Enda Brady: Andy Burnham is selling his vision well — but he will need to get creative to fix broken Britain

With the UK government spending £390m a day solely on interest repayments on its debt, and a right-wing press wanting to see him fail, Andy Burnham will need some quick wins to avoid the fate of so many recent British prime ministers

Andy Burnham was sworn in as an MP in the House of Commons on Monday, June 22, after winning the Makerfield by-election — but the knives are already out for him. Picture: House of Commons/UK Parliament/PA

Heard the one about the new prime minister who wants to work from home? And he’s not talking about the flat above No.10 Downing Street. Britain’s new leader-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, has made it clear that he plans to spend some of the week working from Manchester, a “No.10 North” as it’s being called.

Britain is Europe’s ‘WFH’ capital — a country that has seen vast swathes of its workforce refuse to fully return to the office after the pandemic, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that even the incoming PM wants to do it.

Working from home works for some, some of the time. I’m just not sure it’s the right thing to do when you’re the PM and everybody expects you to be in Downing Street.

To be fair to Burnham, he’s selling it to the public as a way of moving power out of Westminster and into the regions. He spent nine years as a very successful — and popular — mayor of Manchester, and knows just how badly areas outside of London have been served by successive British governments.

The bulk of the country’s cash always seems to go to London and the south-east, with the result that towns and cities around the UK have gone into a dramatic decline in recent years. There’s an anger in these places, from Cornwall to Cardiff, from Dorset to Dundee, and that angst is something Nigel Farage and Reform UK are desperately trying to tap into.

Burnham says it’s part of his plan to “re-wire” Britain, which is a great idea because the place has been haywire for more than a decade. Very little works anymore — not the system, not the country, and increasingly, not the people. (There are more than a million young people in the UK currently doing precisely nothing, the so-called NEETs — not in education, employment or training).

It’s a bold move by Burnham to shift power out into the regions, though he will face criticism if he’s seen to be spending too much of his working time in Manchester and the north-west. His political philosophy even has its own term already — ‘Manchesterism’.

History tells us that big gambles in the early days of a new premiership in the UK tend to end quickly and badly. Just look at what Liz Truss did with her ‘mini budget’ that crashed the markets, almost destroyed the pension system in days and ultimately had her out the door of No.10 in six weeks.

Punching through

Burnham needs to be careful, but he’s clearly of the view that Britain is so badly broken that something radical has to be done to fix it. That’s if it can be fixed at all.

What impressed me most about his speech the other day was the way he landed his messages. It struck me that he punched through to the public with a speed and precision that Keir Starmer could only dream about.

Burnham made it clear that Britain needs to be “lifted back up” and he intends to do this by building more council houses than the country has seen since the end of the Second World War, and by renationalising water, energy, and transport. He says this is a 10-year project.

Water companies in the UK have been getting away with environmental murder in recent years, trashing rivers and lakes and even the sea, all in pursuit of profit. They’ve been doing it pretty much with impunity, all while their greedy CEOs trouser colossal salaries and bonuses.

The singer Fergal Sharkey has led the campaign to highlight just how much damage is being done to the UK’s waterways. And that’s where Britain is right now — the most prominent voice on the state of the water system is a 1980s pop star from another country.

Former Fergal Sharkey has become an outspoken advocate for water quality in the UK. Picture: Stefan Rousseau

It won’t have escaped Burnham’s attention that the so-called ‘energy cap’ on pricing was lifted this week, allowing companies to charge customers even more money.

The average UK household’s bill is likely to be 13% more per annum because of this, and they are already paying some of the highest energy prices in Europe as it is.

Fixing that problem will certainly help with the cost of living, and that’s where he will quickly gain popularity with the public. People need to see that there is more to life than the cycle of taxes and politicians telling them that nothing can be done because of wars in Ukraine and Iran.

I found it interesting that Burnham can’t find time in his diary to attend the annual summer party being thrown by the US ambassador at his lavish London residence. This particular shindig is to celebrate 250 years of the USA, but the PM-in-waiting won’t be there.

President Trump has already denounced Burnham as being “extremely liberal” and made a belittling comment about him being the mayor of a “small town”.

It’ll be interesting to see how this relationship develops, though I can’t see Burnham wanting to expend as much time and energy on international affairs as Starmer did.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

It’s a simple calculation, really — to win the 2029 election, he needs to listen to the British public and get the country out of this decade-long slump. For far too long, the feeling has been that the political class and the system don’t work for the average family, and it’s hard to argue against that.

Very, very little has gone right in Britain since Brexit, and this new PM is pro-Europe and will surely join the dots up.

But Burnham won’t get much of a honeymoon period, because much of the UK media is right-wing and wants to see him fail, and fail quickly, so that an early election has to be called.

'£390m a day on interest repayments'

One statistic that shocked me recently was hearing that the UK government is spending £390m a day solely on interest repayments on its debt. When they tell you the coffers are empty, the situation is even more dire than that.

Raising taxes is simply not an option, so Burnham and his team are going to have to get creative. Tackling Britain’s enormous welfare bill would be a good start, though Starmer’s own backbenchers effectively killed off any chance he had of reducing it. Let’s see how Burnham can sell welfare reform to them.

He needs some quick wins, and he needs to keep punching through with his messages. Communication in modern politics is how leaders fail or fly.

Andy Burnham is a likeable and highly ambitious man who clearly wants to govern for the next three years and put Labour into a position where it doesn’t get booted out at the next general election.

The knives are already out for him, with Conservatives calling for a snap election because they claim he doesn’t have a mandate. Somebody should tell them that neither did Teresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, or Rishi Sunak, when they were swapping riders as regularly as a yard pre-Cheltenham.

The best thing he has going for him right now is that he’s not Keir Starmer, but that goodwill will evaporate rapidly if the British public doesn’t start to see their living standards improving by the end of the year.