After being warned by Sir Tony Blair in a 5,600-word essay not to drag the country back to the 1970s, Andy Burnham has, of course, this evening vowed to do exactly that. In a bid to burnish his anti-Blairite credentials and show Labour’s lefties that he is truly one of them, the Greater Manchester Mayor published a 1,500-word riposte to Sir Tony in The Times. To spare you the pain of reading it: he calls for more public control of, and state intervention in, everything. And he rails against ‘the direction set by Thatcher’.
Burnham insists that the political turmoil plaguing Britain, and the collapse in living standards after the 2008 crash, are down to deregulation. His comprehensive evidence that big government works? The resounding success, he says, of state control of buses in Manchester.
Taking a big old pop at Sir Tony, he wrote:
The lesson from Greater Manchester is that you can’t just leave it to the market, as Tony’s essay seems to suggest. If you want higher growth in areas that don’t have it, you need strong public control and direction over both the investment strategy and the enablers of a more productive economy, such as transport, energy, water, education and housing.
Remembering that Reform is breathing down his neck in Makerfield, Burnham concedes that Labour’s most electorally successful leader of all time is right that the small boats have got to stop. But, remembering too that he must pander to the left at all costs, the mayor attributed that demand to the constituency he is seeking to represent. He said he wants to crack down on immigration because ‘many people in Makerfield are calling for much firmer control’. He also railed against ‘outsourced contracts that seek the cheapest accommodation in some of the UK’s most deprived communities’ is not the basis for a fair asylum system’.
If the by-election polls are anything to go by, the public should strap in as Burnham prepares to lock the country in and banish us to the 1970s. What a hoot…
Comments