Burnham’s opening speech as Prime Minister leaned heavily on familiar grievances, recycling decades-old criticisms of deindustrialisation without offering anything genuinely new.
Oasis cautioned against looking back in anger, yet Manchester’s other favourite son built his first prime ministerial address on what critics are calling hackneyed old talking points.
Britain has cycled through as many prime ministers in the last decade as it did across the previous 37 years, making the spectacle feel wearyingly routine for many voters.
But familiarity should not breed complacency, and a Prime Minister pledging sweeping changes that no one explicitly voted for deserves serious scrutiny regardless of precedent.
Burnham’s promise to undo “four decades of neoliberalism” is, as commentator Alys Denby argues, little more than a tired socialist talking point dressed up as a fresh mandate.
That promise becomes harder to take seriously given that Burnham himself sat in Cabinet for three of those forty years, making him partly a product of the era he now attacks.
Neoliberalism, much like “trickle down,” is a term used only by its critics, never by its supposed advocates, which makes it a convenient but ultimately hollow political weapon.
The tax burden currently sits at its highest level since the aftermath of the second world war, with debt approaching 100 per cent of GDP, hardly the hallmarks of unrestrained free markets.
On the steps of Downing Street, Burnham declared he would “bring life’s essentials back under public control to make them more affordable,” a claim that fundamentally misunderstands how inflation works.
It is competition, not state control, that drives down prices, and the public sector’s trailing productivity is already estimated to be costing the economy 80 billion pounds a year.
Nationalised utilities must compete for capital against other government priorities, and as Denby pointedly notes, water investment will never win out over welfare spending in that battle.
Burnham’s own record in Manchester actually undermines his statist instincts, with Oxford Economics attributing that city’s growth to a stable environment for private investment and a shift toward services-led employment.
That formula, as Denby observes, sounds considerably more “neoliberal” than anything Burnham appears willing to acknowledge from the steps of Downing Street.
A confiscatory renationalisation regime risks reversing precisely the kind of progress in Manchester of which the former Mayor is rightly and justifiably proud.
Keir Starmer fell because he mismanaged the Labour Party, and the concern now is that Burnham, playing the greatest hits, may simply be repeating the mistakes of his predecessor.
Britain genuinely needs hope and economic renewal, and there is goodwill for any leader who can deliver it, but recycled grievances are unlikely to be the foundation for lasting progress.