ANDY BURNHAM’S failure to oppose Tory welfare cuts in 2015, alongside fellow leadership contenders Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, was a watershed moment.

The contrast was stark between their miserable abstentions, justified by claims Labour would otherwise be “branded” soft on welfare, and Jeremy Corbyn’s principled opposition to an attack on some of the most vulnerable people in Britain.

It helped propel Corbyn into the lead, alerting Labour members to the fact a real alternative existed to endless triangulation and policy determined by perceived media reaction rather than merit.

Burnham’s support for Shabana Mahmood’s attack on migrant rights this week will not derail a leadership bid in which he has no rivals.

But it has echoes of his 2015 stance and is one among many indications that he could prove a continuity-Starmer PM — with disastrous consequences for workers, public services, foreign policy and the fight to stop Reform UK entering government.

Again, we have a policy attacking the vulnerable, forming part of a wider ideological offensive amplified across the monopoly media.

In that case it was “strivers versus shirkers” and a whipped-up hysteria over benefit fraud, which in financial terms is negligible: amounting to significantly less each year than goes unclaimed in benefits people are entitled to, and vastly less than is evaded by the wealthy in tax.

Here it is immigration, and the twin lies that we are overwhelmed by refugee numbers (Britain received fewer asylum applications last year than Spain, Italy, France or Germany) and that legal migration is putting strain on our public services.

Again, it is not just the declared targets but the whole working class which stands to lose out.

David Cameron and George Osborne’s striver-against-shirker rhetoric masked the fact that nearly half of social security benefits are paid to people in work, often as an effective subsidy to poverty-pay employers.

Not only did the crackdown hit those in work as well as out of it, removal of the social safety net allowed employers to drive down pay and conditions further. The “austerity” years were characterised as much by falling wages as by cuts to social spending, and a policy justified as a means to reward people who worked hard (anyone remember Nick Clegg’s “alarm-clock Britain?”) made them worse off.

Mahmood’s Bill is the same. Moving the goalposts for migrant workers so they must work 10 or even 15 years before being allowed to settle is a breach of trust. It will not relieve pressure on services but intensify it, since many of these workers play essential roles in the health, social care, transport and other sectors.

By denying a large swathe of workers the security that allows them to assert their rights, it entrenches a two-tier system which allows employers to push wages down and to cut corners on safety and standards.

Her proposals on asylum are equally vicious, lifting the legal duty to allow human-trafficking victims to stay in Britain if it helps their recovery. Fewer victims will come forward and modern slavers and people-traffickers can breathe easier.

Labour needs to reject all this both because it is inhuman but also because putting services back on their feet is impossible if combined with a Reform-inspired war on their workforces.

The false arguments of the right need confronting, not indulging. Labour under Starmer has simply echoed the right on migration, boosting the far-right vote by legitimising its arguments while losing far more of its own voters to its left.

Scores of Labour MPs have called on Burnham to break with Mahmood’s policy. Campaigns which put workers at the centre of asserting the invaluable contributions they make — already under way from unions like Unison and RMT — give a human face to the economic case.

All must come together to force the incoming PM to drop Mahmood’s poisonous Bill.