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# After Starmer, After Burnham, After that...
- URL: https://futuri.city/after-starmer-after-burnham-after/
- Published: 2026-06-22T11:59:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-19T19:32:44.000Z
- Author: Sophia McAllister
- Tags: Newsletter, #sophiefrommars, #Migrated-1792438291474, #Import 2026-10-19 20:32

In the 6 years between 2016 and 2022 Britain had 5 different Prime Ministers. Cameron bet big against Brexit and lost. May ran through fields of wheat as fast as she could away from having to debate Jeremy Corbyn. Boris Johnson “got brexit done”, got his pockets full and got on his way to greener pastures. Liz Truss was Prime Minister for about 10 seconds and still managed to kill the queen. Finally Rishi Sunak in a huge diversity win became Britain’s first billionaire Prime Minister. The whole time the country and the world watched in bafflement and horror.

“I think it’s just what big political parties do when they die!” As soon as I heard it it struck me as a very concise and true analysis of the moment we’re in. It was Muel, my beloved friend and co-host of Red Planet who said it. We were talking about the revolving door of leaders that defined the Conservative Party’s collapse from unprecedented political dominance down to its current level, just barely holding onto its position as official parliamentary opposition, and trying to figure out if it’s going to happen to Labour when Keir Starmer finally goes. This morning Starmer announced that he is, **finally**, going

Now, the firm truth of this statement isn’t the certainty of the revolving door phenomenon, or the “party leader boss-rush” as I’ve also called it on the podcast (you have to picture Keir Starmer flashing red and white and saying “ouch!”). It is instead the mechanics of why a rapid succession of leaders happens, as in why it happened to the Conservatives and why it *may well* happen to Labour that you have to understand.

The underpinning truth of the matter is that the Labour party is dead. We’ve been saying it for a long time, and we know that there are a lot of people who find hope in Starmer’s exit and believe that Burnham will be able to turn things around, but it’s already too late. The party is unable to correct course because the surrounding logic of what is politically *“pragmatic”* or *“realistic”* or *“viable”* constricts the options available to them so much that they can’t make the only changes they would need to in order to hold onto power.

As loathe as I am to ever agree with anything that infamous waste of skin Wes Streeting says, when he attacked Burnham recently as a “political shopping trolley” he was making a fair observation, albeit to his own sordid political ends. Burnham is not animated by a principled and consistent set of beliefs but rather is engaging in a classic exercise in demonstrating nothing will meaningfully change. He wants us to know he won’t let up on immigration, he won’t challenge the EHRC on trans rights, he won’t change the government’s stance on Israel, and on and on. He is signalling that he will ensure continuity, no doubt with some awareness of the Tory revolving door hanging over him as it has Starmer for most of his term. When people have started in response to this calling him “Starmer with a northern accent” they have been doing it with good cause.

Another recent instance of glorious vindication for Red Planet over the weekend was the collapse of the US-Iran peace deal. We knew it was not going to hold because we have been saying for years that US hegemony is collapsing and that other countries would soon be dictating terms with hard power. Where many people are seeking comfort and relief in the systems that have provided the structure of the last few decades, we see that anything that can survive this slide into fascism needs to face away from imperialist power now, and must be structured to actively resist it.

Some simple ideas outline the core analysis that we have been working from on the show the last 5 years. The current world order, the “international rules based order”, the “end of history“ order, the order of neoliberalism defined by horrifying capitalist imperialism, is collapsing. The wealth and power within the imperial core is being siloed into the possession of the ruling class leaving the working class of the imperial core in freefall. The strongest long term moves any of the richest countries in the world right now can make are to strengthen socialist and democratic institutions or create them in some cases if not have an outright socialist revolution, but the system of imperialism is itself incapable of long term thinking. Socialism or barbarism, you have probably heard it before.

This is relevant to Burnham because he is, once the cloud of lanyards and soundbites of the leadership contest is over, stepping into the collapse of the two party system. The two party system is collapsing because materially conditions are worsening in the imperial core, and that is driving a rupture in the social fabric, the consensus reality, the window of what is politically imaginable. These are revolutionary conditions, and American far-right money is determined to make it a fascist revolution. This force carefully stewarded the rise of various far right protest parties, most recently Reform UK and the social media unreality that many of its supporters live in. The British left has grown and become more organised due to the emergence of this far-right populism.

A canny politician in Andy Burnham’s position would attempt to figure out a synthesis between the two polarised positions and between the realities that are provoking them. We would expect to see promises that included some things to appease the woke left like better environmental policy and higher taxes on the richest in society and some things to appease the Farage-right, like saying the words “tougher on immigration” and looking stern. We would expect some policies that aim to address things that practically everyone can agree are broken, like social housing, education, the NHS, wealth and income inequality, and employment. This, if undergirded by a strong socialist platform and a vision for a Britain that steps out of Trump’s shadow, would redefine the political moment for the UK and make Labour, in a word, relevant. There is a version of “sensible centrist” politics that could orient the UK to face China and Europe, as Mark Carney has been demonstrating in Canada.

Instead, everyone in Labour, including Burnham, continues to treat the kind of politics that Polanski’s Greens represent as completely beyond the Pale\* while saying things like “Nigel Farage is right about immigration”. There is no compromise with the left, only with the far right, and the hallucinated criticism from the far-right that Labour is too much like the Greens already is being given endless credence.

Can being Mr. Nationalisation save Burnham, and by extension, Labour? Already the usual suspects are lining up to tell number 10 and the rest of the country that public spending won’t be possible unless there are also more cuts, to drag out the book-balancing act that mesmerises people into forgetting all the parts of politics outside of the Chancellor’s ledger. However, Burnham may be able to resuscitate Labour’s popularity a little if he can actually push through a wave of nationalisations. Unfortunately that’s rather a big “if” and the people who are promising a new era under “the king in the north” don’t seem to have noticed that his promises so far aren’t actually to nationalise vital infrastructure but to "bring them back under stronger public control”. Strong**er** public **control**. This, again, is the way that “realism” defines a specific and highly ideological perspective in British politics. It is the same view that makes allying with Greens unthinkable and Nigel Farage appear reasonable.

Since the consensus is now that the two party system is collapsing, the ***truly*** canny move would actually be for Burnham to push through reforms to the voting system and open Labour up to the possibility of a coalition. Ranked choice voting would likely deliver a popular front against British fascism, but the Labour party as an entity seems too proud of its position as one of the two parties of this dying two party system to make that move. I live in Southwark, where the local elections delivered no overall majority. Here, despite Labour getting the most council seats, their inability to form a coalition with even the Lib Dems has put a Green-Lib Dem coalition in power. I don’t know the ins and outs of Labours failure in Tooley St (the Southwark Council offices) but I see a micocosm in Southwark of Labour’s national problems. We must keep Reform out, the left is very fractured, and all the parties who are used to not being in power are happy to work together. This, if I’m right, leaves Burnham in the position of trying to offer something that makes people want a Labour government and just a labour government.

Will the revolving door come for Labour? Maybe not. It is a mark of Starmer’s absolutely staggering wetness and lack of political nous that has led him to this position, and there may not be any sunlight between Burnham and Starmer in policy terms, but Burnham doesn’t have to get massacred at the local elections. It is possible he will come in and hold onto power through to the end of Labour’s current term, but at the end of that term we face a legitimately terrifying possibility, that of a Reform government led by Nigel Farage. If Labour can learn to play nice with the left and make the necessary electoral changes then it can be a power holder after the next general as part of a left coalition. I don’t think it will, and I am doubtful Burnham will last to the general, but I do know that Labour must abandon its self-delusion of still being one of the only two options, and if it can’t, it’s dead.

*\*I usually avoid the phrase “beyond the Pale” given its origin in the British colonial rule of Ireland referring to the Pale, the area directly under control as civilised and the land beyond it as unknowable and barbaric. Here however it felt appropriate as the politics represented by the Greens is being treated as uncivilised and unthinkable and one of the main divides in British politics right now is around our country’s support for a settler colonial project committing genocide.*