Sir Keir Starmer’s authority is fading. His poll ratings, and Labour’s, are disastrous. Key lieutenants are departing. With Labour conference looming, the talk is less about governing than about whether Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is positioning himself for the top job. In this context, Sir Keir’s speech on Friday to fellow centre-left leaders deserves close attention. It was continuity dressed as renewal: capital behind the wheel, social policy just along for the ride.
Tellingly, Sir Keir invoked “abundance” – the buzzword of American supply-side liberals and title of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s eponymous book. In Washington, it is the banner for centrists who pin prosperity on deregulation, rapid infrastructure rollout and market-led growth, with redistribution an afterthought. Sir Keir rebranded it “social democracy”. This was some chutzpah: a rallying cry from a civil war inside America’s Democratic party dressed up as Britain’s progressive future.
In the UK, Sir Keir argues, the political flashpoint is illegal migration. He claimed it was too easy to slip into off-the-books work and stay. But migrants in Britain already live with digital proof of status: a nine-character share code handed to employers or landlords, who verify it against a Home Office database. Sir Keir now proposes to treat British citizens the same way. A universal digital ID, mandatory for the right to work, is presented as protection against a shadow economy and another Windrush scandal. In reality, it risks laying the foundations for something more far-reaching. A consultation will consider whether including “additional information … would be helpful”. That opens the door to the Tony Blair Institute’s vision: a unified digital infrastructure that can link health, welfare, housing, tax and migration records. This would be not just a work check, but a national data spine – a backbone of interoperable personal information, attractive to Big Tech. Fights loom over gender identity, police access for protest surveillance and corporate capture. Digital identity can be built as public infrastructure, empowering citizens and protecting rights as in Estonia and Denmark. Sir Keir’s choice seems to follow the Anglo-American, not European, script.
Enter Mr Burnham, sketching a different course. His “Manchesterism” sees national control of the essentials: housing, energy, transport, water. He wants prices regulated via public coordination to keep costs low. He says long-term borrowing should be used to build the social stock. He is unafraid to float another £40bn for social housing, or to dismiss “bond vigilantes” as arbiters of affordability. On the continent this is normal politics. In Britain it marks a bracing break with the post-1980s consensus.
The irony is that Sir Keir once campaigned on a similar programme: public ownership, higher taxes for the wealthy and a Green New Deal. One by one those promises were abandoned as high office came into view. What remains is cautious orthodoxy. Mr Burnham is offering Labour members what Sir Keir once promised, before discarding it. That is, no doubt, why “Manchesterism” appeals to members and unsettles Downing Street. It is not nostalgia for municipal socialism, but closer to European models of interventionist capitalism: taming costs directly, rather than waiting for markets to deliver. The contrast is stark. Sir Keir sells continuity. Mr Burnham’s ideas offer rupture. The question for Labour conference is which future the party wants.
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