In the run-up to his coup against Sir Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham was sold to wavering Labour MPs as the ultimate ‘man of the people’. It was Burnham, his supporters argued, who ‘gets it’ in a way that the out-of-touch London lawyer Sir Keir simply did not. Only Burnham understood the frustrations, fears and hopes of the swathes of voters turning to Nigel Farage for answers. Only he could win back traditional Labour supporters in former heartlands from Reform. Yet Burnham this week demonstrated just how strikingly the reality has failed to live up to the sell.
In an interview with GB News yesterday, the Prime Minister appeared to think it politically savvy to suggest that he would spare working-class communities the burden of illegal migrants by dispersing them to more affluent areas. ‘We cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers,’ he said. ‘I do believe all parts of the country need to work, to play their part.’
The man who rode into Downing Street on a platform of being connected to the country appears too ideologically blinded to see the obvious
That last sentence was a glaring indication of Burnham’s disconnect from the public mood. Voters do not want illegal migrants sent to already struggling and deprived working-class towns. But nor do they want them housed in plush, leafy villages like Piddington. Working class or middle class, it does not matter: the public do not want them anywhere in this country. With the exception of some out-of-touch Green supporters, they want the arrivals to end altogether.
There is no collective ‘part’ for the country to play because these are not desperate evacuees escaping, for instance, Nazi persecution in Europe. There is no moral obligation for Britain to take in thousands of undocumented economic migrants arriving from France. As much of the country sees it – and polling shows – there is instead a moral imperative to protect Britain’s borders from those entering illegally. This should be glaringly obvious. Yet the man who rode into Downing Street on a platform of being connected to the country appears too ideologically blinded to see it.
Of course, it is not only Burnham who is failing to understand this. Home Office minister Anna Turley was sent out on the broadcast round this morning to trumpet the closure of 13 asylum hotels, as though the country were expected to rejoice that their occupants had merely been moved from one form of inappropriate accommodation to another. Asked by the BBC about the Prime Minister’s promise to put more pressure on middle-class communities, Turley responded: ‘This is about fairness. We won’t be asking anyone to take more than they can – it’s about their fair share.’ Again, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding: for many voters, the only fair share in this situation is zero.
Part of the strategy deployed by Burnham’s team upon taking power was to drown out the troublesome immigration debate with a flurry of cost-of-living announcements. In fairness, it worked during his first week and for part of his second. Unfortunately for Labour, that plan was disrupted by the inconvenient arrival of a 230-seater mega-dinghy, which has forced the issue back to the top of the political agenda. There are a handful of Labour MPs who understand just how fed-up people are, whether they live in Blackpool, Makerfield or a sleepy Oxfordshire village. The question now is whether Burnham can ever bring himself into line with the public on immigration – and, if so, how quickly.
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