Andy Burnham told his Cabinet this morning that they need to give people a ‘sense that help is coming’. He was largely focused on the cost of living as he addressed ministers, but one of his other big themes in the past 24 hours since taking over as prime minister has been moving power out of Westminster and ‘into every postcode in the land’. It’s the kind of pitch that most new PMs make before they start to realise the limits of their own power, and wonder whether they want to let go of any more of it in the way they’d initially suggested.
Burnham is coming into government at a time when the British state seems pretty powerless. He is promising a ‘circuit breaker for Britain’, but like all the other prime ministers before him in recent years, he hasn’t yet managed to articulate how he is really going to break the most pernicious circuit of all, which is the one keeping Britain in a state of learned helplessness. There is a widespread acknowledgement and understanding of the big problems that this country faces, but little ability or effort to really fix them. Whitehall and public services seem stuck in a loop where they can recognise their own individual problems, but then decide not to really address them because they involve complex solutions.
