I want Andy Burnham to succeed. Any British person should want that. Yet I am sceptical of his ability to do so. So far as I can see, he is a decent man. But that is not enough to be a successful prime minister of the UK. Keir Starmer is also a decent man.
To be a successful prime minister, Burnham needs to have a plan able to tackle the biggest problems confronting the country. Starmer never did. Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s former chief adviser, remarked that “preparation matters more than strategy ... I’d like to tell you it’s the other way around, but I think preparation counts more.” The truth, however, is that both matter, but with preparation anchored in strategy.
Strategy, in turn, must be anchored in a clear sense of priorities. What, then, must be the priority of all priorities? The answer, as Daniel Susskind wrote recently, is economic growth.
Sustained growth is a necessary condition for the achievement of a higher standard of living and the financing of desired public services. After two decades of near stagnation, this has become the number one priority.
The United Kingdom, after all, has the lowest investment rate of all large high-income countries. Moreover, its growth of “total factor productivity” – the best measure of its rate of economic innovation – has averaged minus 0.5 per cent a year over the past decade.
So, what does Burnham offer? His biggest idea is that of radical devolution of money and powers to local government. As was reported, “a new ‘Number 10 North’ would be the ‘nerve centre of a rewired Britain’ and the conduit for his government to redistribute ‘power and resources’ across the country”.
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A second priority would be “the biggest council housing building programme since the postwar period”. A third would be to give every young person “a clear path into a reindustrialised Great Britain”. And the fourth would be to “take greater public control” of essential services such as water, housing, energy and transport.
This would go with some sort of industrial policy, to safeguard sectors such as steel, defence and energy. Despite all this, he continues to promise “sound public finances”, reiterating that he would stick to the current fiscal rules.
My response is the comment attributed to Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Quite obviously, a vast amount of ignorance does indeed need to be worked through.
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As a result, there is little chance of “rewiring” the government within a few years. The challenge is not merely administrative.
It will require enormous changes to the powers and capacity of local governments, huge reforms of the civil service and, not least, big reforms in taxation and spending. Burnham cannot already know how best to do all this, though he could at least build upon the last government’s work on “levelling up”.
More importantly, what does he “know that just ain’t so”? The point here is that even if he could do all he wants, it would be unlikely to solve the UK’s growth problem.
Yes, it would be a good idea to rebalance the economy, regionally. But everything we know about contemporary economic growth suggests that economies of agglomeration matter too. The idea that the UK economy could thrive without rapid growth in and around London is a fantasy.
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Again, the UK needs more housing, more building and far fewer planning controls. But council housing cannot be the solution on its own. The private sector will have to play a central role. The same is, of course, true of economic growth itself.
Burnham’s instinctive statism will not deliver that. Similarly, he may believe in “re-industrialisation” as the route to regional recovery. But the world of large-scale industrial employment has gone, partly because of global competition and partly because of soaring productivity, which is likely to grow yet faster in the years ahead.
Again, if we are to have far quicker growth, much of it will have to come from dynamic new firms in new sectors. These will depend on highly flexible labour markets and supportive finance.
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Burnham’s tasks are many. First, he has to fill in the many holes in his ideas for remaking the British state.
Second, he must recognise that what he “knows” will be insufficient to deliver the economy the country needs. Ideally, he should remove some of the legislation, especially on the labour market and taxation, that the Starmer government has brought in.
Third, he has to manage all this in the context of a far from comfortable fiscal position.
Above all, the benefits even of good policies will not be felt quickly. Can he inspire hope in what will remain hard times? That is likely to be by far his biggest challenge. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
