Britain's new Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his wife Marie-France van Heel on the steps of 10 Downing Street last month. Has Burnham got the right recipe to take Britain forward?
Adrian Wooldridge
Most Labour prime ministers start their time in power offering a vision of the future. Tony Blair promised that New Labour would give “new life” to Britain by mastering the global economy and revitalizing tired institutions. Harold Wilson said he would reforge the nation in the “white heat” of the scientific revolution. Clement Attlee offered nothing less than a New Jerusalem.
Andy Burnham, by contrast, thinks the best way forward is backward. His guiding philosophy is reversing 40 years of neoliberal privatization, deregulation and market triumphalism. He is more interested in investing in buses than in high-speed rail. In his first speech as Labour leader, he singled out the 84-year-old Neil Kinnock, a pre-Blair left-winger, as his political inspiration. The last UK prime minister to make such play with nostalgia was the last Cambridge man to hold the post before Burnham, Stanley Baldwin.
There is nothing wrong with looking backward - though it is an odd obsession for a self-described progressive. Edmund Burke pointed out that society is a contract between the living, the dead and the yet to be born. Goethe said the healthiest societies have both roots and wings. But Burnham’s problem is that he does not seem to know which “past” he wants to bring back to life.
