“HOPE” is again doing the rounds across the left following Andy Burnham’s by-election victory and Starmer’s departure.

A Burnham coronation rather than a leadership contest means the promised “battle of ideas” is cancelled. Fair enough, none of them have any ideas anyway, other than continue as before.

Personalities and “presentation” are not the issue, policies are.

Nothing fundamental will change under a Burnham premiership and he will, sooner or later, suffer a similar fate to Starmer.

Britain is in deep systemic crisis. Whatever party is elected, always on a promise of change, they all pursue the same core policies: cuts, privatisation, austerity, repression and warmongering.

This crisis is not limited to the United Kingdom, it is an irresolvable crisis of liberal democracy itself in which inter-connected Western political elites haemorrhage legitimacy and authority amongst both the working class and significant sections of the middle classes too.

Those “left” liberals voices so prominent in our movement say Burnham’s victory shows Reform can not only be beaten but, careering between despair and elation as these dilettantes do, some even claim there is no chance of them winning a general election.

Socialists understand that given even the hint of an alternative, based on their class interests, the working class, despised and condemned by these self-same liberals as racist, bigoted “gammons,” will grab it with both hands.

But hope must be concrete. It requires a programme, or it is nothing.

Real change would require an end to austerity, cuts and privatisation, a major programme of public ownership, an end to repression, including the bans and proscriptions on protest, an end to the militarisation drive and repeal of the anti-trade union laws.

Burnham’s deal with Streeting and those who backed Starmer kills any hope anything near this will be delivered. It is not even guaranteed he will introduce proportional representation, a long overdue democratic reform.

Like all reformists with no reforms to offer he will be agreeably malleable in representing the profiteers interests.

Socialists don’t sneer when workers express hope but patiently explain the danger of career politicians exploiting it as short-term cover all the better to maintain the status quo.

Affiliated, and non-affiliated, unions are again bit actors in the Westminster political drama and not, as they should be, fierce advocates for a genuine socialist alternative.

The low level of strikes indicates many union leaderships are pursuing a strategy of accommodation with Labour on the basis of promised minor concessions. They should instead be building militant resistance through united, co-ordinated action against attacks on our class.

Starmer’s job was to extirpate the Labour left following the defeat of the Corbyn movement, which threatened the political consensus around not just the neoliberal economic agenda but also, in some respects more importantly, in expressing support for the Palestinian people, opposed murderous Western imperialism itself.

The top priority for the ruling class is slashing welfare in favour of warfare.

The media led the campaign to compel the Labour government to abandon welfare for increased military spending and drive the concommitant militarisation of society. All this to face “enemies” created by Britain’s coat-tailing of US imperialism; the principal feature of its foreign policy in a period of accelerated post-imperialist decline.

The media briefly puffed up Al Carns, who resigned as defence under-secretary, as a potential challenger to Burnham. The former Royal Marine colonel elected in the Labour landslide in 2024 was previously a military adviser to a succession of Tory defence ministers, quitting his military career to stand as a Labour MP.

The role of his type is to influence MPs and tie Burnham to the militarist line, and given the latter’s record Carns won’t have to try too hard, especially as there are also some sympathetic ears in the trade union movement itself.

The current crop of Labour MPs, with some exceptions, are the worst ever elected: minor union officials, NGO and third-sector administrators, unprincipled careerists and moralising identity politics fanatics, along with the Starmerite political gangsters of Labour Together, and those, like Carns, with strong ties to the state and security services. They could never represent a serious or reliable oppositional force to the militarists.

The ruling class wish to avoid handing over state power to fascists, preferring to govern through liberal authoritarianism — the “iron hand in the velvet glove.”

The judicial outrages that characterised the Filton Four trial, the Palestine Action ban, the arrest of anti-war activists and so on, are all evidence of state repression supposedly based on elected, democratic “authority.” Here again, Burnham will be expected to conform.

Our task is to build resistance at all levels, in the workplace, in the communities, centres of learning and on the streets — advocating a return to class politics focused on the demands of workers in relation to their pressing material concerns and to demand co-ordinated united struggle on the industrial front, long promised but never effectively delivered.

All this must also be unbreakably linked with the anti-war movement if we are to protect the gains that remain from those generations of struggle that afforded our class some degree of stability since the end of the second world war.

Because we must be in no doubt — the drive to militarism, just like austerity, is a class issue, inextricably connected with depriving us of everything we still hold onto.