Andy Burnham is keen for everyone to know about his yellow buses.
The Mayor of Manchester, who is currently standing for election as a Westminster MP, grows almost mawkish as he rhapsodises about them in his new campaign video.
‘Honestly,’ says Andy, choking up as he admires one of his Bee Network buses, ‘there’s few things in life that will ever make me more proud than that.’
Well, Burnham has certainly had an easy ride as the ‘King Of The North’.
For years, the BBC and the influential Left-leaning Manchester Evening News have consistently refused to hold him to account for his many local failures, while lauding his modest successes.
His little fiefdom, in turn, has helped him to stand apart from the vastly unpopular Labour machine at Westminster.
Burnham has long had a knack for seizing on good news and taking the credit.
But now that he is preparing for the Makerfield by-election next month – where victory would put him in pole position to be our next Prime Minister – the scrutiny has suddenly become much more unforgiving. His era of free passes is over.
Britain is about to see the real Andy Burnham, a man who has listened to flatterers for so long that he now believes his own publicity.
Andy Burnham will breathlessly tell anyone who’ll listen about his yellow buses
Disastrous
I have lived in Manchester for 25 years, studied for my Masters degree at Manchester University, brought up my children there and even stood against Burnham as the Reform candidate in the 2024 mayoral election. So I have seen the effects of his rule up close.
And it’s now time to take a long, hard look at his record, which – from financial to cultural issues – is far more chequered than his slavish establishment supporters would have you believe.
Let me turn first to economics. On Burnham’s watch, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, the body that he leads, has been turned into one of the most indebted local authorities in Britain, with liabilities of £1.43billion, largely due to massive investment in housing and transport.
Then, last September, he infamously proclaimed that Britain is too much ‘in hock’ to the bond markets.
The plain fact is that, thanks to disastrous levels of public borrowing from the Tories and Labour, our £2.9trillion national debt cost us £110billion in interest charges last year, a figure that represents roughly £1 in every £12 spent by the Treasury – almost as much as we spend on education and double the defence budget.
And following the news that Burnham was seeking a return to Parliament in order to contest the Labour leadership, the markets got a serious case of the jitters.
Because they view him as the most spendthrift of all the likely winners and, on Friday, the yield – or interest rate – on 30-year Government bonds, or gilts, briefly reached 5.8 per cent, the highest this century.
Greater Manchester Combined Authority, over which Burnham presides, is one of the most indebted local authorities in the country
So Burnham announced a screeching U-turn, this time abandoning his plans to relax fiscal rules and vowing to stick to the Government’s existing borrowing limits.
He’s also prone to making catastrophic mistakes on basic issues that have cost the British taxpayer vast sums, including more than £100million wasted on a failed congestion charge plan that was funded by Whitehall.
Preparations for a ‘clean air zone’ to reduce pollution got underway shortly after he was elected as Manchester’s Mayor in 2017.
Laughable
The plan was given a hesitant welcome, until residents grasped the reality: they would be paying up to £60 a day to drive in their city.
The idea that this was a genuine attempt to reduce pollution was laughable. The zone extended far beyond the most congested streets, into the countryside where the air was already as fresh as anywhere in the country.
Never mind ‘clean air’: Burnham’s plans were a smokescreen to fatten up his budget.
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As this became obvious, the public backlash was ferocious, with one Facebook group – Rethink The Clean Air Zone – set up solely to oppose the measure, attracting over 77,000 members.
In 2022 the plan was paused, before being scrapped entirely in January last year – but not before the Mayor’s office had wasted £104million of public funds, including £27million on grants to help drivers upgrade to electric or compliant vehicles and £36.6million for the operating infrastructure.
This latter figure included the cost of 462 cameras with automatic number plate recognition technology, at an eye-watering cost of £375,000 a month. Nearly 100 of these were vandalised during protests.
Another £3million was spent on 1,300 road signs warning drivers of the zone’s existence.
But these sums are dwarfed by the monies involved in the Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund, which lent £983million to property developers between 2015 and 2024.
Burnham has championed the fund, claiming it was set up to support local building projects that might not qualify for bank loans.
But the biggest beneficiary by far has not been Manchester’s first-time buyers or people struggling to save for a deposit while simultaneously paying rent, but a single property company, Renaker.
Some £104million of public funds was wasted on a clean-air scheme that was later srapped
Around 60 per cent of the fund, or £600million, has gone to Renaker, a prolific builder of towering glass apartment blocks, such as Deansgate Square, the tallest building in the UK outside London.
Its founder, Daren Whitaker, has a net worth of £525million, which put him at number seven in the North-West business rich list last year.
Yet Renaker has no affordable housing among its developments. It has built 6,110 new homes with fund money, but all of these are luxury rental properties, according to a report by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and largely concentrated in the city centre.
As for cultural issues: if there’s one thing the Mayor loves more than a yellow bus, it’s a woke bandwagon, from green energy to rejoining the European Union or trans activism.
To be fair, mindful of Makerfield’s reputation as a Leaver redoubt, Burnham has performed an abrupt about turn on the EU – he now says he doesn’t intend to steer the UK back into Europe despite having stated unequivocally just a few months ago: ‘I want to rejoin.’
But there are no signs of him recanting when it comes to the trans issue. He publicly opposed the Supreme Court judgment that ruled references to ‘sex’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the Equality Act refer to biological sex and criticised the guidance issued by the Equality And Human Rights Commission that resulted from it.
Spendthrift
Worst of all, as campaigner Maggie Oliver wrote in the Daily Mail this week, Burnham has failed to keep his promises to stop the grooming gangs preying on vulnerable girls and children in care across the North.
That’s typical of the man: Burnham is an idealist in the mould of Groucho Marx, the kind who declares: ‘These are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others!’
Grooming gangs campaigner Maggie Oliver wrote that Burham refused to keep his promises to the victims
I know this first-hand, having faced him in debate on frequent occasions during the 2024 mayoral election campaign.
He’s adept at getting the audience on his side with comic touches, for instance by pulling faces and making mocking gestures while his opponents are talking.
It’s a useful skill, because it undermines the arguments that he might not be able to meet with actual facts and figures.
But personality doesn’t count for much when the markets need reassurance and inflation is soaring.
Dan Barker was the Reform candidate for Mayor of Greater Manchester in the election of 2024.
