British politics has a strange ability to speed up time. For weeks, the question in Westminster was how much more wear Keir Starmer could endure. Today the question is already different: who comes after?
And one of the most plausible answers is Andy Burnham. Only a few years ago, the mayor of Greater Manchester appeared to have ruled himself out of the national race. After two failed attempts to lead the Labour Party, he had built a formidable regional political platform and many saw him as a “Northern governor” more than a future prime minister.
But political crises have the power to reorder everything. If Starmer leaves Downing Street, Burnham could suddenly find himself in the strongest position of his entire political career. Not because he represents a radical ideological rupture with the current prime minister. Nor because he embodies a return to the old Labour. His strength lies in something deeper: the increasingly widespread sense that the United Kingdom has entered a new political phase, the post-Brexit phase, and that it needs leaders capable of addressing problems different from those that dominated the last decade.
“The British political history of the last ten years can be summarised as a long search for answers to the wrong question”
Because, in fact, the British political history of the last ten years can be summarised as a long search for answers to the wrong question. The Brexit project was pitched as a renewal of the nation. Leaving the European Union was meant to free the United Kingdom from regulatory constraints, enable it to strike more ambitious trade deals, and open a new horizon of global prosperity under the flag of “Global Britain”.
Ten years after the referendum, the balance is far from clear.The report Brexit, Ten Years On, published by the think-tank Global Trade Policy Observatory, is probably the most rigorous assessment to date of the outcomes of that strategy. Its conclusions are uncomfortable for both Brexit supporters and those who believed that leaving the EU would rapidly transform the UK’s economic position.
It is true that London has managed to rebuild a large part of its network of trade agreements and has signed new deals with Australia, New Zealand and India. It has also managed to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
But the economic benefits have proved extraordinarily modest. According to the government’s own estimates cited in the report, the deal with Australia will boost the UK’s GDP by barely 0.08% in the long term. New Zealand’s deal by 0.03%. Even the deal with India, touted as one of the UK’s great post-Brexit strategic victories, would hardly yield a 0.13% improvement.
Even more striking is the evolution of the UK’s trade geography. The grand aim of Global Britain was to reduce economic dependence on Europe and gradually reorient trade towards the faster-growing Indo-Pacific economies. Yet, in 2024 the European Union still accounted for roughly 41% of British exports and about half of the country’s imports.
“After a decade of political battles, endless negotiations and huge institutional costs, the fundamental structure of the British economy remains essentially European”
Before Brexit, the figures were remarkably similar. After a decade of political battles, endless negotiations and huge institutional costs, the fundamental structure of the British economy remains essentially European. The geography and value chains built over half a century of integration have proved more powerful than any political slogan.
Paradoxically, the report also shows that Brexit produced the opposite effect to what many of its supporters imagined. The European Union did not lie paralysed in the face of a supposedly more dynamic and agile Great Britain. On the contrary, Brussels accelerated its trade policy, sealed new deals with India, Australia, Indonesia or Mercosur and strengthened its tools of economic defence. In certain negotiations, the EU achieved conditions even more favourable than those secured by London. The size of the market remains a source of power.
And precisely there lies the political opportunity for Andy Burnham
For years, Burnham has insisted that the UK’s central problem was never Brussels. It was territorial inequality. It was the extraordinary concentration of wealth, investment and political power in London. It was the economic neglect of broad swathes of the North and the Midlands.
In other words, Burnham has long argued that Brexit correctly identified the country’s discontent but got the diagnosis and the solutions profoundly wrong. The cities that voted heavily to leave the European Union still face today the same problems of productivity, housing, infrastructure and public services as they did in 2016. In a sense, the grand promise of Brexit did not fail because the UK lacked political autonomy. It failed because the root causes of British discontent were, above all, domestic.
That makes Burnham a leader well-suited to the moment. He can speak to Brexit voters without disparaging their motivations. He can advocate more pragmatic relations with the European Union without reopening the culture wars of the last decade. And he can articulate an economic project centred on reindustrialisation, regional investment and political decentralisation.
“Burnham has long argued that Brexit identified correctly the discontent of a part of the country, but he was deeply wrong about the diagnosis and the solutions”
Perhaps more importantly: he can directly contest the political turf of Nigel Farage. The Labour Party’s main threat today does not come from a Conservative Party still in rebuild mode. It comes from Farage and his ability to keep capitalising on the frustration of regions that feel nothing has changed.
Burnham offers an alternative answer. An economic patriotism with a territorial rather than identity-based character. A notion of national renewal that does not hinge on reclaiming sovereignty from Brussels, but on redistributing opportunities within the United Kingdom itself.
That is why the succession talk around Starmer will be much more than a debate about names. It will be a debate about the nature of the next British chapter. The Brexit era is ending. The question that is beginning to prevail is another: how to rebuild a country that discovered that leaving the European Union was not enough to solve its deepest problems.
Few politicians seem as prepared as Andy Burnham to attempt to answer that question. And precisely for that reason, on the day Keir Starmer’s leadership might end, it is worth paying attention to Manchester’s mayor.
