There is an opportunity for a progressive moment in Britain. On the whole, Andy Burnham’s start has been promising. Gone is the top down, overly bureaucratic approach of Keir Starmer, replaced by a more granular, bottom-up strategy from No.10’s current occupant. In focusing on grassroots issues, and staying disciplined on a cost of living message, Labour has begun to reassert itself as the people’s party. This kind of politics suits the current media and political climate far better than grand rhetoric ever could. And it’s just as well. The old art of oratory, the kind that could make a country feel something, is dying, and there is no one left in our political ecosystem with the gift to revive it.
Burnham is unlikely to be a great statesman. He will not lead Britain on the world stage the way Starmer did, for all his faults. Poor at home, Starmer was respected abroad: Emmanuel Macron sent him off with France’s Légion d’Honneur, and Ursula von der Leyen called him a statesman who had grown into the role in just two years.
Somewhere between the two men, there are signs of potential. If grassroots discipline and credible leadership could meet in the middle, pushing and pulling issue by issue, a genuine progressive moment might not just exist, but connect with and excite Britons. That might seem at odds with a political climate still shaped by Reform’s continued strength and a public weary of promises. But my conviction is clear: progressive government is within our grasp. If, and only if, we want it.
The energy is elsewhere
Britain is lagging behind a trend already visible across Europe and the United States. In America, progressive candidates are having a genuine moment, campaigning hard on healthcare, the cost of living, AI regulation, and a rising backlash against data centres eating into local power and water supplies. Trumpism remains powerful, and remains in office, but the energy sits with the left, and it carries itself with a swagger American progressives haven’t managed in years.
Even the party’s more cautious centrists are borrowing that energy. Jon Ossoff, one of the Democrats’ chosen standard-bearers for a more moderate rebuild after 2024, has built his re-election campaign on the same combative, viral, anti-Trump swagger that used to belong to the party’s left flank, and it’s fuelled speculation about a 2028 presidential run. He’s leading in what’s being called one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, in a state Trump carried two years ago. If the mood has reached even Ossoff, it isn’t confined to the movement’s edges anymore.
From the darkest of times, when politics feels at its most hateful, divisive, and angry, come the roots of hope. Britain may not yet show the same signs. That doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
A certain idea of France
France is a nation whose politics rarely follow the rules. In 2002, French voters propelled Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the Front National (rebranded National Rally under his daughter Marine) and a man twice convicted for denying the Holocaust, into the second round of the presidential election, less through conviction than through a fractured left and a desire to rattle the establishment. In 2017, Emmanuel Macron shattered the two-party system that had dominated the Fifth Republic through the creation of his movement, En Marche. At the time, because Macron was a centrist, none of this felt particularly dangerous. Looking back, it probably should have. He won the election. In doing so, though, he also broke apart the two parties that had spent fifty years keeping the extremes contained.
As France prepares to elect its next President next year, and with the race well underway, recent polling suggests the run-off may be between the hard left and the hard right: Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen.
Neither is a clean protest vote. Le Pen was convicted of embezzling EU funds last year, and only returned to contention this summer when an appeals court reduced the ban that came with it. Twenty years spent trying to scrub her father’s name off the party hasn’t quite worked; Jean-Marie’s shadow, and the Holocaust denial that built it, still hangs over Rassemblement National.
Mélenchon carries controversies of his own. He has faced repeated accusations of antisemitism, over his rhetoric on Israel and Gaza, his relationship with French Jewish organisations, and remarks that critics, including figures within his own party’s traditional allies, have described as dog-whistling. He has also faced criticism, echoed in independent reporting on La France Insoumise’s internal culture, that he runs the party as a tightly controlled, top-down operation, an uncomfortable fit with its professed commitment to radical democracy.
He is standing for a fourth time, having previously run in 2012, 2017, and, most narrowly, 2022, when he finished third with almost 22% of the vote. His platform, rests on a handful of consistent commitments: lowering the retirement age back to 60, raising the minimum wage, and a programme of “ecological planning” that would see the state nationalise strategic industries and direct investment into renewables. Institutionally, he is campaigning for a Sixth Republic, a rewritten constitution intended to curb the concentration of presidential power built into the Fifth Republic. His position on Europe is confrontational rather than separatist: rather than pursuing an exit along British lines, La France Insoumise’s strategy is one of “European disobedience,” implementing his programme regardless of EU competition and stability rules and negotiating from a position of strength, with a vaguer fallback plan to leave the existing treaties should that approach fail. It is, by most measures, the most radical programme among the leading candidates, and one he intends to run alone, having declined to join the unified left-wing primary organised for October.
It had been assumed that Édouard Philippe, Macron’s first Prime Minister and the mayor of Le Havre, would be the main centre-right challenger to the far right in 2027. That assumption no longer looks safe. His polling has slipped in recent months, with Mélenchon closing the gap on him for second place. There is, at present, no equivalent figure on the centre left. An attempt at a unifying primary has stalled, the field remains fragmented, and one of the few names still floated as a fallback is François Hollande, a former president in his early seventies who left the Élysée a decade ago as its most unpopular President ever.
As such, it is the more provocative candidates, baggage and all, who are sucking the oxygen from the debate. That is not to say the moment is beyond hope. There is a clear gap, and a clear appetite, for genuine progressive thinking and governance. It is simply that no one has yet seized on it.
What we’re seeing in America and France is that an appetite for left-leaning, people-centric politics exists. A much more grassroots, modernist agenda. A reset, really. Looking at the world as it is, we can see it hasn’t actually changed all that much, and that radical change is well overdue. That opportunity exists in Britain too.
My manifesto for Britain
If I were the one standing outside that black door, here’s what I’d say.
Firstly, I’d say that the country is fundamentally broken. The sooner we admit that, the better.
I’d say that no one leader is capable of solving all of our problems.
I’d make absolutely clear that the social contract is broken. That the relationship between the public and its leaders is interrupted by middlemen: the media, and other political leaders.
Standing at that podium, I’d make a promise to be honest and direct. That when asked gotcha questions by journalists, I’d answer them honestly, without fear that the media, big tech and other politicians would clip and manipulate my words to suit their own aims. We need to accept that our media no longer seeks to impart the truth; media is now money. Profit over truthtelling. We need to accept that however brilliant many of our political journalists are, their organisations are feeling the squeeze, and there is pressure to turn political news into entertainment, to maintain a readership or viewership. We need to accept that at certain outlets, pundits are deeply political and cannot be objective. We need to accept that the BBC is so terrified of a Reform government coming after it that it has become hesitant in its coverage. Fake bots on Twitter and TikTok are looking to manipulate how you think. They want chaos. They want disruption. Because from that chaos, they can profit. At your expense.
And so I’d ask the British public to enter into a new social contract, where whatever we think of each other, we try to cut out the middlemen. We talk to each other.
My flagship programme in my first hundred days would be a national tour of towns across the UK. Towns a Prime Minister has never visited before. We’d use town halls and churches to have a conversation for a couple of hours. Anyone could attend. No party bunting, no flashy lights, no spectacle. Uncomfortable chairs, tea in paper cups. We’d sit and chat. Not argue. We’d listen to each other. Everyone would have their opportunity to speak and be heard. Twee? Potentially.
I’d talk about infrastructure. Because the truth is, we have forgotten how to build things in this country. Government contracts have ballooned so far beyond any reasonable cost that we have simply accepted highway robbery as the norm. We shouldn’t. I’d make a promise, a simple one: we will actually build things. On time. To budget. Without burning through public money on consultants, overruns and managed decline dressed up as due process. Look at what China and the United States can do. Bridges erected in days. Infrastructure delivered at pace and at scale. In Britain, we can’t build a railway extension without a decade of inquiries and a bill that doubles before the first brick is laid. That has to end. Government contracts should not come at a premium. The public purse is not a trough. And I’d say that clearly, to the people who profit from that culture, as much as to the people who suffer from it.
I’d fix Parliament. Not review it, not commission another report about it, not kick the can down the road for the fifteenth consecutive year. Fix it. The Palace of Westminster is an inferno waiting to happen, and every Prime Minister who has looked the other way has gambled with a building that belongs not to politicians but to the country. I wouldn’t let my ego get in the way. I wouldn’t be precious about being the Prime Minister who never sat in the Commons chamber during restoration. So what? Parliament is Britain at its absolute best. The history, the theatre, the tradition, the weight of everything that has been decided within those walls. We cannot lose it. We will not lose it. And any leader who has prioritised their own legacy over its survival should be ashamed of themselves.
Finally, I’d make clear that I refuse to make promises I can’t keep. We’ve entered a political culture where politicians who know full well they’ll never hold power make outlandish promises precisely because they’re popular. The truth isn’t an important enough consideration anymore. I’d say I have more respect for the British people than that. That, like it or loathe it, I’d be direct, honest, and unflinching in my commitment to levelling up the nation.
Because the truth is, none of this is really about what I would do. It’s about what we need someone to do, and the creeping, uncomfortable feeling that nobody is coming. That we are waiting for a leader who understands that Britain doesn’t need managing; it needs rebuilding, from the foundations up, with honesty and without vanity. Someone who can stand at that door and mean it.
That’s the moment on offer. Somebody just has to take it.
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