Is Burnham just Blair in a T-shirt?

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For those of us old enough to remember Andy Burnham as a not-especially-effective member of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet in the late 2000s, it is sometimes difficult to see what qualities have made some sections of the Parliamentary Labour Party speak of him as if he were a Merseyside Aragorn. To them, after a self-imposed exile, he has returned to rescue Labour’s Gondor, and right will triumph.

One major attraction, naturally enough, has been that he is not Keir Starmer. Even with Labour plumbing frightening depths of unpopularity, the Prime Minister has still weighed it down, regarded even more critically than his party. Burnham, on the other hand, is a rare British politician with close to positive favourability, at least until recently. Clearly it would be hard work to find a leader who would make the situation worse, but what does Burnham stand for, who is he, what does he believe?

Today he made his first major speech since declaring formally that he would seek the leadership of his party. Appearing in – where else? – Manchester and wearing a blazer over a T-shirt, this was Burnham’s opportunity to set out his stall not only to a restive Labour Party but to the electorate at large. ‘Andy Burnham speaks to the nation’ may not be a phrase to summon up the blood or stiffen the sinews, but we would at least be able to get more of a sense of what the future holds beyond his love of Everton FC and The Smiths.

George H.W. Bush famously referred to a grand, overarching political purpose, something he was conscious of lacking, as ‘the vision thing’. Burnham has ‘the vision thing’, without question. Today’s speech revealed that, at its heart, it is devolution. It may seem an unlikely foundation for an emotive, progressive cause, but Burnham has taken devolution, or perhaps more accurately what the European Union calls ‘subsidiarity’, and used it to stitch together a number of issues.

He began with a thesis which, except for different phraseology, could have come from the mouth of Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage.

‘Westminster hasn’t been working for people, and it hasn’t been working for a very long time.’

This was followed by crowd-pleasing visions of an emptiness which reminded anyone listening that Burnham had risen during the high days of Blairism.

‘We need to change politics and we need to do it now. I am going to do things differently. I am going to give Britain the circuit breaker it needs.’

Starmer was rewiring the state, Burnham is installing a circuit breaker. Everyone is an electrician now. It makes you wonder what Kemi Badenoch, who actually is a systems engineer, might do with the state if given the chance. Burnham continued with less than original observations that Westminster politics were ‘broken’, that there is too much ‘finger-pointing’ and that we should embrace ‘a more collaborative politics’.

From these platitudes, to be fair, Burnham is drawing a case of sorts. His experience as Mayor of Greater Manchester – had he mentioned that? – told him that when power was devolved to a local or city level, people’s attitudes changed: they put ‘place first, not party first’, focused on ‘problem solving and not point scoring’ and thought ‘long term, not short term’.

Burnham’s conclusion is that devolution, by empowering people in a way which encourages collaboration, can be transformative not only economically but culturally. But what does this mean in concrete terms? Burnham observed that Britain has a hugely over-centralised government, and the dominance of London distorts the economy because the ‘over-centralised part of the country is not pulling in the same way but in different directions’. Politicians are unable to effect change because ‘power is not in the hands of those places they represent. But held by an insufficiently accountable outsourced state.’

Giving more power to elected mayors was always likely to be on Burnham’s agenda, although much of the hard work has already been done in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026. But he wants to see more powers for rural economies too, allowing them to find local solutions to issues like public transport. Burnham also wants to move a substantial part of the Prime Minister’s Office to a ‘No 10 North’ in, guess where, Manchester. It will be ‘the nerve centre of a rewired Britain’, a streamlined state with a ‘laser-like focus on growth and regeneration’.

Andy Burnham promises ‘the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen’. That may be so. It would certainly be a positive step to make local authorities more accountable and less tied to London, less dependent on the block grant for funding. But two elements of his ‘vision thing’ should cause prickles of concern. Hidden among the thickets of bland, empty, motivational slogans is an apparent belief that nationwide prosperity has eluded us simply because we have not wanted it enough nor articulated it enough. Burnham comes across as a man who thinks if he speaks sufficiently clearly and plainly, everything will fall into place.

The other cause for concern is that, though this is hardly surprising, Burnham, like Starmer and Rachel Reeves, fundamentally believes that the state is the principal motor of economic growth. If the right government departments carry out the right dirigiste policies in the right places, wealth will grow. It is Harold Wilson and George Brown’s National Plan, directing the economy to bring prosperity wherever ministers want it. This is of a piece with ‘reindustrialisation’: it doesn’t matter where markets and investment may prefer, nor in what sectors, because the government will engineer comforting scenes from the past.

Much of today’s speech went little further than vibes. It remains to be seen whether the UK can be governed as a scaled-up Manchester. My suspicion is not, but will Burnham learn the hard way or the easy way?

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