Mayors of Working Class Manchester and Melting Pot New York pose new challenges to Regressive Populism in Britain and America

Way back in 1844, Friedrich Engels, a wealthy school dropout from Germany, wrote the first of his many books, “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.” He was 24. The book soon became a classic on nascent urbanism and an intimate account of the making of the industrial working class. The setting and the location for both was Manchester, the burgeoning 19th century Lancashire town, which Engels called “the most important” and “the most sensational” city in England, after London. He went on to describe it as “the principal site of … the Industrial Revolution … the ur-scene, concentrated specimen and paradigm of what such a revolution was portending both for good and bad.” Now nearly 200 years later and 10 years after Brexit, not to mention the splendid rise and the stately fall of a whole empire in between, a man from Manchester is going to London to see the King and become Britain’s next Prime Minister. Its seventh in a decade and fourth in five years. The national mood seems ready both for good and bad. There is no other choice. Andrew Murray (Andy) Burnham, the popular Mayor of Greater Manchester will soon replace the beleaguered Sir Keir Starmer whose premiership finally unraveled over the last weekend leading to the Monday morning resignation. Sir Kier left with genuine grace, great pathos and total disbelief in the rapid fall from high promises to hopeless frustration. It was also quite different from the end games of Starmer’s five predecessors, all of them Tories. James Cameron, who started the procession in 2016 by calling a boneheaded referendum on Brexit, left in a mighty hurry no sooner than his gamble had backfired. His successor Teresa May thought she could reconcile the Brexit blunder and the British reality but failed and left. Boris Johnson came as a clown and left as a clown but only after being the wrecking villain of pre-Brexit Britain. Liz Truss, out of depth and out of sync, lasted little over a month. Rishi Sunak had all the depth he needed to succeed as a fiscally conservative PM, but he had no chance of winning an election after Johnson’s antics as Prime Minister. Inadvertently, as well, Sunak became the convenient immigrant prototype to lead Britain’s grand old party with its white elders fleeing formal politics and its rank and file flocking to the anti-immigrant Reform UK Party. It is the rise of Reform UK and the thrashing it gave to both Labour and Conservatives in this year’s local elections that hastened the collapse of the Starmer government and Starmer’s exit as Prime Minister. There were other factors too, both personal and political, which contributed to Starmer’s rapid and ultimate failure. His new successor Andy Burnham is a different political persona even though there will likely be not much difference in the policies of the two men. The great British hope now is that Burnham’s personality and Mayoral record in Manchester would help him stem the Reform tide in the country and reverse its current momentum. Time will tell. Keir Starmer: Rapid Rise and Sudden Fall In the election that Prime Minister Sunak called in 2024, Starmer led the Labour Party to a seemingly landslide victory, but that was also hugely lopsided. Labour won 411 out of 650 (63%) seats in the House of Commons, but it managed only 34% of the popular vote. “Loveless landslide” was the verdict of the pundits, but the tenuousness of the victory was lost in the euphoria of Labour returning to power after 14 years in opposition wilderness. Prime Minister Starmer and the whole government started on the wrong political foot on every government initiative and even announcements. The worst of them was to limit Winter Fuel Payment benefit that helped millions of households in England and Wales. The irony of it is that this payment was perhaps the first benefit measure of the Labour government under Tony Blair in 1997. It was the brainchild of then Chancellor Gordon Brown who introduced it as a universal benefit for pensioners. Tory governments after 2010 were critical of the universality of the program but would not cancel or scale back what had become a popular program. Starmer as Prime Minister dared to go where Tories wouldn’t and the backlash was swift and became the start of the government’s slide even before it had found its footing. Although acknowledged for his skills and strengths in policy, Starmer turned out to be an ineffectual and bumbling politician. Surprisingly so for someone who was an accomplished barrister and a highly successful prosecutor with interest in human rights. As a prominent Member of UK’s Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, Starmer had extended his professional tentacles to the Soviet Union before its collapse, to South Africa after apartheid, to Northern Ireland, as well as European and Caribbean countries. All of this has come to nought at 10 Downing Street. Despite his failure as Prime Minister, Starmer was not new to politics or the Labour Party. Like most Labour politicians, Starmer’s political roots also go back to his parents who were both working class Labour supporters. Starmer himself became a young Labour activist as a teenager and a member of the university Labour Clubs at Leeds and at Oxford. He was even associated with one of the Trotskyite tendencies, the Pabloites, in the Labour Party. His entry into parliamentary politics came late, becoming an MP in in 2015 at the age of 53, a year before Brexit, and became leader of the Labour Party in his first attempt following Labour’s defeat in the 2019 election and the resignation of Jeremy Corbyn. The trajectory of Andy Burnham, the next Prime Minister, has been a different one within the Labour Party. Born in Manchester, in 1970, and eight years younger to Starmer, Burnham made an early start in parliament. He was young at 30 when he was first elected in the 2001 general election that started Tony Blair’s second term as PM. Burnham made his mark as an MP, held several junior minister positions under Blair, and joined the full cabinet under Gordon Brown. Ideologically, Burnham was to the left of Blair and closer to Gordon Brown, the socialist from Glasgow. After the Labour defeat in 2010, Burnham ran for the party leadership twice, in 2010 and again in 2015, and lost both, first finishing fourth to Ed Miliband and later finishing second to Jeremy Corbyn. In the 2020 leadership race that Starmer won, he was supported by Burnham who by then had become Mayor of Manchester. Mayor Burnham as Prime Minister Burnham had left Westminster in 2017 for local politics, contested the Greater Manchester mayoral election, and was elected Mayor garnering 63% of the vote and winning majorities in all ten of the regional boroughs. He has since been re-elected twice as Mayor with the same popular vote. During Covid-19, Burnham provided an alternative local leadership to fighting the pandemic that was quite the contrast to the blunders at the national level under Boris Johnson. With the unpopularity of the Starmer government, the blowup from the Epstein scandal, and the local elections debacle, there was pressure within the Labour Party for Mayor Burnham to return to Westminster and challenge Starmer for the leadership. After months of bureaucratic party infighting, a by-election path was found for Burnham to become an MP and be eligible as a leadership candidate. On June 18, Burnham won the by-election as a Labour candidate in Makerfield, a riding in the Greater Manchester Area where a vacancy had been created by the resignation of the incumbent Labour MP. Burnham won impressively with a 54.8% vote, upending Reform UK’s gains in the local elections. He won a plurality of votes from all the main parties – Conservative, Lib-Dem and Green – with all their candidates losing their deposits. He ran on his record of achievements as Mayor – in public housing, public transport, public inquires into child sexual exploitation and facilitating universal access to university education. Already as an MP and Minister, Burnham had gained national prominence – promoting a National Care Service paralleling the National Health Service, and for making a statement in parliament condemning the cover-up of police abuse and suggesting that the cover up had been “advanced in the committee rooms of this House and in the press rooms of 10 Downing Street.” Those who are supporting Burnham now are obviously hoping that he would be able to reignite the old Labour flame that went dead under Starmer. This was unfortunate because Starmer had already moved the government to the left on many policy fronts, including re-nationalization of sectors that had failed under privatization. Andy Burnham is not the first City Mayor to become British Prime Minister. There have been two rather unsettling predecessors. First was Neville Chamberlain who was the Mayor of Birmingham during World War I, before he became Prime Minister at the start of World War II. Most recently, Boris Johnson served two terms (2008-2016) as the Mayor of London before becoming Prime Minister. Andy Burnham should know Britain’s Mayoral history well, but he will also know that he is cut from a different political cloth and that he is entering Downing Street in a different era facing different challenges. One of the areas where Burnham’s predecessor slipped up and never recovered was in dealing with Donald Trump and his mercurial ways. The more hopeful among British commentators have been citing from one of Burnham’s campaign speeches during the Makerfield by election: “This is a final chance to change. This is what people said directly to me on the hundreds of doorsteps that I stood on. We must hear it, we must act upon it and we must get it right. There will be no second chance. But there is a chance now from this result tonight to build a new politics based on unity and hope. Turning away from the path that takes us to a divided, dark politics of the kind we see in the United States.” The battle might be on, to put it mildly. Mamdani’s New York Magic Unlike in Britain, there is no national mood as such in the US. Instead, there are many moods across the nation with the pushes and pulls between them shaping the course of politics in this midterm election year. In one of those moods in New York, Mayor Mamdani has pulled off a stunning sweep within the Democratic Party in the primary nomination contests to elect party candidates for New York’s Congressional Districts in the November election. Mamdani endorsed three candidates, all of them members of the Democratic Socialists of America. All three of them have defeated establishment candidates of the Democratic Party and won nominations to contest the November election. Before the primary vote in New York on Tuesday, none of the mainstream pundits expected Mamdani to pull this off. After Tuesday, none of them have stopped talking about it. President Trump was exercised enough to declare on social media, his only pulpit, that “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”. Giving fake praise to the Mayor, Trump wrote that Mamdani had, “pulled through three solid Communists, and has received loud and universal applause from the Fake News Media. Congratulations Mr. Mayor.” It is too late for Mr. Trump to learn the differences between democratic socialism in America and communism that is in his nightmare. The Democratic Socialists of America are a broad civil society organization that grew from a membership of 6,000 when Bernie Sanders ran his primary campaign for the 2016 presidential election that Trump ended up winning. And thanks mostly to Trump and his executive actions, the membership has now grown to over 100,000 with activists in every state. The primary reason for their being is opposing Trump’s indefensible policies and initiatives – from immigration to domestic welfare and foreign warfare. New York is the organization’s nerve centre even as it is the vibrant microcosm of the nation’s diversities and contradictions. One of New York’s Congressional Districts (the Seventh) is the country’s “Commie Corridor”, while the 12th District is America’s wealthiest enclave. Progressive Democrats have won nominations in both as well as in the 10th and the 13th Districts. President Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, went to defeat in the 12th, while the surprising nominee for the 13th District is a firebrand democratic socialist, Darializa Avila Chevalier. Ms. Chevalier is an Afro-Latina from the Dominican Republic who is a community organizer and a sociology Ph.D. student at Columbia. Ms. Chevalier, known to be “like AOC, but to the Left,” defeated Adriano Espaillat, a 71-year old veteran Latino Congressman also the from Dominican Republic and the first Dominican to be elected to the US Congress. Mr. Espaillat was once an ‘undocumented immigrant’, a category that Trump and his MAGA base now want deported. His defeat sent shockwaves through the American Latino establishment, but to his Latina critics, the Congressman had grown too flabby in office in spite of his own beginnings and early challenges. The convulsions in New York may or may not make an impact on the course of the campaign for and the results of the midterm elections in November. But they are indicative of new grassroots forces and processes that define the emerging political push backs against racist, right wing and anti-immigrant populism, not only in the US but also in Britain and other western democracies. The current transition in Britain reflects that dynamic. The essence of the new thrust is that it is shaking up the traditional opposition of American Democrats to right wing populism, which has become too conventional and even elitist. The campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were culturally elitist and they lost to the most financially elitist presidential candidate in American history. Former President Barak Obama is trying hard to prevent his post-presidential politics from being similarly branded as politics of elitism in retirement. What sustains this elitism is the myriad of establishment silos claiming to represent every ethnic and immigrant group in America. They operate transactionally at the top in utter isolation from their own grassroots. The genius of Mamdani is in attacking these silos and establishing grassroots solidarity irrespective of religion, ethnicity and immigrant diversity. He has demonstrated that this approach can work in New York’s melting pot, and that it can be politically successful. Trump, the consummate market politician, gets this instinctively. But traditional and elitist Democrats are too timid to embrace the new mode politics in New York City. by Rajan Philips