Andy Burnham is for turning

A New Labourite, a Corbynista and Keir Starmer’s No1 fan all walk into a bar. The landlord looks up and says, ‘The usual, Andy?’. There may be various versions of this Andy Burnham joke doing the rounds, but they all hint at the same truth. The mayor for Greater Manchester tries to be all things to all Labourites. He is a man of such staunch views, that if his party doesn’t like ’em, well… he’s got others.

This matters. According to YouGov polling this week, Burnham is currently the overwhelming favourite among Labour members to succeed Keir Starmer and become their party’s next leader – and, as a result, the UK’s next prime minister. Depending, of course, on whether he’s actually able to win next month’s Makerfield by-election and re-enter the House of Commons.

Labour members’ enthusiasm for Burnham is a mark of their desperation. Whatever they see in him – other than not being Keir Starmer or Wes Streeting – it’s certainly not political conviction. This man is for turning.

Take Brexit, which is especially pertinent given he wants to stand in a heavily Leave-voting seat. A one-time member of Tony Blair’s globalist New Labour cabinet during the 2000s, Burnham is predictably pro-EU. But beyond that, he’s all over the gaff, even on the question of whether we should have had a referendum at all.

Back in 2015, while mounting his second charge for the Labour leadership after the first failure in 2010 (he’s a trier, I’ll give him that), he was enthusiastically backing a referendum on EU membership. ‘The public are asking for this’, he told a BBC interviewer, before urging David Cameron’s then Tory government to stage a vote as soon as possible. Ten years later, he was pumping out a very different tune. ‘When I look at the Brexit referendum, Cameron and Osborne were wrong to even agree to [it]’, he told an interviewer.

And as we’ve seen this past week, he’s just as capricious on the question of respecting the Brexit vote. When he was first flaunting his third-time-lucky leadership ambitions in September last year, he was waxing lyrical to the Guardian about overturning Brexit. ‘Long-term, I’m going to be honest, I’m going to say it, I want to rejoin [the EU]’, he said. But not anymore, it seems. On Monday, he announced he was not interested in trying to force Britain back into Brussels’ cold embrace, claiming we’d be in ‘a permanent rut if we’re just constantly arguing [about Brexit]’.

To be fair to Burnham, he’s at least being consistent in his inconsistency. He has vacillated over respecting Brexit almost from the moment 17.4million Brits ticked the Leave box. He has claimed, at various points, to understand why vast swathes of largely working-class Britain wanted to ‘take back control’. He has even pointed out the deleterious impact of high levels of EU immigration on workers, undercutting wages and dividing communities – a taboo in Labour circles. Ahead of the 2019 General Election, when Keir Starmer, then Labour’s Brexit spokesman, proposed negotiating a new deal, and then campaigning against that deal in a new referendum, Burnham actually said he would campaign to leave in such circumstances. He pointed out that many in and around Westminster didn’t understand the ‘huge anger at the political class’, and what would happen if it tried to thwart Brexit.

But during the same period, there was another Andy Burnham publicly flirting with stopping Brexit, just as he did in 2018, as establishment fears of a No Deal Brexit grew. He issued a call for another referendum with, one presumes, a different result.

And it’s not just Brexit and the EU on which Burnham says one thing and then says the near opposite. It’s on every issue. He’ll pose as a Labourite opponent of ‘Tory austerity’ at one point, and then tacitly support it the next. As a member since 2015 of Labour Friends of Israel, he will rightly attack the anti-Zionist ‘spitefulness’ of the likes of Jeremy Corbyn. Then, just a few years and one Hamas-led anti-Semitic pogrom down the line, you’ll find him backing the recognition of a Palestinian state.

His politics is dizzying in its array of contradictory positions, views and principles. He’s spent a good portion of his Manchester mayoralty striking a socialist-lite pose, talking up increased public spending and, more recently, a ‘full-fat social democratic’ programme, premised on more borrowing, taking on the bond markets and filleting chancellor Rachel Reeves’s cherished fiscal rules. That was until this week. On Monday, as the bond markets got jittery, he reversed position, telling ITV News: ‘Let me say this really clearly. I support the fiscal rules.’

Even on identity politics, Burnham has been unable to hold his own ‘progressive’ line. Like much of the political class of the past decade or more, he’s been up to his neck in trans ideology. In a public letter in 2019, also signed by mayors Sadiq Khan, Dan Jarvis and Steve Rotherham, he urged the Tory government to accelerate gender self-ID. The following year, he was publicly distancing himself from the gender-critical LGB Alliance, after claims it had been invited to a meeting with him. A spokesman said Burnham had ‘made his support for the trans community very clear over the years’.

But his embrace of woke – ‘I call it respect for other people and basic decency’ – has been loosened a little by last year’s Supreme Court ruling, affirming the biological basis of sex. In an agonising interview with LBC last year, Burnham was reduced to saying it had all become very ‘confusing’ after the ruling.

There’s nothing wrong with a politician changing his mind in light of new circumstances, having reflected on the arguments or respecting the will of the people. This is often necessary and can be healthy in a democracy. But that’s not what has been happening with Burnham. He’s not thinking and reflecting on Brexit, or the fiscal rules, or gender identity. He’s far more passive than that. Like the classic Fast Show character, Indecisive Dave, he is guided less by some inner political compass than by the opinions of others. He tells people what he thinks they’ll agree with. He’s an affable wet blanket blowing in the wind. When it changes direction, so does his flapping.

And to think, if the Labour Party gets its way, this personable but spongiform character could end up in No10. He may make it past the Makerfield by-election, his flaws not yet fully exposed by the scrutiny that will come with a stint in Downing Street. But he won’t make it past an electorate already fed up with this exhausted, clueless and incompetent Labour regime.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.