Dave Levy is worried by recent media reports.

Several news sources are reporting that Ed Miliband and his supporters are losing the fight to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. Worse, it seems the person being considered as an alternative is the socially conservative Shabana Mahmood.

“Stopping Miliband from becoming chancellor is a national emergency,” wailed one Telegraph columnist. “Opponents of Ed Miliband believe that they have quashed his bid to become Chancellor,” reported City AM. “Labour whips have told MPs that they expect current home secretary Shabana Mahmood to be handed the role while Miliband will be offered the job of foreign secretary, the Financial Times reported.” “Andy Burnham’s allies ‘block Ed Miliband from becoming chancellor’,” reports the Times.

Is this just mischief-making by Labour whips and wishful thinking from the media? Andy Burnham is already said to have appointed former Blairite would-be welfare cutter James Purnell as his Chief of Staff.

Burnham has also stated that he intends to take advice from some of the country’s leading monetarists. These include former Bank of England economist Andy Haldane, widely seen as an expert on ‘financial stability’, and former Conservative minister Jim O’Neill, a former chair of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Also said to be advising him is Richard Hughes, a former chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility and now a senior economic adviser at the London-based fund manager Taula Capital.

Andy Burnham cannot promise change on the one hand and economic continuity on the other. Recent governments offer plenty of examples of Prime Ministers who appointed Chancellors they believed would reassure the markets only to find their capitulation to Treasury orthodoxy hemmed in their ability to govern progressively.

As Chief Secretary to the Treasury in an earlier Labour government, Burnham himself “witnessed at firsthand the fractious dynamic between the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and his chancellor, Alistair Darling, and the damage that such tensions cause,” note academics Dave Richards and Sam Warner, authors of a new book, The Myth of Treasury Control.

If Andy Burnham were to not appoint Ed Miliband as Chancellor,  then his government will become ‘Starmerism with a northern accent’. Labour needs a change of direction, not just a change of personnel.  Burnham’s recent ‘big speech’ underestimated the cultural inertia in the Treasury. If he is “to save Britain, Burnham must take on the Treasury,” the New Stateman warned recently.

The financial rules need to change and Burnham needs a Chancellor to drive different behaviour in the Treasury, Bank of England and the Office of Budget Responsibility. There is only one candidate who can do this.

If Burnham gets it wrong, then Labour will continue to lose its progressive urban voters to the Greens, or Plaid Cymru in Wales. And if he fails to make substantial inroads into the cost of living and public service crises, then the hope he has raised will turn to despair and the vultures of the right will benefit.

Dave Levy is a member of Lewisham North CLP and blogs at https://davelevy.info/blog. He is a member of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy Executive Committee.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Secretary_of_State_for_Energy_Security_and_Net_Zero_Ed_Miliband_(55066031341)_(cropped).jpg Source: Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband Author: UK Government, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.