Burnham to Channel 4: Reverse 40 Years of Thatcherism, Bring Utilities Back
Andy Burnham used an interview with Channel 4 News this weekend to call for the UK to go down a “completely” different path to the past 40 years, involving putting “more things back under stronger public control”. “Margaret Thatcher deregulated the whole country,” he said. “The country gave away its control of the basic things that people depend upon every day. And that was a big mistake, in my view.” Josh Simons said in an interview on Sunday that public ownership of utilities — energy, water, social housing — could be “an important part of” the Burnham pitch to voters in Makerfield and beyond.
“Energy, water, social housing — those things that are the basics of our lives that we all depend on — have gotten so expensive,” Simons said in an interview. “And one of the reasons why they’ve gotten so expensive — not the only, but one of the reasons why they’ve gotten so expensive — is that we privatise a lot of them, and often the bills that we pay go to the shareholders.” The Burnham economic programme, as drawn by Channel 4 and the BBC, deliberately combines a Labour-left utility programme with a Burnham-Mayor delivery pitch — the explicit alternative to both Reeves’s fiscal restraint and Streeting’s liberalism. The Greater Manchester mayor is expected to be formally confirmed as the Labour candidate for Makerfield next week.