As we all sweltered last week, British politics broke every thermometer. A prime minister resigned, and a pair of eyelashes in a black t-shirt swept in. That description is due to the country’s least-likely new national poet, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.
Said eyelashes Andy Burnham will today unveil his economic direction. It’s a big time speech on his home turf, Manchester – a city that’s had mixed reviews under his stewardship. But mixed reviews are a vast improvement on the absolute pans that were two years of a Keir Starmer government.
The papers have all had the pre-speech briefs, so there probably won’t be a lot of surprises. Notably, Burnham won’t, apparently, be taking questions from the press. Is that a sign of nerves around some undercooked proposals? Or a signal to the wider country that it’s them, and not the lobby journos stumbling off the train from Euston, that he answers to?
It can be pretty difficult to work out Burnham’s direction of political travel. His decisive Makerfield byelection win involved painting himself as, first and foremost, a representative who was also one of those he sought to represent. And so also a very different man from the prime minister he was looking to replace.
That useful image was tarnished just a week after his victory when he appointed as his chief of staff another Blair-era appointee, James Purnell, whose last job was heading up a lobby firm. Nothing says “continuity Starmer” quite like the next PM surrounding himself with briefcases.
Is the King of the North also the king of mixed messages? According to the Telegraph, one thing that won’t be in doubt after his Manchester speech today is his ambition. He’ll ask the British public to give him a decade to overhaul our lagging economy. Funnily enough, Starmer said much the same just weeks before his resignation.
Ten years will mean winning two elections. And the big question now is when the first of those will be. Advisers to the next PM, former Goldman Sachs boss Jim O’Neill and former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane, have both written recently about inventive ways a Burnham treasury could raise money without breaking Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules. But those rules, enshrined in Labour’s 2024 “We’re Not Liz Truss” manifesto were entirely designed to financially hamstring the incoming Starmer government, sacrificing economic renewal to the mood swings of the bond markets, the press barons and his own backbench MPs.
That last group, who have so far failed to show much appetite for improving the lives of ordinary Brits, may find themselves sidelined after today. According to the Guardian, Burnham will pledge “good growth in every postcode” by diverting power and funds from Whitehall departments to local decision-makers. Regional mayors and local authorities will be given new powers to decide certain local taxes, and some infrastructure funds might be coming their way too.
At the same time, regional authorities will be given broader powers around youth unemployment. In what the Times is pitching as “welfare reform”, Burnham will argue for a new contract between the government and the more than a million young people not in employment, education or training – the so-called NEETs. That pledge is based around the work of yet another former Blair-era minister, Alan Milburn. His review of the relationship between young people and the benefits system isn’t due until September, but its centrality to Burnham’s economic thinking is politically indicative.
Done right, no one could possibly object to lowering the welfare bill by supporting young people back into work or education – or preventing them from leaving it in the first place. The trouble is, successive governments have pitched plans on the cheap around this exact area, with none of them making much impact. And it may be that what’s ultimately proposed later this year are simply punitive welfare cuts tied in a ribbon of pretty words. But if a Burnham government can get this right, there’s as much as £125bn a year to be saved, not to mention young people’s futures to be made.
Those NEET figures represent the very human cost of an economy that’s stopped working for a lot of people. The apparently unstoppable decline of towns and regions in parts of the country is its visible geographic analogue.
Making towns and families across England feel loved again, through relatively quick and visible improvements to their high streets and their kids’ fates, could boost Burnham’s confidence around an early election. More scarily, it’ll put to the test the theory that’s, so far, an article of faith: that it’s only economic deprivation pushing English voters towards Reform UK.
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