Is Andy Burnham a left-wing Liz Truss?
Say what you like about Andy Burnham (and I intend to say a lot) but he’s not short on ambition. Armed with a single by election victory he now intends to oversee “the biggest change in our lifetime to the way Britain is run.”
The PM-in-waiting had popped down to London for some selfies before returning to Manchester to tell his assembled acolytes that things in the capital were even worse than he thought. There’s too much division and arguing, he said, before inviting us to imagine what it would be like if we all just got along.
Fortunately, we didn’t have to imagine it as Burnham set about painting a picture of utopian Britain. Everyone gets a home, every high street thrives, local councils transform themselves into expert and efficient managers of water, energy and transport, everyone’s bills come down and we can all “afford a night out.”
The only thing standing in the way of this paradise is an army of Whitehall bureaucrats who like to say no. But those days are over. In Burnham’s Britain, there will be “good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart.” I can hardly bring myself to write those words so I don’t know how he managed to say them.
Fetishising local government
Burnham isn’t the first politician to fetishise local government. The 2010 Conservative manifesto was (laughably) called An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain, and it vowed to “give individuals and local government much more power, allow[ing] communities to take control of vital services.” The difference is that the Tories wanted a Big Society whereas Burnham is quite clear that the future lies in a Big State.
After this we had the Northern Powerhouse and a proliferation of regional and city mayors. We’ve also got two decades of Welsh and Scottish devolution to look at, and who could possibly do that and conclude that we need more of it? Almost everything the Welsh and Scottish governments have touched has been a disaster, not least health and education.
But this time it will be different. Why? Because Burnham says so. He somehow intends to achieve all this while staying within the letter of the fiscal rules and the spirit of Labour’s 2024 manifesto. Neither seems possible. The entire agenda has the ring of a left-wing Liz Truss experiment: act as if we can afford it, act as if he has a mandate for it, and hope for the best.