The new Prime Minister only likes devolution when power is devolved to him
Nigel Farage
Daily Telegraph 29/07/26
Andy Burnham has taken just nine days to betray the principle he came to power championing. Instead of localism, he’s now proposing a giant new central government bureaucracy, which would raise your taxes, expand the state, and even potentially rip apart families.
On July 20, standing outside Downing Street, he promised to “take power out of here and carry it into every postcode in the land.” Four days later, opening “No 10 North”, he spoke again of “putting power in every postcode” so that places could do more for themselves.
By July 29, however, he was taking personal ownership of a National Care Service (NCS) integrated with the NHS. Even by Westminster standards, that is quite a turnaround.
The phrase “National Care Service” predates Burnham’s premiership, but he has chosen to accelerate the Casey Commission, make the issue a test of his leadership, and place the project at the centre of his new Government. He now owns the contradiction, and the hypocrisy is impossible to miss.
The man who arrived in office denouncing the hoarding of power in SW1 has immediately reached for one of the Left’s oldest and most centralising answers: another vast national bureaucracy.
His defenders will insist that a service can be nationally funded while remaining locally delivered. This is the usual Whitehall sleight of hand. Central government will write the rules, control the money, set the standards, and “measure the outcomes”, while local councils are forced to administer its decisions and absorb the blame.
Social care needs reform, but Burnham is wrong to assume that the largest possible expansion of government is the answer. Social care is, by its nature, personal and local. The needs of an elderly person in rural Cumbria are not the same as those of somebody living in central Manchester. Housing, transport, labour markets, family networks, charities, and existing provision all vary.
A sensible system would allow different places to respond differently, trying different arrangements and learning from one another. When something works, others can copy it. When it fails, it can be abandoned without imposing the same failure on the whole country.
Centralisers dismiss this as a “postcode lottery”, as though any variation between places is automatically an injustice. But uniformly lowering standards is not fairness, either. A national system can impose the same bad decisions everywhere just as easily as it can spread good practice, while eliminating local difference inevitably means eliminating local discretion.
The Local Government Association has argued that reform should be nationally supported but locally led, with councils remaining central and people able to live among those they know, in the places they know. That is a more humane principle than building another machine in Whitehall. Burnham says his service will put citizens’ needs first, but the real test comes when the needs of a family collide with the “efficiencies” of the system.
Will an elderly mother be offered a place two counties away because that is where capacity exists? Will a husband and wife be kept together when doing so is more expensive? Will families be told that their nan must be carted off to a home miles away because that is what the national system considers most “efficient”?
Once a national bureaucracy has acquired budgets, managers, regulators, and institutional interests of its own, the debate is never again about whether it should exist. It is merely about how much more money it needs. We have seen this time and again. Burnham has already refused to rule out tax rises, warning that the fullest version of his reforms will require “difficult decisions”.
When politicians start talking about “full and sustainable funding”, it means a new, permanent claim on the taxpayer. The NHS comparison is intended to reassure the public, but it should instead prompt the question of whether Britain wants another major central government bureaucracy, complete with national structures, national targets, and national funding crises.
When has bigger government ever solved a problem? More often than not, it worsens the issue, gives it a departmental logo, and employs thousands of new administrators and managers to explain why the next round of funding must be twice as big as the last.
The deeper issue is what this tells us about Burnham. As Mayor of Greater Manchester, he built his reputation by arguing that Whitehall was remote, rigid, and incapable of understanding local needs. He demanded power for local leaders while he was one of those local leaders.
Now that he occupies Downing Street, he has gone native, embracing bigger central government and higher taxes. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Perhaps his localism was never a principle so much as a claim upon power: devolution when the power was flowing to him, centralisation once he possessed it.
Britain needs social care reform, but it does not need another vast state apparatus making intimate decisions about people’s parents and grandparents. Burnham promised to loosen Whitehall’s grip. His first great domestic project suggests that his localism only applies when the power is being devolved to Andy Burnham.
Nigel Farage is the leader of Reform UK
Comments
Post a Comment