DAY ONE in Number 10 for Andy Burnham. Starmer made it simple for the new Prime Minister. All he has to do is do what he said he would do.

Where Starmer took office on a false prospectus — that he would put into place Corbyn’s policies — and then proceeded to betray each one and start a police regime that stripped the guts out of Labour, all Burnham has to do is keep his word.

At the rhetorical level Burnham has done well. Abandoning the ID card scheme — a maladroit move that Starmer bungled and which gifted the Tories a chance to pose as defenders of individual liberties — is set alongside his pledge to concentrate on the cost of living for working people.

Where this newspaper has been the forum where scepticism about Burnham’s radical credentials are aired we can state plainly that in Burnham there rests both great hopes and real fears.

But tackling the cost-of-living crisis entails real measures that go to the heart of the central contradiction in capitalist society between the interests of the class of people whose wealth derives from the work of others and the rest of us who, without work, cannot live.

The post war settlement — now vastly eroded — partially compensated for Britain’s vastly unequal distribution of wealth with a national health system, free public education, mass municipal housing, unemployment insurance and a social security system it was possible to leave the essential features of capitalism inviolate. But the battle over pay never ends.

The welfare state is capitalism’s silent tribute to socialism and it is a measure of our present-day problem that the deepening crisis of the system — combined with the extirpation of working-class state power on our continent — has weakened the social wage in every country.

But actual wages are important and repealing Thatcher’s anti-union laws would change the balance of class power in the workplace.

When the chancellor of the united capitalist Germany — the most powerful economy in Europe — says his country cannot afford the welfare state he was giving voice to a war-fighting prospectus that Starmer instituted in our country but without the brutal honesty of a German ruling class that gave us Nazism, the second world war and now offers the prospect of another war with Russia.

As always, foreign policy and domestic policy are as one. Increasing arms expenditure to the level Trump insisted on but which European leaders in their majority endorse will lead to war.

Of course, the armament and aerospace monopolies are making unimaginable profits and the only way for arms profits to continue is to use up the war materiel already in place.

There is the temptation to see this as the main driver of the war policy that unites the EU with a Nato based on the projection of US power on our continent.

And the deal which makes European arms spending contracted to the purchase of US aircraft, missiles and munitions is but another toxic aspect of the imperial alliance.

But this is the system under which we live. Andy Burnham is about to discover that living in Number 10 gives him no place to hide. Either he begins to untangle to poisonous pairing of a military policy grounded in austerity economics or he will go the way of the last series of prime ministers.

Britain’s complicity in the Gaza genocide is tied up with an imperial policy that entailed the Iraq war, the war on Afghanistan and more recently a Jihadi regime in Syria and now the war on Iran.

Ending British military, diplomatic, logistical and intelligence support for Israel would be a good place to start.