Burnham: the man without a plan

I’m glad Andy Burnham is the new prime minister. Don't get me wrong, I know just how unspeakably awful he's going to be, but it really does help me underscore the point I've been making for the last three years. If your entire platform is based on slogans with no hard policy behind it, then you'll start making a fool of yourself within minutes of taking office, and the clock starts ticking on your administration's implosion.

This especially looks to be the case with Andy Burnham, whose first command in Number Ten was to put an end to rough sleeping, despite having utterly failed to do so in Manchester. Precisely what Burnham thinks can be achieved when we have no border control to speak of, I don’t know.

But Burnham doesn’t have a plan for anything else either. He’s got his Number 10 North gimmick and his Manchesterism hobby horse but nothing that speaks to stubbornly low growth, low productivity, high tax, out of control welfare spending, high inflation, high energy prices, heavy regulation and open borders. Labour might be enjoying a Burnham bounce in the polls but it’s not going to last.

In this, Burnham is in a double bind because his own ideology, insofar as he has one, prevents him from doing anything that might liberate the economy, and even if he could see his way to doing something useful, his own party will put the brakes on.

He’s stated his desire to make “changes people will feel” but that’s not going to happen without fixing the fundamentals, so all he has to work with is sticking plasters for which there is very little fiscal headroom. He’s going to be on the losing side of negotiations with the Treasury.

Consequently, Pollyanna Burnham has absolutely no idea what's about to happen to him. He has a head full of bad ideas that weren't tried by any of his recent predecessors, not because his predecessors were smarter than him, but because they were rapidly disabused before getting down to business.

Burnham, though, thinks that bad ideas will become good ideas if he's the one implementing them. For Burnham, the normal laws of political reality do not apply. There are hard lessons for him behind the door of Number Ten, waiting like starved crocodiles for their hapless prey.

While this is going to be endlessly entertaining and wholly predictable for us politicos, it is not without consequence. This is the gear shift that pushes the "just about managing" into the "not managing" bracket. This is the turn that pushes businesses and households irrecoverably into the red and upends what people have been struggling to maintain. This is the narcissistic clueless meddling that puts the country into a death spiral. The anger will be palpable.

By that, I don't necessarily mean the sort of riots triggered by the tone-deaf and ineffably useless Starmer. That cannot be ruled out, of course, but this is the inflection point where the normally reserved, who just prefer to get on with their lives, are dragged into the wake turbulence against their will. It's the bill hike that obliterates the last of their disposable income. It’s the denial of the last of the small pleasures that make the drudgery of making ends meet bearable - when there's no longer any reward for taking the punishment - and there's no end in sight.

This is when Burnham's entire psychological construct begins to dissolve. The world as he understands it is one where if you're nice, with good intentions, then you are liked - and the only reason you could dislike such a person is if you yourself are not nice. Starmer was better equipped to be hated because he had no empathy, and public sentiment of any kind had no bearing on his demeanour. Burnham, on the other hand, wants and needs to be liked. This is often a fatal flaw in politicians.

What makes Burnham especially dangerous is that he will pull at any and all levers in search of doing the nice thing, in order to be liked, oblivious to the second order consequences, and will be shocked, surprised and horrified to learn that his every action has the opposite of intended effect on public morale. He will not understand why. He is not capable of understanding why, even if it is explained to him in the most gentle terms by a compassionate softly-spoken primary school teacher.

Unlike Starmer, though, he won't go into the bunker to hide. He will take it to mean that people just haven't gotten to know him yet, and need to see more of him so they can understand that he's a nice guy and on your side. And when it doesn't work, he will blame the interface layer. If we don't get it, it just means something is lost in translation. That's when nice turns nasty.

This is the hole he will keep digging, the scab he simply won't stop picking until the sore becomes an open wound. WHY WON'T YOU UNDERSTAND HOW NICE I AM?? They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Burnham, though, does not plan to build a road. He intends to drill directly to Hell with industrial tunnelling machines. There is no force of magic that can make socialism work.

Crucially, what Burnham doesn't understand, is that the Labour party has become the party of the status quo for a reason. There is nowhere else for the left to go. Tony Blair, for all his many faults, was smart enough to understand certain economic laws of gravity. He shit-canned socialism because he knew that you can't hope to help people if the state is broke. He rebuilt the state as a managerialist welfare dispensary.

That might have been a viable avenue for 1997. But "sharing the proceeds of growth" is contingent on actual growth, which is no longer possible in a hyper-regulated, high tax moribund economy. Blairism is as dead as Burnham’s socialism. The bottom line is that there is no left wing solution to what ails us.

Burnham, though, believes enough time has passed for us to have forgotten, so that we'll mistake old ideas for new ideas. A lot of people probably will fall for it again, but it doesn't take very long to relearn the lessons. The Finding Out stage happens faster each time. On that basis, Burnham is not a man who will make it to the next election intact. He doesn't have much to work with. He has no mandate, no fiscal headroom, limited political capital, and absolutely no talent. A man promoted to captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. The only way for Burnham is down, down and down.

There is a lesson here for the parties of the slop right. You can win momentary popularity with slogans, and even win elections, but if you want to achieve something with power, you’re going to need a plan. The Burnham administration will be an object lesson in what happens when you don’t have one.