This article is published in full in Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and is part of Alameda’s After Order project

Blairite roots, post-Corbyn reinvention, Mancunian creed: what kind of Labour PM is Andy Burnham?

A joke has been circulating in British political circles for some time now. It goes something like this: ‘A Blairite, a Brownite, and a Corbynite walk into a bar. “Hello Mr Burnham,” says the bartender, “what’ll it be then?”’ After the first few weeks of Andy Burnham’s leadership of the United Kingdom, can we discern which version of the new prime minister will manifest in power?

In answering this question, we should acknowledge that in line with the joke about mixed allegiances, Burnham’s political backstory is more than usually complicated. Born in 1970 into a working-class family of Irish descent in the North West of England, Burnham had a relatively ordinary upbringing. Some commentators have emphasised the centrality of Catholicism in his development; remarkably, Burnham is the first openly Catholic British prime minister, and he has claimed that Catholic social teaching ‘underpins’ his politics.

→ Read the full piece UK: An Outsider Prime Minister?, published by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.