Andy Burnham Making Shabana Mahmood Chancellor Would Resurrect the Failed Politics of Morgan McSweeney

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” asked Johnny Rotten at the end of the Sex Pistols’ fractious final gig.

A similar question is now being asked by those on the left of the Labour party who helped to make Andy Burnham Prime Minister.

Their question was brought into focus this week by reports that Burnham has now buckled to pressure not to make Ed Miliband his Chancellor.

According to multiple reports, Burnham has been persuaded that Miliband, would not “pass the sniff test” with senior City figures, who have long opposed him being elevated to Number 11.

Instead, Burnham has reportedly been persuaded to make Morgan McSweeney ally and Blue Labour favourite, Shabana Mahmood, his Chancellor instead.

The avowedly anti-immigration Home Secretary is not a popular figure within the Labour party, to put it mildly. 

A recent poll of Labour members found that she was the least popular member of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet by some distance, falling below even Rachel Reeves and Starmer himself. 

Miliband, by contrast, was the most popular.

In this, Labour members are the polar opposites of the consensus view among most of the British commentariat.

Indeed I suspect if you were to poll senior editors and proprietors at major newspapers about their favourite member of Starmer’s Cabinet, Mahmood would likely come first and Miliband last.

Of course the question of who Burnham should make Chancellor isn’t purely a left vs right, Labour vs business and the media, one.

Miliband’s commitment to a green economy meant he was opposed by a series of trade unions representing oil and gas workers, whilst a few city figures had actually backed him over the alternatives.

Also while Miliband was the favoured candidate of the soft left in the Labour party, one of his biggest champions over recent weeks has been Tony Blair’s former Political Secretary John McTernan, who originates from a completely different wing of the party.

McTernan told Byline Times that he believes Miliband is the only candidate for Chancellor with a chance of getting a grip of the Treasury and delivering for working people.

“The choice for Andy Burnham is whether the Labour Government runs the Treasury or Treasury runs the Labour Government, it’s as simple as that,” McTernan said.

“We’re in the middle of the third heatwave in the UK this year and that demands a different economy… Either we stay addicted to the 20th century fossil fuel economy, or we’re led into good jobs, well-paid jobs, union jobs of the renewable economy, and that’s one which also cuts costs for households who use renewable energy, cuts costs for businesses and households that use electric vehicles or electric vans. 

“The choice is so obvious. If you want to end neoliberalism, then you need to have a chancellor who knows how to switch to a different political economy.”

The fear amongst those backing Miliband is that any other candidate would simply be pushed down the same road at the Treasury that Rachel Reeves was when she was persuaded to cut the winter fuel allowance – triggering a post-election collapse in Labour support. They fear that Mahmood would be similarly malleable.

“Shabana is very able, very bright, very hardworking, very politically imaginative, but I could not tell you what hers or any other of the people who are being briefed as potential chancellors, what their approach to running the UK economy would be, or what their approach to growth would be,” says McTernan.

“The truth is if you don’t have your own political economy then you will get the Treasury’s and we know what the Treasury’s is. It is austerity. It is cuts for the most vulnerable, it is the reduction of local government to a shadow of its former self.”

Mahmood’s allies have pushed back against the characterisation of her as being right wing, saying that she is much more left wing on economics than widely assumed.

It is true that little is known about Mahmood’s own economic views given that her sole experience in this areas was as a junior shadow Treasury minister under Ed Miliband more than ten years ago.

However, what we do know from her time at the Home Office is that she is an essentially anti-liberal figure, favouring a closed immigration system, which in turn necessitates a closed economy.

She has justified this ‘Blue Labour’ approach to politics by insisting that it is the key to fending off Reform and the far-right. 

Announcing what she described as “the most significant changes to our asylum system in modern times” last November, Mahmood declared that “the era of permanent protection for refugees is over”.

Justifying her decision to remove the right for refugees to remain indefinitely in the UK once their asylum application is approved, she declared that “If you don’t like this, you won’t like what follows me”.

Unfortunately this strategy of delivering right-wing policies in order to fend off Farage has been a highly unsuccessful one.

Although lauded by the press, the anti-immigration rhetoric and policy pursued by Mahmood and Starmer coincided with a collapse in support for the party amongst its more liberal and metropolitan base. And rather than try to stop that collapse, Mahmood has actively welcomed it.

One of the most revealing moments on this came in April when she boasted about how she had told “white liberals” heckling her about her immigration plans to “f*** right off”.

Two months later and many of those same liberal voters did exactly as she instructed, voting heavily for the Greens and Liberal Democrats instead, and delivering Labour one of its worst local election results in its history.

Of course Burnham was able to reverse much of that collapse during his Makerfield by-election campaign. Yet he did so, not by campaigning against immigration, whilst telling liberal voters to “f*** off”, but by being a unifying figure, who focused on issues like the cost of living, whilst offering progressive alternative to the agenda pursued by the Starmer Government.

There have been some encouraging signs since then, most recently in Burnham’s appointment of the brilliant former 38 Degrees and Hope Not Hate campaigner Matthew McGregor as his new head of Political Strategy. McGregor, unlike some in the Labour party, understands that Labour’s loss of voters to the Greens has been the biggest cause of the party’s recent collapse, rather than a simple transfer over to Reform.

Yet if Burnham does push ahead with the appointment of Mahmood, then much of the progress Burnham has made in undoing the damage caused by Starmer and McSweeney over the past two years will be undone. It would risk, as the Times’ well-connected Labour chronicler Patrick Maguire put it this week, leaving Burnham’s Government looking like “Mcsweeneyism in an Everton top”.

This would be good news for Zack Polanski and the Greens, but it would be bad news for those hoping for a Prime Minister who will unite the progressive vote and lock Nigel Farage out of Downing Street for good.

If that is where we’re heading then it would be the second time, following the victory of Starmer in 2020, that Labour left-wingers would feel duped by a leadership candidate promising left wing policies, only to deliver the complete opposite once in power.

Ever feel like you’ve been cheated? Some in Labour now believe that they might just have been.