Downing Street’s Cooperative Moment

Andy Burnham’s Quiet Economic Campaign

Andy Burnham faces one of the harder jobs in politics. The former Manchester Mayor and newly-elected Labour Party leader will become the United Kingdom’s (UK) Prime Minister on 20 July – weeks after his election to Parliament – and inherit a caucus still reeling from a historic local election defeat in May.

Burnham will be bound by promises of bold action and political culture change, Rachel Reeves’ self-imposed fiscal rules and tax pledges, and Keir Starmer’s generous parting gift of £4.7 billion worth of unfunded defence promises.

But unlike many other Labour Party members, Burnham maintains the ideological commitments needed to navigate his narrow path to political success. He will enter 10 Downing Street as the first British Prime Minister to serve both the Labour Party and the Co-operative Party, bringing his decades-long commitment to cooperative principles into the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Co-operative Party has served as the political wing of the British cooperative movement since its founding at the 1917 Congress of Cooperatives. Its history mirrors the Labour Party’s own historic, now-frayed relationship with the British labour movement, though the Co-operative Party is not wholly independent.

Co-operative Party activists develop policy and run advocacy campaigns, and its local branches lead candidate selections. But, since 1927, it has exclusively run joint Labour and Co-operative Party (LCP) electoral slates and required its candidates to secure Labour Party nominations.

The Co-operative Party promotes community ownership and the growth of financial, consumer, and labour cooperatives across the British economy. Its policies also do not cost much money. The Party – in keeping with cooperative principles – aims to slash barriers to local economic control, while maintaining a commitment to community-led, rather than state-led, projects.

“You can’t force co-ops on people … They have to be bottom-up, you know; you have to go with what people want… It’s [the Government’s] job then to facilitate and enable people,” Burnham said at the Co-operative Party’s 2021 Conference. And he has applied that principle, fairly consistently, since he first joined the LCP in 2001, across wildly different iterations of the Labour Party.

Throughout the 2000s – as he cycled through Cabinet posts in the Blair and Brown Governments – Burnham served as Chair of Supporters Direct, a Co-operative Party-proposed and Labour-backed group created to help football fans take control and ownership of their clubs.

“What is the antidote to a decade of greed [in football]? The answer is already before us: supporter and community ownership of clubs. Quietly and almost unnoticed, football is Britain’s fastest-growing sector for cooperative and mutual ownership,” Burnham wrote in a 2002 editorial in the Guardian. “The people’s game is ripe for a supporters’ takeover,” he added.

Under his leadership, Supporters Direct helped dozens of community groups buy shares in football clubs and a handful – including the John Green-sponsored AFC Wimbledon – buy out private investors entirely.

Burnham has further deepened his commitment to cooperative principles in recent years. He created the Greater Manchester Cooperative Commission (GMCC) in March 2019 – just over year into his first term as Manchester Mayor – and asked it to develop cooperative-sector growth recommendations.

“As the home of the cooperative movement, it’s vital we harness those values and put them at the centre of everything we do, working with cooperatives and social enterprises to build a stronger, fairer Greater Manchester where nobody is left behind,” Burnham said at the time.

In early 2020, the GMCC completed its work, and Burnham fully accepted its 43 recommendations. These included proposals for him to promote credit unions and lobby financial regulators to loosen reserve requirements for them.

Burnham has promoted Manchester-based credit unions in recent years, as the GMCC requested. He teamed up with nine local unions – in 2024 – to create a consumer loan product for Mancunian union members seeking annual bus passes. His move likely did not add any costs to Manchester’s annual bus pass scheme, but did create a clear incentive for people to join financial cooperatives and keep savings local.

Burnham could, as Prime Minister, give effect to the second part of GMCC’s credit union recommendation without bumping up against Reeves-imposed cost constraints. If he decides to, he would have an admittedly imperfect, working model to follow.

The National Credit Union Administration, the US’ main credit union regulator, has proposed dozens of credit union-related rule changes since 2025. The agency plans to ease collateral holding requirements and inter-union loan restrictions to encourage lending. But it has also proposed less ideal changes to remove some discrimination protections and speed up union-bank mergers.

Burnham has not announced any credit union policies in recent days. But his early comments as Labour Party leader suggest that he will adopt a cooperative approach to policymaking when he formally takes office.

Minutes after he won control of the Labour Party on 17 July, Burnham offered party members a stark diagnosis of the UK’s core political challenges. “Slowly, at times imperceptibly, over four decades, political and economic power drained away out of our communities in every region and nation of the UK,” Burnham said.

“If we don’t have sufficient public control over the cost of the essentials, how can we have control over inflation, public spending, and the rest of the economy? The right used the phrase ‘take back control’, but they are the ones who gave it away in the first place,” he added.

Burnham’s speech was light on specific policy proposals – a source of concern among many activists – but his rhetoric was not new. He has used his precise diagnosis of the British state to advance a fairly specific set of cooperative policies for decades.

Burnham also gave listeners a clearer signal of his Government’s cooperative plans. “Let’s have the courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected, like social care, and have the conviction to go out there together and argue for our plans, he said.

Though the line itself did not say too much, Burnham’s past comments suggest his social care policies will focus on the cooperative movement. During a social care panel at Co-Op Congress 2023, Burnham was clear about the movement’s role in the sector.

“It does feel [like] the co-op ideal is uniquely suited to social care, doesn’t it, in terms of the culture and ethos of cooperatives. It kind of feels like the fit is perfect … So maybe the co-op movement is the only movement, really, that can fix social care,” Burnham said.

His plans on social care could be as structurally oriented and cost-effective as his Manchester-era credit union scheme, allowing him to obey Reeves’ budgetary rules without either running to the right or avoiding bold action.

Burnham could – as he promised Labour Party members on 17 July – “[not] out Green the Greens, or out Reform Reform, or [do] what we’ve done in the past … wearing too many Tory clothes.”