THE Labour Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph newspaper yesterday said that many Labour MPs have been privately urging him to stand against Keir Starmer as party leader.
This was the second interview given to the media by Burnham this week in the run up to the Labour Party conference that opens in Liverpool next week.
In both interviews, first to The Spectator magazine and then the Telegraph, Burnham focused on the need to ‘turn the country around’, with the clear message that Starmer was finished and he was preparing to launch a campaign to oust him.
Challenging Starmer would require Burnham to relinquish his Mayoral job, get elected as an MP and then obtain the written support of 80 Labour MPs.
Despite these hurdles, Burnham, despite being coy about his intentions, is clearly manoeuvring to be the person to dump Starmer and call a halt to the disastrous plans by his government to ‘rescue’ British capitalism from bankruptcy by slashing benefits and the welfare state.
These plans by Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves were upended by the massive hostility of workers to cuts to benefits of the sick and disabled, a hostility that was reflected in the rebellion of Labour MPs forcing Starmer into a humiliating climb down that reduced Reeves to tears in the Commons.
Now Reeves faces the impossible job of coming up with a Budget in November that will meet her cast iron fiscal rules of only spending what a bankrupt British capitalist economy can afford.
With the Labour government forced to borrow £18 billion from the international money markets in August, just to pay the bills, it is clear that massive cuts to state spending, super-austerity, is the only solution for Starmer and Reeves.
It is no surprise that the Starmer government – being torn apart by the demands of the capitalist class and the revolutionary upsurge of workers refusing to sacrifice their lives for the profit of the bankers and bosses – is collapsing and Labour MPs are desperately searching for a another leader.
Burnham, with his criticism of the ‘culture of Westminster’, is now front runner in the campaign to dump Starmer. As for Burnham’s economic plan to ‘turn the country round’, these amount to changing council tax on expensive homes, plus £40 billion of pounds borrowing to build social housing, plus income tax cuts for lower earners and a 50p tax rate for the highest paid.
In The Spectator interview Burnham insisted he would be prepared to defy any resistance to his borrowing and tax increases for the rich from the international money markets saying: ‘We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets.’
Former Tory prime minster Liz Truss thought she could defy the bond vigilantes in 2022 in her mini-budget that handed billions in tax cuts to the rich paid for by a massive increase in government borrowing.
The capitalist bond markets reacted by dumping the pound and coming close to crashing the entire UK economy, which was only rescued by the Bank of England priming billions to buy up government bonds to try and avert a complete economic collapse.
While Burnham’s objectives in calling for a massive expansion on government borrowing are more laudable than the tax cuts for the rich Truss wanted, the international bond markets will quickly make clear that they are the bosses of the capitalist system, and what they are demanding is that the working class pays the price for the biggest economic crisis in the history of capitalism.
Burnham’s bravado will cut no ice with these financial vultures. In fact – the working class alone has the power to resolve this crisis by seizing power and taking hold of the productive forces.
The burning issue today is for the trade unions to mobilise the power of the working class, by calling a general strike to dump the Starmer government and bring in a Workers Government that will nationalise the banks and major industries placing them under the management and ownership of the working class.
The victory of the British socialist revolution is the way forward for workers and youth.
The TUC must be made to call a general strike at once to begin the British Socialist Revolution!
