In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Story of the Lost Special” (in which Sherlock Holmes gets only a glancing reference), an entire train goes missing shortly after it has passed through Kenyon Junction. The junction was just outside the village of Culcheth in the northwest of England, where the UK’s latest prime minister, Andy Burnham, grew up. It has a claim on global history: in 1831 it became the first station where passengers could change between two independent railway lines. Here the Manchester-to-Liverpool line met the one that connected Bolton to Leigh—both created by one of the titans of the English Industrial Revolution, the engineer George Stephenson.
In Conan Doyle’s story, first published in 1898, the police inspector charged with investigating the mystery surveys the area between Kenyon Junction and the next station, at which the train has failed to arrive:
In the stretch of railway between these two points…the country is dotted with ironworks and collieries…. There are no fewer than twelve which have small-gauge lines which run trolley cars down to the main line…. Besides these, however, there are seven which have or have had proper lines running down and connecting with points to the main line, so as to convey their produce from the mouth of the mine to the great centers of distribution.
This teeming world of ironworks and collieries, by which Culcheth was closely connected to the great centers of distribution in the mother country of a global empire, is long gone. Burnham’s family moved there from Liverpool in 1971, when he was a year old. A decade earlier Kenyon Junction had closed for passenger traffic. In Burnham’s early childhood it was derelict, and during the 1970s it was completely demolished. Its station buildings, sidings, warehouses, and four platforms serving eleven lines of track evaporated as completely as Conan Doyle’s disappearing locomotive.
Lost railways (though not lost trains) featured in Burnham’s maiden speech in the House of Commons in July 2001. He introduced himself as an emissary from “the communities that were the cradle of the Industrial Revolution” and thus, in a sense, as an envoy from England’s glorious past. He had been elected as the Labour MP for Leigh, the large town nearest to his home village. “The spinning jenny,” he told Parliament, “was invented in Leigh by a poor weaver called Thomas Highs, but we were denied our place in the history books by an entrepreneur from Blackburn who quickly patented it.”
His own constituency could thus be imagined as a point of origin of the modern world. Which made it all the more poignant that, as he lamented, alongside “the closure of the mills and mines in the 1980s and 1990s,” Leigh had become “the largest town in England without a railway station.” Burnham expressed his hope that the development in Leigh of a massive new leisure and retail complex—to be called, without apparent irony, Xanadu, after the stately pleasure dome in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”—would allow for the rebirth of Kenyon Junction. As he explained in 2022, he had imagined naively that after that first speech “I was going to get a call from a Department for Transport civil servant the next day to say, ‘Well, and where exactly would you like this new train station, Mr. Burnham?’ It took me a while to realize that I was basically talking into the abyss.”
Burnham’s train dreams may have been interrupted by the political equivalent of Coleridge’s person from Porlock, but they were not innately fanciful. He was speaking out of an awareness that, in some profound respects, the place where he grew up, and hundreds of places like it in the North of England, had gone backwards in time. In the twenty-first century they are more disconnected from the centers of power and the leading edges of technology than they had been in the 1830s. If the old rail lines were the arteries linking northern towns to the beating heart of the empire, their severance signified a return to preindustrial peripherality.
Once, British history was centripetal—the ubiquity of industrial society pulled most of the island (and part of the neighboring island of Ireland) into the same economic and social system. But in Burnham’s lifetime it became centrifugal, creating ever wider distances between the northern and western regions and the rich heartlands of London and the southeast. Britain’s regional inequalities—in pay, disposable income, productivity, education, health, and life expectancy—are among the most severe in the developed world. In spite of the lip service to what Boris Johnson as prime minister called “leveling up,” these disparities have been largely unaltered since Burnham made his Westminster debut a quarter of a century ago.
A centrifugal economy creates a centrifugal politics. The big story of the UK this century is disjunction. In three of its four nations—Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—the devolved governments are led by nationalists who want to disconnect from the grid of Britishness and establish independent states or, in the case of Northern Ireland, join with the rest of Ireland. The other (and overwhelmingly dominant) nation, England, voted for a different act of separation, cutting itself off from the European Union. But Brexit was also a defiance of the metropolitan center, a mutiny by the North against the Southeast. In Burnham’s Leigh, nearly two thirds of voters backed Brexit in the 2016 referendum—very much against his advice. In Makerfield, the nearby constituency he now represents, the vote was similar. This revolt was against Westminster more than Brussels.
Burnham’s political career has been shaped by two dark stories that between them encapsulate the sense of alienation in northwest England. One is Boys from the Blackstuff, a brilliant five-part TV drama written by Alan Bleasdale, shot on location in Liverpool and broadcast by the BBC in 1982. It followed the lives of five men who had lost their jobs in the great wave of deindustrialization set in motion by Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in 1979. It acted out, in what felt like real time, the unraveling of British male working-class identity.
In Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain (2024), the manifesto he cowrote with the mayor of Liverpool, Steve Rotheram, Burnham identified a rebroadcast of the series as the spur to his decision to join the Labour Party when he was fifteen. It seems significant that the episode that had the biggest impact on him is the most unashamedly nostalgic. In “George’s Last Ride,” an old docker near death is pushed in his wheelchair along Liverpool’s once glorious Albert Dock, now largely derelict. Amid the starkly beautiful ruins, George utters his dying words:
Forty-seven years ago, I stood here, a young bull, and watched my first ship come in. They say that memories live longer than dreams. But my dreams, those dreams of long ago, they still give me hope and faith in my class…. I can’t believe that there’s no hope, I can’t.
In Head North, Burnham writes:
I remember turning away from the screen to see the tears streaming down my mum’s face. Her dad, Jimmy, had worked on those docks as a lorry driver for Tate & Lyle, as had our Irish ancestors before him. It was painfully close to home.
Even more painful was the Hillsborough disaster of 1989. Almost a hundred fans of Liverpool Football Club were crushed in a soccer stadium in Sheffield. The calamity was caused by egregious failures by the police officers in charge of crowd safety. But the fans themselves were blamed for their own deaths and mercilessly slandered as hooligans in Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper The Sun. The scandal was covered up, the bereaved families were ignored, and no one was held accountable. There could have been no more brutal proof that these people did not really count.
Hillsborough provided, however, the first real evidence that Burnham is a politician with both emotional intelligence and moral purpose. When, as secretary of state for culture, media, and sport, he represented the then Labour government at the twentieth-anniversary memorial in Liverpool’s home ground at Anfield in 2009, his speech was interrupted by chants demanding justice for the victims. Burnham had the wit to stop talking and listen. The next day he pushed at cabinet for the creation of an independent investigative panel and new inquests. The final report, issued in 2012, resulted, in 2016, in ninety-six verdicts of “unlawful killing.”
Burnham’s speech on the ruling in the Commons was a passionate denunciation of “a police force that has consistently put protecting itself over and above protecting people,” a judicial system “that gives the upper hand to those in authority, over and above ordinary people,” and print media that colluded with the police to create a “false version of events” that lingered for almost thirty years. The speech was so powerful that, against parliamentary protocol, it drew sustained applause and cheering.
There was a bitter irony, however. Burnham delivered his philippic two months before the Brexit referendum. He gave voice to a proper antielitism, characterizing the Hillsborough cover-up as a “collusion between elites.” But that righteous anger was almost immediately diverted into the false antielitism of Brexit. Just as Donald Trump was doing in the US that year, Britain’s reactionary right surfed the waves of resentment against distant political institutions, corrupt justice systems, and cynically compliant media organizations.
Perhaps in recognition of this reality, Burnham staged his own revolt against Westminster, resigning as an MP and successfully contesting the election for the mayoralty of Greater Manchester in 2017. He won almost two thirds of the vote—a feat he repeated in 2021 and 2024. His media image as “King of the North” was burnished by his effective advocacy for the region during the Covid-19 pandemic and his skillful redefinition of “Manchesterism.” In the nineteenth century the term signified a radical commitment to laissez-faire economics as well as social liberalism. Burnham made it stand for an activist regional administration in which public utilities were returned to collective ownership and businesses worked in close partnership with local government—a combination that gave Manchester a relative dynamism under his leadership, an exception to Britain’s economic inertia.
He also articulated an opposition to the whole established Westminster system, which he described as a centralized hierarchy that only grudgingly conceded to popular democracy without ever really embracing it:
Westminster remains an antiquated world into which degrees of democracy were introduced as the franchise was extended. But, fundamentally, it remains the same: a system built to concentrate power in the hands of the already-powerful and that much has not changed through the centuries. This over-concentration of political power in one place in too few hands is the main reason why Britain is one of the most politically centralised and economically unbalanced countries in the developed world…. It is also the underlying explanation for more widespread failure.
Burnham’s accession to power thus raises two big questions for progressive politics across the democratic world: Can the left give nostalgia a meaning that is not reactionary? And can democratic governments give up some of their power not to private oligarchies but to communities and citizens who feel increasingly powerless? Burnham’s ability to provide credible responses to those questions may depend on the answer to a third one: Can the United Kingdom hold together?
Two thirds of the way through Burnham’s first big speech as prime minister, given at the Labour Party conference on September 29, he stopped speaking. Much of the audience, thinking he had lost his train of thought, rose to encourage him. But the pause was for dramatic effect and to gather himself for a passage he would deliver with a catch in his voice and an air of barely suppressed emotion. This was the moment that would be excerpted for social media feeds and TV reports. In it he fused his own personal nostalgia for a progressive British past with assurance that Britain still has a future as a unified polity.
A fortnight earlier, Burnham’s father, Roy, had died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. On the same day, the first ministers of the three devolved governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland held a summit in Cardiff. John Swinney of the Scottish National Party, Rhun ap Iorwerth of Plaid Cymru, and Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin signed a joint declaration that “Westminster’s time is coming to an end”—an awkward assertion for Burnham because it is also what he himself (albeit with different implications) believes. Swinney made the prediction personal by suggesting that Burnham will be the last prime minister of the UK.
It would be wrong to suggest that Burnham cynically used this conjunction of personal sorrow and political challenge as an escape hatch from the complexities of the UK’s national questions. He nonetheless achieved that to brilliant effect. He quoted Swinney’s prophecy of doom and then pivoted to paternal piety:
Whatever its flaws, this country gave my dad a good life…. The United Kingdom my dad represented is the one I believe in. A union of nations that gave trade unions and the cooperative movement to the world. The National Health Service. A country that stood up to fascism. A country of solidarity, not separation. That’s the Britain my dad represented. Britain is not perfect. It can be better and we will make it so. But it still stands for something worth saving, worth fighting for. And we will always be stronger facing a changing world together, rather than separating.
Oratorically, this is tremendously effective—it distills hundreds of years of socialist history into the figure of his dear dead dad. Roy Burnham, who worked as a telephone engineer for the British postal service and then for the privatized British Telecom, was born in May 1941, when Britain still controlled more than a quarter of the world, the trains still stopped at Kenyon Junction, the collieries and ironworks were working overtime, and Albert Dock was a vital base for the British Atlantic fleet. Burnham, moreover, projected his vision of a united Britain back a generation further. Near the start of his speech, he reminded the party faithful that the conference was taking place on what used to be Liverpool’s working waterfront, and he dug back into his Boys from the Blackstuff memory bank: “For me, life truly has come full circle because this is where my story began. My granddad drove a lorry along these docks for Tate & Lyle.”
There’s an awful lot of death wrapped up in this rhetoric—a dead father, a dead world of industrial might, the death foretold of the United Kingdom that Burnham was pledging to defy, the death of the fictional George in Boys from the Blackstuff that brought tears to his mother’s eyes because it reminded her in turn of her dead father. All these intimations of mortality are permeated with an air of nostalgic reverie, the “dreams of long ago” that give the dying George hope for the working class.
This backward glance is a more elegiac and plaintive version of the retrograde vision that animates ascendant right-wing movements: the “again” in MAGA, the “back” in the winning Brexit slogan “Take Back Control.” Burnham’s rhetorical question at the party conference was, “We led the world’s first Industrial Revolution from the Midlands and the North of England. So why can’t we lead the next?” The lost world can become a new world, one in which Britain (so long as it hangs together) can again be a global powerhouse.
Yet these stakes are far too high. If the future of the union is to be gambled on Britain regaining some equivalent of its world-shaping power in the nineteenth century, it seems a losing bet. The striking absence in Burnham’s evocation of the past is empire. This amnesia is convenient not just because it makes Britain’s “long ago” much more benign and progressive than it really was but because it evades the question of how a revived UK could lead the world without the raw might of conquest. The realistic aim now is surely to make Britain a successful member of what Canadian prime minister Mark Carney calls the “middle powers.” Delusions of grandeur merely get in the way of achieving it.
Burnham’s promise of resurrection also exposes the ambiguities within his own position as a leading figure in the centrifugal politics of the last two decades who nonetheless is now appealing for “solidarity not separation.” He evokes the first Industrial Revolution as a product specifically of “the Midlands and the North of England”—not London, not Wales, not Scotland, not Northern Ireland. This may be accurate enough, but it also draws on a particular regional story. Its emotional ground is the grief that lingers after the slow death of the North of England’s sense of itself as the engine room of world history.
Burnham is well aware that a large part of his mission is to confront the English question. The rise of English nationalism—itself driven in part by resentment at the devolution of powers to the three other nations—was at the heart of Brexit. Burnham wants to revisit that fateful decision and declares that “Brexit has done more harm than good.” He knows that he cannot get the economic growth necessary to implement a progressive agenda while Britain’s economy remains stymied by its perverse erection of barriers to trade with its most important market, the European Union. But even though Brexit was a phony response to the alienation of much of England, Burnham can’t just sweep it away. He has to replace it with a genuine response.
Hence one of Burnham’s signature moves—Number 10 North. He announced very quickly after he became prime minister that he will establish an equivalent of 10 Downing Street in Manchester and govern at least one day a week from there. He called Number 10 North the “nerve center of a rewired Britain” and promised that it will “oversee the biggest rebalancing of power our country has ever seen.” This might be surprising to those who live in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, who may wonder how it could be bigger than the establishment of elected parliaments and executives in Edinburgh, Cardiff, and Belfast. The hidden assumption in Burnham’s phrase is that “our country” is England.
This is not to say that Burnham’s idea of “driving power out of Whitehall” and shifting it to the North of England is a bad one. It is merely to point out that there is a tension between his passionate support for the devolution of authority to more parts of the UK outside of London and his desire to shore up the union itself. The Westminster system that Burnham rightly sees as the culprit for Britain’s failures is highly centralized for a reason: it is hard to hold four nations together without a top-down culture of command and control. Dismantling that system while preserving the union is a risky business. Burnham shares with his nationalist opponents the desire to destroy Westminster—the difference being that he wants to destroy it in order to save the union, while they want to do so in order to kill it off.
Conservative unionists always believed that giving more autonomy to the smaller nations within the UK would not appease their sense of separateness but deepen it. In that, at least, they were right: the very existence of devolved parliaments validates a sense of national difference. Burnham, with his retreat from Westminster to Manchester in 2017, was declaring himself (though he would never put it this way) a North of England nationalist. Now that he occupies the dead center of the Westminster system, he has to both honor that impulse in himself and tame it in others.
There is a path through this maze. In 2022, when Labour was out of office, it established the Commission on the UK’s Future, chaired by Burnham’s former mentor Gordon Brown. Its report acknowledged the core British problem of
an unreformed, over-centralised way of governing that leaves millions of people complaining they are neglected, ignored, and invisible, all too often left to feel as if they are treated as second class citizens in their own country.
This unbalanced system had created a country in which “half the UK population live in areas no better off than the poorer parts of the former East Germany, poorer than parts of central and Eastern Europe…poorer than the US states of Mississippi and West Virginia.”
It recommended radical constitutional change: the abolition of the absurdly undemocratic House of Lords (made up of almost eight hundred unelected appointees); its replacement by an elected Assembly of the Nations and Regions; the devolution of economic power to all towns and cities in England and greatly enhanced self-government for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; and an explicit constitutional commitment to ensuring the same standards of living across the UK.
Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, welcomed the report when he was in opposition but quietly shelved it as he approached the possibility of winning a general election. Giving away power is a very attractive idea until you have power yourself. One of the perennial problems of the British left has been its inability to resist the seductive idea that a system that exists, as Burnham has written, “to preserve the status quo” can be used to force through progressive change.
The starkest embodiment of this dilemma is the great majority of parliamentary seats Burnham has inherited from Starmer’s victory in the general election in 2024. Labour actually secured just one third of the vote, but the first-past-the-post electoral system gave it two thirds of the parliamentary seats, benefiting from a process designed to shore up central power by giving the winning party a commanding majority.
Burnham, however, has established a national commission on electoral reform, knowing full well that a fairer allocation of parliamentary seats would have given Labour a much-reduced majority—and in effect that some of his MPs would not now hold that title. Sweeping constitutional change along the lines of Brown’s recommendations would also reduce Burnham’s ability to dispense political patronage, not least his capacity to reward supporters with appointments to the House of Lords.
Implicit in Burnham’s drive to spread the UK’s wealth, moreover, is the reality that spending has to be directed away from London and its hinterland. The established test for large-scale infrastructural projects is that they provide the maximum possible return on investment. This means that money goes to those regions that are already most developed. As Burnham complained when he was mayor of Manchester, the official attitude is that “those old industrial communities can’t become anything again so why invest in them?” Turning this orthodoxy on its head and giving priority to the poorest places is not a direct attack on London, but its indirect consequences for the capital will become increasingly obvious.
In his pursuit of this radical agenda, Burnham’s enemy is time. Apart from everything else, Brexit has been a colossal waste of time. It distracted governments and civil servants and initiated the chronic political instability in which Burnham acceded to office as the seventh prime minister in ten years. He must now not only make up for lost time but accelerate profound changes to Britain’s constitution, its economic decision-making, and its industrial strategy, all while coping with chronic domestic and global crises.
Yet his advantage is that he has no choice but to be radical. More than any other British politician since Thatcher in 1979, he is defined by the sense of an ending. Thatcher believed that industrial Britain was moribund and proceeded to kill it off without pity or regret. Burnham believes that the postindustrial Britain she created is expiring in its turn and that, unless he can resurrect some version of the past she buried, it will take the UK with it. Rather than contenting himself with one last ride on that ghost train, he knows he has to lay down a whole new set of tracks.