Andy Burnham has accepted £20,000 from trade unions in a month as Labour backers begin to plan for life after Keir Starmer. The Greater Manchester mayor received his first union donations in two years in a major boost to his by-election campaign. They come after Labour-affiliated unions called for the Prime Minister to stand down last week.
On Friday, the most powerful union leader – TUC general secretary Paul Nowak – said there was an ‘overwhelming sense of frustration’ with the PM. The donations will be welcome to Mr Burnham as he builds his war chest to do battle with Reform UK in Makerfield.
Mr Burnham was paid tens of thousands by three unions who called for Sir Keir to go, between March 24 and April 24, The Times revealed. He received £10,000 from the Fire Brigades Union, whose head Steve Wright was one of the first to criticise the PM. It had even considered disaffiliating from Labour.
The Communication Workers Union donated £5,000 after its boss Dave Ward praised Mr Burnham as a politician who ‘wants to put forward solutions to working people’. A further £5,000 donation came from Unison though was said to be to cover the Labour Party’s local elections in Greater Manchester rather than for Mr Burnham. However, Andrea Egan, the general secretary, is one of the mayor’s keenest supporters, describing herself as a ‘fan’ and him as ‘King of the North’.
Mr Burnham has described himself as a supporter of ‘unions of all kinds’ and has picked up backing where Sir Keir is losing it. On Friday, the PM faced further woe after Mr Nowak said he was ‘angry’ at the state of Labour and its leadership. In his first intervention, he said it was clear that there was a sense of frustration with Sir Keir, in the statement issued by trade unions.
He told the Guardian: ‘They don’t think he could lead Labour into the next election. I’m not going to cut across where our Labour unions are at, but whoever is in No 10, they’ve got to show working-class people that they are on their side. I think what you got from that statement was that overwhelming sense of frustration – 22 months out from that landslide election victory, which Labour won on the basis of a manifesto that had one word on the cover: “Change”. For a lot of people there hasn’t been any real change. They certainly haven’t felt it in their pockets. I get that sense of frustration – 100 per cent.’
He added: ‘It makes me angry when you have self-inflicted mistakes like the Mandelson scandal and winter fuel payments.' He warned that the local election results showed the country was on course for a Reform government without a radical change. The union boss described Mr Burnham as a ‘talented politician and one that has managed in Manchester to prove that he can deliver’. But he also questioned whether the mayor could prove he could tap into issues that matter to working class people.
