complain about division. Why, sir, you are the one who joined a party. Really, a lot of it is incoherent. I am going to be Labour, a party, but be for all of us, a whole, because Labour is for us. But this is squaring the circle in the usual, old, tired manner tried by, say, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn et al. It can’t be done. It’ll end in tears and backbench rebellion.

The logic holding all this together is that we can find unity by going back beyond Blair to fight the old battles with Thatcher. Now, this is a cry the Ancient 80 Year-Old Socialists can get behind! But I wonder whether the young half-witted campus radicals can be persuaded to get involved. It all depends on whether Burnham does as he promises and stands up to Trump, and also whether he can negotiate awkward-squad subjects like Gaza, Chagoza, the Boatza and Tranza.

I have news for Burnham. This is that though he is right to complain about 40 years, in part, is he not aware that at least half of what went wrong since 1979 was done by his crowd: the post-Kinnock Labour party? By “Us.” Isn’t he aware that social demoralisation, stupid bureaucracies, endless grift, dislike of work, spend-spend-spend, a politics of blame and shame and whine etc. is mostly a consequence of the Caring Left?

Anyhow, the question is when the Nice Noises will come into conflict with Reality.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.