This is the speech Burnham needs to give on day one

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Below is a speech incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham could give – one that would unite the country around a shared vision of prosperity.

Prosperity for All

My fellow citizens,

Today, as I stand before you as your Prime Minister, I want to cut through the political noise and give you the unvarnished truth about the path ahead.

For too long, our political debate has treated economic growth as a dry, corporate abstraction – something for spreadsheets, not communities. We have been told a false story that you can either care about wealth creation or you can care about the poor, but you cannot do both.

I am here to tell you that this Government is rejecting that failed dichotomy. From this moment on, wealth creation and economic growth are the number one priority of this administration.

This is not an abandonment of our social duty; it is the ultimate fulfilment of it. Throughout ten thousand years of human history, the default, natural state of mankind has not been comfort and peace – it has been poverty, scarcity and conflict. History shows us that human flourishing is never accidental. It is the result of deliberate choices, robust institutions and the relentless generation of wealth. For the last twenty years, we have abandoned the hard work of making those choices. 

Some have embraced a degrowth agenda believing growth only benefits the rich. Policies that suppress growth do not protect the vulnerable; they plunge them further into hardship. There is a profound moral imperative to create wealth because it is the only proven mechanism to lift the poor out of poverty and grant true human agency. Indeed when economic growth stalls as it has in the UK for two decades, it is the poor who suffer the most. 

What do I mean by wealth creation?

My predecessor spoke about economic growth and wealth creation. He was not wrong to do that. But we need to be clear what we mean. For a long time, I, like many Labour politicians, thought wealth creation and growth meant government spending. But I have come to learn what wealth creation actually is.

To understand how we will achieve this growth, we must change how we think about wealth itself. Wealth is not merely the hoarding of material assets or gold in a vault. Wealth is the crystallisation of human ideas into physical, institutional and social realities. 

Every product, every service, every life-saving medical advancement starts as a spark in the human mind. A wealthy society is simply one that can turn those ideas into tangible things quickly, efficiently and without unnecessary friction. Under this framework, money is not the goal itself; it is a measurement of how successful we are at transforming creative energy into crystallised value. When the state manipulates currency or has a loose monetary policy of printing money, it distorts that measurement, rewards speculation over productive labour and fractures public trust. Those in my party and others who advocate for a magic money tree are actually advocating for the impoverishment of the young. 

To move this nation from the lowlands of economic stagnation to the highlands of prosperity, we must recognise that human flourishing – what we all want – has many faces, and all must be attended to. This means building an economic system anchored in a firm moral context – one that recognises that voluntary exchange between a willing buyer and a willing seller is a fundamental expression of human dignity and liberty.

Liberty vs licence: smashing cronyism

But let me be absolutely clear about the kind of market we are championing. There is a vital distinction between liberty and licence. 

Liberty is freedom under the rule of law – it is fair play, equal opportunity and competition on the merits

Licence is the abuse of freedom – it is the pursuit of unearned privilege, regulatory capture and monopoly rents.

True growth does not come from cutting corners or letting powerful corporations write their own rules. For too long, our economy has suffered from all kinds of regulatory distortions and barriers to economic activity. We see public restraints, unnecessary licensing and rigged regulations that serve no public purpose other than to insulate wealthy incumbents from the healthy gale of rivalry. Nowhere is this more apparent than our obviously failed planning system. This has taken away the ability of our young people to own their homes, have families, invest in the future – all those things we tell them they should aspire to do.

We must be clear that not every business is the same, and not every business is a promoter of wealth creation and growth. Businesses that lobby for regulations to keep out competitors, and cronyists who keep the UK’s playing field tilted in favour of vested interests, destroy wealth rather than create it, because they replace competition – the most powerful poverty-alleviating force mankind has ever known – with monopoly and incumbent advantage. But the entrepreneur who finds a product that society needs and succeeds in meeting that need – that person creates wealth and should be celebrated. For too long, my party has vilified those people, while unconsciously promoting the incumbent elites. Or worse, we have treated both groups as if they were the same.

Let me be clear: while my opponents claim to be business-friendly, or the party of business, I stand for free exchange, for wealth creation, for the markets that drive innovation and for poverty alleviation. I stand for competition, and against the crony elites.

This Government will not engage in lazy deregulation that harms the public. Instead, where regulation is needed, it will serve competition, not incumbents. Some have suggested we should have a system of one-in, one-out or one-in, ten-out. Some judge the regulatory state by the number of pages of rules. This is lazy nonsense, appealing to ideology and not substance. We need a regulatory state that is unafraid to intervene to protect property rights, your own security and the ordinary process of free exchange without distortions. That is a radical policy, as radical policies are needed to pull Britain from our decades-long economic malaise. 

We will protect the competitive process itself, not individual competitors. If an incumbent company cannot survive a fair test of innovation and efficiency, it will not be rescued by state favouritism. 

Growth needs free speech

To make this vision reality, we must fiercely protect the foundational pillars of free exchange: property rights. 

Property rights are not just about land and machinery. In the modern economy, the products of thought and creativity – intellectual property – are the true drivers of development. If we weaken these protections, we destroy the incentive to invest, innovate and compete. 

Furthermore, we must recognise that free speech itself is a species of property right – the fundamental right to your own expressive capacity and the output of your vocal cords. There is a direct, undeniable link between civil liberties, free expression and robust economic growth. When you stifle speech or allow overly broad state interventions, you stifle the very ideation that precedes wealth creation. We will defend both fiercely. 

For too long we have eroded the basic right to free speech on which our society is founded. This has led to bizarre and unfair outcomes, like the absurd number of people arrested for tweets and the fact that police were so terrified of being called racist they allowed that fear to overcome their basic common sense when presented with a dying man. This ends now, and common sense and equality before the law starts now. 

Real rights protect human agency

Finally, we must be honest about the role of the state. In recent decades, the concept of ‘rights’ has been expanded by well-meaning institutions to include an endless list of social guarantees. I used to believe, like many of my colleagues, that if we wanted something – food, transport, clothing – all good things and needed by people, then it was the government’s responsibility to deliver it. But we must understand the mechanics of governance: a true right requires the coercive power of the state to enforce it. The British state has grown far too large and far too bloated. It is not possible for us to sustain these levels of debt. 

When the state uses its coercive power to manage and provide everything, it inadvertently crowds out voluntary exchange, crushes competition and destroys the very wealth needed to sustain a society. 

Therefore, our focus will be on securing fundamental, pre-political natural rights: life, liberty, property and the derivative rights of free speech and economic freedom. By keeping the state focused on protecting these boundaries rather than dictating economic outcomes, we allow the non-zero-sum miracle of cross-border trade and domestic competition to naturally expand human capabilities. 

I reject our opponent’s suggestions that the state has no role or is always and everywhere a bad actor. You can be from the government, and you can offer real help to people. The state does have a role to protect your fundamental rights as I have expressed them, but we have let it crowd into places it has no business being.

To my Labour Party colleagues, you might say that this ignores traditional Labour priorities, of healthcare for all our citizens, education for all children and support for the working class. But if we do what I suggest we will improve our NHS, we will have better educational outcomes for our children and we will lift people out of poverty. And indeed the Australian Labor Party under Paul Keating and the New Zealand Labour Party under Roger Douglas both embraced precisely the reforms I am talking about, and their economies grew spectacularly as a result. Let us not forget that it was Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan, who deregulated the airlines in the US, making flights affordable to the average citizen.

Unleashing the frontier

My fellow citizens, the journey ahead will require a profound cultural shift. We must move away from the path-dependency of economic stagnation and institutional drag. We must stop fearing the future and instead celebrate the dignity of enterprise, risk-taking and innovation. 

If we truly want to grow our economy, we can only do this by opening our borders to international competition, smashing behind-the-border regulatory barriers, and allowing willing buyers and sellers to interact freely. Only then will we unlock a wave of productivity this country has not seen in a generation. 

Wealth creation is our number one priority because we want the British people to thrive and prosper. We want a country where you can rise on your merits, and where if you do fall, a compassionate state will cushion the blow, but will not intervene in ways that push more people into poverty. Let us begin the work of building a prosperous, peaceful and truly free nation.

I know the current US administration is not the most popular in our country, but let me close by paraphrasing the US Under Secretary of State, who recently said that Britain will be great again, because the British people already are. As Prime Minister, I make a solemn vow to serve you, the British people, who have always chosen the right path, and to faithfully implement your will.

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