By Ben Chacko
LONDON: Andy Burnham passed his 100th day in office as the Britain’s Prime Minister on Tuesday, October 27. As we prepare to hear his first Budget, it is a moment to reflect on his progress. His ambitions could hardly be more vaulting. As he campaigned to be leader of the Labour Party, and hence Prime Minister, Burnham pledged to reverse the “40-year wrong turn” the country had taken, to end neoliberalism and to give back to voters in places like his Makerfield constituency the old Labour Party they had once known.
So far, he has come up short, despite some welcome small-scale announcements, of which there were several more today.
On the bigger issues there has been little, if any, change. The new government has maintained its backing for the Ukraine war, and for the immense military spending increases that are set to beggar the country for years ahead.
Burnham has obsessively promoted reintegration with the European Union — a subject about which he cannot apparently stop speaking — and even floated rejoining the bloc, the opposite to his indications to people in Makerfield. As stated here before, this alone risks rupturing Labour’s base of electoral support all over again.
The welcome indication of a new direction in relation to Palestine from Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has since been substantially undermined by Burnham’s commitment to maintaining the proscription of Palestine Action and his over-the-top response to the new Green policy on the conflict, to the point of trying to upend local government arrangements across the country.
We still await the promised action to take Thames Water and other failing utilities under public control. But we do have the same iron-clad commitment to the Treasury’s rules, despite all the Prime Minister’s talk of standing up to the bond market speculators.
This before a Budget from which nearly all radical measures have been briefed as excluded. He has instead leant heavily on promoting regional devolution, with new powers for local leaders, including the metro mayors among whom he was once numbered.
There are positive aspects to this, as well as dangers of entrenching regional inequalities, but it is hard to see how dispersing political authority will stimulate economic growth if capital remains concentrated in private, profit-maximising, hands.
All this indicates that Burnham has either underestimated the measures that would be needed to translate his purported aspirations into practice, or that he did not mean them in the first place.
These deficiencies are covered by a political operation superior to Keir Starmer’s, and indeed a personality far more appealing to the public.
Yet even these have only produced a modest polling bounce. Even the best surveys for Labour leave it adrift of the modest share of 2024, and at levels which would have been regarded as disastrous at any point over the last 80 years.
In truth, Labour’s prospects of a further Commons majority appear to rest entirely on the more-or-less even split among right-wing voters between the Tories and Reform.
Should those voters start to consolidate around Kemi Badenoch’s belligerent Conservatives — the more likely pole for such a consolidation as Reform remains mired in mounting scandals and declining support — the polling would suddenly look a good deal less benign.
So far Burnham has ruled out an early general election, and it is hard to see the case for putting an immense Commons majority in gratuitous jeopardy.
But if he is not to leave Labour at the mercy of a repaired rift on the right he needs to step up delivery on his original stated agenda, as well as end British backing for the menacing war drive. The next 100 days must be better. (IPA Service)
Courtesy: Morning Star
