The Cult of Andy Burnham

I always chuckle when media snobs say the little people are easy prey for demagogic trickery. Because no one is more likely to pant over a slick politician and his polished-turd slogans than these Oxbridge types. Witness their schoolgirl swooning over Andy Burnham this morning as he fluttered his famous eyelashes and spelt out his vision for a better, fairer Britain. His speech was a carousel of cliches, feelgood slogans, microwaved Blairism and what passes for leftism in the posher coffee houses of Manchester, and yet they lapped it up, all goggle-eyed and weak-kneed. I’m so embarrassed for them.

It was Burnham’s first major policy speech since he launched his bid to usurp Sir Keir and become PM. It’s been rolling news all day. As I write this my TV screen is split between a gurning Burnham getting a standing ovation from his assembled acolytes and a flushed Beth Rigby giving her ‘analysis’ (TLDR: it was fab, fab, fab). Reading the BBC’s coverage, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a ‘fight them on the beaches’ moment for our knackered nation. His speech was ‘bold’ and ‘affectionate’ and best of all there was no ‘adverse reaction in the markets’. In fact, the Beeb gushed, there was a ‘small positive one’. Capitalism has spoken! King Andy may ascend to the throne!

They all need to turn up the air-con and cool down. His speech was deathlessly platitudinous. It was full of those technocrat-era cliches that evaporate upon the merest investigation. ‘Place first, not party first.’ ‘Problem solving, not point scoring.’ ‘Long term, not short term.’ Up not down, sun not rain, forwards not backwards. Starmer himself was a master of such fag-packet Boomerish bromides. ‘Look forward, not back’, he was fond of saying, leaving the rest of us wondering: look forward to what? Infinity ‘asylum seekers’ and more sly sabotaging of Brexit?

Under Starmer – and both Tory and Labour PMs before him – such PowerPoint drivel was a stand-in for actual policy. Will it be the same under Prime Minister Burnham? Everyone likes a bit of ‘problem-solving’, but what problems? Our broken borders? The cult of welfarism that indulges young people’s fever dreams about suffering from ADHD? Our refusal to frack for gas in order that we might appease the gods of weather and hold back ‘global boiling’? Will those problems be solved? I won’t hold my breath, especially if Net Zero nutter Ed Miliband becomes Burnham’s chancellor.

Even the more substantive-sounding parts of Burnham’s speech raise more questions than answers. His key focus was on restructuring public life. He desires nothing less than the ‘biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen’. I don’t know, the 17th-century revolutionaries who got shot of the king and abolished the Lords might have something to say about that. In Burnham’s ‘rewired Britain’, there will be oodles more devolution, meaning we will ‘take the power out of the centre’, he said, and disperse it across these isles. There’ll even be a ‘No10 North’ – a PM’s seat of power in Manchester to show that London isn’t the be-all and end-all of Blighty.

This is a continuation of the Blairite project of devolving ‘power’ to the nations and the regions. It sounds enticing – who wouldn’t want to loosen the political stranglehold of the SW1 wankerati? – but it is an illusion. Far from democratising the kingdom, the ironically top-down enforcement of devolution always ends up empowering the lanyard classes. Power is sold off not to everyday people but to the officious and the sharp-elbowed and the thirsty guzzlers of the Kool-Aid of woke. Look at Scotland, where the gift of Blairite semi-autonomy birthed not a new, democratic nation but a Tartan tinpot regime run by corrupt twats who put money in their banks and rapists in women’s prisons.

Far from ‘rebalancing power’, as Burnham dreams, devolution merely disperses it, and that can make it harder for we the people to hold the powerful to account. Power becomes more veiled, not more visible. There are untold problems of unearned power in 21st-century Britain. The imperious, bloated civil service is a law unto itself, frequently scuppering the democratic dreams of the electorate. Binding global treaties prevent us from behaving like a sovereign state and removing undesirables from our territories. Judges hubristically override policies drawn up by those we elect. The House of Lords remains a medieval pox on our liberties, elevating the ‘wisdom’ of the unaccountable over the wishes of the people. Anyone serious about ‘rewiring Britain’ would be addressing all of that, not empowering yet another Pride lanyard priggish they / them to become a micro-mayor of some northern town.

It seems Burnham wants to follow up his ‘Manchesterism’ – which no one can actually define – with Leicesterism, Sheffieldism, Glasgowism… breakaway mini-regimes that would further concentrate power in the hands of the credentialled classes. The result would not be a ‘rewired Britain’ but a fractured Britain, overseen by a thousand woke fiefdoms. Have you ever wondered why the graduate classes squeal with glee over devolution even as they wring their hands over the ‘low-information’ masses and our dumb votes for Brexit, Boris and all the rest? It’s because they know devolution empowers people like them, not riff-raff like us.

Burnham has a ‘10-year plan’ for Britain. Strewth. Even Stalin only went for a five-year plan. Upon whose authority will he ‘rewire Britain’? He won a vote in Makerfield, not the United Kingdom. Fancy talking about ‘rebalancing power’ even as you sweep to power in a coup that would make Pinochet blush. But the liberal media couldn’t give a toss about any of that. They’ve gone all mawkish for King Andy. They follow him around like tragic ducklings. They gasp with juvenile wonderment when he says ‘Long term, not short term’. They’ve succumbed to his cult and we know why: they pray he’ll hold back the tide of populism. Imagine bigging yourself up as a warrior for the democratisation of Britain when really you’re motored by a blind terror of the democratic anger of the masses. The arrogance. The duplicity. That’s Burnhamism.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.