Stuart Lambert, co-founder
Nominations to succeed Keir Starmer opened this morning, and barring a surprise challenger, Andy Burnham will be Prime Minister within a fortnight. So his OpEd in today’s Times, on defence and national security, is effectively the opening statement of the next government. It repays close reading. Not just for what it says, but for where it says it, and how.
The channel is the first message
Burnham’s team chose The Times, not, say, The Guardian. That is a deliberate act of audience selection. He has no need to persuade his natural base. The readers he needs are the sceptical ones: business leaders, investors, conservative-leaning voters and international peers who wonder whether the “King of the North” can be trusted with the macro stuff.
The tone follows the channel. This is a darker, more sombre Burnham than we might expect. “A darker world.” “Hard power.” Absolute commitments to NATO, the nuclear deterrent and the US relationship, and keeping Jonathan Powell as national security adviser. The subtext, aimed squarely at sceptics, is clear: I am serious, pragmatic and globally aware. Logical, not ideological. Trust me with the things you assume Labour is bad at.
There is added bite in the subject choice. Starmer’s premiership began to unravel in part over a defence spending dispute that cost him his Defence Secretary in June. Burnham is planting his flag precisely where his predecessor fell.
Whether you agree or find it convincing is not the point. This is positioning, done very deliberately. And it tells us three things about where Britain is heading.
1. Geopolitics sets the agenda now, and permanently
The piece signals that whoever occupies No 10, the national focus will be determined by global geopolitics rather than domestic wishlists. Energy shocks, cyberattacks, war in Europe: these are the organising facts of political life in Britain as in anywhere. Anyone waiting for a return to the sunlit domestic optimism of 1997 (and there’s definitely a dose of that cultish fervour among some of the Labour base) will wait forever.
2. This is a Sustainability 3.0 argument, made from Downing Street
Beneath the defence framing, Burnham is making the case we have been making to clients for the last two years. Resilience needs to be the magnetic north for every corporate/sustainability/social impact/policy (they’re all one, blurred thing) narrative. And here it is specifically “British resilience”: spending on people, “as local as possible”, sovereign capability, reduced foreign dependency.
Every company and investor operating in Britain is being put on notice: this will remain a “UK first” agenda. It is phrased far more diplomatically than the America-first rhetoric coming out of Washington, but the direction of travel is the same: away from economic globalisation, towards a domestic-first, more protectionist posture.
The obvious contradiction here is of course that the issues that most affect British lives, from energy price shocks to climate change to war, are ever more global in source and nature – but the political answers to them are becoming more local. That tension between global problems and domestic-first narrative is the defining feature of this era, and communicators who cannot navigate it will struggle.
3. Reindustrialisation is the emotional core, whatever the economics say
Burnham’s answer is to make things at home again, using defence investment to create British jobs in communities “that have seen opportunities drain away”. It is an age-old argument, and the economic evidence for it is thin (personally, I’m sceptical but then I’m an Economist subscriber). The IFS notes it is far from obvious that defence spending is more growth-friendly than transport or education, and that neither defence R&D nor exports is likely to be transformative for growth. Standard estimates put the short-run return at 60p to £1 of GDP for every additional pound spent.
But the economics are not really what matters here. Because this is an era where people have ‘had enough of experts’ and in an attention economy, boring facts aren’t as exciting as opinions. What matters is that psychologically, reindustrialisation is enormously powerful. To people anxious about their place, and Britain’s place, in the world, “we will make things here again” lands in a way that no productivity statistic can. Burnham knows this. It will be a core theme of his government.
What this means for companies and comms
The practical conclusion is straightforward. If you want traction with corporate stakeholders in Britain over the next few years, whether that’s policymakers, partners, investors or internal gating audiences (like the CFO!), you need to frame what you do in terms that are non-contentious. Inarguable. As beneficial to people in Britain, and as a contribution to growth and resilience.
That applies whether you make software, ships or shampoo. Sustainability strategies built around abstract global commitments will get a polite hearing at best. Strategies that can show jobs, skills, sovereign capability and resilience in specific British places will get meetings.
None of this is a surprise to us. It is the argument at the heart of our Sustainability 3.0 framework, and today it moved from analysis to government policy. The new Prime Minister has told us exactly what he wants to hear: “ensuring a resurgent Britain”. The job to do is to work out what your authentic, credible version of that story is.