Even Sir Keir is trying to show there is fight in the old dog yet. This week his government briefed that it wants supermarkets to cap food prices. This would ape a foolish policy north of the border, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) says it will compulsorily cap the price of up to 50 essential foods in big supermarkets. But Labour’s policy would be voluntary. It is vintage Sir Keir, seemingly radical but toothless—and reportedly already sinking. A “battle of ideas” is supposedly going on inside the Labour Party. PDFs are flying like bullets across the internet as wonks argue over Britain’s future. But this war is really more of a skirmish. The rhetoric is outrunning the substance, the differences are smaller than they appear and the debate ducks the most important questions. Both Labour’s left and right start from the same diagnosis, bemoaning Britain’s rentier economy, where wealth is extracted and the cost of living is too high for ordinary people. Mr Burnham wants to put “more things back under stronger public control”, like energy, housing and water. He points to his success as mayor at bringing Greater Manchester’s buses under public control (but not ownership). The left adds a dangerous desire to control prices. Mr Burnham has previously called for rent controls. Angela Rayner, another contender, wants to raise Britain’s minimum wage. The Labour Growth Group, a pro-business caucus of MPs, takes a different view. It likes the “abundance-liberalism” ideas gaining ground with American Democrats. It wants to boost the supply of essential goods like housing and energy by abolishing the veto points in the planning system. Ironically, Manchester’s success in recent decades owes more to this approach (from the 1990s the city approved swathes of private development) than to anything Mr Burnham has espoused. Yet there is less clear ground between these camps than they let on. The left, too, pays lip service to planning reform. Mr Burnham’s “public control” need not mean nationalisation: tighter regulation of essential industries could suffice. The Growth Group wants much the same, proposing public-interest ownership tests and state involvement in dividend disbursals. All rightly want greater fiscal devolution.
The similarities are clearer on tax. Most Labour MPs want to tax work less and wealth more. Both Mr Streeting and Louise Haigh, a power-broker on the left, have previously called for higher capital-gains tax. But the detailed proposals are less radical than they appear. Ms Haigh has suggested that the rises should be accompanied by a system-wide overhaul, such as introducing tax-free allowances for inflation. Done well, this could boost growth. Neither Mr Burnham nor Mr Streeting has suggested an outright recurring tax on all wealth. Mr Burnham’s focus is on revamping Britain’s mad property-tax system, under which London mansions pay less than two-beds in crumbling towns. On borrowing it is generally believed that Labour’s left would be more fiscally profligate. Ms Haigh has advocated loosening the fiscal rules to enable more borrowing for investment. But the closer the left gets to power, the more scared of the bond market it becomes. On May 18th Mr Burnham ruled out any changes to the fiscal rules if he becomes prime minister. Labour’s “battle for ideas” is notable less for its vibrancy than for what it leaves untouched. Take public spending. More than other countries, Britain has struggled to bring this down since covid-19. Spending is forecast to be 45% of GDP in 2026-27, up from 39% before the pandemic. Worse, it is projected to balloon in the coming decades as ageing pushes up spending on
health care and welfare (see chart). Reining this in is essential to Britain’s long-term fiscal health. Yet no candidate wants to talk about the difficult choices (like welfare reform or less-generous pensions) ahead. Then there is Europe. Mr Streeting and Mr Burnham have both said they want Britain to rejoin the EU one day. Ideas for improving ties this decade are scarcer. Mr Streeting has vaguely called for “a new special relationship”. Mr Burnham has said he won’t seek to rejoin if elected: he wants “a relentless domestic focus”. But the outside world won’t just disappear. As protectionism grows, the lack of ideas for securing Britain’s trading relationships looks remiss. The best example of Labour’s holiday from reality is the lack of discussion about AI. The coming years will be dominated by questions of how to make Britain competitive and how to support workers who lose out to AI. Yet nobody is talking about it. In 2024 voters were denied an honest debate about the choices facing Britain. Two years on, Labour’s politicians are at it again. This might help them win the leadership, but it won’t help them govern. As Sir Keir has shown, the surest way to lose the battle of ideas is not to have any. ■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//britain/2026/05/21/labours-battle-for-ideas-is-a- skirmish-over-small-differences
Hate Labour? Vote Labour! Makerfield and the new politics of paradox May 21st 2026 “If you vote Reform in three weeks’ time,” said the Labour activist, “Keir Starmer will still be prime minister.” It was a threat. Eileen, a Reform UK voter, from Winstanley in the constituency of Makerfield, was laying out her problems with the current Labour prime minister. The only way of removing him, said the Labour activist, was to vote for Andy Burnham, the Labour candidate who intends to win the seat on June 18th and replace Sir Keir as prime minister soon after. “I don’t believe you,” replied Eileen. Why would she? It is absurd. A Labour activist begging a Reform voter to back Labour to give Sir Keir the boot? Pull the other one. Yet the by-election
in Makerfield, a collection of towns and suburbs in a former mining area just outside Wigan, is riddled with such oddities and contradictions. The battle for Makerfield has already had commentators reaching for “The Road to Wigan Pier”, George Orwell’s journey into working-class life in the area in the 1930s. In fact, “1984” is a better guide to the current situation, where paradox and doublethink are the order of the day and Labour offers a very strange pitch: Hate Labour? Vote Labour! Politics in Makerfield is upside down and inside out. Words take on their opposite meaning. After the 2016 Brexit vote, one writer broke Britons into “Somewheres”, who were rooted, and “Anywheres”, who were mobile elites. Candidates boast of local connections. Yet Makerfield is “not really a place”, in the words of Josh Simons, its former mp who stepped down explicitly so Mr Burnham could challenge Sir Keir. It is a sprawling, awkward map born out of electoral convenience rather than geography. This current emblem of Somewhere is nowhere in particular. Terms such as “left behind” have become contorted and no more so than in Makerfield. Parts of it are bashed up; most of it is fine; some of it is flourishing. If Makerfield is left behind, so is the rest of Britain. In 2025 median weekly wages were £762 ($1,028), or a fraction below the national figure. A child in Makerfield is no more likely to be in poverty than one picked at random from the rest of England. Their chances here are often better. Winstanley College, a local sixth-form college, is one of the best in the country and sends as many students to Oxbridge as Dulwich College in south London, a public school that charges £32,000 a year. When Mr Burnham says Makerfield and its ilk have been “long forgotten”, he really means the opposite: they are impossible to ignore. In truth, British politics has catered to their supposed whims for a decade now. Their demands, whether departure from the European Union or drastic cuts to immigration—overseen by the tail end of the last government and by this one—have been met. No matter. In the apogee of post-Brexit politics, a collection of northern towns will alone decide the fate of the government. If Mr Burnham wins, the “king of the north” expects a coronation in Westminster; if he loses, Labour endures its own version of “The Anarchy”. The “long forgotten” decide which path he takes.
And why not? It is, after all, a Labour “heartland”. The area has returned Labour mps since 1906, when the party first emerged. Except the term “heartland” has inverted: often it is a place where no one votes for you any more. The Tory heartland of Oxfordshire now votes Lib Dem; the Labour heartlands of the north-west and north-east voted in reams of Reform councillors in the local elections on May 7th. Labour is in danger in Makerfield, but it is in danger everywhere, from Anywheretown to Somewhereville. Yet Makerfield matters more, if only in the heads of Labour MPs. Today geopolitical realities come second to Makerfield. Mr Burnham, who was once rather bombastic about rejoining the eu, now dismisses the idea of rejoining any time soon, in order to pander to these voters. Yet believe the polls and Makerfield, a “heartland” of the Leave vote where two-thirds voted out, would vote to stay in the eu if the vote was re-run. Ten years is a long time and demography—Leave voters were overwhelmingly older—is a powerful thing. Politicians have grown used to the old labels. A place that was once Leave is Leave for ever, opinion and actuarial tables be damned. Maybe the voters of Makerfield are actually being ignored this time. Perhaps the most fateful figures in the politics of paradox are non-voters who vote. They are electoral dark matter, weighing heavily on British politics, shaping it invisibly. When they do emerge, as they did in 2016, they can mould it for a generation. At the local elections this month in the area, they turned up. Hundreds of people on estates who usually never bother turfed out long-standing Labour councillors and ushered in Reform ones. Of the 25 seats up for election on Wigan council, Reform won 24. Whether they swell booths again in June will determine the next occupant of Downing Street. That depends on what they make of Mr Burnham. Who better than he to rule the politics of paradox? He personifies it. A man who decries 40 years of misrule was in government—whether as a bag-carrier or high-flying minister—for a good chunk of it. The lifelong politician is now an outsider, having spent the past decade as the mayor of Greater Manchester. A man firmly embedded in the establishment will become the tribune of people who want to smash it. If voters are willing to embrace paradox, they are willing to embrace him. But it is a tough sell.