The lesson for Burnham - before it's too late

It wasn't an absence of charisma that did for Starmer; it was an absence of courage

If you wanted to encapsulate the reasons why mainstream politics has so struggled across the liberal world, you would call it Keir Starmer. I say this with sadness. But, as I argue in Braver New World, politicians who see their job as managing and tinkering will be destroyed by hostile forces. That’s what’s happened. Andy Burnham can have all the media savvy ‘ordinary bloke’ charm in the world, but that won’t enable him to turn things around. He needs to think big. Take calculated risks. And deliver radical change. It can be done. Others are doing it.

Everywhere you look you see liberal democratic leaders paralysed with fear. They worry about the markets (with reason); they fret about conventional media and social media (with less reason). They wait for bad things to happen, trying to anticipate what their critics might say of them in case they put a foot out of line. It’s a self-fulfilling spiral. They did that before the populists came onto the scene – why else would Tony Blair have flown halfway around the world to an Australian island to curry favour with Rupert Murdoch in 1995? And they do that now, with the populists in the ascendant. Who will forget the NATO secretary general Mark Rutte thanking ‘daddy’ Trump?

Even though he has enjoyed a parliamentary majority that others would only dream of, Keir Starmer obsesses about the latest focus group or the latest utterance of Nigel Farage. The Britain he inherited was in the doldrums – more than a decade into an era of austerity and a failure of governance (not to mention the act of wanton self-harm that was Brexit). Everywhere you looked, public services were in crisis: the NHS, the criminal justice system, housing, social care. These factors feed off each other. Worse housing leads to worse health. Worse health produces more social care demand, more anxiety. That leaves fewer people in work, lower growth and perennially low productivity, leading to lower tax revenues for public spending. More societal dislocation leads to more crime, which leads to jails that are overcrowded and prisoners released early and wrongly.

What has made it worse is a sense of helplessness, of politicians muddling through without any sense of strategy. Voters may put up with all manner of sacrifices if they are given a clear vision – and where possible, involvement in a plan. What will the world look like in a decade, and what does their country want to become? What they get instead is different. Shortly before presenting her Budget in November 2025, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (gave a speech which had been billed as a mature explanation of the difficult choices ahead. It was, commented Mark Borkowski, an author who has written about the history of public relations, ‘the kind of performance that explains why so many have tuned out. Westminster no longer talks with the country, it talks at it, in a beige dialect. Every syllable sanded down until nothing could possibly offend, or indeed, interest… It’s not just political; it’s cultural. We’ve built a political class allergic to spontaneity, terrified of the unpolished truth.’

Populists, by contrast, see in every crisis the opportunity to disrupt, to remake the world in their own image. Imagine if mainstream politicians did the same. Imagine if they didn’t seek to fill in the potholes in the hope of restoring the status quo, but instead saw in every challenge the opportunity to build afresh.

My starting point is that we cannot assume things will return to the way they were. The rise of authoritarian populism has ensured that. Why is it that mainstream politicians, including those who promised so much for so long, end up doing little more than tinkering? The key ingredient that eludes them is courage. What does courage in leadership mean? First, what it isn’t: it has nothing to do with recklessness, shooting from the hip, courting short-term popularity.

In the era of instant judgements and the pressure to make binary choices, that is the coward’s way out. Nor is it triangulation, working out the position of the two extremes and placing yourself in the middle, constantly looking over your shoulder for any criticism from the loudest voices. Nor is it based in rhetoric. I could quote Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope. Or the Tony Blair, 1997 variety. Or JFK, or Willy Brandt, or Nelson Mandela, or Martin Luther King.

No, the courage I am talking about is muscular, reflecting the harder-edged realities of now. It is based on commitment to see something through; staying power; resilience in the face of adversity. It is about being prepared to go against the grain when necessary and being honest with your citizens. Communication is a skill that has earned a bad name in politics, becoming synonymous with spin, scoring quick points, pushing messages that often appeal to the lowest common denominator. The communication I’m talking about is a subset of courage.

Contemporary politicians have been told that voters won’t accept candour. The moment criticism gathers speed on social media or in traditional media, then is whipped up and distorted by political opponents, a chosen policy is toned down, delayed or abandoned. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Much hinges on social solidarity and in citizens having a sense of agency. The evidence is clear that societies where citizens are informed and involved are more likely to cohere and succeed.

Politicians might insist that, long-term, such difficult decisions are all very well, but they don’t win the daily news agenda, the unremitting battle for headlines that was hard enough before the advent of fake news and bots. And they don’t win elections, because most of the problems are so intractable that it would take far longer than the four- or five-year voting cycle for the benefits to be reaped. Where’s the credit therefore in thinking afresh?

Think of it another way. Given that the link between delivery and trust has been undermined, if mainstream politicians don’t think more imaginatively about the future, they won’t have a future. The old world is not coming back.