Will Manchesterism save the Scottish Labour Party?
Probably not, no.
Right, article over, we can all go home. Less glibly , as we muddle through the awkward Starmer-to-Burnham interregnum, the space is being filled with much musing on whether and how he will turn things around.
Scotland’s distinct political sphere means we’re considering his impact not just on Westminster, but Holyrood too. Whilst it’s far too early for firm predictions, I’ve got my own theory shaping up about how I don’t think Burnham is going to be the saviour Scottish Labour so desperately want.
Nationalists HATE this one weird trick!
It’s important to understand the roots of that desire in the devolved context. Throughout the SNP’s time in office, the Pro-Union opposition parties have gone through a series of increasingly desperate “surely this will be the end of Nats!” wishcasting scenarios.
In the SNP’s first term, the fact that Labour didn’t lose a single seat to them in the 2010 UK Election was taken as a sign the experiment was over. The SNP then went on to an unprecedented and as yet unrepeated majority, which led to the 2014 Independence Referendum.
Ah, well, nevertheless!
Hopes then turned to the idea that once the Yes campaign lost, as it inevitably would by a large margin, the SNP would be utterly ruined! Then not only did the referendum deliver a much larger Yes vote than expected at the outset, but the SNP were so buoyed by it that they won 56 of Scotland’s 59 MPs in the 2015 UK Election, absolutely shattering Scottish Labour.
Ah, well, nevertheless!
Initially unsure of the next step, into the breach stepped Scottish Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson. Hitting upon strident Unionism as the magic formula just right for the moment, she led her party to a stunning revival in the 2016 Scottish and 2017 UK Elections that had her widely described as Scotland’s Next First Minister. Never mind that was a fanciful idea from the first, she stood down before 2021 anyway, and her (rather unpleasant) successor failed to make any headway.
Ah, well, nevertheless!
As the Conservative revival hit the buffers, it was time to turn back to long-nursed hopes of a Labour UK Government, which would surely settle the jocks right back down. The chaos following Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as SNP leader and First Minister and the complete calamity of the Johnson-Truss transition by the Conservative UK Government opened the window for both a genuinely impressive Scottish Labour recovery and Labour UK Government in 2024.
Of course, that was soon ashes in their mouths, as Starmer proved utterly unfit to be Prime Minister. Support collapsed, and the SNP went on to win this year’s Scottish Parliament election almost by default. Scottish Labour aren’t blameless in this, as much as they may wish otherwise, but that’s a whole other topic… (My wife, she has been most vocal on the subject of Anas Sarwar’s leadership. Has he resigned? When is he going to resign? Why isn’t he resigning now? And so on…)
Ah, well, nevertheless!
Enter Andy Burnham, erstwhile Mayor of Greater Manchester. Here is another opportunity for Scottish Labour and their media outriders to get their hopes up. Some of this has been quite explicitly rooted in the fact Burnham is from the north of England.
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He’s got a different accent from all those southerners! That superficial difference alone will surely endear him to the Scots, and that’s not at all a patronising and quite odd attitude to take, right? It’ll also neutralise SNP attack lines about being governed from London, or so the theory goes. I am not convinced, to say the least.
The first Prime Minister of England?
What makes Burnham meaningfully different from any previous Prime Minister is that he isn’t a creature of Westminster; or at least, not anymore. Obviously, he did his time in Cabinet in the Gordon Brown years. He spent 16 years as an MP, during which he stood for Labour leader twice before.
Yet it is his near-decade as Mayor of Greater Manchester that ultimately made him. Detached from the day-to-day of governance at Westminster, Burnham has been able to present himself as unsullied by Starmer’s many errors. His freedom from collective responsibility and the whip allowed him to toy with criticisms of his government that would have been career-ending were he an MP when he made them.
Most importantly, he has cultivated a reputation as a vocal, visible and highly effective leader for his city, a true believer in decentralising power (you’ll forgive me for refusing to use the term “devolution” for something so utterly incomparable to what we have in Scotland.) Some Mancunians who know far better than me about their city may suggest that reputation isn’t entirely accurate, but certainly, it’s part of his personal mythos.
This is unique in UK politics to date. In the modern democratic era, everyone who has risen to the office of Prime Minister has done so through the Westminster machine. To reach the top not simply after having been a Combined Authority Mayor in the past, but that having been such a crucial part of your ascension, almost has shades of how you can springboard to President of the United States just as easily from Governor as you can from Senator.
It may also be Burnham’s fatal flaw as far as Scotland is concerned. This is a man whose political agenda has been shaped by English Regionalism. That may well be a welcome change for large parts of England, but it means very little for Scotland (or indeed for Wales). No one here is going to get excited about more powers for Manchester, Birmingham or Leeds, and the audience for looking enviously at the office of Metro Mayor is limited to one MSP in Glasgow.
Burnham has already shown a relatively poor understanding of Scotland when he gave Dundee as an example of somewhere that feels distant from Holyrood. Dundee, which had the strongest Yes vote in 2014. Dundee, which elected a majority SNP council in 2022 despite a proportional voting system. Dundee, which has a complete SNP lockdown on its constituency representation in both parliaments, including one seat which had a by-election on the very same day as Burnham’s own that the SNP easily won.
If he’d paid attention, he might instead have went for Aberdeen, where the SNP had a massive loss to the Conservatives, again that same day. He might also want to brush up on the fact that the “centre vs periphery” dynamic in Scotland is very different to England.
The Central Belt accounts for around three-fifths of Scotland’s population, and about three-quarters of the Labour vote here. The places most distant, both in geography and character, from Holyrood are the likes of Dumfries and Galloway, the rural North East, the Highlands and the Islands. These are not places conducive to England’s city-centric model of decentralisation, nor do they offer fertile ground for Labour recovery.
What’s more, it’s functionally impossible to do meaningful transfer of powers from Westminster to Scottish Local Government, because almost anything that could be done at local level is already devolved to the Scottish Parliament. Either amending the Scotland Act to change the power distribution entirely, or simply using Westminster’s unlimited power to legislate for Scotland regardless of what Holyrood wants, would bolster SNP attack lines about English politicians overruling Scotland’s parliament.
He seems to be unaware he’s inheriting a Scottish party which lost heavily to the SNP this May, and was only 2% away from losing to the Greens as well. In fact, it did lose to the Greens in both the capital and the largest city in Scotland. Within my voting lifetime it was unthinkable Labour would lose in Glasgow, and now they’re the city’s third party at Holyrood level.
If Burnham isn’t careful, he’ll just make things worse. In some respects, I’m viewing him as having the potential to be the first leader with a genuine feeling of being “Prime Minister of England”. If by the time of the next election his big ticket success is English decentralisation and Scotland either got nothing or he picked a fight with Holyrood over it, I don’t think that’s going to end brilliantly for him or his Scottish colleagues.
Never say never…
I’m certainly not saying the SNP are unbeatable (they were in 2024), or that Burnham is absolutely doomed to fail in Scotland. We have potentially three years before the next UK Election, and goodness knows what will happen in between now and then.
However, Burnham faces enormous challenges north of the border, and those need to be accepted and understood. Simply taking it as an article of faith that this will be the thing that finally gets the Nats will prove as insufficient now as it has so many times before. Expecting English Regionalism’s strongest soldier to be a Scottish Saviour seems to me more likely than not to end in tears.
Ah, well, nevertheless…
