Recently anointed UK Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham has launched a controlled experiment in social democratic resistance against the international rise of populism. Less than a month after leaping from mayor of Manchester to member for Makerfield to fulfil his destiny of saving Labour from extinction, he is cunningly pre-empting the policies of his main opponents. Burnham’s aim is clearly to regain the trust of Labour’s traditional base: the working class which has been drifting to the right – and when the right fails them, even righter.

First he declared dead the Blair-era plan to get a majority of young Britons to university. His predecessor, Keir Starmer, had already replaced Tony Blair’s target of 50 per cent attendance with an ambition for two-thirds of children to go to university or take on an apprenticeship. Shortly after his elevation, Burnham went further, pledging a “major shake-up” which will “value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap”.

You might remember versions of this policy from the likes of the Australian Liberal Party. The Morrison government’s Jobs-ready Graduates Package increased the cost of non-vocational university degrees while discounting vocational courses delivered at university, such as nursing and teaching, in an (ultimately failed) attempt to encourage students to choose the latter. One Nation, historically the party of the sans-degrees, emphasises vocational pathways in its platform. US Republican President Donald Trump celebrates blue-collar America as the “backbone of our great nation”.

In Australia, the Albanese government is still powering ahead with the Whitlam-era goal of getting Australian children to university, as though that is the most respectable option. In June, Education Minister Jason Clare introduced the “Opening the Doors of Opportunity” university accord “to help more Australians get to and get through uni”. This will support the steady climb in the number of Australians who hold an undergraduate degree, which reached a third of the population in 2025.

Now Burnham has announced another policy associated with the modern right. He will ensure wealthier areas in the UK house asylum seekers. “We cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers,” he told GB News. Burnham’s comments come after a well-to-do village launched a campaign against plans to house 1250 asylum seekers at a defence site in the area.

It contains an irresistible echo of the controversy over migrant bussing during the Biden presidency. From 2022 to 2024, Republican-governed border states protested the impact that Biden’s reduced immigration controls had on their cities by putting migrants coming across the border onto buses destined for Democrat-led states – especially targeting those which had declared themselves migrant-friendly “sanctuary cities”. Florida governor Ron DeSantis sent two plane loads of migrants to the well-heeled island of Martha’s Vineyard, while Texas governor Greg Abbott transported more than 100,000 migrants to New York City, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, among others.

Democrats called the redistribution “chaotic”, “cruel” and “unkind”. They found endless reasons why they shouldn’t have to take the migrants in. LA Mayor Karen Bass invoked a current “tropical storm warning”. NYC’s then-mayor Eric Adams sued the bus companies bringing the migrants, declared the state financially incapable of supporting them, and told them they were unsafe in the city. Martha’s Vineyard rounded up the nearly 50 migrants left on the doorstep of a community centre and sent them off to a defence base on the mainland, claiming it was “better equipped” to take them in.

Australia has never explicitly had the discussion about spreading refugees and new migrants across wealthier suburbs. But opposition to affordable high-density developments, often favoured by new arrivals, can act as its proxy.

In what I am casting as Burnham’s social democratic experiment, the Australian Labor government and the US Democrats are the control group. Years of fearing incursions from further left – from “the Greens Political Party”, as our prime minister has branded them here – has aligned them with graduates and the professional classes, who now overwhelmingly vote for progressive parties.

UK Labour, then, is the trial in this experiment. The issues Burnham is dealing with are not all that different from the challenges facing the US and Australia, though Australia’s undocumented workers are less likely to have breached our borders illegally and more likely to be visa overstayers who’ve entered the country as tourists or international students. Still, all three countries have to navigate electoral pressure from previous waves of migrants keen to bring family to join them in calibrating a policy to slow the pace of entry to one which the entire population feels more comfortable in managing.

In all three countries, the endogenous degree-less masses are the loudest force making their displeasure over immigration known, and demanding governments urgently turn their attention to the needs of those who are already citizens. In the US, Trump listened and gained their vote. In Australia, One Nation is benefiting from their frustration. And Albanese is trying to find a way to appease them without losing the strong migrant lean to Labor. Labor is now promising to reduce immigration numbers, and get tough on visa overstayers “without breaching harmony”.

The UK now has two populist parties, after a splinter group called Restore declared Nigel Farage’s Reform too migration-friendly. Burnham’s strategy is brasher, calibrated to head them off at the pass.

The US migrant bussing program is credited with boosting Donald Trump’s 2024 share of the vote by more than 3 per cent in counties which received migrants. Swing voters swayed his way.

If Burnham only changes Labour’s position on education and migrant distribution, and that shifts electoral dynamics in his favour, Australia will have a template for how a similarly high-taxing government can navigate a populist environment. Burnham would effectively be discarding the disgruntled middle class, who are facing higher taxes following the last Labour budget. At the same time, he’d be reducing Labour’s reliance on ethnic community votes, which are starting to peel off to the Greens, swapping them for reconsideration by rural and regional Britons who feel ignored.

The experiment should be of especial interest to the Albanese government, which can expect to be caught between growing anti-immigration sentiment on one hand, and challenges on the other in some seats from the growing Muslim Votes Matter community group, if it views tweaks to migration as discriminatory.

For social democrats balancing constituencies, Burnham’s lessons will be pure electoral maths.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.

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Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.