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Sir Keir Starmer has come under pressure from two potential leadership rivals from the left of the Labour Party as both Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham made high-profile interventions.
In her strongest political broadside since resigning from the cabinet last autumn, Rayner urged the prime minister on Tuesday not to abandon his manifesto pledge to cap ground rents for leaseholders in England and Wales.
At the same time, Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, called on Labour to take on the “new British right” over “who broke Britain” in what will be seen as a thinly veiled leadership pitch.
Starmer has been reeling from repeated U-turns and plummeting poll ratings and is expected to lead Labour into disastrous elections in Wales, Scotland, London and parts of England in May.
The interventions are likely to raise fears in Downing Street that the two Labour politicians are burnishing their profiles ahead of a leadership race.
Writing in the Guardian, Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, called on Starmer to limit annual charges for existing leaseholders, intervening in a cabinet row between housing secretary Steve Reed and chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Reed wants to cap ground rents on existing properties, building on a previous Tory intervention that limited ground rents on new-builds.
But Reeves is seeking to block the proposal, having been urged to do so by influential institutional investors who fear that the changes would damage the value of their property portfolios.
Ministers had hoped to publish a draft bill implementing the changes in December but that was delayed after a last-minute Treasury intervention.
In the article, Rayner, who was also housing secretary until September, said that investors were getting an annual return for “doing absolutely nothing” and could lift ground rents and service charges regardless of the “devastation” caused to tenants.
“Labour made a promise to leaseholders that we would fix this injustice, but ministers are currently subjected to furious lobbying from wealthy investors trying to water this manifesto commitment down,” she said.
Rayner has kept a low profile since she stepped down four months ago after admitting she had failed to pay enough stamp duty on a property purchase. But her supporters still believe that she could be Britain’s next prime minister, with wide backing among trade unions and Labour MPs.
Meanwhile, Burnham, who has previously topped polls of both Labour members and voters asked who would make a better party leader, warned that Britain was stuck in a “low-growth doom loop”, in a speech at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The former Labour health secretary also suggested ministers were “just chasing general numerical housebuilding targets” rather than focusing on affordable homes and outlined his own form of “business-friendly socialism”.
“This is a decisive moment in our politics when the British left should go out confidently and win the argument as to who broke Britain and what will fix it,” said Burnham in a speech on regional inequality.
Burnham is widely seen as a potential challenger to Starmer, although he does not currently have a seat in Westminster.
Parts of his speech appeared to be a rallying cry to the soft left of the Labour Party in particular, the source of his strongest support.
“In recent days we’ve heard the claim from the new British right that Britain is broken,” he said, referring to rhetoric from the populist right-wing Reform party, which has topped the polls for months.
“But if they believe what they are saying, can I ask them who or what broke it? I know what I think — it was the four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse: deregulation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit.”
The left should now go out and win that argument, he added.
Burnham also repeated the claim that Britain is “in hock to the bond markets”, a phrase for which he was criticised ahead of autumn’s Labour Party conference.
A “low-growth doom loop” and “shallow, adversarial politics” had led the country to that point, he said.