Esther Krakue says she has never felt sadder for this country. Andy Burnham has been Prime Minister for a matter of days and, apparently, he has the answer to Britain's problems – Margaret Thatcher. A woman who left Downing Street 36 years ago and died in 2013, is apparently what ails us. It's genuinely alarming when the man running the country appears more interested in refighting the political battles of the 1980s than confronting the crisis actually shaping people's lives today.
Leadership change driven by polls
But he wasn't chosen to fix any of those. He was chosen to move a number. After hundreds of polls telling Labour MPs they were heading for electoral oblivion, they did what any frightened, sanctimonious politician more interested in protecting their own hide would do and swapped out their leader. It doesn’t matter whether it would plunge us further into chaos or make us look unserious and ridiculous; it’s what was necessary. Polls clearly run this country now, putting the nation's interests a distant third behind party loyalty and job security.
Cabinet picks and policy U-turns
Even Burnham's Cabinet picks aren’t newsworthy, because reshuffling a front bench of this quality is just moving the problems down a seat. How is the country supposed to feel that 'help is coming' — an odd phrase, as if we're in a hostage situation led by the Government — when he's festooned it with the criminally useless, or in the case of Louise Haigh, the actually criminal? She resigned in 2024 over a fraud conviction she'd pleaded guilty to, and has now been handed the Cabinet Office and the ethics brief. A bad joke if ever there was one.
On policy, Burnham doesn't know whether he's coming or going. He's scrapped the digital ID scheme – I'm sure to the relief of the millions who signed the petition to get rid of it – and the jury trial restrictions are reportedly coming out of David Lammy's Courts and Tribunals Bill too. Both were Labour policies a fortnight ago, defended by ministers who are still sitting in his Cabinet. You can't run a country like this. Whether either policy was any good is beside the point, since the answer depends on who's holding the job.
Lack of vision and direction
Do any of these people actually have a vision for the country? They keep jumping from one half-hearted solution to another. What's worse is Labour seems to function under the delusion that binning your predecessor's worst ideas amounts to governing. It doesn’t; that's just tidying up. And Burnham's already being tugged towards land taxes, wealth taxes, nationalised utilities, fiscal discipline and a larger budget, apparently all at the same time, by people who've never had to reconcile any of it.
To govern is to choose. He has no rival and no rebellion worth the name, which is about as much room as any prime minister ever gets, and he's spending it on an argument with someone who's been dead for over a decade.
What people really want
What people want isn't ideology. They want to know what any of this does for them. They were promised that if they worked hard and stayed on the right side of the rules, their children would end up better off than they were. Almost nobody believes that anymore. More goes out in taxes every year, while everything gets harder, and the people making the least effort seem to do perfectly well regardless.
That's a dangerous place for a democracy to be, and it deserves better than another leadership swap ordered off the back of some bad polling data. Unfortunately, that decision has left us with a man who thinks it's still 1997. He was hired to shift the numbers, and the moment they stop shifting, Labour will do to him precisely what it did to Starmer, because that's now the only move the party knows. Listen closely, and you can already hear the bottom of the barrel being scraped for whoever comes after him.
