SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
London: For a man who always claimed to despise Westminster politics, it was Whitehall’s worst-kept secret that Andy Burnham was desperate to return.
The former mayor of Greater Manchester confirmed he would stand to replace Keir Starmer less than two hours after the British prime minister’s tearful resignation speech on the steps of 10 Downing Street.
Burnham’s path has been cleared by Wes Streeting after the former health secretary abandoned his own leadership ambitions to throw his weight behind the MP for Makerfield.
Burnham could be prime minister by the middle of next month if no other challengers emerge.
Here is what his premiership would entail.
Economy
In an interview with London’s Telegraph last September, Burnham set out his vision for a high-tax, high-spend economy. This included higher council rates on expensive homes in London and the South East, £40 billion ($76 billion) of borrowing to build council houses, income tax cuts for lower earners, as well as a 50 per cent rate for the highest-paid.
Burnham said: “There are people in homes in London that are [worth] double-figure millions paying less council tax than people here. It’s just not justifiable.”
Some parts of that agenda may well live on into his premiership, but others have not survived first contact with the reality of national politics. Under pressure to defend his mandate to lead, Burnham has confirmed he will stick to the promises in Labour’s election-winning manifesto.
That means, if he is to tinker with tax, it is most likely to be on property, an area where the 2024 document was largely silent.
Currently, council rates are based on an assessment of a property’s value in 1991. Burnham did not set out how he would reform the system. A process of revaluing properties would prove costly and time-consuming. It could make adding additional tax bands a more attractive option.
Last year, Burnham praised Angela Rayner in her then role as housing secretary when the government announced a £39 billion ($73.9 billion) investment in affordable housing, with the provision that 60 per cent would be for social rent.
However, he said 100 per cent of the money should have gone to social housing, representing a £15.6 billion increase in spending.
But other plans that he unveiled while still just a local politician will now have to fall by the wayside. The former Manchester mayor has vowed not to break the manifesto pledge not to increase income tax, national insurance, VAT (Britain’s version of the GST) or corporation tax.
It means that his flagship economic policy, to introduce a 10 per cent “starting rate” for lower earners while raising the top level of income tax to 50 per cent, is unlikely to come to pass.
Defence
Burnham has backed the government’s call to increase military spending and has suggested he would find the money from cutting the ballooning welfare budget.
Starmer has vowed to raise defence spending from 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent by 2027, funded through cuts to the international aid budget. Further rises to 3 per cent by the end of the parliament in 2029 and to 3.5 per cent by 2035 have been promised, but with no outline of how they would be funded.
Burnham has said there needs to be a 10-year plan to boost the country’s security, which would include ensuring more defence jobs are created in Britain.
In a June interview, he said he would change public procurement rules so that companies had to demonstrate their “social value”, such as by creating work placements and apprenticeships for young people, to obtain government contracts.
The former Manchester mayor said he was “not squeamish about saying that the plan would be to reduce the welfare bill” to drum up extra money for the armed forces.
Brexit
Burnham has previously been unequivocal in his support for Britain rejoining the European Union. Speaking at a fringe event at the Labour Party’s conference in September, he criticised his party for failing to “call out” the economic damage inflicted by Brexit.
He added: “Long-term, I’m going to be honest, I’m going to say it … I hope in my lifetime I see this country rejoin.”
But more recently he has softened that position, conscious that two-thirds of Makerfield residents voted to leave the EU back in 2016.
Lately, he has moved towards Starmer’s position, backing closer economic ties with Brussels but insisting he does not want to “re-run” the Brexit referendum.
“Britain will be stuck in a permanent rut if we’re just constantly arguing” about the decision to leave, he said in an interview in May.
Immigration
Before the EU referendum in 2016, Burnham warned that free movement of people had “risked the safety of our streets”.
More recently, he defended Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s immigration plans in March as “balancing up fairness, but also security at our borders” in an interview with Sky News.
However, on the same day, he appeared to side with Rayner’s criticisms of the government’s immigration policy as “un-British”. He told BBC Radio 4 that Rayner had been echoing “moral questions”.
Nonetheless, with the threat from Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform UK party at the forefront of his mind, it is unlikely that a Burnham premiership would see a radical softening of Labour’s border policies.
When the latest immigration figures were released in May, showing that net migration dropped to 171,000 last year, Burnham responded by insisting it “needs to fall further”.
Healthcare
Burnham used to say his lifelong ambition was to become health secretary, a passion that began in his early working years as a junior health researcher in the Labour Party.
He served as health secretary during a turbulent period for the previous Labour government in 2009, when he lacked time before the looming 2010 general election to roll out major reforms to social care to better align it with the National Health Service.
However, his white paper on social care remains on a shelf in Whitehall, containing some “pretty radical solutions” for funding the service. The main idea was to attach a 10 per cent levy to people’s estates to pay for their care after their death. It was immediately labelled the “death tax” by the Conservatives.
Burnham supports greater health devolution and giving local government more responsibility for NHS provision. He has cited a 2022 study in The Lancet that found following devolution of health and care, life expectancy rose faster in Greater Manchester than in other parts of the country.
The Telegraph, London
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
