Jill Rutter takes stock of Andy Burnham’s first few days in government.

After a couple of weeks when Andy Burnham went underground with few sightings in public, this week he has shown what he meant by hitting the ground running.

He appointed a Cabinet – with a heavy Manchester representation (5 members represent seats in Greater Manchester, and there are seven from the North West when two Liverpudlians are added in). London’s representation in the full Cabinet is down to two.

He rewarded those who backed him early and helped usher Keir Starmer out of the door. He dispensed with the services of those who had been some of the most frequent spokespeople for the Starmer regime –Darren Jones and Peter Kyle.  Expect to hear far more Northern accents as close allies like Louise Haigh, Jonny Reynolds (back at his old business department) and Lucy Powell become the preferred voices of the government.

There is a huge amount of churn at Cabinet level. But one good decision Burnham has made is to eschew much change at junior ministerial level with a lot of people continuing in post, and others, like Dan Jarvis, who was briefly Defence Secretary after John Healey quit, returning to his old Security Minister beat.

He has moved quickly to reorganise government. The most eye-catching move is the creation of so-called No.10 North, a Manchester base that the new PM will work from (an interesting question is whether his successors with seats well away from Greater Manchester will find that so appealing) but the most important moves are the rebadging and beefing up of the policy secretariats in the Cabinet Office as a new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with the other, less central tasks hived off into a ‘Onegov’ agency.  That starts to address a longstanding weakness in the UK government – that we expect the Prime Minister to drive a programme for government, then refuse to give him or her adequate resources to do it and then wonder why the well resourced permanent Treasury expands to fill the vacuum.

The Prime Minister is also transferring lead responsibility for the central planks of his reform programme to his new Manchester operation. They will lead on devolution strategy (taken over from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) – though it is not clear how far that stretches into local government reorganisation – and take over local economic growth from the Treasury. It will be interesting to see how that works with the Treasury’s interest in economic growth, Reynolds reassuming control of the modern industrial strategy he developed in his first outing as Business Secretary and Angela Rayner back to press on with the completion of the devolution map.

Burnham has followed the example of previous Prime Ministers and employed a loyal enforcer at the centre. But Louise Haigh is quite inexperienced compared to some of the earlier occupants of the role – she spent very little time as a minister before being forced to step down by Keir Starmer and the success of a lot of the changes will depend on her, and her ability to work well with the Cabinet Secretary.

The more surprising machinery of government changes are the dismemberment of Rishi Sunak’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology. Science and innovation go to the ever changing business department, which gets renamed again; digital goes back to DCMS whence it came; and AI goes to the centre. This may, or may not, be a more sensible division of responsibilities than bundling these issues together. What is indubitable is that this sort of change creates distraction and disturbance, as the carve-up and reintegration take up the time and effort of senior leaders and usually end up with a price tag attached. The hope is that this change was much debated beforehand and the pros and cons were properly assessed before the changes were made.

Before taking office, Burnham promised a policy blitz. What has been notable is the nature of the policy announcements seen to date: Unpopular digital ID cards binned before even taking office on Sunday night; Tuesday morning, the decision to temporarily remove VAT (at 5%) from household electricity bills in England, Scotland and Wales; followed on Wednesday morning by taking the bus fares cap in England back to £2 in 2027.

The VAT cut (pending longer-term measures to create a ‘breathing space’ in cost of living pressures) was to be paid for by cancelling plans for digital ID cards: the problem for the government is that their predecessors had never identified how to pay for ID cards which were announced after the spending review was concluded. It’s not huge money in the scheme of things but it is a black mark against the civil service that they failed to stop the government falling into the trap of saying it would be paid for by the money saved by cancelling digital ID. This is a government – as the Prime Minister emphasised to the Cabinet – that needs to be seen to be reining in its potentially spendthrift inclinations.

The bus fare cap is also being funded out of a switch from international climate finance grants to loans. That against a backdrop where the UK aid budget is a fraction of what it once was, and presumably the money that now becomes repayable goes to poor countries saddled with a big climate adaptation or transition challenge.

Expect to see more of this, as what Burnham termed a “cost of living” government looks to subsidise household bills through “reprioritisation”. The rationale seems to be to reverse the experience of the Starmer government – which managed to squander any goodwill in a mess of badly landed policies, minor ethical transgressions and political tone deafness – by buying ‘breathing space’ to develop longer term plans with more promising paybacks. Reeves and Starmer seemed to think they needed to get the economics right, and the politics would follow (it didn’t help that they got the economics quite badly wrong at the Budget); Burnham will be hoping more attractive short-term politics will give time for the economics to come good.

The problem is that he, like Starmer and Reeves before him, faces a double bind of manifesto red lines at home and Trump-induced chaos abroad.  He has already pulled off one amazing transition – from barred by-election candidate to unopposed PM in less than six months: escaping that straitjacket would be a stunning second act.

By Jill Rutter, Senior Fellow, Institute for Government. 

4 min read10 min

The 2024 general election saw the greatest mismatch between the share of seats parties won compared to their share of the vote. Labour received two-thirds of the seats on just a third of the vote, whereas the Greens and Reform UK received just over one per cent of the seats between them for their combined 20 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, millions of votes didn’t count, with over 70 per cent cast – 21.2m – not directly affecting the outcome.

Part of the reason for this is that Westminster’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system is designed for two parties and cannot cope with the multiparty politics we now have. This trend is not going away: the last general election was the first ever where four parties received over 10 per cent of the vote, and we now have five parties polling consistently over 10 per cent. The result is that Parliament is becoming less representative of the way people voted, and the next could be even more unrepresentative.

The link between what people express at the ballot box and the parliaments they get matters, which is why there are mounting calls for a move to proportional representation (PR). Simply put, PR is about making sure Parliament more accurately represents the way the country voted. We would argue that is the strongest foundation for our democracy.

To his credit, Burnham has himself diagnosed this problem, saying people feel politics isn’t working for them and that he backs moving to PR as part of a necessary “rewiring” of Westminster. In this, the new PM reflects growing support for electoral reform, as the British Social Attitudes Survey has recorded a consistent majority for scrapping FPTP in recent years for the first time since it started polling the question in the 1980s.

So, what happens next? Burnham has said he wants to win a mandate for PR by having it in the next Labour manifesto. Here again, he has considerable support within his own party. A solid majority of Labour members back PR, as do eight of the 11 Labour-affiliated trade unions, and there is a growing caucus of MPs now calling for electoral reform that spans all wings and factions of the party, as well as other parties in Parliament.

Next comes the thorny issue of which electoral system to propose. The UK already has decades of experience of proportional systems that maintain a strong constituency link, such as the Single Transferable Vote in Northern Ireland and the Additional Member System in Scotland and London.

Inaction would leave our democracy on a dangerous trajectory

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Burnham has backed a review of the voting system by an independent commission that would then recommend a system of PR for the UK to adopt.

This echoes the Royal Commission that New Zealand had in the 1980s, which laid the foundation for its move to PR from FPTP in 1996. Meanwhile, over 90 Labour MPs have backed the idea of a National Commission on PR.

Whatever the review mechanism, there is an important principle here: that there should be a truly impartial look at how to make our electoral system work better for voters.  

Like any new PM, Burnham will be instantly beset by numerous pressing and grave issues as he settles into Downing Street. Launching a commission need not distract from those priorities. It would establish an independent process while ministers get on with governing.

A manifesto commitment on electoral reform requires substantive policy development. A genuinely independent commission should be given time to conduct the work that would later inform that commitment, taking public and expert evidence, assessing the options and making recommendations against clear democratic principles. 

Time is of the essence for our democracy. We have a dysfunctional electoral system that is producing parliaments that look less and less like how people voted, at a time when trust in politics is at a record low. Inaction would leave our democracy on a dangerous trajectory. 

Burnham has long been one of the most passionate advocates for a politics at Westminster that better represents the whole country. In 2023, he argued: “I don’t believe all people in all places will be equally represented in Westminster until every vote matters.” 

Launching an independent commission in the first 100 days of his premiership to look at how to make Parliament properly reflect the way the country votes would be a crucial first step towards realising that vision.

Darren Hughes is Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society

Jonathan Reynolds – then business secretary, and who has returned to the role under Andy Burnham – lifts molten metal during a visit to the British Steel site in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, April 2025 (PA Images / Alamy)

5 min read28 min

That is why Andy Burnham is right to place reindustrialisation at the heart of his agenda. It is also why I’m part of Labour’s Reindustrialisation Research Group of MPs. Because reindustrialisation is not simply an economic strategy – it is a freedom agenda.

For too long, we have spoken about freedom almost exclusively in negative terms: freedom from regulation, freedom from taxes, freedom from government. Those debates have their place, but they overlook a deeper truth.

Freedom is not simply the absence of restraint. Freedom is the presence of opportunity. It is the freedom to earn a decent wage; to learn a skilled trade; to own a home, raise a family and build a future in the community that shaped you. Above all, it is the freedom to become everything you are capable of becoming.

That freedom has steadily been taken away from too many Red Wall communities. Across the North, the Midlands and Britain’s industrial heartlands, people did not lose ambition. They lost opportunity. They lost industries that had sustained families for generations, and they lost secure, skilled work. And with that went something far more valuable than a payslip: the confidence that if you worked hard, your children would live better lives than you had.

That was never simply an economic loss. It was a loss of freedom. Deindustrialisation did not just close factories – it hollowed out communities, weakened civic institutions and left too many towns dependent upon decisions made hundreds of miles away by people who neither understood their history nor shared their aspirations.

For decades, Britain has attempted to manage that decline. We have redistributed wealth rather than creating it. We have expanded welfare while shrinking productive capacity. We have concentrated investment in already successful places while asking everyone else to be patient. It has not worked.

The answer is not to manage decline more efficiently. It is to reverse it. That is the mission of reindustrialisation. The Reindustrialisation Research Group exists because Britain needs far more than another set of short-term economic interventions. We need a new political economy that makes more things, in more places, with more British workers. One that builds resilience against global shocks, creates good jobs close to where people live and restores agency to communities that have too often felt powerless.

This is not nostalgia but necessity. The world is becoming less globalised and more competitive. Nations are once again thinking seriously about energy security, manufacturing capacity, critical minerals and strategic supply chains. Britain cannot afford to watch from the sidelines while others rebuild their industrial strength, nor can Red Wall communities afford another generation of missed opportunities.

Reindustrialisation means producing more of our own energy, making more of our own steel, building more advanced manufacturing, and investing in defence, nuclear, engineering and new technologies. It means patriotic procurement that backs British workers, affordable energy that allows industry to compete and an active state willing to invest where markets alone will not.

Most importantly, it means spreading that investment fairly across every nation and region of the United Kingdom. Economic growth that benefits only London is not national renewal. It is geographical inequality with a larger GDP. The true measure of success is whether a young person growing up in Hartlepool, Stoke, Wrexham, Grimsby or Bolsover has the same freedom to build a successful life as someone growing up anywhere else in Britain.

That is why education matters. Vocational skills matter. Transport matters. Industrial policy matters. Every apprenticeship, skilled job and factory built expands freedom. Every community connected to opportunity expands freedom.

That is why I joined the Reindustrialisation Research Group. Its mission is not merely to scrutinise policy but to help shape a long-term national strategy capable of transforming Britain’s economy. One that matches the scale of the challenge with the scale of investment required, recognising that Parliament has a responsibility not simply to react to change but to help lead it.

The objective is straightforward: to build an economy that works everywhere, not just somewhere. Working-class communities are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for the chance to contribute again. They do not want dependency. They want dignity. They do not want permanent redistribution. They want productive work. They do not want managed decline. They want national renewal. And they do not simply want freedom from government.

They want the freedom that comes from opportunity: the freedom to work, to earn, to build, to innovate, to stay close to family, to own a home and to believe that hard work will once again be rewarded. That is the promise of reindustrialisation. Not simply stronger economic statistics, but stronger communities. Not simply higher growth, but wider opportunity. Not simply a wealthier Britain, but a freer one.

If we are serious about taking back our freedom, then we must once again become a nation that makes things, builds things and believes in the people who have always been at the heart of Britain’s success. For Red Wall Britain, freedom will not be won through slogans. It will be won through opportunity. And opportunity begins with reindustrialisation.

Jonathan Brash is Labour MP for Hartlepool and a founding member of the Reindustrialisation Research Group

Then, and now.

Scottish politics: where repeated catastrophic failure is just another way to succeed.

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Laurent Warlouzet looks at the evolution of European integration and the role the UK has played from within and outside. 

Britain has been at the core of the European integration process since its inception, despite frequent upheavals. In my recently published book, Liberty, Solidarity and Community: Capitalism and European Integration, I argue that there has always been a discrepancy between the official discourse of British leaders, who portrayed themselves as isolated champions of freedom battling continental Europeans, and the day-to-day reality of Britain’s constant engagement with Europe.

An examination of the British archives from Margaret Thatcher’s leadership (1979–1990), in particular, sheds light on how the Iron Lady sought to steer the single market programme in a free-market direction. She also supported greater cooperation in foreign policy and research and development, and she even lobbied Brussels to provide massive amounts of state aid for a limited number of favoured pet projects, from the Harland & Wolff shipyard to the Nissan plant in Sunderland. Obviously, she was later disappointed by what she perceived as excessive dirigisme emanating from Brussels.

Britain was highly influential in Brussels during its membership of the European Economic Community and later the European Union (1973-2020), notably through its powerful Commissioners, from Roy Jenkins to Leon Brittan and Neil Kinnock. Even after Brexit, once the disputes over the Covid-19 vaccines subsided, Britain has remained influential in Europe, largely thanks to its substantial involvement in supporting Ukraine. Even in trade, the attraction of the single market is so great (for the simple reason that, geographically speaking, Britain is still in Europe!) that it has proved difficult to conclude a comprehensive trade agreement with the United States. Such an agreement would probably require significant divergence from EU single market rules, causing major disruption to UK-EU trade in the process. For example, during talks about a putative US-UK trade agreement under the Premiership of Boris Johnson, the issue of the European Union‘s (in)famous ban of chlorinated chicken, which is permitted in the US, was raised.

Even before Thatcher, the UK had played an instrumental role in establishing the first European organisations: the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which administered the Marshall Plan (1948), and the Council of Europe (1949). Although it initially refused to join the European Communities, it eventually became a member in 1973. Britain failed in its attempts to promote alternatives to the European Communities, such as the 17-country Free Trade Area proposed in 1956 or, failing that, the smaller seven-country European Free Trade Association (EFTA), established in 1960. Yet it remains to be seen whether Britain could revive a new kind of EFTA for the whole of Europe, now that Brussels is embarking on a wave of deregulation. The rise of far-right parties in Europe could hollow out the European Union from within by weakening its regulatory framework and federal judicial system, thereby reviving the model of a free-trade area as the organising principle of the European continent.

Britain is also still an “awkward partner” (an expression coined by a diplomat in 1980) for a European Union that seeks to pursue a more assertive trade and industrial policy. The book shows that Brexit has strengthened the European Union by enabling France to advance long-standing legislative proposals on industrial policy and protectionism that Britain had consistently opposed. Reintegrating Britain into the European Union, or even into some of its initiatives, such as European rearmament or proposals to establish a “European preference” for certain strategic products, would mean greater competition for EU firms. Should Britain be treated as a privileged partner or simply as a friendly neighbour?

Beyond the British case, the book advances two broader arguments. First, capitalism is not simply a contest between free-market advocates and supporters of welfare and environmental policies. There is also a third camp that favours protectionism and a more assertive foreign and defence policy. Accordingly, the governance of capitalism rests on three foundational principles: liberty (the free market), solidarity (social and environmental policies), and community (protectionism and assertive foreign and defence policies).

Second, in seeking to preserve peace while managing growing economic, social, and environmental interdependence, Europeans have chosen a distinctive path: European integration. This project has never been exclusively neoliberal. Rather, it has evolved through a combination of supranational ‘liberty capitalism’ national ‘community capitalism’ (industrial policy), and various forms of ‘solidarity capitalism’ (cohesion policy, the joint procurement and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, environmental policy, and so forth). Drawing extensively on archival sources, the book also highlights the many alternatives considered by European leaders, including a free-trade area, economic planning, a carbon tax (as early as 1992), fiscal harmonisation, joint industrial projects, a common foreign policy, and a European army.

The book highlights some of the major questions for the EU, such as: is it able to cope with the return of power politics, or is it merely a regulated market? How does industrial policy need to shift in response to Trump’s policies? And how else might the European Union evolve to deal with the new world order?

Today, the central challenge is to develop European forms of ‘community capitalism’ – that is, a European approach to industrial policy and strategic protectionism. A major foreign policy challenge for the United Kingdom in the years ahead is whether the evolving European model is one which it wants to participate more deeply in.

By Laurent Warlouzet, Professor, Paris Sorbonne Université. For a longer summary of the book, see here, or the book is available in open-access here.

(dennizn/Alamy)

4 min read1 hr

The observation was simple, but one that might contain a profound truth: no two countries with a branch of McDonalds had ever gone to war with each other.

The writer Thomas L Friedman, who first noticed this phenomenon back in 1996, had been worried he’d missed an example. Might there have been golden arches in Buenos Aires when Argentina seized the Falkland Islands? No, the chain didn’t open in the country until four years after the conflict.

Friedman’s argument was always tongue-in-cheek, but there was a serious theory underneath it: once a country had reached the point where it could sustain a market in McNuggets, it would have a population wealthy and comfortable enough that they wouldn’t support a government that took them into wars of aggression. With the burger giant spreading to more countries, the implication was that one day we might see world peace delivered simply through the medium of Happy Meals.

Thinking about it now, it’s a slice of 90s nostalgia as vivid as an Oasis concert or a Tony Blair speech about education, a reminder of how optimistic that decade felt: the Berlin Wall was down, Nelson Mandela had gone from jail to government, football might even be coming home (to one part of the UK, anyway). A couple of years before Friedman set out his idea, Pulp Fiction had opened with a long riff about the differences between McDonald’s in France and the US. Thanks to the metric system, Americans learned, in Paris a quarter pounder was called a royale with cheese. Although “a Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it le Big-Mac”.

Sadly, the Golden Arches Theory, as it became known, was doomed. In 1999, Nato bombed Belgrade. In response, locals attacked their branch of McDonald’s, possibly having failed to understand the mechanism by which its presence was supposed to keep them out of a war with the US.

Friedman argued that the short duration of that conflict made it an exception that proved the rule: Serbians didn’t want war, they wanted fries and cheeseburgers (and other things that came with the capitalist post-Soviet order). Unfortunately, more challenges were on the way. Israel’s retaliation against Hamas in 2023, and its subsequent attack on Lebanon, put a strain on the relationships between McDonald’s franchises in the Middle East.

A McDonald’s wasn’t necessarily a sign that a society was getting rich enough to be peaceful

But the final failure of the theory came in the very place where it had arguably first taken root. The 1990s had begun with the grand opening of a McDonald’s in Moscow. Tens of thousands queued to get it. It was a news story around the world, with the BBC interviewing a man who ate half a burger and took the other half home for his wife. This was the West winning. And McDonald’s was a Russian hit: by 2022, there were more than 800 branches in the country, employing 62,000 people.

The company’s presence survived a couple of breaches of the Golden Arches Theory: Georgia had a McDonald’s nearly a decade before the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, as did Ukraine when the Crimea was annexed. But the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine was the final straw. McDonald’s closed and then sold up its stake in Russia.

Even in the 90s, Friedman had acknowledged that getting a McDonald’s wasn’t necessarily a sign that a society was getting rich enough to be peaceful. After all, a big part of the chain’s appeal is that the food is cheap. But he’d still hoped that a world of quick, abundant food would be more appealing to people than war. It turned out that the forces that drive people to attack their neighbours were stronger.