Andy Burnham just doomed Britain – soon be screaming for Starmer | Personal Finance | Finance
Andy Burnham’s supporters are doing everything they can to ensure their man replaces Sir Keir Starmer without a leadership election. They want a coronation instead. It’s not hard to understand why. It has nothing new to offer. If you put the two men side by side they would say the same vague words about ‘change’ and ‘hope’, but Burnham would give them a little more warmth and humanity. If he comes to power and fails to do so, this attraction will quickly weaken. As he wishes. This is inevitable.
Burnham will have no authority. This is not democracy. This is a coup, and a far-left coup at that. But only for a few weeks. Labor will be energized as it rids itself of stubborn, annoying Starmer. Activists are misty-eyed today, but two years ago they were misty-eyed after Starmer’s ‘loveless landslide’ and look how that ended.
Labor has crushed us with tax after tax, allowed spending and borrowing to spiral out of control and saddled us with dismal cabinet ministers like Rachel Reeves, Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner. Shortly after the election I described this trio as Labour’s economic suicide squad, and today we are seeing the results. No one will shed any tears for Starmer’s downfall except the man himself and his valiant wife. But we will all have tears in our eyes when we realize that things will get much worse rather than better.
Andy Burnham won’t be enjoying this any more than the rest of us. He loves to be liked, but when voters discover he has no real plan, the hate will flow. Starmer managed to sit in his office, work through paperwork, and convince himself that he was doing a great job. Burnham, in turn, will be traumatized by the tsunami of disappointment heading her way.
The UK economy is on the verge of collapse. But every idea Burnham and her supporters come up with will make the situation worse. He wants to nationalize more, pay more taxes, spend more. But this will only accelerate the disastrous policies of the last 20 years, which have resulted in 53.3 per cent of households receiving more from the welfare state than they pay in. This catastrophic rate will increase further as the population ages and young people are unable to find work. It is literally unsustainable.
It seems likely that Burnham will fire Chancellor Rachel Reeves, but Reeves will leave her with a bad parting gift. It borrowed a further £23.3bn in May, far exceeding forecasts of £17.7bn. We are on track to borrow £140bn in total this year. We already pay the highest debt interest in the world and this will rise further in the near future as our debt burden exceeds £3 trillion. If Burnham feels obliged to appoint mad Ed Miliband as Chancellor, it’s game over.
Burnham’s ‘King in the North’ joke may have tickled voters in Manchester and Makerfield, but it will wear pretty thin in the rest of the country. Most Britons don’t live in the North and don’t have much time to devote to developing their own regional mythology. They just want to pay the bills and move on. Burnham delighted 24,000 English people at Makerfield. He will find it much harder to convince the remaining 70 million. Especially if he gives in to leftists’ demands to tear up the manifesto and increase income tax and VAT.
Burnham’s popularity has already begun to wane; Its rating dropped from +9 to -11 in just a few weeks. The closer he gets to number 10, the faster he’ll slide. This is inevitable. Burnham needs to make tough decisions to cut spending and grow the economy, but she’ll be pushed from pillar to post, grinning inanely while hard-left ideologues like Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner and Louise Haigh run the show.
Almost no one from Labor has run a business or worked in the world beyond activist politics. They have no idea how to turn things around, and the bond market is afraid of their economic ignorance. We are moving further along the path of decline, and at an ever-increasing pace. We may soon be longing for Keir Starmer’s dogged incompetence. We might even think things were better under the unfortunate Rachel Reeves. That’s how bad it can be.
