How the far-right will seek to undermine a Burnham government, and how he should tackle the threat

From the perspective of the far-right, any progressive government is a disaster: even if it does little, it doesn’t actively help the transfer of wealth and power to the richest 0.001%. So of course it makes sense to prevent the election of a Labour government (or a Green government or a Lib Dem government) and try to engineer the election of as far-right a government as possible.

Until recently, Labour’s dismal showing in the polls was very good news for the far-right: Electoral Calculus estimated that, on current (up to 28 May 2026) polling, if a snap election were called tomorrow, the result would almost certainly be a right-wing government.

Source: Electoral Calculus

But enough labour MPs were aware of that to act: Starmer has confirmed that he will step down, and Andy Burnham seems certain to be his successor.

So now the far-right faces a new challenge: how can they ensure that Burnham does not make Labour electable?

The most likely answer is that they will exploit their enormous resources to make both the reality and the perception of Burnham’s premiership a disappointment:

• The resources they have at their disposal are mind-blowing;
• They have built an extremely powerful influence eco-system – powerful enough to influence all of us;
• They can exploit this both to undermine both the reality and the perception of Burnham’s premiership.

We are working hard to alert MPs in all progressive parties to this danger, so that they will act while there is still time.

The resources they have at their disposal are mind-blowing

We have reached the point where the world’s richest 0.001% (about 56,000 adults) have three times more wealth than half of the entire world population combined. And even within that tiny group, the inequality is immense: to be at the bottom of the group, you would need wealth of over £100 million, but to be at the top of it, you would need to be Elon Musk, whose wealth is estimated to be over £715,000 million – over 7,000 times greater.

In the world where most of us live, median household wealth in the UK is around £300,000. And to be in the UK top 1%, you would need around £3,600,000. So we are (in absolute terms rightly) used to thinking about the top 1% as though they are extraordinarily rich. But in comparison with the wealthiest, they are really not far from the norm.

Consider just one individual, Elon Musk. Forbes compiles a real time list of the world’s richest people. Musk comfortably tops the list, even though his wealth declined by $8 billion yesterday (25/6/2026)!

When we wrote about extreme wealth in January (and Musk was far poorer than today), we did a little thought experiment. Here is an update based on his wealth today.

Take a moment to imagine that you lost 90% of your wealth. What would that mean for you?

For almost all of us, that would be financially crippling. But the table below shows what that would mean for Elon Musk.

If he lost 90% of his wealth. Musk would still have nearly £72 billion; if he lost 99%, he would still have £7 billion; if he lost 99.9%, he would still have £715 million and still be one of the richest 56,000 people in the world. Even if he lost 99.999% of his wealth, he would still have over £7 million – comfortably in the UK’s top 1%, and extremely comfortably-off. He would need to lose 99.9999% of his wealth to be anywhere near the UK median wealth.

In comparison, someone near the bottom of the UK’s top 1% who lost 99.9999% of their wealth would be down to their last £3.60.

And of course, this is unfair. But even more urgently, it is dangerous. It means that Musk can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy political influence, without even noticing the cost.

They have built an extremely powerful influence eco-system

Using this wealth, Musk and others have constructed an extremely powerful ecosystem: powerful influencers, media and social media, lobbying groups – as well as simply acting as donors.

That ecosystem can reach both voters and politicians in extremely powerful ways. Sufficiently powerful to persuade any of us. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, if you’re surrounded by a personally-tailored wall of disinformation, you are vulnerable.

Let’s look at just how powerful it is. Compare Trump and Starmer – both have failed to tackle the cost-of-living crisis facing ordinary people, so they are both unpopular. But Trump is also a convicted felon who has started wars, threatened allies, arrested domestic enemies, and is implicated in the Epstein files. So you might expect some difference in their approval ratings … and there is a difference: Trump is far more popular.

Just this month, Mark Carney commented on how, in the Brexit referendum, UK voters were persuaded to vote for something they did not think they were voting for.

The US economist, Justin Wolfers, wrote that,

“The election cost Musk $288 million. … Or to say this another — more terrifying — way: Yes, Musk bought the 2024 Presidential election. And if future elections come with a similar price tag, then he can still afford to purchase another 3,819 elections. …

Elections sound expensive. And to regular folks, they are. They’re prohibitively expensive, costing millions. But we are now in a world where some people are worth billions and in one politically-engaged case, a trillion. To the super-rich, elections are cheap.”

The far-right ecosystem, in other words, is more powerful than most democratic governments.

They will undermine the reality and the perception of Burnham’s premiership

If the far-right can exploit this power to make Burnham unelectable, they will have achieved their aims.

The temptation for any government is to think that by doing the right things, they will regain or win the trust of the electorate, and secure re-election. But this assumes an electorate with access to the facts. And in many countries, including the UK, it is very hard for an individual who does not have time to research the issues using primary sources (which is at least 99% of the population) to know what is really happening. So being perceived as having delivered is vastly harder – while the ecosystem is in full operation – than merely delivering. (And just delivering is hard enough).

But the far-right does not want to wait until the next election to drive policy. They want to steer it now. And we can see that the ecosystem is powerful in that way too. There has already been an enormous amount of discussion in our media about whether appointing Ed Miliband as Chancellor would be putting the future of the British economy of a dangerous left-wing radical who would inevitably cause another Liz Truss moment.

If they can control the cabinet membership, the far-right can constrain policy.

Conclusion

There is a substantial risk that the far-right ecosystem will derail Burnham’s premiership … unless the government acts.

Our Defensive Constitutional Reform project analyses the risks and sets out the actions the government must take – quite quickly – if it is to avoid that fate. Our next Parliamentary event is on Monday 29 June. There is still time to encourage your MP to attend.

And if you think this is important, please share widely on social media, and take a look at 99% and join us.