“Who is the real Andy Burnham?” said Stephen Pollard in The Spectator. He has been branded a “Blairite, a Brownite, a Milibandite, a Starmerite”, and there have been “few more transparent examples of political shape-shifters” than the mayor of Greater Manchester.
What does Burnham stand for?
As “King of the North”, Burnham has based his latest pitch for the Labour leadership – and therefore for Downing Street – around what he calls “Manchesterism”. This involves “devolving power from Westminster, reducing Treasury control over public spending and promoting growth by increasing public spending on infrastructure”, said The Times’ policy editor Oliver Wright. He has also been “explicit about his desire to take key public services such as energy, water and rail back into public ownership”.
Burnham’s overriding “theme” is that the nation has been “on the wrong path since the 1980s”, and it is this “four-decade slide into decline that he is vowing to overturn”, said The Telegraph’s Ben Riley-Smith. His solution may lie in “an expensive wish list of economic interventions – re-nationalisation, re-industrialisation, lower rents and more council homes”. But there is “a telling silence so far on how, exactly, all of this would be funded”.
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How did he get into politics?
Burnham was born on 7 January 1970, in Aintree, Liverpool, and, one of three brothers, he grew up in Culcheth, near Warrington, between Manchester and Liverpool (he is a lifelong Everton supporter). His father, Kenneth, was a telephone engineer; his mother, Eileen, was a receptionist. A sporty child, he went to St Aelred’s, a Catholic secondary school in Newton-le-Willows, before studying English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he met his Dutch-born wife, Marie-France van Heel, with whom he has three children.
After a spell working for trade magazines including Tank World, in 1994 he took a job as a researcher for the MP Tessa Jowell, later the culture secretary. In 2001, he was elected as the MP for Leigh, Greater Manchester. He served as a junior minister in the Blair government, and as culture secretary and health secretary under Gordon Brown.
After being heckled at the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, he became a campaigner for the victims’ families. In 2010, he stood for the Labour leadership but was beaten into fourth place by Ed Miliband; and in 2015, he came second to Jeremy Corbyn. Having spent nine years away from Westminster, a place he has often publicly derided, he seems determined to return there.
What might his premiership look like?
Under a Burnham premiership “big spending cuts seem unlikely”, said the Financial Times. But “that leaves tax rises”. He has already floated the idea of putting up taxes on the rich and hiking levies on assets and wealth.
Even compared to metropolitan mayors, a PM runs “a much bigger machine, and there is nobody to beg for money (instead others beg you for it)”, said The Economist. They must also “convincingly argue” for “policies that make some people worse off” against “fierce opposition”. While “less wooden, more charming” than Keir Starmer, like him Burnham “has sometimes shied away from contentious measures”. In truth, he “has not really been tested for the top job”.
Could Manchesterism translate into a national policy?
Some argue that the term is so loosely defined as almost to be meaningless: that it is mostly about “vibes”, and falls far short of a policy agenda that could be translated to the national stage. Burnham is politically something of a shape-shifter; there is, allies admit, “a lot of thinking still to be done”.
We don’t know exactly what it would mean to bring transport, energy and water into “public control”, but nationalisation would certainly be vastly expensive. Burnham’s team have studied revenue-raising options, including the equalisation of capital gains tax with income tax, and higher taxes on landlords. He has also previously called for sweeping constitutional reforms, including the abolition of the House of Lords and the introduction of a more proportional voting system.
Would Burnham spook investors?
Many investors have marked his card, owing to his remark that “we’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets” (critics note that Manchester City Council’s debt reached £1.6 billion last year).
In recent weeks, however, he has sought to calm jitters by letting it be known that he would stick to the Treasury’s existing fiscal rules if he became PM, and that he “understands the cost of borrowing is a huge constraint on government”. His team have also suggested that he’d stick to Labour’s commitment not to raise the “big three” taxes: income tax, VAT or employee national insurance.
