Andy Burnham’s Cringe Britannia

So ends the most boring coup in British political history. Andy Burnham is our new prime minister, Keir Starmer’s leaving van is on its way to north London, and we’re all left wondering whether this latest round of musical chairs will make the blindest bit of difference.

Time was, PMs were ousted mid-term over crises, over defining political questions, over something of consequence. This time around we seem to have something more akin to a summer makeover – a Paul Smith glow-up of a Labour Party totally out of ideas.

Burnham has certainly reset the vibes. The expensive, donor-purchased suits are out. (The new PM reportedly intends to keep it smart-casual when he’s not addressing parliament.) Starmer’s embattled supply teacher has been replaced by Burnham’s Radio 6 Music dad. But politically speaking, we seem destined for more of the same dysfunction, idiocy and anti-democracy.

That Starmer came to power when he did – just two years ago, though it has aged us all immeasurably – is faintly tragicomic looking back on it. A creature of the liberal-left, cosmopolitan, eco-obsessed state reigning over a people smarting from broken borders, sky-high energy bills and a not-so-sneaking suspicion that the elites regard them as scum. A nation looking for inspiration and leadership lumbered with a man who would struggle to gin up a biddable scout group.

It was never going to end well. Starmer proved himself psychologically incapable of doing what is necessary to set Britain on a more prosperous, self-confident path. For doing so would mean dispensing with Net Zero, mass immigration, international ‘human rights’ law – the panoply of failed orthodoxies from which our political classes continue to draw their phoney moral superiority.

Will Burnham be any different? Will he ’eck. He spoke in his brief, cliché-ridden address outside Downing Street today about finally moving on from Thatcherism, apparently convinced that a few more public-private bus networks would represent a radical new economic model. In truth, he is an unthinking adherent of the real ruling-class ideology of our time – the Third Way worship of technocracy over democracy, multiculturalism over nationhood, and environmental piety over economic growth.

The contradiction is glaring. Burnham is simultaneously posing as a steady pair of hands and a decisive break with how politics has been done since the 1980s. When he spoke outside No10, he had one eye on the markets, jittery at any perceived ‘lurch to the left’, and another on his backbench MPs, for whom virtue-signalling and infinity welfare is now the closest thing they have to an ideology.

Thus, he spoke one minute of ‘regain[ing] our stability once again’, and the next of a ‘circuit breaker for Britain, bringing forward the biggest changes in the last 40 years’. Those asking how he intends to achieve either were left in suspense. Apparently, he’ll set out his actual policies in the coming days, presumably once he’s had a chance to come up with some. He has pledged to end rough sleeping, though – something he ultimately failed to do as mayor of Greater Manchester.

The speech was bland in rhetoric and starved of any detail, and purposefully so. At least we were spared the bopping along to New Order and Smash Hits-style social-media interviews that have accompanied his coronation so far. Welcome to Andy Burnham’s Cringe Britannia, where we know more about his guitar-playing prowess than what he actually intends to do with the country; where Things Will Only Get Worse, only to a more Madchester-infused soundtrack.

Constitutionally speaking, the mood music is all he is really allowed to change. Given he has no mandate of his own, and says he won’t call an early election, Burnham is, for now, doomed to tinker around the edges of Starmerism, all while pretending otherwise. So he won’t lift the ban on new oil and gas projects, but he will try his darndest to speed up the existing ones. We’re told he will scrap Starmer’s hated digital-ID scheme, but he is minded to ban VPNs. A new dawn this isn’t.

All this reminds us of the man’s total lack of democratic legitimacy. Only the good people of Makerfield have had an opportunity to vote for him, in last month’s by-election, which ultimately sent Starmer packing. Burnham didn’t even stand for parliament on Labour’s 2024 manifesto. He stood unopposed in the Labour leadership race, too, meaning even party members didn’t get to have their say. Now he comes to power with parliament in recess until September, sparing him any democratic scrutiny for his first month-and-a-half in post. At least the media have gotten over their initial bout of giddiness and are starting to ask tougher questions of our unelected PM.

I bet it won’t even take six weeks for the shine to come off him. Before long, to paraphrase Burnham’s beloved Smiths, the country will be looking back on Our Andy’s coup and wondering, what difference did it make?

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.