Burnham and Me

Me and Burnham? It was a mere flirtation, never a full-blown affair; no secret assignations in seedy Brighton hotels, no hired detective to witness the adultery in order to get the divorce through. Yes, I succumbed to hope. Burnham's rhetoric was very different; I thought maybe he was for real. But I should have seen it coming. Burnham hired as his right hand man, his chief of staff, James Purnell, former chair of Labour Friends of Israel, a man who went on a visit to Jerusalem during which he noted that "Palestinians live on less than $1,000 a year, and malnutrition is appearing" - which observation does not seem to have dented his advocacy for Israel. Purnell was a member of Flint Global, a lobbying firm which lobbied government on behalf of tech giants and water companies. I should have noted that Burnham's cabinet appointees are all from the centre and right of the party, with no one from the left. I should have noted that whilst Ed Miliband stood before conference and said “I want to say to the millions of people in this country and indeed elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people: we hear you, you were right.” the police were arresting grannies outside the conference hall for protesting against genocide. So what is this new rhetoric for? I believe that Burnham, being a much more formidable politician than Starmer, realised that Labour had lost half its voter base to the Greens, and that Gaza was a big reason for this loss. He wants to hegemonise the centre and centre-left, and he has won over many Green voters back to Labour by adopting a more pro-Palestine rhetoric. (In fact, Burnham has adopted a lot of the Green rhetoric wholesale. Labour's slogan at their recent party conference was "Hope Again". This is literally just the Green slogan from last year, "Make Hope Normal Again", with two words subtracted!) As a result, his party has enjoyed a bounce in the polls, but he is still left with that 10 percent or so of the electorate who persist in supporting the Greens and stubbornly refuse to come back under the Labour umbrella. So the next step is to delegitimise the remaining left wing opposition as antisemitic, just as Starmer did. Labour, it seems, is a party that cannot change its spots. Will the attempt to delegitimise the left work? I don't think so. The Greens (much to the chagrin of at least a couple of their MPs) are a democratic party and the members will, I think, not be cowed or bullied into dropping their opposition to Zionism. There may be amendments to the ZiR motion at the next conference, along the lines suggested by Polanski, but nothing that will alter its essence. The Burnham bounce is real. One only has to look at the record of opinion polling since Burnham took over. But it is not that great: Labour is still in the mid to upper 20s, not even at their level at the last GE. If Burnham announces the go-ahead of Jackdaw and Rosebank (oil and gas extraction) I think we'll start to see that lead erode. Multi-party politics is not be buried quite so easily. Burnham might still achieve great things: a National Care Service, as great as the National Health Service, would be a very significant achievement. So would sorting out the housing crisis, reforming the voting system to make every vote count, and even possibly taking us back into Europe - though I am more sceptical now than I was before that he will in fact achieve these things. But in the end, whilst he is infinitely more personable than Starmer, with a seeming ability to get people on-side with a flutter his eyelashes, I now see him as a rather superficial figure.