Andy Burnham has been Prime Minister for less than a week, and in that time he has already proved why he is unsuited to the job. It began with cutting VAT on electricity bills. The Prime Minister told the country this cut would be funded by savings from a digital ID scheme that Labour was forced to strip back after our campaign against it. But that scheme was unfunded and the money never allocated, as Labour's own Darren Jones, the minister responsible, confirmed. So £850million of tax cuts rests on a saving that does not exist.
Then came the £2 bus fare cap, a Conservative policy that Labour scrapped when they pushed the cap up to £3, over our objections. Restoring a good policy is welcome; restoring it with £454 million that has not been found is not. Then there is the £340million to end rough sleeping, with no indication of where a single penny comes from. And all of this before the £5billion hole Keir Starmer left in the Defence Investment Plan that Burnham must now fill.
Several announcements in one week, and not a single line of a funding plan between them. That is before you even reach the more expansive and more expensive policies Burnham is already floating such as the £18billion a year price tag for a National Care Service.
The fundamental problem is this: Andy Burnham and his team have arrived in office without a plan. Without a plan for what to do, and, just as importantly, without a plan for how to do it. So everything they announce falls apart the moment it meets reality.
None of this is new. It is the same failure that defined the two years before it. Keir Starmer had four years in opposition to write a plan for government and did not. Morgan McSweeney has admitted as much. A government that arrives without a plan inevitably takes bad decisions, and that is a large part of why Starmer's government collapsed. Andy Burnham is repeating those mistakes.
Under Starmer cutting Winter Fuel Payments remains a key example of a foolish decision. Officials had pressed for that cut for years, and a Prime Minister with any political instinct would have seen what it meant to strip that support from 10 million pensioners during a cost of living crisis. Starmer did not. He made the cut and only reversed it under Conservative pressure.
But the real lesson of the past week is not about Andy Burnham. It is about Labour. Labour always display the same instinct: tax more, spend more, borrow more. An approach that the man at top fully embraces. Under Starmer, Pat McFadden the Work and Pensions Secretary summed up in private what his colleagues wouldn’t say in public, complaining that too many internal Labour meetings he attended came down to "who can we tax to pay benefits to others."
Families should be under no illusion about the autumn. The tax burden already stands at a record level after two Labour Budgets raised taxes by £36billion and then £26billion more. Inflation has sat above target for 19 months. Unemployment has climbed to 5 per cent and youth unemployment has sky rocketed, the highest in a decade. Unfunded spending will now see Labour reach for even more tax hikes.
But there is another way. That is to control public spending especially the welfare bill. To get people off benefits and into work. By doing this taxes can be reduced and the deficit too.
The problem though is that Andy Burnham does not understand these simple economic realities and has also shown in his first week that for him the numbers do not add up.
