WHAT are we to make of Andy Burnham’s argument that Britain is on a path towards the poisonous politics of the US under the current Labour leadership?

He has immediately tapped into a widespread feeling that transcends otherwise impermeable class and political boundaries in Britain. This is that the political culture of the United States — and particularly the personality and administration of Donald Trump — represent a wholly undesirable model and that we do things differently here. Or at least aspire to.

Of course, where our ruling elites deplore the manners and style of Trump, it is because his strategic confusion, inept diplomacy, braggadocio and recklessness are endangering the sanctity of the transatlantic connection.

This dates back to the Marshall Plan in which the enormous surpluses — built up by the US in a war which cost it just 407,316 military deaths and 671,278 wounded and netted a mountain of treasure and tribute — were deployed to stop the spread of communism in a Europe saved from fascism by the Red Army.

What concerns our ruling class is the danger of a breach between the European Nato states, of which Canada is now and honorary member, and the United States, which would leave the bosses of Britain’s banks and big business monopolies bereft of the protection the global gendarme offered in an increasingly multipolar world.

Burnham leaves this dimension to the present-day politics of the relationship between Britain and the US unexplored.

Instead he says: “It doesn’t feel that we’re heading in the right direction. It doesn’t feel like we’re heading to better lives for people.

“Things are getting harder, and politics is getting more polarised, and the path we’re on, if we are not careful, is a path towards the politics of the United States of America, a polarised, poisonous politics where people in communities don’t work together anymore.”

There is a real issue here — that the rhetoric deployed by government ministers around the questions of migration and minorities substantially enables the narrative promoted by the likes of Nigel Farage and the more overtly fascist tendencies of Rupert Lowe and “Tommy Robinson.”

These are the issues around which communities are polarised and around which the present government’s language and legislation make a marked contribution to the toxic atmosphere that dominates much of politics.

It would be better if Burnham were to be more explicit and challenge the dominant sense that people crossing the Channel in small boats is the essence of the migration phenomenon.

Small boat arrivals account total around 42 per cent of total asylum applications but only 5 per cent of overall immigration to Britain.

Small boat crossings are just a fraction a fraction of Britain’s migration, which is largely made up of people arriving for study, on family visas or legal work visa granted by government at the specific request of employers.

Burnham is an astute politician on a clearly defined path to take leadership of the Labour Party. And he is acutely aware that the widespread antipathy to the bipartisan politics of capitalist consensus is connected to an intense distaste for the confrontational politics of Trump and his imitators this side of the pond.

But comrade Burnham needs to add heft to the basic demands of British people for wages that reflect the cost of living, affordable housing for all, an end to privatisation, decent education that serves both our country and our kids and a privatisation-free NHS.

One essential step in diminishing the dangerous polarisation that threatens our people is to make clear the clash of interests between the people and that class of bankers, bureaucrats and big business bosses who share so much with their equally venal transatlantic counterparts.

This would be a positive polarisation.