Hope springs eternal in politics as in life. So it is with Andy Burnham, so-called King of the North. Many Labour MPs and activists want to crown him King of the whole country.
Sir Keir Starmer is in denial, saying he wants eight more years to accomplish great wonders, and will attempt to relaunch himself today with another banal speech.
It won’t help. Starmer is doomed, and after Angela Rayner’s extraordinary 1,000-word statement last night it’s very hard to see how he can survive much longer.
On the face of it, Ms Rayner is in cahoots with Burnham. She demands that the Mayor of Manchester be allowed to return to Westminster. Her statement, presumably approved by Burnham, is a hard-Left manifesto.
The country can’t carry on with ‘deregulation, privatisation, and trickle-down economics’, she writes. ‘Labour is in danger of becoming the party of the well-off, not working people.’
Angela Rayner calls for ‘immediate action’ on workers’ rights and redistributing wealth. She reveals herself as the true political offspring of Jeremy Corbyn that we always suspected her to be.
Meanwhile, Blairite Wes Streeting is intimating that he’s ready to take over from Starmer. It seems increasingly likely that he’ll be the casualty of the Rayner/ Burnham palace coup.
Last night it was even being suggested that Energy Secretary Ed Miliband might be the Left’s heir apparent. Rayner is impeded until HMRC’s investigation into her tax affairs is concluded. Burnham hasn’t even got a seat.
Angela Rayner is in cahoots with Andy Burnham. She demands that the Mayor of Manchester be allowed to return to Westminster, writes Stephen Glover
It won’t be easy to find one given Labour’s unpopularity even in its heartlands, as last week’s local elections in England, and parliamentary elections in Wales and Scotland, vividly showed. His henchmen are nonetheless said to be confident.
These are dizzying developments. If the Mayor of Manchester can get a place at the table before Starmer is carted off, he remains the preferred candidate of an increasingly dominant Left.
This is my question. Why should Andy Burnham’s enthusiastic supporters believe that he will make a better Prime Minister than the disastrous Keir Starmer? All of a sudden he is being billed as the country’s saviour.
That wasn’t the view of Labour MPs and activists when Burnham previously put himself forward to be leader of their party. In 2010 he flopped badly, coming fourth out of five candidates. In 2015 he was trounced by Jeremy Corbyn.
His record as Health Secretary in the dying days of the Gordon Brown government counted against him. He greatly exaggerated the dangers of swine flu to humans. Far too many vaccine doses were ordered, of which over 30million were unused at a cost of £150million.
How has this flawed politician been converted into the King of the North? Part of the answer is that it has been a great advantage for him to be in Manchester, 200 miles from London.
Burnham has escaped the national scrutiny to which Labour politicians in London are subjected. He has quietly got on with a not especially taxing job, while being ignored by the wider world.
An Andy Burnham cult has grown in the calm of his northern bastion. In yesterday’s The Mail on Sunday, Dan Hodges reported that last Friday the Mayor was mobbed and greeted as a hero as he walked to open a new gastropub. A journey expected to take 20 minutes lasted two and a half hours.
Enormous and wildly unrealistic hopes are invested in Andy Burnham by Labour’s faithful. Let me forecast that if he becomes Prime Minister he will end up being as widely loathed as Sir Keir Starmer.
In fact, a government led by Burnham and Rayner would bequeath us an even greater mess than Starmer and Reeves have left. The time may come when we look back on the first two years of Labour’s rule as only the prelude to a terrible storm.
In fact, a government led by Burnham and Rayner would bequeath us an even greater mess than Starmer and Reeves have left
All the mistakes of the failing Prime Minister and Chancellor will be repeated by Burnham and Co on a bigger scale (possibly with the zealot Ed Miliband as Chancellor). It will be more of the same – much more, and much worse.
Starmer and Reeves have increased taxes by £75billion in 22 months, throttling an economy that was already grossly overtaxed. Burnham will double down. Last year he publicly called for a wealth tax, and is reportedly considering raising inheritance tax. Rayner’s rabid statement is cut from the same cloth.
When the Government attempted to trim the rocketing welfare budget by a comparatively modest £5billion last year, the King of the North helped to thwart the proposal. Welfare would continue to soar on his watch.
Mainstream, a Labour pressure group associated with Burnham, has called for more re-nationalisation. Starmer and Reeves have restricted themselves to taking the railways back into the public sector.
Whereas Starmer is slyly and step-by-step sliding us back into the maw of the European Union, Andy Burnham has shamelessly said that the United Kingdom should rejoin the bloc. Never mind that 17.4 million people voted to leave.
This country is already heading for a recession as a result of Rachel Reeves’s mismanagement of the economy, plus the effects of Donald Trump’s futile Iran war. With Burnham in charge, and Rayner and Miliband at his side, the recession would be deeper and longer.
Britain is close to insolvency, and is only kept afloat by the bond markets, which are charging ever higher rates to lend us money. Burnham’s response last year was both ignorant and terrifying.
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He asserted: ‘We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond market.’ Oh, yes? Just how would he propose to make up our massive deficit? His grasp of economics is not much better than that of the Green Party’s Zack Polanski.
Burnham, Rayner and Miliband have nothing in their locker other than the same old collection of failed economic policies that have impoverished every country in the world in which they have been adopted, including ours. Tax, spend and borrow even more is their fatal mantra.
Wes Streeting would be far better, but party stalwarts aren’t going to choose someone who doesn’t believe in ever higher taxes and has dared to say that welfare should be cut.
Last week Kemi Badenoch said that if Starmer is ousted there should be a general election because neither Burnham nor the other contenders have a mandate from the British people. She is absolutely right.
A wealth tax, wholesale re-nationalisation, higher inheritance tax, rejoining the EU – none of these measures were included in Labour’s 2024 manifesto on which the party was elected. It is an offence against democratic principles to foist them on the British people now.
We all know, of course, that the vaunted King of the North wouldn’t call an election because he is perfectly aware that the Labour Party would be wiped out if he did.
There might be a brief Burnham honeymoon but, as soon as voters realised that he had made things even worse than the benighted Starmer, public sentiment would viciously turn against him.
Sooner or later, though, these terrible people will be swept away. We must keep this thought alive. It is all that will sustain us during the dark days that lie ahead.
