Burnham and the problem of politics by social media

One of the biggest assets that Andy Burnham brings to the Labour Party is that he is a better performer than his predecessor. But that is also one of the biggest downsides — he is better at drawing attention to what he is doing.

Take the media. As Labour leader and prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer preferred to produce his own social media content or be interviewed by friendly influencers rather than face scrutiny from traditional media. But he wasn’t very good at it and as a result his output often went unnoticed. Now Labour have a prime minister who can perform and the same approach, often produced by the same team, is causing excitement and drawing attention at Westminster.

Burnham’s social media appearances — largely in short-form video on Instagram and TikTok, often doing something light-hearted, like sharing crisps with the chancellor of the exchequer — are a good way to signal to a large audience that the Labour government has changed. They also remind traditional journalists of the ways in which our influence is fading.

In the uneasy deal between politicians and the press, particularly in television, politicians were long forced to trade scrutiny for an audience. What has changed is that social media now enables politicians to dodge scrutiny, or at least cherry-pick who provides it, by engaging in direct marketing on a scale they never could before.

The United Kingdom is by no means unique in this — quite the reverse: what Burnham is doing has become part of the toolkit for effective political leadership across the democratic world. But what makes the British case distinctive is that it has unpicked, essentially by accident, 70 years of regulation. Political advertising has never been allowed on commercial television and radio, but modern social media is really just unregulated broadcasting.

Around half of people on TikTok will never post a video of their own. Most YouTube users will watch but never upload a video. What we do instead — whether on TikTok,…