𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Are you getting bored of Andy Burnham yet? I am, and we might have 10 whole years of him. That’s the main takeaway from the ‘World According to Burnham’ today. Unable to question the incoming Prime Minister, the humble members of the world press find ourselves forced to glean whatever kernels of knowledge as to his wishes from tea leaves and tarot cards.

I might have to start learning chiromancy as I advance my methods of research into the indeterminable will of our future leader. Today, he stood in Manchester and cooed to his entranced followers a speech that was as empty as he is breathtakingly naïve.

His hypnotised audience – mostly Labour supporters and MPs jostling for a new jag – lapped it all up. I am not so convinced. Most mayors occupy a space almost entirely unique in our country, wielding great power over their locale, dispensing vast sums of other people’s hard-earned money, and being almost entirely without a watchful eye on how they act.

The egotistical hubris this spawned was on full show today. Indeed, near to where the metropolitan messiah purred his sweet nothings was a display case carrying a garment he once wore. I wish that wasn’t true – but alas it is. There, for all to see, was his jacket in a museum case, for supplicants to gawp at. Perhaps we should place it in the nearest A&E and see if it heals the sick?

Of course, he refused to take questions. Indeed, many reporters were sent to the back of the room – as far away from him as possible.

Some seem to think this is acceptable. That the man who would be king lacks a mandate, and refuses to elucidate as to what he might do to this country.

I disagree. Burnham has form, running away from this paper when asked if he would betray the Brexit referendum. Today, his entire speech was little more than a self-absorbed diatribe appealing to everyone to just be a bit more like him.

But it said almost nothing. We saw no proclamations about what his vacuous pledges to see “good growth in every postcode” and to put “place” first would actually cost us all. It was as if someone had opened up the sluice gate on the slurry pit of soundbites.

Being a Mayor is a fundamentally different kettle of fish than being Prime Minister. A mayor splashes to cash, has limited revenue-raising powers, and does not need to fight competing national departments. The job he’s warming himself up for is the one that has to make those trade-offs, and nothing today suggests he’s reckoned with that.

Instead, we have been treated to a smorgasbord of nonsense, written by the think tankers of his team, and filled with such empty platitudes as a country “lifted back up”. He intends to do this – we understand – solely by changing how we “do” politics, and handing more power to the utterly uninspiring and drab display of metropolitan mayors we are already inflicted with.

We are in effect being asked to hand more power and control over our lives ever to the very same clique of people who left us in this mess in the first place. The Blairite consensus that handing power to a motley collection of bureaucrats with vague notions of stakeholder democracy and an ever more invasive and poorly run state will somehow help.

What Burnham is really offering is top-down socialism with a smile. Devolution doesn’t shrink the state; it does quite the opposite. His vane “No.10 North” simply relocates power rather than disperses it. It is as if an A level politics class obsessed with the appearance of governing rather than the actuality of what it means was allowed a little too close to the levers of power.

This is not a serious blueprint for governing a country in decline. This was a hodge-podge of pleasant noise that, in effect, was promising to do things, lots of things, nice things. Yet the problems this country faces are enormous.

Law and order is eroding at almost every level, and rebuilding it means serious money for police, courts and prisons. The state grows more expensive by the year, while the workforce paying for it continues to shrink. We have an energy crisis, a poverty crisis, conflicts multiplying abroad and armed forces begging for cash, and more than a million young people out of work – on top of housing nobody can afford, child poverty, and a generation that feels detached from the society around it.

You don’t fix any of that with a slogan and a second postcode for the guy in charge.

This myopic mayor has done little to present a plan that contains nothing of note, explains little has to how it will be achieved, and fundamentally doesn;t address the structural problems our country faces. We may be bored with Burnham already, but the harm he is set to do to this country by focusing entirely on the wrong things will be extremely hard to ignore.