Burnham Is Ascending While Farage Is Waning

Reform’s rebellion looks far less inevitable when Farage is facing questions about £5m and Burnham is offering a different kind of disruption.

Photo by Mylo Kaye on Unsplash

I don’t know if it’s just me, but it feels like there’s something in the air.

And no, I’m not talking about the immense levels of pollen currently suffusing absolutely everything right now and leaving me looking like I’m a fountain frog, dripping from every visible crevasse in my face.

I’m rather talking about the political air that’s been blowing through the country.

Burnham is currently on his ascendancy, Starmer is rather more gracefully taking his leave of office than his Tory forebears and, probably most importantly, Nigel Farage is having a rather hard time of things.

Now, out of the three of those, the one that leaves me nearly effervescent with glee is the leader of Reform having a seriously hard time of things. He, after nearly two months of not having his scheduled weekly grievance fest press conference, he decided to go onto the airwaves.

It did not go well.

Everyone from Nick Ferrari to Julia Hartley-Brewer were asking some seriously pointed questions about the £5m donation that was uncovered by the team at The Guardian. It was truly a sight to behold.

Farage who has at times felt like he had his own dedicated green room in every news studio in this country was finally faced with some actual scrutiny.

And that scrutiny was painful. For him. Not for me. I loved watching him squirm.

For years Farage treated scrutiny as something that was meant to happen to other people. Migrants, civil servants, judges, teachers, charities, universities, the BBC, Coutts Bank, random women on Question Time who have the audacity to actually know things. These people were all fine to be placed under the Reform magnifying glass and be accused of destroying the whole of the United Kingdom.

But ask Farage why a crypto-billionaire gave him £5m and suddenly scrutiny becomes terribly vulgar. Rude, in fact. The worst possible breach of etiquette and something that’s just not done in polite society.

Democracy, in the world of the Reformati is incredibly important until anyone dares to ask whether the man in the Union Jack socks is being finance by someone’s wealth appears to have entered politics in this country through a side door wearing sunglasses and a fake moustache.

This is I think why the last week and a bit has felt so very different - not because Reform UK has suddenly vanished into the ether, that has definitely not happened. The far right doesn’t evaporate because on politician sweats through his suit in an interview out of sheer consternation. Reform remains dangerous, it still has momentum and it still has a base that’s angry, alienated and very easily fed and led with a diet of nationalist slop.

It does, however, feel less inevitable than it has for a while.

Farage’s performance has always been dependent on a very specific performance. He is not just a politician, he is a vibe. He has for decades presented himself as the bloke at the pub who is in the know. Who really knows what’s happening. He has painted himself as the outsider and disruptor. The one who’s different to anyone in Westminster and not on the take. The man who is willing to say what everyone else is too cowardly to say.

For years and years, broadcasters have allowed him this performance nearly completely unchallenged. On the BBC, he wasn’t interviewed so much as he was basted - he would turn up, say something inflammatory, complain about being silenced while speaking into his seventy-third microphone for the week, and then leave having deposited another rancid, steaming little pile of national decline into public discourse.

The questions around the £5m though - those are causing some serious damage to his performance. Largely because it’s a simple concept with simple questions.

Who gave you the money?

Why?

What was it for?

Why did you not declare it?

And why, exactly, should the public accept a sneering “mind your own business” from a man who has literally made an entire career out of demanding that everyone else explain themselves?

This has coincided with a rather larger change in the political weather - the ascendancy of Andy Burnham.

Until recently, Reform had the enormous benefit of being the only visible insurgency. Labour, as a bearly two year old government, looked exhausted and on the backfoot. The Tories had the appearance of a particularly unruly neighbourhood WhatsApp group. The Lib-Dems were doing their usual thing of being very nice in places with very expensive chutney.

The only party really standing up against Reform up till now had been the Greens, for which they should absolutely be applauded - even if we all have to admit that a Green government is a bit of a pipe dream for at least the next election.

Burnham though, irritatingly for Farage, is offering a different kind of disruption - and one that has the potential to chime with a lot of the electorate, certainly if done right.

Now, before I get into that, I will say this - Burnham is inheriting a country that by the numbers is in a nominally better place. The economy, while not insanely good, is at least stable. Migration has come down significantly¹, and we can see a few green shoots in at least the elective side of the NHS².

He is, by and large, set up in a better place than the Starmer government in 2024.

But beyond that, he is bringing something compelling to the table, something that Farage genuinely struggles to do. Because he’s not bring in the politics of resentment, not the politics of “they are coming for your bins, your borders and your gammon.”

He’s bringing in the politics of place. Of power moving outward from Westminster and into the places that sit well outside of it - which, by my reckoning, is 99% of the country. He is raising the spectre of saying the country cannot forever be run by a small cluster of people in SW1 who appear to believe that anything north of Watford is a mythical fog kingdom filled with bus lanes and unrest.

And I find myself, very cautiously, dangerously, almost against my better judgement, a bit optimistic about that.

Definitely not in a “finally, saviour!” way. I am far too miserable and politically traumatised for that.

But.

The idea of radical devolution does feel like one of the possibly very good answers to the sheer rottenness of the UK political ecosystem.

The problem I have felt in the past is not only that Westminster makes bad, out of touch decisions - but rather that Westminster hoards the power to make bad decisions, and then becomes terribly surprised when the country falls apart in suspiciously predictable ways.

Last year, I wrote a column for Byline Supplement about the death of local journalism and why it has been so dire for the country. My argument then was that when local journalism dies, local accountability dies with it. Councils become less visible. Developers get an easier ride. Local corruption becomes harder to spot. Communities lose the institutions that tell them what is being done in their name, with their money, on their streets.

There are real parallels here.

Local democracy, over the past few decades, has been weakened from two sides. On the one side, local journalism has been gutted, leaving communities less informed and far less able to hold power to account.

On the other, local government itself has been completely hollowed out after more than a decade of austerity, completely stripped of meaningful central funding, decimated of capacity and then handed the responsibility of looking after some of the hardest, bleakest and most politically radioactive jobs in the country.

Social care, temporary accommodation, children’s services, special educational needs, adult safeguarding, bins, potholes, libraries. The entire gamut of what makes a community run was given to local councils while at the same time they were stripped of every single resource and funding pot needed to actually run these.

I suppose my question then comes in that when Burnham talks about radical devolution - does he mean devolving as a branding exercise, or does he mean giving actual resource and authority to the people who work the closest to our communities?

The UK does not need another round of “local leaders” being invited to stand in front of shiny banners while the treasury keeps the keys, the wallet and the emergency exits.

Real devolution, in my mind at least, means money. It means fiscal power. It means authority over transport, housing, skills, health and economic strategy being shaped at a much more local level for and by the people who are most affected by the consequences.

It would mean local leaders having enough authority to matter and enough scrutiny to stop them becoming tiny regional emperors with lanyards.

But stronger local politics, properly funded and properly scrutinised, might be one of the few ways out of the sludge. Not because local government is inherently noble. Anyone who has spent more than twelve seconds near a planning committee knows it can attract some of the strangest people ever produced by these islands.

Democracy, as a whole, tends to work better when power is closer, more visible and easier to challenge.

Reform offers fake localism: it tells people their communities have been destroyed, then points them towards migrants, net zero, “woke councils” and whatever else Farage has found at the bottom of his grievance hamper. Radical devolution, if done properly, offers something far more threatening to him: actual agency.

That is why I think the last few weeks have felt so different.

Farage’s politics largely depends on people feeling powerless, ignored and furious, while making sure the fury is always directed sideways or downwards, never towards the billionaires, donors and political operators who would quite like to keep the system exactly as it is.

Burnham’s challenge will be proving that radical devolution is not just a Manchester-flavoured slogan, but a serious programme for rebuilding power where people actually live.

If he can even begin to make the case that Britain works better when Westminster loosens its clammy little grip, then Reform’s entire act starts to look smaller, thinner and much less like rebellion.

1. Whether this is actually a good thing is seriously up for question, but that’s a post for another day.

2. Again, unplanned and primary care are still largely on fire - also a post for another day.