You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. Sir Keir Starmer took former New York governor Mario Cuomo’s political maxim to the extreme: in office, his demeanour was downbeat, his speeches stultifying. Too often he looked like ex-Liverpool manager Arne Slot on a bad day at Anfield.
So here’s my five cents worth of advice to Andy Burnham as he prepares to be anointed Labour Party leader and prime minister. You barely campaigned for the top job. You can afford to ignore Governor Cuomo, the Hamlet-on-the-Hudson who never plucked up the courage to run for the White House.
It’s time for poetry.
Britain is desperately seeking some source of inspiration to revive animal spirits, the pre-condition for economic growth. Burnham, the cheerful chappie in a tight black T-shirt, has recognised that Labour’s whingeing about 14 years of Conservative misrule has run its course.
True, Britain is suffering from Long Brexit. Ten years after the EU referendum, GDP is down, perhaps between six and eight per cent; employment and investment are below par; and the productivity lag since the global financial crisis remains acute.
President Trump’s tariff offensive and his ill-judged war against Iran have massively increased uncertainty. The Ukraine war and the urgent need to increase UK defence spending in response to the Russian threat – highlighted by this week’s reports of drone incursions over US air bases in the UK – make the government’s task doubly daunting.
But to govern is to choose, and Burnham needs to make some hard choices. Gimmicks such as setting up Downing Street North or splitting HM Treasury do not cut the mustard. The ex-mayor of Manchester has to pick fights, not just with the opposition Conservatives and Reform UK, but also with spendthrift Labour backbenchers.
Nor can Burnham focus only on wooing back disgruntled Labour voters in the north of England. He must address overseas investors. They want to know whether Labour is going to lurch further left or whether it is time to have a second look at the UK economy which, incidentally, is performing marginally better than the eurozone core in France and Germany.
Back in 2025, hundreds of rich and super-rich fled London to flat tax Milan, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Their goal was to escape chancellor Rachel Reeves’ misguided crackdown on “non-doms”, the wealthy living in the UK seeking to protect their foreign-sourced income.
The war in the Middle East has served as a timely reminder to wealthy tax refugees of the UK’s “safe haven” status. Now is the time to put out more flags. As one visiting Indian business tycoon observed over breakfast in Mayfair: “Is it better to live or pay lower tax? I think I know the answer.”
Burnham and his new chancellor – maybe Wes Streeting, Ed Miliband, Shabana Mahmood or wild-card Ed Balls – have minimal room for manoeuvre. Public finances are severely stretched. Britain’s high borrowing costs contribute to an annual debt-interest bill of around £110bn, almost twice the annual defence budget.
Team Burnham faces a balancing act. Ministers must maintain fiscal discipline in order to reassure the bond markets, while finding enough money for investment allowances and measures to ease the cost of living crisis among those Britons living on the margin, the so-called “precariat”.
Root-and-branch welfare reform is critical. Every day nearly 1000 people sign on for some kind of handout. There is no incentive for GPs or social security pen-pushers to check further on cases of mental and physical incapacity. A new “workless” generation is growing up. This is an affront to personal dignity. But non participation in the labour force also exacerbates Britain’s already dire rate of productivity.
Welfare reform is therefore a totemic issue. Spending must be cut, but not in the hamfisted fashion pursued by Reeves and HM Treasury. Arguably, the retreat on winter fuel payments and later on personal independence payments (PIPs) and other health entitlements sealed the fate of the Starmer government.
The original sin, of course, was Labour’s electoral commitment to rule out increases in income tax, national insurance charges and VAT – which account for the largest source of government revenue. A more adroit politician than Starmer or Reeves would have recognised the need to overhaul the fiscal rules inherited from the Conservatives.
In their present form, these rules are overly reliant on Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts, where inherently volatile economic projections have an undue impact on tax and spending. Everything comes down to fiscal “headroom”.
This suits HM Treasury which can say “no” to spending departments, but the incessant focus on how close the chancellor is to breaking the fiscal rules penalises the UK economy in terms of borrowing costs. Burnham should ask his football mate Lord Jim O’Neill, a former top Goldman Sachs economist and current Burnham adviser, to come up with sensible alternatives.
It is also high time to unpick “the triple lock”, the government guarantee which protects the state pension against inflation. The mechanism makes no economic sense: it promises to double the cost to the country by 2070.
Moreover, the generational mismatch is glaring at a time when young graduates are already being overwhelmed by student debt and the costs of renting or buying accommodation, particularly in London.
Burnham has just said he intends to preserve the triple lock in line with Labour’s manifesto commitment. No doubt he’s worried about alienating pensioners more inclined to vote than youth.
This is not unreasonable given he’s been fast-tracked into the top job precisely because Labour supporters believe he – rather than Starmer – can win the next general election. But this is where the poetry has to give way to hard prose.
Burnham is a political chameleon. No one can be quite sure whether he’s soft left, soft right or soft touch. Reading Jennifer Williams’ excellent recent profile in the FT, based on ten years of covering Burnham in Manchester, I was reminded of former US President Bill Clinton.
Clinton was a top drawer politician who had a phenomenal ability to connect with people. His fatal weakness was that “he loved to be liked”, in the words of his long-time aide Betsy Wright.
Andy Burnham should not make the same mistake.
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