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Former health secretary Wes Streeting and Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham have begun to set out their pitches for the direction of the Labour Party, as they prepare to stand in a future leadership contest to replace Keir Starmer.
On Saturday, Streeting said he will stand in any upcoming leadership contest and called for a “bigger politics” and a “battle of ideas”, while Burnham said he wanted to “save” the Labour Party and get it “closer” to working-class communities again.
The Parliamentary Labour Party was plunged into crisis after the party’s disastrous results in last week’s local and devolved government elections. More than 90 MPs have since called for the prime minister to resign or set out a timetable for doing so, and five ministers, including one Cabinet minister, have resigned from their posts.
A formal leadership challenge has not yet been launched to topple Starmer, but Streeting and Burnham have now both made clear their intentions to stand as contenders. Streeting resigned as health secretary on Thursday, and Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) has given Burnham permission to attempt to stand in a parliamentary by-election to re-enter Parliament.
After making a speech to the Progress conference in London on Saturday afternoon, Streeting confirmed he will stand for the Labour leadership once a challenge is launched.
In his address to the conference, he was critical of the direction of the Labour Party under Starmer’s leadership and set out his own vision for the party and government – including stating that the UK must eventually rejoin the European Union.
“The biggest economic opportunity we have is on our doorstep,” he said.
“We need a new special relationship with the EU because Britain’s future lies with Europe, and one day back in the European Union.”
He added that if the UK were to re-enter, the government would have to seek a “new mandate” through future party manifestos, as the UK left the European Union “through a democratic choice”.
Streeting said that in the local elections last week, voters were “warning that unless we change course, Labour risks being the handmaidens of Nigel Farage and the breakup of the United Kingdom”.
He recalled that when he spoke at the same conference for the first time 11 years ago, he warned that “never again must we allow a tyranny of silence in the name of party unity to send us on to avoidable defeat”.
Streeting said there had been an “overcautiousness” in Labour when the party was in opposition.
“Interesting policy ideas couldn’t be floated because we were too afraid of what the Tories might say, so we said nothing,” he continued.
“As a result, we arrived in government underprepared in too many areas and lacking clarity of vision and direction. Questions which had gone unanswered in opposition couldn’t be ignored in office, leading to the early catastrophe of the winter fuel cut.
“We’ve carried this culture into government with a heavy-handed approach that has seen backbenchers scolded for interesting private members’ bills which weren’t the government’s policy.”
Starting to set out his own vision for the country, Streeting said that Labour should prioritise immediate issues that concern voters, such as affordability, the small boats crisis, and the NHS. He described his top three priorities as fixing the UK’s relationship with the EU, determining what type of capitalism a Labour government would like to oversee, and creating a public infrastructure around online information technology.
Meanwhile, Burnham is applying to be the Labour candidate in the Makerfield by-election in Greater Manchester, after former minister Josh Simons agreed to stand down to make way for the mayor.
In an interview with the BBC on Saturday, Burnham said the upcoming by-election was a “very necessary election” that was about “fixing politics”.
“It’s not been working for people, and people have a really strong sense of that,” he said.
“We’ve got to just see this as a sort of a kind of moment to reclaim the Labour Party, to save it from where it’s been. We can’t just carry on as we are. We’re going to change the conversation in this campaign. We’re gonna get Labour closer to these communities again, and I’m kind of excited about what all of that means.”
He said that Labour needs to “change” and that he did not blame voters who had abandoned Labour in recent years.
“I want to regain their trust,” he said.
“I want Labour solidly to be the party of working-class people and working-class communities, and that requires a lot of change.”
According to Burnham, “Britain has been on the wrong path for 40 years”, which started with deindustrialisation, deregulation of the buses, and the “privatisation of life’s essentials”.
He spoke of the need to “fix politics, to fix the economy, get the basics back under public control”.
