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Clive Lewis just backed Andy Burnham for PM – or so it seems

It’s rumoured that Andy Burnham is planning to challenge Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership. While Burnham hasn’t announced anything official, he has discussed his ‘plan for Britain’, and now Labour’s Clive Lewis has hinted he’d support such a plan.

‘Manchesterism’ from Andy Burnham

Andy Burnham recently launched the ‘Mainstream’ campaign group which is calling for wealth taxes, an end to the two-child benefit cap, and the nationalisation of utility companies.

Despite the rumours, Greater Manchester mayor Burnham cannot currently challenge for the leadership as he is not an MP. To do so, he’d have to step down as mayor (or finish his term), run for office as an MP, and then run to be leader. Evolve Politics had more to say on how this could transpire:


Reporting on Andy Burnham and his political ethos, New Statesman said:

Burnham describes his “Manchesterism” as a form of business-friendly socialism that seeks to retake public control of all essential services, from housing to transport, in order to make life “doable” for those trapped in the insecure world of Britain’s outsourced Serco economy. Most important of all, in Burnham’s view, is reclaiming public control of housing. “To me, if you’ve not got control of housing, you’ve not got control of the costs the country is facing.” Not only is public control of the essentials necessary to drive down costs for ordinary people, it is also necessary to drive down costs for the state. “When you’ve lost control of housing, energy, water, rail, buses, you’ve lost control of the basics of life, but you’ve also then lost control of costs and public spending.”

The point, Burnham says, is that “it can’t be just a changing of the guard: you have got to change the whole culture and… are people up for that?” Burnham is offering something far more radical than a change of leadership. He wants a change in direction and a wholesale change in personnel: a northern takeover.

Burnham’s proposals are in stark contrast to the policies which Keir Starmer has enacted in government. Simultaneously, they are in line with the 10 pledges which Starmer made to secure the Labour leadership.

Burnham has said that several MPs asked him to challenge Starmer, saying:

People have contacted me through the summer – yeah. I’m not going to say to you that that hasn’t happened. But as I say, it’s more a decision for those people than it is for me.

Clive Lewis

Lewis is a member of Labour’s Socialist Campaign Group. Responding to a New Statesman article covering the Tony Blair institute, Lewis wrote (emphasis added):

The revelations in this article are shocking and unacceptable.

From Mandelson in Washington to Blair’s TBI writing NHS data policy with Oracle’s billions, to corporate lobbyists sitting on departmental boards – we are watching a state quietly repurposed to a degree not seen under any previous Labour govt – to serve the boardroom, not the public.

This is a political culture where dissent is pathologised, ideas policed, policy pre-cooked by private interests and presented as “inevitable.”

In this hollowing-out of govt, we face the danger of a politics so cowed by vested interests that it cannot stand up to them. And when that happens, it is the authoritarian right who reap the rewards.

People aren’t fooled. They can feel the country is being run for “them” not “us.” And unless Labour changes course – embracing pluralism, democracy and genuine debate – it will deliver power straight into Farage and Trump’s waiting hands.

Perhaps we’re in need of a bit of ‘Manchesterism’ – a different way of doing govt and one not afraid of giving control of public services to the very people that use and run them; Us!

Lewis has criticised Starmer in the past:


Starmer’s allies, meanwhile, have briefed against Andy Burnham:


Featured image via Kinversam (Wikimedia) / Scottish Government (Flickr)

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.