I’m a bit confused. Why exactly is Andy Burnham the Prime Minister? Because depending on who you spoke to over the last few years, Sir Keir Starmer was one or all of many great things.
He was a wily political genius, who hoodwinked the troublesome membership of his party into electing him as leader. A forensic prosecutor with an eye for detail so sharp he could cut you from 20 paces.
His MPs even gave him a standing ovation a little over a week ago. He must have done great things. So why this week is Burnham in No 10? Is it that Starmer just felt he’d already achieved all the great things he wanted to achieve?
The answer, of course, is that Starmer became instantly unpopular because he went into office with no demonstrable desire to fix the big structural problems we can all see around us every day. In health, social care, housing, on our high streets. Nothing. On ending rip-off Britain, where private profit dictates how we heat our homes and draw our water. Nothing. And on his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Unforgivable.
There are already early signs that Burnham will end up in a similar place to Starmer, albeit via a different route. I believe he is a tinkerer; I don’t believe he has the appetite for the kind of transformational change we need.
He asks us to look at his record in Manchester – Manchesterism. I’m happy to. As mayor of Greater Manchester, he gave £1bn of public money to private property developers to build luxury flats and only a handful of affordable homes.
Meanwhile, rents have soared, and Manchester and Salford have the highest rates of homelessness in the north west.
Look at his Cabinet. Keeping Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary is an endorsement of her awful immigration policies and makes it look like Burnham wants to chase Reform UK leader Nigel Farage down the road like Starmer did. And if making John Healey Chancellor is a sign he wants to prioritise defence spending over, say, support for sick and disabled people, then the new Prime Minister will crash and burn as soon as the last.
Health Secretary Yvette Cooper running the NHS when she is second only to Wes Streeting for donations from organisations linked to private health and Streeting himself as Defence Secretary when he has taken tens of thousands of pounds from companies linked to arms firms and the US tech giant Palantir.
He’s moved part of No 10 to my home city of Manchester. Great. But viewers on breakfast TV on Friday heard Housing Secretary Angela Rayner, with her northern accent, say the new Burnham government is against rent control.
This doesn’t look like change; it looks very much like more of the same.
Take the bus fare cap. I think this is particularly interesting (hear me out). The switch back to a £2 cap on fares is a good thing and the Green Party supports it. Though we would go further and make bus travel free for everyone under 22 and invest more to improve routes and services.
But the way the Government has said it will be funded is a major concern. They essentially want low-income countries that we have an obligation to support through international aid to shoulder even more debt.
How will this work? The UK Government doesn’t just provide grants to help countries tackle the effects of the climate crisis; it makes some of this funding through loans which countries have to pay back. The plan for the buses is that more of the grants will be converted to loans, loading countries with even more debt when we should be leading the way internationally on climate justice and debt relief.
Burnham will know that if you change the lead singer of the band but sing all the same songs, you’re the same band. I get why some people are saying we should give him a chance. Yes, I will welcome anything that shifts the balance of wealth and power from the super-rich to working-class people. But while he carries on tinkering at the edges, with trade-offs that end up with poorer people paying the price, I will carry on saying there is another way and fighting for those that are being failed and ignored.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m not going to snipe at Burnham for the sake of it. But I am also not in politics to make him or the Labour Party popular; I am in politics to replace him and the Labour Party.
Is Andy Burnham just Continuity Starmer? I think we will come to realise soon that he is. I challenge him to prove me wrong.
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