Andrew Neil was not impressed. Writing in the Daily Mail after Andy Burnham walked into No 10 as Prime Minister, he said the new leader had arrived on “the same welter of vacuous cliches” that carried him to the Labour leadership.
Neil ticked off the slogans. Burnham’s rise was a “circuit breaker.” He stood for a “new political model, a new economic model.” He would offer “problem solving not point scoring.” And there was the promise to lift “every postcode in the land,” along with the “reindustrialisation of Britain,” which Neil said will not happen while industrial energy costs in Britain are the highest in the world.
A ten-year plan and a rough-sleeping pledge
Burnham made two fresh announcements: a ten-year plan due by the autumn, and a first “instruction” as PM to end rough sleeping across the country. Neil was unmoved by both.
Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson each talked about ten-year horizons, he noted, and both were gone quickly despite landslide wins. Burnham has no general election victory behind him. If his plan breaks with Labour’s 2024 manifesto, Neil argued, “the demands of democracy” mean he should put it to voters.
On rough sleeping, Neil pointed to Burnham’s record. Elected Greater Manchester mayor in 2017 on a promise to end it in the city-region, Burnham saw the numbers fall at first. Then they climbed back toward the level he inherited, and by that point, Neil wrote, his attention was elsewhere.
Looking backward
Burnham also attacked the 1980s, the decade he believes sent Britain the wrong way with “neo-liberalism,” meaning the Thatcher reforms. Neil called that “arrant nonsense.” In his telling, Britain’s recovery after decades of post-war decline began under Thatcher, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown wisely built on her changes, which gave the country growth and rising prosperity until the 2008 financial crash.
What struck Neil was how backward-looking the new PM seems. He accused Burnham of longing for an era of state-owned heavy industry, powerful unions and very high taxes, then listed what followed in the 1970s: power cuts, the three-day week, endless strikes, rubbish piling up in the streets and a bailout from the IMF.
The speech Neil would have given
Neil laid out his own program. Money set aside for Net Zero, which he called a costly folly, should go to defence spending and to supply chain resilience. He wants more North Sea oil and gas drilled, the green levies on energy bills scrapped, and planning laws overhauled in a way that Starmer, he said, “bottled.” He also called for a high-speed rail link between Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool.
Welfare was the biggest challenge, in his view. Around 11million people of working age do not work, while Skills England says the country is one million skilled people short for the infrastructure and housing already planned. Neil would move a million people off benefits into work and open a world-class STEM school or college in every town and city.
He doubted Burnham will do any of it. “I don’t kid myself he has the stomach for it,” Neil wrote, adding that Burnham needs to realise “even a messiah can’t put the clock back.”
