The Prime Minister’s Jekyll-and-Hyde personality masks a ruinous socialism that threatens to bankrupt us
Daily Telegraph 22/0Don’t be fooled by the strange case of Andy Burnham, a Jekyll-and-Hyde politician par excellence. There are two contradictory sides to his personality: one reassuringly conventional, affable rather than ideological, the other darkly terrifying, committed to persecuting the petite and haute bourgeoisies of southern England.
The first facet, on prominent display for the benefit of the financial markets, is that of the inoffensive tinkerer, the Dr Jekyll of the North, the fake outsider, the establishment Leftist who speaks a good game, wears T-shirts but is ultimately a standard non-player character, an instant captive of the Blob, a rearranger of deckchairs who will damage but not ruin Britain. Ten-year gilt yields are up, but have yet to explode.
Burnham’s “big” ideas, so far, have been strikingly underwhelming and unoriginal for a man committed to “ending neoliberalism” and delivering the greatest change in 40 years. We’ve had another £2 cap on bus fares outside London (a Boris Johnson policy, its semi-national remit making a mockery of Burnham’s beloved devolution), an 86p per week cut in electricity prices via zero VAT (marshalling Brexit freedoms he despises), the latest pledge to end rough sleeping (which won’t succeed) and the creation of more useless bureaucracies, not least Downing Street North.
We’ve even had a few good reversals: he will scrap digital IDs, retain trials by jury and review the absurd prisoner early-release scheme (though unless he builds more prisons, which he won’t, the fundamental problem won’t be solved).
On the face of it, it’s business as usual: under Burnham’s Dr Jekyll act, Britain will continue to decline at an accelerating rate, but at least it won’t suddenly implode.
Yet there is a second, far more sinister Mr Hyde side to his personality, one that threatens extraordinary destruction. Burnham’s monstrous alter ego, currently repressed, is that of a revolutionary socialist committed to obliterating conservative Britain, to undermining private property, to rigging the rules of the game to ensure a permanent socialist hegemony, to welfarism and to destroying educational standards. When fully uncaged, it will break Britain.
A slayer of Right-wing and especially southern sensibilities, it sees itself as a socialist restorationist, an avenger of Neil Kinnock’s great defeat of 1992. This side of Burnham, unlike the version that wooed foreign investors to Manchester, understands nothing about the sources of Britain’s prosperity – treating private property as sacrosanct, a post-1980s respect for entrepreneurship and enterprise, deregulation, a niche as an entrepot economy attracting the best and brightest, especially in the City – and will ruin what is left of our society.
His staggeringly ignorant advocacy of mass public ownership and council housing is contradicted by international evidence: state-owned monopolies are more wasteful and less productive, on average, than private, competing firms. They treat their customers worse. They cannot raise capital. Placing the National Lottery under public ownership would be especially stupid.
The renationalisation of the railways, which began in 2002 with Railtrack, has failed to deliver the goods. Net zero and other interventions effectively semi-renationalised the energy companies, and it’s been a gigantic failure. Scotland’s state water industry is just as abysmal as England’s private monopolies. Our social housing sector remains proportionally far larger than those of our European counterparts, and families want to be able to own their own homes, not remain as wards of the state.
Burnham’s Mr Hyde doppelgänger may yet want to usher in proportional representation (PR) and take us back into the European Union, destroying conservative Britain’s last hope. He is obsessed with inheritance taxes and hitting homeowners ever more harshly, especially those who live in London and the south of the country. He supports the dreadful mansion tax first popularised by Ed Miliband and legislated for by Rachel Reeves, an immoral levy that will be rolled up with interest in the form of even higher inheritance tax for those, such as illiquid pensioners, who cannot afford to pay.
Burnham’s second self remains in love with the idea of a national social care service paid for by imposing (yes, you’ve guessed right) another crippling death tax on most people’s assets, enmeshing millions of families into the inheritance tax trap for the first time. He is determined to find more ways of taxing land and capital gains (the so-called “unearned” wealth so detested by the hardcore Left).
It is this side of Burnham’s personality that will increasingly dominate as the weeks go by, as he unveils his Soviet-sounding 10-Year Plan to remake Britain, as he scrambles to find policies commensurate with his absurdly grandiose ambitions, as his Cabinet apparatchiks begin their latest Left-wing lurch.
Miliband is unfit to be Foreign Secretary, and will now focus on delegitimising Israel and stealthily undoing what is left of Brexit.
Miatta Fahnbulleh, Miliband’s replacement as Energy Secretary, is even worse than he is: she supported an even faster rush to net zero, as well as quasi-Marxist economic policies. Lucy Powell, Education Secretary, has previously supported stripping private schools of their charitable status and will further undermine state school standards.
The greatest immediate danger is financial. I’m fond of John Healey, the Chancellor, but he supports higher marginal tax rates, mansion taxes and other socialist nostrums. His job is impossible: Burnham, absurdly, believes that welfare spending can be “cut” gently by improving training or making bus fares cheaper. It won’t work. The bill will keep on surging.
How will Healey pay for it? How will he fund the multi-billion black hole in the Defence Investment Plan? How will he make a meaningful difference to the cost of living, over and above the current trivial announcements? Nationalising Thames Water will cost billions. Where will the money come from? What about the next round of pay rises, of NHS spending, of handouts to Labour client groups, and Burnham’s social care reform? Spending cuts aren’t credible under such a Leftist government, so brace for historic tax increases, or an unsustainably massive rise in public borrowing.
Bill Gross, the Pimco bond king, described the UK in 2010, when Burnham served in the Gordon Brown Cabinet presiding over the financial crisis, as “a must to avoid. Its gilts are resting on a bed of nitroglycerine”. Even a small shock would have propelled Britain into quasi-bankruptcy.
Some 16 years on, our new Prime Minister has learnt nothing: his Mr Hyde alter ego is a financial arsonist, determined to spend money he doesn’t have in pursuit of grandiose dreams, even at the cost of incinerating Britain’s public finances. The first few days of the Burnham era have been weirdly anticlimactic. The oncoming fiscal inferno will feel anything but.
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