Written by If the overriding imperative in British politics is to block the path to power of Nigel Farage and his Reform party, Labour is making exactly the right move by replacing Sir Keir Starmer with Andy Burnham.
From the Editor’s Desk, The Tablet 24 June 2026
In an age where politics is personal rather than ideological, his good-natured charm and friendly lack of formality will be a priceless asset on the nation’s doorsteps when election time comes round, as the recent Makerfield by-election demonstrated. Starmer, decent, serious and conscientious man though he is, was never in the right job. He lacked not only personal warmth but a moral vision, a sense of purpose, and his government lacked direction.
Will Burnham supply what was missing? There are enough clues to suggest he can. Two of them are contained in the word he coined to describe what he was trying to do as mayor of Greater Manchester – “Manchesterism” – and in his personal and family background as a working-class born-and-bred Lancashire Catholic. The two are connected. He has stated more than once that the bedrock of his politics is in Catholic Social Teaching, which he learnt at his Catholic school, and in a Catholic brand of community activism which he absorbed under the influence of Derek Worlock, the Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool during Burnham’s formative years.
It is surprising how many media commentators, speculating on what Manchesterism might look like when applied to the whole country, have failed to examine more closely this body of teaching, which is set forth in great detail in a dozen official church documents published in a series starting with Rerum Novarum in 1891 – all available online. They are signposts towards the goal of a society that meets more fully the material and moral needs of its members. It is the antithesis of that which leads to the common complaint that Britain lacks hope in a better future – that “Britain is broken”.
Catholic Social Teaching does not offer a political programme of its own, but it does provide fairly stringent criteria that can be applied to policies or statements of political objectives. Its principles are as relevant on the right of politics as on the left, and they are as incompatible with Marxist class war as they are with free-market capitalism. The most recent teaching document in the series, Magnifica Humanitas, published by Pope Leo last month, is a comprehensive analysis of the moral and political challenges presented by artificial intelligence; his predecessor, Pope Francis, contributed to the tradition with Laudato Si’, on humanity’s duty to care for the environment, and Fratelli Tutti, on the obligation to “love your neighbour as yourself” – especially the poor and vulnerable, including migrants and refugees.
These three documents are not the only keys to understanding “Manchesterism”. This lies in two concepts which are foundational to Catholic Social Teaching: solidarity and subsidiarity. The latter, an unfamiliar word often inaccurately translated as “devolution”, refers to the obligation of higher authority in any political structure or system not to usurp the natural right of people to control their own lives. It comes from the 1931 encyclical of Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, which declared: “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organisations can do.”
Devolution implies that central government holds all power legitimately, but may find it convenient to delegate aspects of it to local and regional authorities. Subsidiarity challenges that assumption. It says legitimate authority flows upwards from the grassroots, not downwards from the centre. So Greater Manchester may legally have been given the devolved power to reorganise its bus services, to take an actual example, but morally it should not have needed central government’s permission before it adjusted local transport services to best meet the needs of local people. Indeed, to block those devolved powers would be a “grave evil and disturbance of right order”.
Bus services may be a trivial example, but what, for instance, about the reorganisation of the National Health Service to integrate it with adult social care? This would have huge national implications. It might be expected that subsidiarity would say that the integration should be done locally. But solidarity, the other key principle from the Catholic Social Teaching tradition, is inseparable from subsidiarity. And solidarity – the principle that “all are responsible for all”, as Pope John Paul II put it – would not accept a health service–care sector amalgamation that disadvantaged certain sectors of the population, such as those living in rural areas, or the disabled, or those with learning difficulties. The overriding judgement would be whether such a policy served the common good and upheld the dignity of individuals. And the state’s role is to promote the common good and human dignity wherever it can.
That includes intervening when businesses governed by market forces are seen to be harming the community or other stakeholders, including the workforce – a particular concern of Archbishop Worlock. In historic cases, Catholic Social Teaching would have justified state intervention to halt de-industrialisation or to mitigate the damage. The Catholic tradition insists that people come before capital, which is why many neoliberal economists distrust it. But there is also a growing interest among economists and social philosophers in “the politics of the common good” and Burnham is going to find himself on the same page as, for example, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, also a Catholic with roots in the Catholic Social Teaching tradition. And the creative tension between solidarity and subsidiarity is at the heart of the story of the European Union, whose foundations also lie in the tradition.
Catholic Social Teaching does not rely on one credal system, Catholicism, nor on biblical texts (though both sources are relevant), but on the ancient humanist tradition associated with Aristotle and, to an extent, Plato. These ideas fed into the intellectual bloodstream of medieval Catholicism through Thomas Aquinas, helped by Islamic scholars who were his contemporaries. This bodes well for the wider acceptance of the principles of human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity and solidarity, as does the way this tradition flows with the grain of human nature and against the Hobbesian “war of all against all” which the promoters of conflict and grievance wish to see – and with whom battle is about to be joined.