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 economic boom that followed, even though Burnham himself was one of its many beneficiaries?
Was this speech for real? Is our new Prime Minister serious? Does he know any history, any economics, any psephology? Does he really believe that his supposed charm – and the fact that he isn’t Sir Keir Starmer – is enough to overcome these striking lacunae?
Does he really assume that his by-election victory in Makerfield means that the British public wants to turn back the clock to the 1970s, a period that most don’t even remember, a disastrous, bankrupt, impoverished, litter-strewn, strike-ridden decade that turned the UK into the world’s laughing stock and came to symbolise a very British declinism? Who did he ask? I can’t remember an election, or a referendum on the subject.
Even given the low bar set by recent prime ministers, this was a shockingly poor speech from our Prime Minister-designate, a farrago of nonsense, historical revisionism, blatant contradictions, economic illiteracy and character assassination.
Given Burnham’s demonisation of the 1980s – and thus of its principal architect, Margaret Thatcher, one of the just two truly great British PMs of the past 85 years – the Kumbaya politics was especially hypocritical, as was the nonsensical claim that he will be “pro-business” while renationalising all that moves.
Burnham claims to believe that he will end factional politics, a delusion born of his ludicrous appointment by acclamation. Following a colour-by-numbers approach to speech-giving, the new Labour Party leader believes his arrival will usher in “a new politics”, that he will govern on behalf of “forgotten places everywhere”, that he “will be a leader for all places”.
If that sounds like drivel, that’s because it is. Does Burnham really believe that a jaded, disillusioned public that has heard all of this before will be swayed by his remix of all of the old tunes? Or is his Messiah complex so pronounced that he believes that simply willing a revolution will automatically see it enacted?
If so, we are truly in trouble as a nation, though not as much as Burnham himself when he realises that there are no levers to be pulled to fix any of Britain’s pathologies.
He is the seventh PM in a decade and evidently has no clue what to do. We are living beyond our means, an ever larger welfare state sucking the lifeblood from a quasi-stagnant private sector economy that is now too small, too constrained by red tape and taxes and command-and-control policies to fund our ruling class’s socialistic ambitions.
Millions of our fellow citizens are trapped on welfare, and our economy is hooked on immigration. The best and brightest of our youth dream of leaving for sunnier climes, just as their grandparents did in the 1970s. Capital is fleeing Britain.
We need to force-feed the state with semaglutides, not encourage it to feast on yet more of the economy. The public sector ran out of cash in the 1970s, and the nationalised industries were starved of capital spending; local and national officials proved equally useless at running companies or serving consumers then as they would today.
Privatisation combined with competition worked. High marginal tax rates, as we see today, discourage work and investment; even higher taxes, as per the 1970s, would turn a disaster into a cataclysm.
Yet Burnham, who doesn’t seem to realise or care that the Government has already spent everybody else’s money several times over, is pinning his hopes on that tried and failed method: yet more nationalisation, yet more taxes on the “rich”, yet more bogus local bureaucracies.
If Burnham really looks up to Kinnock, he should learn from him. The 1992 election was enlightened by a genuine policy debate. The public listened to Labour’s proposed tax raids on aspiration, its pledges to turn back the clock. Its considered verdict was apposite in every respect: on your bike.
Burnham, by contrast, has been anointed in the most presumptuous of fashions, with no debate or discussion. He is constitutionally entitled to rule, but has zero democratic legitimacy. We know he is a born-again socialist, but have yet to be let in on the details. Cliché-strewn speeches don’t help. We need a general election to scrutinise what passes for our PM-designate’s vision, and we need it now.
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