London: The first thing Andy Burnham did upon becoming Britain’s new prime minister was to admit failure. It was an honest and necessary step because Britain has seen an awful lot of failure over the last decade. But it also raised expectations that the new leader could arrest the country’s dismal decline. And, so far, there is no sign he has a solid plan to do so.
In his opening remarks in Downing Street, just after his meeting with King Charles, he said this was a moment for “reflection and new resolution” about the future. “It requires my generation of politicians to raise our game,” he said. He admitted that Britain’s leaders had not been good enough, and he added: “We will be.”
A new leader always tries to break with the past and hold out the promise of a better future, so Burnham mainly stuck to that formula. He did, at least, acknowledge that Britain was suffering from a generational failure.
Burnham is a devastatingly good politician. He has walked into 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s official residence, barely a month after returning to parliament. He trounced the right-wing Reform UK party at a byelection. He was elected to the Labour leadership unopposed. His predecessor, Keir Starmer, resigned because his defeat was obvious.
This required ruthless political skill. Burnham and his allies worked for at least a year to ensure that every mistake by Starmer – and there were so many of them – led to a leadership coup. Now their moment has finally arrived. Do they actually know how to use their power to lift Britain’s fortunes?
The Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, mocks Burnham for promising so much. “I have found Andy to be a nice man,” she said on Monday. “But Britain needs a leader who can take difficult decisions, not a people pleaser.”
Nigel Farage, the populist leader of the right-wing Reform UK, has an effective line about Burnham’s attempts to appeal to both left and right. “I have to say I find the whole thing utterly vacuous,” Farage said at a conservative conference last Friday. “He is the great chameleon of British politics, capable of being all things to all people.”
In truth, Reform has no great policy plan. It simply has a powerful complaint. “We are going down the drain,” Farage said. “Britain is broken. We have to wake up to that fact, acknowledge the extent of the illness, and until we do that, you’ll never be able to put the right cures in place.”
This message resonates because people can feel the decline around them – in the grim town squares with empty shops, in the number of unemployed young people, in the industries being shut down, in the knife crime on the streets, in the wait for healthcare and in the low economic growth.
‘People believe in a basic bargain. Work hard, play by the rules, get an education, and you and your children can have a better life. Across the developed world, people feel that bargain has been broken.’
Lynton Crosby, political analyst
But the sharpest message came from an Australian observer, Lynton Crosby, who entered the debate on Monday with a word of warning. He is a former adviser to Liberal governments in Australia, including to John Howard for many years. As the executive chairman of CT Group, he is also a former adviser to Conservative governments in Britain.
“What voters are asking for is not ideology, it is substantive delivery and change,” he wrote in The Times on Monday. Crosby offered a contrary view to the conventional wisdom in London. He said Starmer could have survived and, possibly, won the next election if Labour had held its nerve and worked harder on what voters wanted.
“The most powerful driver of how people vote is a simple question: what does this mean for me and my life?” he wrote.
“People believe in a basic bargain. Work hard, play by the rules, get an education, and you and your children can have a better life, a home of your own, a rising standard of living. Across the developed world, people feel that bargain has been broken.
“A prime minister who had grasped that, and governed relentlessly around it, would have had something real to offer. The path was there for Starmer to take.
“Instead, Labour lost its nerve. Rather than hold to a steady, long-term course, the party let itself be governed by polling rather than addressing the underlying values and concerns the polling was being driven by; reacting to every fluctuation instead of doing the patient work of government.”
Crosby warned Labour, and Burnham, that changing the leader would solve nothing if the party did not understand the national problems it needed to fix and “hold steady” to some economic foundations.
“Burnham is being pulled towards a contradictory program of land taxes, wealth taxes, public ownership of utilities, fiscal discipline and a bigger budget, all at once,” wrote Crosby.
“But to govern is to choose. A leader with no rival and no rebellion has the rarest of opportunities in politics: the room to choose one credible plan, govern on it and deliver the growth this country needs. But if he fails to learn the lessons of his predecessors, he will undoubtedly share their fate.”
Burnham may not want to heed the advice from Crosby, but he should. Everyone can see that the new prime minister is trying to appeal to both left and right with his vague talk. He is promising to be more caring with welfare, help workers with tax cuts, spend more on services, nationalise industry, stick to the fiscal rules and spend more on defence.
The sad fact is that he has very little room to do any of these things. The country’s net public debt is £2.9 trillion ($5.6 trillion), or about 95 per cent of annual economic output.
This means the government is spending £110 billion on debt interest this year, which is about 8 per cent of all public spending and among the highest levels in five decades. Britain is not just broken. It’s broke.
This is why Burnham is pledging to honour the “fiscal rules” in the budget. He has no other option. His government will be savaged by the bond markets if he and the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Healey, stumble on fiscal policy.
Burnham offered hope on his first day, and he is promising help with the cost of living on his second. But nobody can be sure how his ideas will work and whether they will do any good. He is yet to be tested on tough choices.
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David Crowe is Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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