Will new British PM Andy Burnham be less awful than Keir Starmer?
It’s very hard to say.
Here’s one viewpoint:
The uncertainty arises because Burnham is a rare figure in British politics: a genuine political veteran who refashioned himself as an insurgent. Born in 1970 in Aintree, a suburb of Liverpool, he was first elected as a member of parliament (MP) for Leigh in 2001. He served under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Culture Secretary, and, from 2009, Health Secretary. His signature achievement from that era—launching the Hillsborough Independent Panel into the 1989 stadium disaster—established his reputation as a politician who takes on institutional cover-ups on behalf of ordinary people, a theme he has cultivated ever since. …
As mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017, Burnham won three consecutive elections by widening margins, earning him the sobriquet “King of the North.” He built a policy record on buses, housing, and homelessness that made him Labour’s most popular politician in the polls. He belongs to the party’s so-called “soft left:” to Starmer’s left on economics and public services, but no Corbynite.
To Starmer’s left, eh? I suppose this is what that refers to:
Burnham promised in his first speech outside 10 Downing Street to “build a new economy where we put life’s essentials back under stronger public control.”
What could possibly go wrong?
More:
Burnham has pledged to reverse nearly two decades of low growth since the 2008 financial crisis by harnessing public and private capital for transport, housing, and infrastructure. This, in essence, is his mayoral playbook scaled nationally. His signature gesture is a “No. 10 North” in Manchester to coordinate devolution, alongside an ambitious social housing program, taking back control of public utilities, nationalizing steel, and expanded social care. …
… He has committed to the government’s existing borrowing limits, pledged fiscal discipline, and promised to reduce the welfare bill. Much of the substance is continuity with the Starmer-Reeves agenda—industrial strategy, self-sufficiency in sectors essential to national security, directing procurement toward domestic production—but wrapped in a more compelling political story. Burnham’s talk of “sovereign capabilities” in shipbuilding, energy, AI, and quantum would not sound out of place in Paris or Brussels.
Sounds rather magical, doesn’t it? Expanded social services along with fiscal discipline? Financed by shipbuilding, AI, etc.? More details can be found here.
Even the Guardian is wondering.
By the way, Britain has had seven prime ministers in the last ten years.
Don’t look behind the curtain Dorothy.
Possibly more awful is my bet.
I know nothing about Burham, other than what I’m reading here. But here’s a thought. Maybe, just maybe… he promised improvements in Greater Manchester and more or less delivered on them. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
Contrast that to Pete Buttigieg who had little impact on South Bend when he was mayor. (Oh, but his father was some Marxist hotshot.) Or mayor Karen Bass. The Palisades fire was such a disaster of disfunction on multiple levels. Mayor Bass and her predecessors were directly responsible for much of the unpreparedness.
I am increasingly astonished that Americans don’t really seem be aware of what these politicians they elect are doing, or are NOT doing, or possible don’t connect causes and effects.
A part of the problem is that media everywhere follows the notion that “if it bleeds, it leads.” What about the good stuff that is happening? Too boring.
He won by the same margin in 2017 and 2024. What differs in re the by-election for the Mayor’s chair underway, is that Reform UK is polling much better than it did in 2024, but not enough to take the office. What’s depressing is that the polls indicate that about 30% of the sum of votes going to the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and Restore Britain will re-deploy to Labour rather than Reform UK. In a sane world, Labour would get the redeployed Green vote and that would be it.
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British society is suffering from insufficient fertility, wildly excessive immigration, poor vetting of entrants, wokery as institutional ideology, insufficient prison and jail capacity, excess discretion granted judges in criminal sentencing, a habit of confounding criminal justice with social work on the part of an array of institutional actors, dysfunctional state intervention in housing markets, dysfunctional state intervention in the provision of medical care, an overly complicated tax code, an excessive minimum wage which is geographically uniform rather than properly regional, a parlous industrial relations regime, bloated and ill-organized higher education systems; assaults on freedom of contract, freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom to publish; and allowing the military (especially the Navy) to rot. To top it off, the churches in Britain are self-immolating and the royal family seems to produce a distracting grotesque or two in each generation.
?e has a foreigner Marxist adviser. You don’t ever see a Leftist who is more center replacing a hsrd core Leftist.
The invasion of foreigners will continue without a stop or slow down.
Tommy Jay,
I don’t think Bass is dysfunctional. I think she is a commie saboteur who willfully created the situation.
His entry to #10 Downing has been engineered on a political front, shifting him from one role to another in preparation of his appointment.
He will be worse. He is arriving on a platform designed to imitate populism, in particular the populist idea of reviving economic growth and at-home prosperity by reinvigorating the base of manufacturing and natural resources, as has been done in the US.
The rationale is different though, I think. In the UK’s case, he’s trying to imitate Trump’s re-shoring and at-home prosperity, but the UK doesn’t have the raw material or economic might to make that effective. He’s hoping to distract his populace by imitating what appears to be successful elsewhere. He’s hoping to distract them from the disaster which is outside, on the street – the wretched immigrant class, on the dole, which was put there by design and is destroying the country’s culture from inside out. He’s hoping to distract them away from the rape gang crisis, which will never be prosecuted, and from the arrests of natives for angry online posting. None of that is going to change, it will persevere until it becomes the norm.
I read a few days ago that more money is handed out for public welfare than is taken in, in tax revenue, and that 1 in 3 working age men are on the dole, not working. I fear we may have to accept that the UK is gone, an abject lesson on what happens when citizens lose their right to bear arms and politicians are no longer guided by the awareness that action can be taken outside of their control.
England is merely a carcass now being picked over by the Muslims and Labor. A pity it didn’t end the way Churchill wanted:
“If this long Island story of ours is to end let it end with each of us weltering on the ground choking in his own blood.” The entire history of England looks down on these pussies with utter contempt.
Orwell tried to warn them.
He will be worse than Keir Stalin. His opening foreign policy speech was one attack on Israel after another and not once did he mention Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah. Burnham’s foreign secretary will be the absolutely dreadful and incompetent Ed Miliband.
https://www.thejc.com/opinion/he-enabled-corbyn-gave-assad-butchery-the-green-light-and-now-catastrophic-ed-miliband-is-our-foreign-secretary-you6ktoq
Tommy Jay
“I know nothing about Burham, other than what I’m reading here. But here’s a thought. Maybe, just maybe… he promised improvements in Greater Manchester and more or less delivered on them. That’s nothing to sneeze at.”
He was an awful Labour politician who like Starmer pandered to the Muslims.
He’ll probably be worse, if only because Starmer, whatever his other faults, was smart enough to know that Labour only held its large majority by virtue of voter frustration with the Tories, and so they needed to step carefully. Behind the scenes the British version of our Progressives, and the upper class Right (think the editorial staff at The Economist) ache to ‘put the pedal down’, and I’m not sure Burnham wants to restrain them, or would be able to if he wants to.