Burnham’s debut: ‘A spendthrift prime minister who wants to please everyone’

Andy Burnham’s first Prime Minister’s Questions began with a change in appearance. The former mayor of Manchester put aside his open-collar jacket and appeared in the traditional Westminster style, wearing a dark suit and neatly tied blue tie.

“I want this country to believe in itself again, and I want people to have hope,” Burnham told Parliament. “That is what this government will do.” He said Britain had made a series of “wrong decisions” since the 1980s: political power had become centralized, economic power had been privatized, and the country had been deindustrialized. Austerity then weakened local councils, he said, while Brexit deepened the damage.

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I want this country to believe in itself again, and I want people to have hope.

Burnham argued that power must be distributed more widely. Regions and local authorities should have the resources to drive growth and reindustrialize, he said. His first measure would give regional mayors more authority over education and tax policy, a plan he had announced in July.

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A monument to the failure of privatization.

The prime minister also promised greater state control over the privatized water industry, which has faced repeated negative headlines over the routine discharge of wastewater into rivers and the sea. He called the sector “a monument to the failure of privatization.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch attacked Burnham as “a spendthrift prime minister who wants to please everyone, but does not know where the money will come from.” Burnham deferred the fiscal argument until the budget is presented at the end of October. He confirmed plans to raise defense spending from 2.3% to 3% of economic output, but gave no details on how the increase would be financed, saying only that his government would be based on fiscal responsibility.

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A spendthrift prime minister who wants to please everyone, but does not know where the money will come from.