In May 2025, when Keir Starmer was still prime minister, Labour politicians, campaigners and journalists gathered at the Ministry of Sound in London to watch a series of panel talks and presentations illuminated by the lucid glow of club lights. The day-long event was organised by a campaign group called Compass, and the subjects included child poverty, the Murdoch-owned media and the rise of the radical right.
“We felt as though the Labour government was failing, and needed to be pulled into the 21st century,” Neal Lawson, the founder of Compass, told me. The Starmer government’s support for the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, its equivocating stance on Gaza and its emulation of far-right rhetoric – crystallised in a speech on immigration, during which the prime minister suggested Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” – were causing Labour supporters to rapidly desert their party. “The Starmer project was so obviously intellectually bankrupt. He was personally so disinterested in ideas and big thinking that I thought, this is never going to fly,” Lawson said.
At 4pm, the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, got up on stage to deliver the closing address. “It’s the latest any Labour people have been in the Ministry of Sound on a Saturday,” he joked, cheerfully sweating under the lights. He spoke for 15 minutes, speeding up with excitement. Unlike Starmer, Burnham seemed to have a clear theory about the “dark and divided times” the country found itself in, identifying the long-term cause of Britain’s “modern malaise” as the privatisation of essential services, such as water and electricity, under Margaret Thatcher. Rather than mimicking the rhetoric of the right, he suggested that Labour should take concrete steps to improve voters’ lives, “things that matter to people every single day”.
The prospect that Burnham might replace Starmer seemed distant. He wasn’t an MP, and any route back to Westminster was unclear. But he was the most high-profile Labour politician to eloquently diagnose the causes of Britain’s widespread sense of political disenchantment and economic injustice, something that Starmer had never managed to do. “It wasn’t just the speech of a mayor of Manchester,” Lawson recalled. “It was the speech of someone who looked and sounded like they wanted to be prime minister.”
A few months later, Compass launched a new membership organisation, Mainstream, with the aim of funnelling leftwing ideas into a new Labour government. It wasn’t intended to be a campaign organisation for Burnham, Lawson told me, but it was “a happy coincidence”. Burnham signed its founding statement. As the political momentum for an alternative to Starmer increased, and as Burnham started to look like the only real contender, a small group of economists in London began working together to persuade him that, were he to become leader, he should make the unaffordability of everyday life his focus.
For years, Labour had prized economic growth as the main route to improve living standards. But economists such as Alfie Stirling, the director of policy at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF); Hannah Peaker, deputy CEO of the New Economics Foundation (NEF); and Carys Roberts, a former policy adviser to Starmer who had resigned in October 2025, argued that this approach was mistaken. The government didn’t have long enough until the next election to wait for growth to materialise, they believed, so it should try to improve people’s living standards now by intervening in the market to lower the cost of living. On 14 May 2026, the Labour MP for Makerfield, Josh Simons, announced he would be standing down and cleared the way for Burnham to run in a byelection. On the same day, the JRF and the NEF published coordinated research proposing a new system of rent controls. (The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the thinktank where Roberts formerly worked, had published similar research a few days earlier.) “We were anticipating political movement,” Stirling told me. “And we wanted to make sure we were landing the right policies.”
Burnham seemed to take their message on board. In his first weeks as prime minister, he threw out a confetti of new announcements. He slashed energy bills and lowered bus fares. He pledged to end homelessness, to build more council housing, and to fix adult social care. “The mood is feeling so much more positive than most of the last year and a half in parliament,” the Labour MP and economist Yuan Yang said this month during a lecture she gave in London.
And, yet, owing to the way that Burnham became prime minister – with no leadership contest or general election manifesto – it’s difficult to tell how radical his government wants to be. Already, he has watered down the council housing announcement (60% of funding for new homes in England outside London will go to social housing, rather than all of it), backtracked on his intention to cap political donations at £500,000, and has stopped talking about “public ownership”, instead using the vaguer language of “public control”. His chancellor, John Healey, is not known as an economic thinker (during his first major speech, Healey spoke mostly about growth, sounding hardly different from his predecessor, Rachel Reeves). “Burnham is the master of vibes. He’s a figure who pops up with a positive story,” Karel Williams, an emeritus professor at the University of Manchester, whose economic thinking has been influential in Labour circles, told me. “It feels as though he’s become a screen on to which different Labour factions project their hopes, telling us more about what other people want to happen than what he might do.”
Nonetheless, Burnham styles himself as the most radical prime minister since Thatcher and has not backed away from his stated ambition to end 40 years of neoliberalism. His willingness to name her ideology suggests that, unlike Starmer, Burnham understands the importance of ideas in politics: having them, spreading them, making them seem like common sense. Many of the ideas that have guided Britain’s governments in the past half century have been produced by a small group of thinktanks within two miles of Westminster. “When there’s the prospect of a new Labour government, that machine goes into overdrive,” Mark McVitie, the co-founder of the Labour Growth Group, a caucus of MPs formed in 2024 with a self-described mission to “smash the status quo”, told me.
In the past few months, a deluge of ideas – some large, some small – have been suggested by people seeking to influence the government. Burnham could nationalise Thames Water, scrap the triple lock that protects state pensions, or put workers on company boards. He could rewrite the mandate of the Bank of England, ban Palantir from the NHS, or tax social media giants to rejuvenate local high streets. He could build the equivalent of London’s Elizabeth line in all of Britain’s major cities, introduce proportional representation or require all new bicycles to have built-in lights. Whether any of these ideas have a chance of becoming reality will become clear over the next few months, first with the publication of the budget, and then with the government’s 10-year plan for Britain. “Nothing is off the table,” one source close to Downing Street told me in August.
This summer, in the weeks after Burnham became prime minister, I began interviewing the small core of people who are trying to shape this agenda. Some have radical ideas about economic ownership, while others spend their lives thinking of ways to devolve political power away from London to Britain’s neglected cities and regions. But for all their different prescriptions, they agreed on one thing: the government can’t afford to wait if it is to have a chance against the threat of a globally resurgent right, funded by oligarchs who are hostile to democracy. “There’s a ticking clock with this,” McVitie said. “I talk about democratic breakdown. And my big fear is that tweaking the current model is not going to work. If you don’t break from the path you’re on, eventually, some form of that is going to arrive.”
One phrase that Burnham has repeated since becoming prime minister is that Britain’s great mistake has been privatising economic power and centralising political power. More than one person I spoke with attributed the phrasing to Mathew Lawrence, the founder of the thinktank Common Wealth. In June, he and the economist Alex Williams published a paper called The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism. It was intended as an alternative to a failed status quo.
“The Blair line was always ‘what matters is what works,’” Lawrence told me. “But is private equity really working to deliver social care? Have leveraged buyouts of the water industry really worked for rivers? Has the privatisation of energy really worked to deliver value for money or energy security?” Faced with the worst decade for living standards on record, the paper argued for a different kind of economy. It would be based upon a foundation of essential services delivered by publicly run corporations, a second tier of privately owned manufacturing and retail businesses, and a third tier of startups in industries such as AI and clean energy that would be regulated and supported by the government.
Lawrence, whose Dr Martens and scruffy beard cut a more casual impression than that of most policy advisers, is always having at least two conversations at once: one in person and another on the phone. I’ve known him for nearly a decade (we briefly shared a flat in 2020), and when we met recently, he took three calls in the space of 20 minutes: one from an MP, another from an MP’s special adviser and a third from a journalist. Although his research has been cited as an influence on Burnham, Lawrence has not been given a role in the new government (neither has Lawson, who helped write the script for Burnham’s byelection campaign video and advised him before he became prime minister). But Common Wealth certainly is influential. As secretary of state for energy security and net zero, Ed Miliband consulted its research when founding the publicly owned company Great British Energy, and Lawrence has since discussed the Productive State paper with the team of Miliband’s successor, Miatta Fahnbulleh.
In Britain, the world of leftwing policy ideas is really a small network of close friends and former colleagues. Fahnbulleh, who previously worked at the IPPR and was then chief executive at the NEF, has hired a number of people from the network into her department. Carys Roberts, formerly director of the IPPR, is her chief of staff. George Dibb, another IPPR alumnus, was seconded to Fahnbulleh’s department to advise on industrial strategy. Another influential thinker in this world is Arthur Downing, a friend of Lawrence who worked as an adviser in the energy department under Miliband. Today, Downing is a strategy director at Octopus Energy and author of a recent book arguing for public ownership of Britain’s energy networks. He recently founded a monthly discussion group called the Haldane Society – named after a hero of his, Thomas Haldane, a Scottish engineer who created one of the world’s first heat pumps – bringing together Westminster insiders and people working in the energy industry to discuss public ownership. “Privatisation is a form of self-loathing,” Downing said at a recent event. “It’s believing that your own government can’t own and operate assets that another state can.”
The thinkers surrounding the Burnham government share certain characteristics. They are mostly men who live in inner London, wear dark blazers over open-collared shirts, and write essays on Substack or for the New Statesman using phrases such as “dynamism” and “productivism”. Some of them have worked for MPs, some have spent most of their careers at thinktanks, and others have come up through what one described as the social media “posting to policy pipeli