One of the most popular and charismatic politicians in Britain, displaying all the charm and personal ease that the uptight prime minister he had toppled over the summer could never hope to reproduce.
An optimistic promise to focus on “left behind” working-class regions and to close the “opportunity gap” between England’s powerful south and its lagging north. A pledge to renew a jaded country and a divided party after a period of bitter political infighting.
“[I will] unite our country, answering at last the plea of the forgotten people and the left-behind towns by physically and literally renewing the ties that bind us.”
Not Andy Burnham on Monday of this week, but Boris Johnson in July 2019 as he took over from Theresa May.
RM Block
Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda to turbo-boost England’s north closely matched Burnham’s pledge on Monday to “rewire Britain”. Both men promised the north better infrastructure, more political powers for public intervention, and more resources.
Most of Johnson’s promises were never delivered, and they were later seen as having served more of a political purpose by boosting his Tory party’s chances in the north in the snap election that he would call just a few months later.
Yet from that point of view, it worked: he demolished Labour’s so-called Red Wall of northern constituencies, broke a political deadlock and strengthened his grip on power.
One of the biggest challenges facing Burnham as he makes essentially the same set of promises as Johnson is that, this time, he will actually be expected to deliver on them when the incumbent in Number 10, Keir Starmer, makes way for him in three weeks.
Despite his claim to be interested in the north, Johnson was always seen as the epitome of a southern posh boy. The Liverpudlian Burnham, meanwhile, is known as the so-called “king of the north”, a politician whose political links, power base and even his accent suggest he knows far more about this region than Johnson could ever pretend.
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“Clearly we can’t go on like this,” said Burnham, in his speech on Monday at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. “Westminster has not been working for people and it has not been working for a very long time. In fact, it is broken. And as a result, the country isn’t where it should be. It is stuck in a rut.”
Yet Burnham also acknowledged that people might justifiably wonder, “What hope can we have that it will be different this time?”
As he laid out his plan to bring “good growth in every postcode”, Burnham sprang the first surprise of his would-be premiership. It had been expected that he would split the UK’s treasury (the department run by the chancellor of the exchequer) in two.
But he promised instead to divide the office of the prime minister. The centrepiece of Burnham’s speech was a promise to set up a “Number 10 in the North” under the aegis of Downing Street to oversee his ambitious agenda to boost the region.
Burnham’s plan is to use the devolution system that facilitates decentralised power in Britain to supercharge the remit of directly elected mayors and their combined authorities, allowing them greater oversight of education, transport, utilities and regeneration in their local areas.
He said he’d use the same set-up to boost Scotland and Wales where, ironically, this could end up benefiting the devolved governments led by his party’s political rivals, the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru, which battered Labour in elections this month.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch dismissed Burnham’s plan as a “bribe” to rebuild Labour support in the north, where Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has usurped it.
If in time it ends up having that effect, Burnham surely will be delighted to prove her right.
