Drill, Burnham, drill, or you will go the same way as Starmer – Brian Monteith
Brian Monteith is unimpressed by Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham’s big speech
Andy Burnham has spoken. All hail Andy Burnham. But are we any closer to knowing what his premiership will really mean? Or was his speech just a new vote whisperer’s phrasebook of seductive words designed to attract our votes, only to find the usual bitter aftertaste of dreams dashed and hopes abandoned?
There is unlikely to be any Labour challenger that might delay or upset a smooth transfer of power, nor any serious scrutiny of what Burnham is offering. Keir Starmer is not finished yet but Burnham’s travelling circus is already on the road and pitching the ringmaster’s wares to get everyone inside his big tent. He’s not even Labour leader yet but he’s already talking as if he has the master key to every door in Downing Street – and everyone’s approval.
The adage, “there’s a sucker born every minute” was attributed to the showman PT Barnum as he peddled his famous hoaxes in Victorian days – and the approach looks particularly apt as Burnham seeks to repackage some old Blairite cheesy smiles and casual dress as “Manchesterism”.
Pure fantasy
“Good growth” is Burnham’s new catchphrase but it will become about as attractive as PT Barnum’s bearded lady. I anticipate milk-water socialism that will curdle on first contact with reality.
"People need to be able to look forward to a holiday with the kids,” says caring Burnham – while supporting a new holiday tax that will make family breaks unaffordable for many.
Burnham plans to build lots more council houses, rivalling the five million built in the post-war era. Yet to build that number today would cost about £1.3 trillion. If he borrowed £40 billion to finance council houses, as he previously suggested, it would cover building only 150,000 new houses.
Britain's top economic problems are neither a shortage of council housing nor a shortage of public borrowing. Burnham's plans are pure fantasy.
His chief error is to argue the UK’s real problem is too much centralised power and the answer must be to devolve more decision-making across the country. It’s the sort of sloganeering that sounds warm and cosy but does not lead to better outcomes because it starts on a false premise.
READ MORE: Could Andy Burnham's devolution vision be the missing positive case to counter Scottish independence
Jobless wastelands
It was no mistake Burnham mentioned Port Talbot, Scunthorpe and Aberdeen in the same breath as locations that could benefit from decisions being taken locally with support from a new ‘Number 10 in the North’. The steel mills in Wales and England, alongside the oil and gas industry of Scotland, ticked the boxes of geographical coverage – pulling us all together (another warm feeling).
Their fate was not sealed because of centralised Whitehall bureaucracy or Westminster political failure but because of bad decision-making. No amount of devolution will prevent the decline or halt a ‘just transition’ from industrial success to jobless wastelands if local politicians and officials embrace the same wrong-think and enact their own bad laws.
Such is Burnham’s desire to embrace the political zeitgeist of whichever setting he’s operating in that he has not recognised the irony that all of those industries have been devasted because of the 2008 Climate Change Act. It was delivered by Ed Miliband in a Labour government that Burnham was a member of.
As explained in detail by the paper Premeditated Industrial Suicide, the UK’s long journey into industrial darkness began in a tangible sense from that point. It started the growth of restrictions and taxes that ended investment, erected domestic barriers and made overseas competition more attractive.
Abolish the Climate Change Act
The enveloping consensus at the time included Conservative and Liberal Democrat opponents saying it did not go far enough. Everyone joined in, with the Scottish Government and local councils cheering it on, often adding to the burden.
More devolved power would have made no difference to preventing Aberdeen’s demise – indeed the SNP accelerated it by using restrictive planning powers. Having a Number 10 in the North is meaningless – change must first start with abolishing the Climate Change Act.
If Aberdeen is to be saved, Burnham needs to immediately authorise the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields to start pumping the hydrocarbons we need to reduce our costs and give us better energy security than foreign powers allow.
What was noticeable was the absence of how the shift to greater devolved power will be afforded. It’s not as if Scottish and Welsh devolution has proven cheap, nor has it been an unmitigated success.
Other than saying the taxpayers’ pound would be made to work harder, it’s all vibes. It’s all about how we emote, how we feel – it’s about the visible optics, not achieving measurable outputs.
The political con is that the UK carbon footprint fell (because we don’t measure the count for foreign imports) but the consumption by our industry remained the same (as they still had to consume energy to make things). Drilling our own oil and gas, mining our own metallurgical coal reduces transport costs, creates jobs, takes people off welfare and raises tax revenue. Importing energy – as we do now – achieves the reverse.
A favourite woolly jumper?
That’s why Burnham, the new red-coated circus ringmaster, needs to start with getting his energy policy right. If he does that then the local decision-making – of businesses and individuals could be more responsive.
There should be no doubt that the Labour government will enjoy a Burnham bounce in the polls, in part, simply because he is not Starmer but especially Burnham’s tone is favourite woolly jumper, rather than a hairshirt Nehru smock.
But if Burnham wants “good growth” then his adage should be “Drill, Burnham, drill” or he may find his tenure, like that of the greatest showman on Earth, is opened up to ridicule and cries of humbug.
Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European parliaments and senior advisor to the Tax Reform Council.
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