Even given the low bar set by recent prime ministers, it was a shockingly poor speech from Labour’s new leader Daily Telegraph 17/07/26 Was that it, then, the great reveal, the sum total of Andy Burnham’s plan for a more hopeful Britain? A paean to Neil Kinnock, of all people, the failed socialist Labour leader turned Eurocrat extraordinaire ? An almost dementedly egotistical claim that his own coronation, and the death warrant to “neoliberalism” it supposedly entails, heralds “the most significant change moment in our politics for 40 years” – apparently more momentous even than the supply-side revolution, Big Bang, Blairism, 9/11, devolution, the rise of the Blob, the financial crisis, the expenses scandal, Brexit, Covid and the emergence of populism? If that might be dismissed as just a little presumptuous, what about our incoming Prime Minister’s explicit repudiation of the 1980s, and thus of the consumerism, individual liberation, social mobility, mass home and asset ownership and ...
Andy Burnham has set out a 1970s vision for Britain in his first speech as Labour leader. Daily Telegraph 17/07/26 The prime minister-in-waiting said that under Margaret Thatcher, the country had “surrendered control of the essentials – housing, water, energy, transport – and left people exposed to higher costs”. Opening the door to nationalising public services, he said: “If we don’t have sufficient public control over the cost of the essentials, how can we have control over inflation, public spending and the rest of the economy?” Mr Burnham added that Britain “took a series of wrong turns” in the 1980s and criticised his generation of politicians for failing to challenge the neoliberalism that “led to the concentration of more wealth and power in the hands of fewer people”. The MP for Makerfield warned that Labour had one last chance to change and pledged to govern on behalf of “forgotten places everywhere” by taking power away from Westminster and Whitehall, devolving it across the ...