What does Burnham’s leadership of the Labour Party mean for working-class political representation now?, asks HANNAH SELL.
The crisis of working-class political representation has been a central but largely unspoken feature of British society for many decades now. The absence of a mass party that fights to defend the interests of the working class in parliament and the council chambers has made it easier for the capitalist class to drive down the living standards of the working class and much of the middle class over a prolonged period. For a time, when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, there was an opening for Labour to be transformed into a workers’ party but that opportunity was squandered.
Today, the urgency of the working class fighting back against capitalist austerity is intensifying. Across Europe young people and workers are taking to the streets. On 20 November, students in Britain will be joining them, taking part in a continent-wide day of strike action. And the issues facing the working class as a whole are not fundamentally different here to France, Spain or Italy. Paul Nowak, TUC general secretary, summed it up, writing, “£14,000. That’s how much extra households have paid in mortgage, energy, loan, and water bills since 2021. From austerity to the pandemic to energy shocks and Trumpflation, working people have borne the brunt of crisis after crisis – and it’s high time for some relief”. (LabourList, 19 October)
That’s an accurate description, but the question is whether the trade union leaders are prepared to mobilise the workers’ movement’s huge potential power, with more than 6.5 million members in TUC-affiliated trade unions, to conduct the serious struggle required to gain even ‘some relief’.
The 2026 TUC Congress did agree to start taking action against austerity when it passed the motion moved by the PCS civil servants’ union to call a national Saturday demonstration this autumn, and for coordinated public sector strike action. In formally accepting the motion, however, Nowak evaded pledging to actually implement it, saying the TUC General Council would have to consider ‘resources’. Six weeks on and the general council is yet to take a decision. Under huge pressure from below trade union federations in France, Spain and Ireland have been forced to call public sector one-day general strikes or public sector general strikes. The same pressure for action is mounting here in Britain.
Fanning hopes in Burnham
At the moment, however, most trade union leaders are trying to hold that at bay by raising hopes in Andy Burnham as prime minister. That was the central thrust of Nowak’s LabourList article on austerity. The TUC’s demands for the first budget of the Burnham government, outlined by Novak, are desirable but very modest compared to the action needed. They include ‘a social energy tariff that knocks up to £560 off bills’, delivering on ‘banning exploitative zero hour contracts’, ‘public ownership and control of our water’, and ending ‘outsourcing’ through the biggest ‘wave of insourcing in a generation’.
Many of the issues that workers want action on are not mentioned. Nothing, for example, on rent controls or council housebuilding, nothing on increasing the minimum wage to the TUC’s demand of £15 an hour, nor on reversing Burnham’s plan to steal £15 billion a year by 2040 from pensioners by keeping the triple lock, nor on nationalisation of the energy companies. Nor has Nowak made any public statements demanding the immediate repeal of the 50% turnout threshold for strike ballots, which Starmer’s Labour promised in its first hundred days in office as part of the Employment Rights Act. We are now over a hundred days into the second prime minister of this government, and it is still on the statute books!
However, even Nowak’s limited demands are clearly not going to be delivered on 28 October. Tacitly accepting the alleged constraints on the government, Nowak says, “of course, there are difficult economic headwinds – and John Healey faces some hard choices to meet his aim to stay within the government’s fiscal rules”. But even beginning to deal with the relentless cost-of-living squeeze which Nowak accurately describes, would require rejecting the ‘hard choices’ being demanded by British capitalism. Those suffering the consequences of those ‘choices’ are always working-class people, and often the most vulnerable. In addition to planning to cut pensioners’ income, it is already clear that Burnham’s Labour government is planning another assault on the benefits of the disabled and the young.
Yet, to give just one example, there is a gigantic £3.2 trillion held in British pension schemes, 10% more than annual GDP. When Reeves became chancellor only a miniscule fraction of them were invested in the UK, and she set out to gently cajole the 17 biggest pension funds to ‘aim’ to increase that figure to a still tiny 5%. They ‘agreed’ in principle as long as there was no question of any firm commitments, never mind mandatory measures. Imagine if Burnham’s chancellor, John Healey, was to introduce laws to force pension funds to invest in Britain’s infrastructure, threatening nationalisation if they failed to do so. That would mark a genuine shift from Reeves’ approach but would also provoke howls of outrage from the capitalist class. It is clear that Healey – who has ruled out even equalising capital gains tax – is no more prepared than Reeves to contemplate this. On the contrary, this government’s priority, like Starmer’s, is keeping the markets and the elites happy, and that means continuing to squeeze the incomes of the working-class majority.
Will Burnham turn New Labour into old?
It is therefore clear that the faint hopes that exist among some trade unionists that Burnham might, at least, be a bit better than Starmer, are going to fade, perhaps very rapidly, on the basis of experience. Burnham is not going to act as an effective means to avoid the question of working-class political representation for long. It would be a somewhat different situation, of course, if trade union leaders really believed that Burnham was planning to make good on his declaration when he ran for the Makerfield by-election to “change Labour”, and to ‘re-transform’ it into a workers’ party. But none of them put this as a serious proposition, as shown by their failure to state clearly what is needed to make that a reality, or to mobilise their members in a mass movement to achieve it.
It was in the 1990s, under the leadership of Tony Blair, that the Labour Party became an utterly reliable party for British capitalism. Prior to that the big majority of working-class people saw Labour as ‘their’ party. Labour had been a capitalist workers’ party, with a leadership that ultimately acted in the interests of the capitalist class, but with a democratic structure and a mass working-class base which could exert pressure on the leadership.
That qualitatively changed when Blair transformed Labour into New Labour. The democratic structures through which the trade unions could act on the Labour leadership were dynamited, and the party’s socialist clause was replaced with a pro-capitalist one. Labour’s vote fell by almost five million – from 13.5 million in 1997 to 8.6 million in 2010. Since then, despite the UK population increasing by over twelve million, there have only been two elections where Labour has won more than ten million votes, both under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in 2017 and 2019.
Corbyn had been a Labour backbencher, for decades part of a tiny isolated group of left Labour MPs, when he was unexpectedly thrust into leadership on the shoulders of the ‘three pounders’. They were non-Labour Party members who, seeing the chance to elect an anti-austerity candidate, took advantage of a ‘loop hole’ and signed up as ‘registered supporters’ for £3 to vote for Corbyn in the leadership contest. A chance existed then for Labour to be re-transformed. Democratisation of the party, including restoration of trade union rights within it, combined with a campaign to deselect pro-capitalist MPs and councillors, could have turned Labour into a workers’ party.
Unfortunately, Corbyn and those around him were not prepared to conduct the struggle needed and as a result they were defeated by the pro-capitalist right of the party, leaving the undemocratic structure of Blair’s New Labour still largely untouched. Nonetheless, Starmer quickly took further anti-democratic measures to try and ensure that an equivalent of the Corbyn ‘accident’ never happened again. The three pounders were abolished, Labour leadership candidates had to get 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party to get on the ballot, up from the previous 10%, and the already weak ability of local parties to deselect sitting MPs was further curtailed.
Nothing has changed under Burnham, nor has he announced any intention to make changes. All the anti-democratic rules introduced by Starmer remain in place. Corbyn is still expelled. The Labour Party conference was stripped of its power in the Blair era, with motions being passed having no effect on decision making. But as the long-established Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLDP) group nonetheless point out, at Burnham’s first conference things got even worse than previous years. Among other things the majority of constituency Labour Party motions were excluded from the agenda, the Conference’s right to reference back sections of the National Policy Forum was usurped, and no discussion was allowed on foreign policy, including Palestine.
Nor is there any indication whatsoever of workers and young people becoming active in the Labour Party as a result of Burnham’s leadership. On the contrary, only 36,127 of the over 250,000 Labour Party members voted in the August 2026 elections to the National Executive Committee (NEC), compared with 44,710 in 2024; 69,889 in 2022; and 129,549 in 2020, all after Corbyn’s departure from the leadership. It is true that the nominations process began before Burnham was crowned leader, but the voting – from 27 July to 27 August – was in the first month of Burnham’s alleged ‘bounce’.
Could there be a surge of trade unionists joining Labour because they are enthused by Burnham? There are no signs of an influx. Certainly no-one is drawing comparisons with the flood of young people and workers who signed up enthused by Corbyn. Nor has Burnham’s leadership led to a qualitative increase in Labour’s poll ratings. There has been a small ‘bounce’ but Burnham’s government is still less popular than Starmer’s was in his first six months as prime minister.
The debate on a new party
So what does that mean for the trade union movement? In the second quarter of this year alone the Labour affiliated trade unions gave £535,510 to the Labour Party. This was the Starmer-led Labour Party which, as a result of its austerity policies, had become hated by working-class people and went down to a historic defeat in the May local elections. Had Starmer remained in place the demands of rank-and-file trade unionists would be deafening by now for their unions to stop handing members’ money over to a party that was attacking the working class in both national and local government. The question of a new party would have been firmly on the agenda.
True, last summer a significant opportunity in that direction was wasted. When what became Your Party was first announced by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana more than 800,000 people signed up, demonstrating the huge potential. Unfortunately, Your Party was stillborn, not only a result of the top-down bureaucratic approach of the leadership, but also because it did not base itself on the trade union movement. Had the leadership made an appeal to the rank-and-file of the trade unions for a joint struggle to win the argument in their unions to build a new party based on the workers’ movement it could have very rapidly made ground. But despite that wasted opportunity there is no doubt that, with Starmer still in place, the debate on the need for the trade unions to build something new would now be being discussed throughout the trade union movement.
But will a new prime minister, with fundamentally the same policies, and atop the same undemocratic party structure, provide pro-Labour trade union leaders with a justification for ducking this issue for any length of time? The answer is clearly no. A northern accent and an alleged ability to relate to working-class people is not going to cut it. The issue is already on the agenda in a number of unions. The PCS civil servants union, for example, agreed a motion on combatting Reform and the far right at its 2026 annual conference which concluded that, “the unions must fight to compel the Labour government to implement pro-worker policies and if it does not do so, the unions should call a conference to discuss the building of a political vehicle for workers”.
In Unite, Labour’s biggest affiliate, the 2025 policy conference agreed that the union would “reassess its relationship with Labour” and that is due to be discussed at the Unite Rules Conference next July. In addition, Sharon Graham, recently re-elected as Unite general secretary, pledged in her election address that she would “make sure that every member has a say on whether we should remain affiliated to Labour before our Rules Conference”. Socialist Party members on the Unite executive argued unsuccessfully that the conference should take place sooner; in order to allow Unite to have an impact on the May 2027 local elections, in which nearly 10,000 councillors are up for election, and in which, without authoritative workers’ candidates, Reform is likely to once again be able to harness anger at New Labour austerity. Nonetheless, it is clear that a debate is beginning in Unite.
Sharon Graham’s support among union activists is primarily based on the union’s industrial militancy under her leadership, including being prepared to take action against Labour local authorities, above all in the heroic, and still ongoing, Birmingham bin strike. In 2025 she supported the motion for the union to reassess its relationship with Labour. However, since then, Unite was one of the first unions to nominate Burnham for leader, as all the affiliated unions went on to do, with Sharon using her authority to argue for that. She correctly condemned the breaking of the pension triple lock, but nonetheless gave Burnham’s Labour Party conference speech 8.5 out of ten. At this stage she, like other union leaders, is putting the case for Burnham to be ‘given a chance’. It is clear, however, that many of the rank-and-file activists who support Sharon will be campaigning, alongside Socialist Party members, for the union to enter the political field as an independent force.
There are steps in that direction that could be taken immediately without any rule changes, not least on the issue of the triple lock. For example, Unite sponsored 100 Labour candidates who were elected in the 2024 general election. Unite could approach them all to move and support an amendment to the budget committing to the maintenance of the triple lock. If 80 Labour MPs were prepared to vote for such a measure it would be enough to lose the government its majority. Of course, it is probable that less than 80 of them would be prepared to do so, but that raises the need for a Unite parliamentary group made up only of those MPs who are prepared to fight for Unite policy.
Inevitably the argument will be raised that a smaller group of MPs who defended the interests of the working class would be ineffective, and that it is therefore better to keep funding Labour MPs who vote for war and austerity in the vain hope that doing so will block Reform. But actually, the history of the Labour Party shows the value of even a small number of workers’ MPs. In the 1906 general election, for example, the precursor of the Labour Party, the Labour Representation Committee, got only 29 MPs elected, while the Liberal Party won a landslide. But that small group exerted the pressure of the organised working class inside parliament. The Liberal government had to repeal the vicious anti-union Taff Vale judgement within ten months and introduce some limited social reforms, including the first state pension in 1908.
Today Burnham is instead slashing the state pension. The trade unions having even 29 workers’ MPs would be a powerful weapon aiding the struggle against austerity. For the majority of the national trade union leaders at this stage, however, the idea of building a new party is petrifying, above all because it would begin to pose the question of the working class overthrowing capitalism and building a new socialist society. However, for the millions of workers who will enter struggle against austerity in the next period, the urgent need for a new party will as clear as day.