The Progressive Delusion

Andy Burnham is the leader the progressive left has been waiting for. He has united the parliamentary Labour party, so divided and demoralised under Sir Keir Starmer, but his ambition goes far beyond unity: he seeks a radical realignment of British politics that permanently locks the right out of power.

At the heart of Burnham’s vision is a belief that Britain has a natural progressive majority, but that it is split across multiple parties: Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and the nationalists in Wales and Scotland. Burnham argues that he has not only a “theory of growth”, as he put it in his conference speech, but an election-winning prospectus around which all progressives can align.

Here it is in broad outline: reform the voting system in favour of proportional representation so that everyone’s vote counts, relitigate the European question, create a national care service free at the point of need, drive growth in the regions through reindustrialisation and more devolution, embrace social liberalism and stop trying to “out-Reform Reform” on immigration.

For now, however, he believes he can turn what Nigel Lawson, the former Conservative chancellor, called the “tide of ideas” in Labour’s favour, and he has both momentum and the gratitude of the party.

But there are two fundamental delusions at the heart of the Burnham project. The first is that Labour remains the party of the working class. Many of his senior ministers may have risen from what Burnham calls the “aspirational working class”, but they are, in truth, educational meritocrats, and Labour is now the party of the professional managerial class: university-educated, urban, mobile, multicultural.

Clement Attlee’s first cabinet in the great, reforming Labour government of 1945 had seven former miners among its members.

That world has gone and yet Labour is deeply nostalgic for its passing – note chancellor John Healey’s veneration of the miners’ lamp in his own conference speech. Meanwhile, the party is struggling to have anything original to say about the technological, economic and demographic forces driving immense upheaval in the world today, from artificial intelligence and the energy crisis to the rise of China and mass immigration.

The second delusion is that there is a progressive majority in Britain just waiting to be united, as Lucy Powell, the party’s elected deputy leader, strongly believes. “Part of our task and challenge,” Powell said on the eve of the Liverpool conference, “is to reunite that progressive alliance … bringing our centre-left bloc back together”.

What does she mean by “our” centre-left bloc? Are the Greens under Zack Polanski’s bizarre leadership a progressive or regressive party? I would argue the latter. The Greens ran a deeply divisive and unpleasant campaign in the Gorton and Denton by-election, and the zeal of Polanski’s anti-Zionism, his culture wars rhetoric and support for open borders are repellent to many Labour MPs who consider him both a fabulist and extremist.

Burnham’s early ideological outriders, such as Neal Lawson, founder of the Compass pressure group, have long argued for coalition-building between Labour, the Greens, Lib Dems and the nationalists. But that approach is based on another delusion, particularly about what the SNP is and wants.

The strength of the SNP, as the late Alex Salmond once said to me, is that it is more than a party: it is a movement and cause committed, above all else, to the break-up of Britain. Today the SNP positions itself on the centre-left, but it has long been a broad coalition of fundamentalists, gradualists, socialists, woke liberals, “Tartan Tories”, and super-wealthy social conservatives such as Brian Souter, co-founder of the Stagecoach Group and one of the party’s biggest financial backers. What unites all factions is the single issue of independence not progressive sentiment, because no nationalism is entirely benign. In the 1970s, let’s not forget, the SNP was associated with anti-Catholic sectarianism. If Burnham dared to enter a “progressive alliance” with John Swinney’s SNP, the cost of any deal would be a second independence referendum, which would split Labour, a staunchly unionist party.

That leaves the Liberal Democrats, the third largest party at Westminster but, under Ed Davey’s leadership, one that seems largely aimless and, unlike Reform UK, incapable of setting the political agenda. Where there is significant alignment between Davey and Burnham is on social care and a new relationship between Britain and the European Union.

But the idea that Liberal Democrat voters, especially in former leafy Conservative seats in the south of England, are socialists or even social democrats is ludicrous. Many Lib Dems are crypto Tories who supported David Cameron’s social and economic liberalism but were opposed to Brexit. They may appreciate Burnham’s positioning on Europe, but, along with disaffected former Europhile Tories, express no wish to roll back the market reforms of the 1980s. In fact, they mostly want tax cuts and a smaller, more liberalised state.

Ever since the Liberal Party was eclipsed by the rise of Labour, socialists, social democrats and liberals were confronted by what the historian David Marquand, in a 1991 book, termed the “progressive dilemma”. Marquand’s argument was that unless the centre-left could find a way of working together across party differences the Conservatives would remain both dominant and the natural party of government.

In 1983 Margaret Thatcher certainly gained from the rise of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) which, in alliance with the Liberals, won 25.4 per cent of the vote in the general election but only 23 seats, compared with Labour’s 209 seats on 27.6 per cent. The first-past-the-post voting system was blamed for the Alliance’s failure to break through. But there was another reason why the anti-Conservative vote was split: the extremity of Labour’s manifesto, which pledged withdrawal from Nato at the height Cold War, unilateral nuclear disarmament and a programme of mass nationalisation. For the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman it was the “longest suicide note in history”.

Burnham is a pluralist and much less tribal than most Labour politicians who can’t see beyond the “movement”, which means he is more interested in ideas and, therefore, open to cross-party deals. He also rightly senses a historic political opportunity because the right itself is now divided between three parties: the Tories, Reform and Rupert Lowe’s Restore. The old progressive dilemma is the new conservative dilemma.

But instead of persisting with the delusion of reuniting an imaginary or wished-for progressive majority, Burnham should ask himself a difficult question: why has progressivism failed?

Lucy Powell’s “centre-left bloc” would no doubt like to rejoin the European Union, but what kind of Europe? The EU as it was before Brexit, and before Angela Merkel unilaterally opened Germany’s borders to more than a million refugees in 2015? That’s gone. Or the Europe of today, with its increasingly popular hardline nationalist populist parties and sclerotic economic growth in Germany and France, once the economic powerhouses of the European project?

Through force of personality, a gift for storytelling and considerable chutzpah, Burnham has taken control of Labour and shored up its core vote. This is no small achievement after the bitter years of civil war under Corbyn and the failures of the doomed Starmer premiership. But, as Starmer used to say, Labour is not Britain. Winning the country will be much harder. A progressive alliance may be the dream of many left-liberals but it would split Labour and create the conditions for a right-wing revival.