The Burnham contradiction

The ideal choice for Prime Minister ... at least until Parliament reconvenes

Yesterday, Andy Burnham was elected, unopposed, as leader of the Labour Party. The announcement, which was widely described in the press as a “coronation”, was immediately followed by a speech from Burnham. So it was tempting to think of it as a King’s speech. But Labour’s new leader is scheduled to meet the real King on Monday, at which point the monarch will put Burnham in his place as Prime Minister.

Burham’s speech was full of Hope and Change. He mentioned them nine times each. Strictly speaking, he mentioned Change a tenth time, but the final time was “I won’t change”. Burnham, the bringer of change, has no plans to change along with everyone else.

On the nine occasions that he was in favour of change, he expressed himself in a way that will have filled many listeners with great optimism. Many, but not all. (Spoiler alert: I was one of the few, not the many. I made the mistake, I think, of listening to what he actually said, rather than letting all the optimism wash over me.)

Anthony David Padgett, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

For a brief moment, I had been encouraged when he said:

Let’s have the self-confidence to find common ground with other parties where we can.

But he quickly showed the superficiality of his thinking by following that with:

By seeking more consensus, we may just find the change we make is more lasting.

He has the timing the wrong way around. It’s true that change may last when people agree with it. But they don’t have to agree in advance. The economics of the past 40 years has endured (at least until now) because Thatcher won the argument, not because everyone agreed with her from the start.

Burnham does not agree with the economics of those four decades. He called them “a series of wrong turns”. He undoubtedly knows many who agree with him, especially colleagues in his own party and in the Greens. But when he tells us what changes he actually wants to make, he will not find the consensus he hopes for.

He knows that already. Of course, he does. Within a matter of seconds of calling for consensus so that “the change we make is more lasting”, he was telling party members the very opposite:

As your leader, I will set a direction that is distinctively Labour.

He won’t – he told us very explicitly – be wearing Tory clothes or pursuing policies that would make the Green or Reform supporters happy. So the politics of consensus was behind him already. The Liz Truss Lettuce lasted an eternity by comparison with Burnham’s Consensus. Now, he was going all out to be:

Boldly, confidently, authentically … Labour.

And he had a plan. He wanted us to know that:

I know what I want to do…. I have a plan.

But he also wanted us to know that his plan didn’t extend to knowing who would be implementing it with him:

Contrary to what you may keep on reading, I haven’t made any decisions yet about who will be in [my] top team.

How can he have a plan to reverse all the economic wrong turns that he believes were central to 40 years of government thinking, including governments he was a part of, if he truly doesn’t know whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer working alongside him should be Ed Miliband or Shabana Mahmood. Was he lying? He couldn’t be. He had told us:

Change starts with honesty.

But Miliband and Mahmood are not interchangeable. Not when it comes to economics. Maybe he wants to dictate economic policy from his own desk and have a puppet running the Treasury. But Burnham is a man whose grasp of economics is so wretched that he told us he didn’t want to be in hock to the bond markets, until someone explained to him that it is the bond markets which lend the money that he will need to borrow if he is to be “boldly, confidently, authentically Labour”.

Burnham would perhaps dismiss everything that I am writing here as “point scoring”, which he says the public don’t like. But it didn’t stop him indulging in it, himself. Once he had dumped the consensus, he told us how, in the 1980s, the country had:

surrendered control of the essentials: housing, water, energy, transport …

In his view, one can’t improve people’s lives without that control. And then he said this:

The right used the phrase “take back control”, but they are the ones who gave it away in the first place.

His supporters in the room loved that one. It’s nonsense, of course. The control that Leavers wanted to take back was control that had been surrendered to other countries. The control that their predecessors had given away was – exactly as Burham had pointed out – an internal transfer from the State to the private sector. If that sounds petty, look at it the other way around. Burnham clearly wants to take back control over “housing, water, energy, transport”. So, can Reform welcome him as a late convert to Brexit? Of course not. The controls are two utterly different things.

So Burnham was just indulging in a bit of point scoring of his own. It’s what politicians do. No harm in that, even if Burnham had started his speech by renouncing the politics of the point score:

Tell people what we will do, rather than always going on about others … let’s see if we can get the ear of the country …. Let’s take a problem-solving rather than a point-scoring approach.

Despite any appearances to the contrary, I have not been picking out contradictions in Burnham’s speech merely to score cheap points over the incoming Prime Minister. It’s not the U-turns and the contradictions that trouble me the most. It’s what lies behind them.

In Andy Burnham, I see (and have always seen) a man who doesn’t like confrontation. He will say whatever it takes to keep people onside. He wants consensus, so long as it doesn’t involve him having to change his own mind. He wants to borrow money without having to convince lenders that we can afford it. He wants a Chancellor of the Exchequer who agrees with him, but he doesn’t want a Chancellor who the bond markets disagree with. And he doesn’t want to upset Ed Miliband by telling him he can’t have the job.

And that is why he has reassured us that he has a plan, but he is doing everything possible to delay telling us what the plan is. He knows that some people won’t like his plan. And the one thing Andy Burnham doesn’t have is a plan for dealing with the fallout that he will encounter when his plan is finally made public.

The coronation suited him because he didn’t have to argue with an opponent. The timing of his appointment suits him because it gives him another six weeks before he has to face anyone in Parliament. Right now, he might be Labour’s best man for the job. But come September …