We have to call this out: neoliberalism and progressive politics are like oil and water. They don’t mix. And Labour today is as unrepentantly neoliberal as it was when Tony Blair (an avowed admirer of Margaret Thatcher) first became Prime Minister in 1994.
There’s a direct lineage here: from Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, via the significantly less evangelistic Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, through to Keir Starmer becoming leader in 2020 – having seen off a sustained ideological challenge from Jeremy Corbyn with the help of Labour Together and the highly influential Morgan McSweeney.
By far the biggest question we have to ask of Andy Burnham as he aspires to become the next Labour leader is where he stands on that spectrum? And will he be prepared to put democratic renewal at the heart of everything he does?
Regrettably, it seems sensible to assume that the next General Election will still be fought on a first-past-the-post basis. Assuming Burnham becomes Prime Minister sometime before the end of the year, he’s made it abundantly clear that electoral reform is not going to be his top priority.
The top priority for all progressive voters must therefore be to ensure that this will be the last General Election fought on that basis. How can that be secured?
Cast ahead to Labour’s Party Conference in 2027. Pro-PR Trade Unions and constituency parties will be sure to bring back an updated version of the motion in support of PR that was overwhelmingly approved back in 2022, but subsequently dismissed by Keir Starmer and therefore entirely absent from the 2024 manifesto. It will definitely pass in 2027, no doubt with Burnham’s active support. Then there will be all to play for between September 2027 and a General Election in 2029.
Step forward Labour MP Alex Sobel, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Elections. Sobel is calling for a National Commission to investigate the most appropriate alternative system to reflect the number of votes cast for each party:
“People need to have confidence that the seats allocated in Parliament follow the votes that are cast in a General Election, and that just doesn’t happen anymore. First past the post is a 19th century system based on having two large parties, but the proportion of the vote for the two leading parties has continued to decrease over time. If you look at elections in England, it’s now a 5-party system; and 6 in Scotland and Wales.”
If Burnham is really serious about PR, Labour could additionally organise and fund a Citizens’ Assembly in every constituency in the country to explore that same question. Legitimacy for such a critical change will not be secured by top-down processes managed by the very people who’ve contributed so much to the decline in trust in politics generally.
The Greens could, of course, seek to establish such a process in the first half of 2027, working collaboratively with the Lib Dems, the SNP and Plaid Cymru, as well as what has become of Your Party by then, and possibly even Prosper UK, on behalf of that rump of one-nation Tories still alive and kicking.
Going without Labour might well prove to be necessary, as part and parcel of a strategy ‘to exert maximum pressure on Labour to be the force for progressive politics in the UK that it now has to become’– as I put it in the first part of this blog. But how much better would it be to bind in a still hesitant Burnham, let alone that recalcitrant majority of hard-arsed Labour tribalists?
There are so many battles to be fought here! How is it, for instance, that Labour has so completely lost control of the narrative about immigration, to the extent that Shabana Mahmood now sounds and behaves like Nigel Farage in deep drag? And why is it that Burnham currently believes his best route to being the next Labour leader, and indeed to winning the next General Election, is to become the back end of Mahmood ‘s hatefully intolerant pantomime donkey? (Forgive the mixed metaphors: I sometimes can’t cope with the surrealism of the Labour Party today!)
Here again, I find myself grateful for the Green Party’s distinctive voice in this fiercely contested terrain: an outright refusal to buy into a single part of Farage’s and Mahmood’s divisive rhetoric; a steadfast commitment to improve the living and working conditions for all; a determination to uphold the UK’s commitments under the Geneva Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights; safe routes for those fleeing persecution; and an end to minimum income requirements for spouses of those already holding work visas. By no stretch of the imagination, by the way, should this be described as an ‘open borders’ policy: strict controls will still be needed within these much broader and more tolerant parameters.
Weirdly, what is seen today by everyone on the right as outrageously ‘woke’ will soon be accepted, I believe, as the height of pragmatism. There’s much back-slapping going on at the moment at the fact that net immigration is down to its lowest level since 2021 (at 171,000 in the year ending December 2025), primarily because of restrictions on Skilled Worker visas. Given our continuing and suicidally stupid failure to invest both in training and in appropriately remunerating UK citizens thinking about careers in the NHS and social care, every single senior manager in these critical professions is pointing to the inevitability of a ‘recruitment and retention car crash’ by 2027/2028.
The gap between perception and reality (endlessly distorted by Farage, our right wing media, reinforced by the highly damaging rhetoric from Starmer about living on ‘an island of strangers’) has never been greater. There’s no future for Labour unless it can narrow that gap. And there’s zero likelihood of this happening without the Green Party holding Labour politicians to account for their wilfully divisive rhetoric and actions in this area.
The failure to fill those recruitment gaps is just one aspect of Labour’s continuing failure to get to grips with many problems in the NHS. The shocking figures announced on Monday showing a tenfold increase in patients dying needlessly because of waiting times in A&E — up from 30 a week in 2015 to 300 a week in 2025, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. And although the NHS has had some success in cutting the backlog for planned hospital care, there’s still a record 1.92 million people in England waiting for diagnostic tests of one kind or another – 400,000 of whom are waiting for more than the mandated six weeks maximum.
And the situation is even more chronic in terms of Social Care – which Burnham says will be a priority if he becomes Prime Minister.
All this is not just a question of lack of funding or inefficiency. So much of it is ideological. I’ve just been reading Hettie O’Brien’s revelatory ‘The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself’. So much of the public realm (services and infrastructure) has been sold off to private investors over the last 25 years, with those new owners using leveraged buyouts to ramp up levels of debt whilst maximising profits. The cumulative burden of all this to taxpayers today is massive.
The Financial Times recently published an utterly extraordinary exposé of the role of private equity in ‘looking after children in care’. The average charge to local authorities by a private provider for a child in care is now £384,020 a year. Which, as George Monbiot tartly points out, “is six times what Eton charges”. 84% of places in England are run for profit (compared with 5% in France), with the Tories (and now Labour) systematically defunding local councils on the ideological grounds that “public is bad and private is good: the foundational belief of neoliberalism”.
Andy Burnham occasionally burbles on about the dangers of unfettered neoliberalism, but in such wilfully vague ways as to be all but useless. So here’s a quick test: do you, Andy Burnham, agree with George Monbiot’s overall conclusion regarding the scandal of children in care today –
“There is no place for a ‘market’ here. Children are not a commodity to be bought and sold. Private profit and public service are always oil and water. But if there is one service that capital should never be allowed to get its filthy hands on, it is children in care” –
and will you therefore follow the example of Wales (under the former Labour Senedd) and commit to phasing out all profit-making in the sector?
In one crisis-ridden area after another, the depth of Labour’s failure becomes more and more shocking – and I haven’t even mentioned taxation, the genocide in Gaza, the cost of living, national security and addressing the combined climate and nature breakdown!
So will it even be possible to fashion a shared policy platform – against the backdrop of such deep ideological divisions and entrenched tribalism?
One has to hope so, and to hope that the Green Party will be at the heart of trying to make that happen. Without it, prospects for a Progressive Coalition look very tenuous.
Jonathon Porritt 10.6.2026
