by Chris Harris 19/8/26
Is Andy Burnham Serious – Or Is He Just Father Christmas?
Remember Christmas Day when you were a kid? You wake up ridiculously early, run downstairs and there are presents everywhere. For a few glorious hours, life is absolutely brilliant. New toys, new clothes, chocolate for breakfast and nobody telling you what to do. Even your parents seem vaguely tolerable.
Then something strange happens. Christmas ends. By New Year, the presents aren’t quite so exciting. The batteries are running down, the chocolate has gone and you’re back in the same bedroom you hated before Christmas. You still don’t like school. You still don’t particularly like some of your friends. Your parents are irritating you again and the food in the fridge hasn’t magically improved.
The Great Burnham Giveaway
Burnham arrived in Downing Street on 20 July promising something Britain desperately wanted to hear: breathing space. And, to give him credit, he immediately started handing things out. VAT on household electricity is being removed from October. Single bus fares in England are being capped at £2 from January. There have been moves on subscriptions and other everyday irritations, alongside cheaper and more accessible bus travel, including the announcement that disabled people’s bus passes will be usable at any time from next April.
Individually, these are perfectly sensible ideas. The electricity VAT cut will save people money. The £2 bus fare will help regular bus users. Removing unnecessary restrictions from disabled people’s bus passes is hard to argue against. The problem is perspective. These aren’t transformational changes. They’re stocking fillers.
The Government itself sold the electricity VAT removal as giving households “breathing space”, and that is probably a fair description of most of these measures. They provide a little bit of help at a time when millions of people need it. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when stocking fillers are presented as evidence of a revolution.
Unfortunately for Burnham, world events don’t care much about carefully choreographed government announcements. The Middle East conflict has pushed energy prices sharply upwards again, and the prospect of another cost-of-living squeeze is very real. Higher oil and gas prices eventually find their way into almost everything: electricity, heating, petrol, transport, manufacturing and ultimately the weekly food shop.
So a rather uncomfortable question arises. How much of Burnham’s much-heralded breathing space is about to disappear before people have even noticed it? That’s the problem with giving people £40 or £50 here and a cheaper bus journey there. It’s welcome, but one decent increase in the electricity bill, the weekly food shop, the mortgage or the petrol tank can swallow it whole.
Father Christmas has handed you a £50 note. Unfortunately, the gas company is waiting outside the front door.
Where Is the Big Stuff?
This matters because Burnham hasn’t sold himself merely as a slightly nicer version of Keir Starmer. He has promised something enormous. In his first speech as Prime Minister, Burnham described his arrival as a “circuit breaker for Britain” and promised the “biggest changes in the last forty years.”
He has talked about a new political model and a new economic model. He has promised to take power out of Westminster and carry it into every postcode in the land. Before becoming Prime Minister, he was talking about a huge rebalancing of power across Britain: No 10 North, power transferred away from Whitehall, greater regional control, public control over essential services and “good growth in every postcode.”
Those aren’t modest promises. That’s not tinkering around the edges. If you tell people you are going to deliver the biggest political changes in forty years, you are setting yourself an extraordinarily high bar. So, sooner or later, people are entitled to ask: where is it?
There is an obvious defence of Burnham here. He’s only been Prime Minister for a month. Fair enough. Nobody sensible expects Britain to be transformed in four weeks. There have also been some structural moves, including No 10 North and changes within Whitehall, while the Government develops plans to give regions a greater direct financial stake in their own economic growth.
So I’m not suggesting he’s done nothing. I’m asking something different. Where is the evidence of political courage?
Because so far I see a politician desperate not to upset anybody. Every announcement appears carefully calibrated to be popular. Every difficult edge seems to be sanded down. Every potential confrontation appears to be approached with extreme caution.
I call him Andy Vibes.
The Andy Vibes
I don’t know whether anybody else calls it this. I do. Burnham is an excellent communicator. Let’s acknowledge that. He understands television, social media and presentation. He understands how modern political messaging works far better than Starmer ever did. He looks comfortable talking to ordinary people. Those things matter. But they aren’t government.
But there is a danger that Burnham starts believing his exceptional ability to present change is the same thing as actually delivering it. It isn’t. Sooner or later the cameras move on and voters start looking at their bank accounts, their rent, their mortgage, their wages, their energy bills, their council tax, their local high street, their NHS appointment and their child’s school. Then they ask the only political question that ultimately matters: is my life actually getting better?
We also need to be careful about the mythology surrounding Burnham’s record in Greater Manchester. I’ve read plenty about it and listened to plenty of podcasts discussing what he supposedly achieved. There were successes. Bus franchising was significant. The Bee Network was politically clever and highly visible. Burnham undoubtedly demonstrated that a mayor prepared to intervene could achieve things that conventional Westminster politicians said couldn’t be done.
But the legend sometimes became rather larger than the reality. Manchester wasn’t transformed into some northern Scandinavian paradise. It still had poverty, homelessness, struggling public services and enormous inequalities. It still had all the structural problems faced by most major British cities. Burnham’s record deserves examination rather than worship. And now he’s running Britain, Manchesterism isn’t enough anyway.
Perhaps Starmer Wasn’t the Entire Problem
This brings me to something I’ve wondered about before. Maybe we were all too quick to conclude that Keir Starmer was the problem. Perhaps he was a problem, but perhaps the bigger problem is Labour itself.
Burnham has changed the presentation dramatically. The language is warmer. The social media is better. The announcements are quicker. There’s more optimism, more political instinct and considerably more personality. But underneath it all, is this really going to be a fundamentally different government? Or are we about to discover that Labour’s problem wasn’t simply the man standing outside Number 10? Perhaps it was the whole machine behind him.
Here’s the really uncomfortable possibility: what if history eventually judges Starmer more kindly than Burnham? That sounds ridiculous today. It might not sound ridiculous in two years.
Burnham’s first few weeks have been clever. Give people something quickly. Show them government can act. Cut a bill. Reduce a fare. Fix irritating little things. Create momentum. Generate optimism. Politically, it makes perfect sense.
But Christmas morning cannot last forever. Eventually the wrapping paper gets thrown away and we discover what we’ve actually got. Burnham has promised the biggest political changes Britain has seen for forty years. He has promised to rewire the country, devolve power, create a new economic model, increase public control over the essentials of life and restore hope.
Those are extraordinary promises, and I genuinely hope he means them. Because Britain doesn’t need another politician who is brilliant at telling us things are changing. It needs somebody prepared to make decisions that are difficult, controversial and occasionally unpopular in order to actually change them.
I am very jittery about Andy Vibes. I am open to be convinced. But my gut feeling is the guy has not got what it takes and can present a good looking show but with poor content. For now, I’m prepared to wait with my fingers crossed in the hope I am completely wrong.
#Andy Burnham #Conservative Party #Labour Party #Reform Party #Politics
