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After being warned by Sir Tony Blair in a 5,600-word essay not to drag the country back to the 1970s, Andy Burnham has, of course, this evening vowed to do exactly that. In a bid to burnish his anti-Blairite credentials and show Labour’s lefties that he is truly one of them, the Greater Manchester Mayor published a 1,500-word riposte to Sir Tony in The Times. To spare you the pain of reading it: he calls for more public control of, and state intervention in, everything. And he rails against ‘the direction set by Thatcher’.
Burnham insists that the political turmoil plaguing Britain, and the collapse in living standards after the 2008 crash, are down to deregulation. His comprehensive evidence that big government works? The resounding success, he says, of state control of buses in Manchester.
Taking a big old pop at Sir Tony, he wrote:
The lesson from Greater Manchester is that you can’t just leave it to the market, as Tony’s essay seems to suggest. If you want higher growth in areas that don’t have it, you need strong public control and direction over both the investment strategy and the enablers of a more productive economy, such as transport, energy, water, education and housing.
