How is Burnham different to Starmer? |
What is Andy Burnham really going to do that’s different from his predecessor? When he made his first address to MPs as prime minister yesterday, Burnham did promise ‘substantial change’, and suggested that this change would have to involve correcting ‘a series of wrong turns’ made from the 1980s onwards. Those wrong turns were substantial: ‘Political power was centralised, economic power privatised and the country deindustrialised. Austerity followed, hollowing out councils and depriving them of the agency to act to reverse any of it, and then Brexit compounded the damage, ushering in a decade of low growth and stalled regeneration.’ That’s quite a list: one that also conveniently skips over the Blair and Brown Labour governments of which Burnham was a part. He presumably thinks those administrations kept going in the wrong direction after the turns taken by Thatcher and co.
The Middlesbrough carnage is just the........