𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

With any new Prime Minister I think it’s right to give them a fair crack of the whip. Are they going to act in the country’s best interests and make the difficult decisions required?

Or are they going to buckle under party pressure, toe the party line and revert to type? Sadly, we already know which it’ll be for Andy Burnham – and it’s clear for all to see. As well as migration, I think many Brits will agree that the benefits bill, and the wider benefits culture in the UK, is in desperate need of intervention.

But he has so far appeared unable to tackle it, and it’s putting the country in grave danger – quite literally. In one astonishing recent remark, he even put handouts ahead of defence.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch asked Burnham to commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence by 2030, suggesting he make savings by cutting housing benefits and reimposing the two-child benefit cap.

His reply?

National security can’t come at the expense of social security.

Heck, even his former adviser Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist, said Burnham’s “Achilles’ heel” is that he’s running a “traditional tax and spend socialist government with better TikTok videos.”

We might laugh at the social media stuff but in today’s world, that’s precisely how elections are won.

It’s less about examining policy and more about likes on Facebook: but we absolutely mustn’t be seduced or we’ll all be made to pay.

Andy Burnham may have only been in office a couple of months, but in my book, that’s enough. He’s shown his cards and is already a busted flush.