If I were Andy Burnham, I’d be terrified about the inheritance Keir Starmer has left. Yet instead of stepping gingerly towards Downing Street, he’s bounding along with glee. So delighted is he, in fact, that he seems not to have noticed that he’s walking into a trap.
The problem for Burnham is that the snare has been laid by his own supporters. ‘He was brilliant,’ an elderly Mancunian woman said in a documentary about the Greater Manchester mayor last week. ‘Ten out of ten – 12 out of ten if you want. [My son] had 18 things wrong with him and within a couple of days [Burnham got him] the top rate of PIP.’ Everywhere Andy goes and every time he bumps into a voter, his spending incontinence kicks in and a new promise is made. ‘It would be great if he could do something for working people. Like an increase in pensions,’ one voter told an ITV reporter.
Tot up the causes he has championed or spending requests he’s nodded at and you reach quite a bill: billions for council house building, billions more for social care, and a few hundred billion for renationalisations too.
Burnham is writing cheques Britain simply can’t cash. He has learnt nothing from the fatal mistakes Starmer and his team made when they entered office just two years ago. There was a confidence among the party’s new MPs that the task at hand was simple: remove the evil and sleazy Tories, and Britain would soon right itself. Burnham brings with him his own delusion: that Britain has been too neoliberal and suffers from too little interventionism. In short, a larger state has never been tried.
