Burnham: “Serious Rewiring”, Transfer Money from “Bloated National State”
In the same Leeds speech, Burnham set out the affirmative case for what a Burnham-led Labour Party would do: a transfer of money and resources from “a bloated national state” to “a malnourished local one”. “We have hollowed out councils and have created an unaccountable state, where too much is delivered by outsourced agencies outside local councillors’ control,” Burnham said. The country, he said, needed “serious rewiring”: a vote for him would be a “vote to change Labour”, and Labour itself needed to change to “regain people’s trust”. The framing positions the Burnham leadership pitch on devolution and public ownership rather than the EU question.
Combined with Burnham’s weekend Channel 4 News interview — in which he argued for “more things back under stronger public control” and called Thatcher’s deregulation programme “a big mistake” — the Leeds pitch is the clearest articulation yet of a substantively redistributionist economic programme. Josh Simons, the Makerfield MP vacating the seat, said in an interview on Sunday that public ownership of utilities — energy, water, social housing — could be central to the Burnham offer. Business and markets are “adopting the brace position” in case the Burnham programme proves to be a Rayner-aligned redistributionist one; David Lammy’s firm Sky News intervention this morning and the cabinet ring-fence around Starmer through Monday have, however, brought ten-year gilt yields modestly off Friday’s 5.18% close.