THE Star sends May Day greetings to all its readers and the wider labour and progressive movements.

Seldom have we celebrated International Workers’ Day amid such gathering storm-clouds — of genocide, neofascism, falling living standards and the danger of imperialist war.

Seldom, therefore, has our unity as a class, within and across borders, been such a compelling imperative.

It is needed to support the heroic Palestinian people. To defend our own menaced democratic rights. To demand welfare not warfare. To end the wars in Iran and the Ukraine. To demand the Labour government puts working people before the profiteers. To reject Islamophobia and anti-semitism.

So let us once more today raise the banner of Marx and Engels — Working people of all countries, unite!

Burnham and the illusion of change

THERE is a joke doing the rounds in Westminster:

A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a bar. The barman says: “What are you drinking, Andy?”

The Andy is of course Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor. And if the joke is worth retelling it is because Burnham is at the centre of the calculations now being made by Labour MPs about their party’s future.

They want, in their majority, to move on from the failure of Keir Starmer’s premiership. The elections next week promise a disaster of historic proportions for Labour. 

And the Mandelson scandal shows no signs of abating, with the release of more documents relating to Starmer’s appointment of him as ambassador to Washington expected imminently.

Yet what next? Burnham is the most popular of the putative successors. Indeed, according to opinion polls he is the only politician in the country with a net positive public rating.

However, he cannot stand for leader of Labour until he is once again an MP. Keir Starmer has already blocked his return to Parliament once this year, likely costing Labour the Gorton and Denton by-election as a consequence.

Should another opportunity arise, there is every likelihood of the Prime Minister and his craven supporters on Labour’s executive trying to do the same again.

Some Labour MPs nevertheless believe that Burnham is worth waiting for, and that therefore a contest should be deferred until he can take part in it.

That is a recipe for perhaps endless delay, while credibility and support bleed out from the Labour Party.

And is Burnham necessarily worth the wait? The joke above gets to the heart of that. What does the Manchester mayor stand for really?

Yes he is a relatable, human-speaking politician. He has been a broadly progressive mayor in Manchester and has built a reputation as an advocate for the north of England.

He champions a more democratic electoral system, something that is already Labour policy but ignored by Starmer.

He has sometimes critiqued the government from the left, really the only space available for a Labour politician. Specifically he has called for an ending of the bond markets’ veto over political decisions in Britain, something currently expressed in Rachel Reeves’s “iron fiscal rules.”

Burnham this week called for borrowing outside those rules this week — but to fund arms spending, not public services, a variation on the call by the Labour right to boost the military at the expense of welfare.

That would be continuity Starmer in another form. It reminds us that Burnham in Downing Street, even if that could be engineered, may not be the radical break with the status quo anticipated. As per the joke, he has a history of shape-shifting.

On balance, the promise of a Burnham premiership is hardly worth the delay — an indefinite delay, as things stand — in acting to evict Starmer from No 10.