Extract from Eureka Street
- Home
- Vol 36 No 15
- The emerging Burnham-ism
- Rob Manwaring, Emily Foley
- 06 August 2026
The French writer and journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr is commonly credited with coining the phrase 'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose' – the more things change, the more they stay the same. Karr's insight was the ‘new’ often struggles to shed the ‘old’. Turning to the UK in 2026, with its seventh prime minister in a decade, older power structures may prove just as persistent despite the new leadership.
Andy Burnham, the former Mayor of Greater Manchester, emerged as the UK’s new Prime Minister, having toppled Keir Starmer, who managed just two years in office after Labour's dramatic landslide win in 2024. Burnham has made a flying start to his premiership, and a ‘Burnham bounce’ has taken place in the polls.
Burnham’s policy agenda
The motor of Burnham’s policy agenda, dubbed ‘Manchesterism’, places the creative use of state intervention at its centre. Burnham’s lighthouse policy initiative as Mayor of Greater Manchester was the ‘Bee Network’, which aimed to reverse neoliberal deregulation of the bus and wider transport network. At its core is the drive to make public services accessible and affordable and push back against the neoliberal consensus.
The strands of Burnham’s national agenda are taking shape. Two key cost-of-living announcements stand out – the commitment to removing VAT (the UK’s equivalent of the GST) on domestic electricity bills, and a cap on bus fares from £3 to £2 in England. These are partly funded by abandoning Starmer’s digital ID scheme. They echo some of the cost-of-living measures Jim Chalmers put in place in Australian Labor’s first term. What’s overlooked in the new is that Starmer’s Chancellor Rachel Reeves had already been pushing for similar measures across her budgets.
Burnham’s most striking commitment is to ‘oversee the biggest council-housebuilding programme since the post-war period’. This pledge potentially signals a significant break from his immediate predecessors and indeed most centre-left and UK governments since the 1970s. Since the rise of neoliberalism politics, there has been an entrenched reticence by Labour (and Conservative) governments to build council housing. Starmer’s approach, like the Albanese government, was to set a target to build more affordable homes, chiefly by relaxing planning restrictions. In the case of the Albanese government, this was attempted through leveraging housebuilding through capital markets, via the Housing Australia Future Fund. Burnham now faces a structural choice about the mode of funding and delivery, if his pledge is to be realised.
Structural and fiscal reform
The promise of Burnham-ism is that it will deliver structural reform to the UK and the ‘change’ that was encoded in Starmer’s Labour manifesto of 2024. Despite the early bounce, the lines are blurred between what Burnham can offer and what the Starmer government was also seeking to deliver. For Starmer, the early agenda was linked to Mariana Mazzucato’s work on the mission economy, in which active state intervention was used to redesign market settings, and corral the ‘coalition of the willing’. Starmer started with five main ‘missions’. Yet, for the most part this was a rhetorical or framing device, but only gestured at wider structural reform.
“The question that Burnham-ism has not yet answered is the degree to which his approach will break free of both Treasury fiscal orthodoxy and the tax settings Labour has imposed on itself.”
The essence of ‘Manchesterism’ is this commitment to public ownership and control, and Burnham-ism might accelerate and deepen an approach already signalled by Starmer. What might be different is that Burnham tends to localise his policy approach – so the change in focus might well be industries and sectors, such as his touted Bee network, which are closer to people’s everyday lives. For Starmer, the creation of ‘GB Energy’ which remains one of his boldest measures, could not be tied quickly enough to benefits in household budgets. Starmer also fell short on the ‘green energy transition’, and one of the early U-turns and policy rollbacks was the down-grading of the commitment to invest in green energy — initially pledged to be £28bn per year, but later reduced to that amount over five years.
The question that Burnham-ism has not yet answered is the degree to which his approach will break free of both Treasury fiscal orthodoxy and the tax settings Labour has imposed on itself. Notably, Starmer and Reeves pledged not to introduce increases to income tax, VAT, and national insurance for employees – a commitment Burnham and his chancellor John Healey have promised to uphold. When Burnham was Mayor, bond markets had reacted strongly to his suggestion that the Treasury was ‘in hock’ with the markets, and here he and Healey will face a critical dilemma in delivering the structural reform, with limited tax options.
Two potential tax changes might provide a clue to his response. First, Burnham has signalled that a greater share of income tax might be allocated to regional mayors. This would be a truly radical step. Second, the idea of a new social-care levy has been floated linked to an overhaul of the whole system that Starmer, and indeed Jeremy Corbyn, promised but never delivered.
Authenticity and performance
The promise of Burnham is that his leadership and communication style is seen as having far more cut-through. Starmer was ‘cautious’ and ‘technocratic’. His projection as a sensible, pragmatic leader, combined with his background as a public prosecutor, earned him the nickname 'Mr Rules', with a 'rules-based approach'. This was undone during the Mandelson affair, when a ‘captain’s pick’ proved highly damaging.
Burnham on the other hand, presents as a more communicative and authentic Labour leader. His performance of politics is far more approachable, with his nickname ‘King of the North’, earned in part through his confrontation with the Conservative government over pandemic support for northern England, reflecting a stronger working-class connection.
There are, however, questions about whether Burnham's communicative appeal will reach its limits during his time as prime minister. His brand of authenticity is rooted in a specifically northern regional identity, leading commentators to question whether the 'King of the North' can also be king of the south.
Centre-left and far-right challengers
The starkest challenge that Burnham faces comes from the resurgent populist right. Despite Nigel Farage’s Reform UK facing a suite of financial scandals, they remain a clear electoral threat and can quickly turn voter frustration against the government. One strategy open to the centre-left is to either co-opt or compete with the right on adopting a restrictive approach to immigration, an approach that has largely become mainstream in the UK. Burnham’s initial support for Shabana Mahmood’s more hardline approach to immigration, and his comments about ‘control’ in response to the current Ceuta crisis in Morocco, suggest continuity.
Yet, a 2021 report by Tarik Abou-Chadi and colleagues suggests that the centre-left’s electoral crisis might only be deepened by this type of strategy. Progressive voters have deserted the centre-left in greater numbers, offsetting any gains such appeals to the right might produce.
Where Burnham-ism might take the edge over Starmer’s approach is his passion and zeal for devolution. This approach has the potential to wrong-foot both right and hard-right, and despite the new No.10 in the North, it faces cultural resistance from Whitehall to ceding power to the local level in England. This ultimately will be the sternest test for the emerging Burnham-ism – its ability to devolve power in the most centralised advanced industrial democracies in the OECD.
Dr Rob Manwaring is an Associate Professor at Flinders University.
Emily Foley is a researcher at Flinders University.
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