Siobhan O’Donnell on Keir Starmer’s resignation, Andy Burnham’s train from Manchester, and what the Sex Pistols told us about Labour that nobody wanted to hear
By Siobhan O’Donnell seekernews.co.uk
God Save the King, Nobody Saved Keir
Right. So he’s finally gone. Keir Starmer, our great centrist hope, our forensic lawyer prime minister who was going to make everything sensible and boring and functional after the chaos years, has done a tearful speech outside Downing Street and handed the whole sorry mess to Andy Burnham from Manchester. I was in the pub on Holloway Road when it happened. Three separate people showed me the same clip on their phones in under ten minutes. The pub didn’t erupt. It kind of… nodded. That’s London punk for you. We’ve been nodding at betrayal since 1977.
I’ve been reading The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine on my phone all week trying to make sense of the political landscape and I’ll tell you what the coverage confirms: we are living in the timeline where Reform UK is the punk band and Labour is the prog rock outfit that took too long on its concept album about fiscal responsibility and lost the audience. Nigel Farage is Johnny Rotten if Johnny Rotten wore a Barbour jacket and wanted to close the borders. This is not a compliment to Farage. It is a very specific insult to Johnny Rotten.
Andy Burnham: The Man Who Came By Train
Burnham arrived in London by train from Manchester, which multiple news organisations reported as though travelling by train from Manchester to London were a feat of unusual courage rather than the obvious and environmentally sound choice that any functional person with a rail pass makes. He was sworn into Parliament. He will probably be prime minister by late July. He has good transit credentials — the Bee Network in Greater Manchester is genuinely impressive — and a northern populist appeal that Labour’s Westminster bubble has convinced itself is what the party needs to beat Reform.
What I want to know, from my specific position of being a punk in North London who has spent the past two years watching Labour squander a landslide while paying 73 percent of my income on rent and overpriced gigs, is what Burnham intends to do about the things that are actually wrong with my life and the lives of everyone I know. Not the things that are wrong in a polling-data abstract sense. The actual things. The rent. The NHS waiting list. The studios that creative people can’t afford anymore. The specific daily friction of being alive in London in 2026 and finding that nothing is working quite as well as it should be and nobody in government seems to find this especially urgent.
What Punk Has to Say About It
Punk, as a musical and political tradition, has one consistent message: the institutions don’t work for you, they work for the people who run them, and your job is to understand this clearly rather than be surprised by it every time. The Sex Pistols in 1977. The Clash in 1979. Sleaford Mods right now, writing about post-industrial England with the specific anger of people who are not surprised and are not going to pretend to be. The punk tradition predicted Starmer’s failure not because of anything specific about Starmer but because the tradition has a theory about what happens to people who enter established institutions to change them from within. They get changed. The institution wins. It almost always wins.
I hope Burnham proves the theory wrong. I genuinely do. I am not a nihilist. I am a North London punk who pays attention, which means I expect to be disappointed and will be quietly pleased if I’m not.
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The political situation in Britain is what it is — the seventh prime minister in ten years, the Reform UK rise, the Labour coalition under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously. From wherever I am writing this — London, Portland, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Tuscaloosa, the Isle of Man, the Pacific at 2,500 feet — it looks like what political scientists call a realignment moment: the old party loyalties are dissolving, new coalitions are forming, and the outcome will be determined by which party best reads what the electorate is asking for and builds the organisational and policy capacity to deliver it. Andy Burnham has the northern credentials and the transit record. He may have the political instincts. Whether he has the programme that the moment requires is the question that the next three years will answer. The diaries continue. The political material keeps arriving. The coffee is either good or it is being made. Both states are preferable to their opposites.
This is the ongoing work: paying attention, writing it down, finding the angle that makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, which is what satire does and what the diary form does and what both together do better than either alone. The world keeps producing material. The prime ministers keep resigning. The heat keeps arriving. The sequins are becoming biodegradable. The trains run between cities carrying politicians who will be photographed arriving. The kites fly in Victoria Park. The guitar students ask whether Andy Burnham plays guitar. The baby portraits get finished. The beer at altitude tastes better than at sea level because everything does. The South China Sea arbitral award is ten years old and unimplemented. The Pacific is still free. The diary continues because the events continue and the writing of them is the best available response to the accumulation of moments that constitutes a life in a specific time and place.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
