Labour’s failures have made a rightwing authoritarian government not just a nightmare, but a plausible next chapter. Having enraged its natural voters – many of whom have flocked to the Greens – Labour MPs have clambered on to a lifeboat named Andy Burnham.

Do the rest of us blindly hop on board? Burnham is, indisputably, Labour’s best bet. He is the party’s most popular politician, and surely the figure best placed to win back voters lost to both the Greens and Reform. He has an easy northern charm, and some genuine progressive achievements to his name, secured with the limited powers he has as Greater Manchester’s mayor. But he has also benefited from not being at the centre of the great national political controversies of our age.

To be blunt: if he wants support from the left, which he will need to win power at a general election, he will have to earn it. Six years ago, Keir Starmer stood on a leadership platform that included public ownership, hiking taxes on the well-to-do, scrapping tuition fees and putting “human rights at the heart of foreign policy”. In retrospect, it now appears it was a deceitful ruse to con the Labour membership into installing a faction dedicated to crushing the left. A failure to scrutinise Burnham after that experience would smack of fatal naivety.

The first test must concern his own political journey. Burnham is a former Blairite special adviser who voted for the Iraq war. Under Ed Miliband, he shifted towards the soft left as shadow health secretary. After Labour’s rout in 2015, he launched his leadership bid in an accountancy firm linked to tax avoidance, attacked the mansion tax as “spiteful” and abstained on Tory benefit cuts. In doing so, he handed the Labour crown to Jeremy Corbyn.

Having once incinerated his leadership hopes with contempt for the left, has he learned his lesson? Those who know him insist his political journey since then is authentic. Now he says Britain “has been on the wrong path for 40 years” – a renunciation of the Thatcherite consensus that implicitly folds both New Labour and Starmerism into the same failure. He is loudly championing “public control”, specifically naming energy, housing, water and transport.

But what does that mean? In one interview, he began by saying he would “put more things back under public …” before correcting himself: “Stronger public control.” The definition matters. Starmer argued that he had committed to “common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water” in his 10 pledges, and that did not mean nationalisation. Burnham cannot pull the same trick. Public control must mean democratic public ownership of our utilities.

Burnham’s flagship success is bringing Greater Manchester’s buses under public control. His integrated Bee Network has meant lower fares, more passengers and improved punctuality. But most buses remain privately owned. If he is merely proposing, say, tighter regulation of water companies, that is nowhere near good enough.

Of particular concern is his record on housing. More than half of the grants from the Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund have gone to a single property developer, Renaker. Its developments have included barely any affordable housing, and mostly consist of luxury flats the average Mancunian cannot afford. Overall, just 503 affordable units have been built. Does this foreshadow a similar relationship with big business nationally?

After he was re-elected as mayor in 2024, he promised to build at least 10,000 council homes in Greater Manchester. Yet, in the first year, only 10 were built. That needs an explanation, and a clear answer as to how he will produce better outcomes in a higher office.

Back in the 2015 leadership election, he condemned “unjustified spitefulness” towards Israel, claiming it stood for gay rights, trade union rights and civil liberties. This was a truly appalling erasure of Israel’s occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and then-siege of Gaza. Since then, he supported a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2023 – long before the national Labour leadership. In June 2025, he backed the recognition of Palestine and declared that Israel was “destroying viable life for Palestinians in Gaza”.

He needs to be clear where he now stands. Does he believe Israel has committed war crimes and genocide, with the legal implications that follow from that? Will he impose sweeping sanctions and end all arms sales? Significant numbers of previously Labour voters have abandoned the party on this issue.

Then there’s electoral reform. He’s previously committed to proportional representation – but he needs to be clear about what system. He now suggests it should be enacted after a general election. This may prove more sensible than yet another referendum, introduced by a majority of MPs being elected who support it. But he needs to be clear that is what he intends.

There is naivety, too. When, last year, he said government had to “get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets”, he merely caused confusion that added to the market pressures he now faces. He has also now had to renounce his previous commitment to rejoining the EU – a recipe for years of culture war gridlock – because he is standing in Makerfield, a strongly leave seat. That only deepens concerns about the firmness of his ideological commitments.

Labour is losing far more support to the Greens than Reform, and so it is unfortunate he is standing in a constituency where his main competitor is Nigel Farage’s party. That the current Makerfield MP, Josh Simons, has become a key cheerleader is concerning, too. Simons was a close associate of former Starmer chief-of-staff Morgan McSweeney, succeeding him as head of Labour Together – whose key purpose was to crush the left. If he has major involvement in Burnham’s campaign, a big red light is flashing.

Burnham may have become a sincerely committed progressive politician. If he delivers electoral reform, the left will be much better positioned to realise his potential – and stave off the Farageist threat. But the left is a force that must be listened to, rather than swindled all over again.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist