Politics: Burnham has no right

By Richard North - June 30, 2026

Call me old-fashioned but I prefer politicians, when making formal speeches, to wear suits, with shirt and tie. I don’t go for this casual “Zelensky” look and intensely dislike the crew-neck T-shirt. It is totally unbecoming for a senior politician.

Sadly, though, with Burnham, that is probably the lowest order of my dislikes which, with very little effort at all, could inflate to a loathing which matches my feelings of the soon-to-be departing Starmer.

The proximate cause at this stage is The Replacement’s latest and only speech since he was elected at Makerfield, where he has set out his broad vision which will guide his government when he becomes prime minister – which is looking increasingly certain.

Speaking at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, the man completely lacks humility and any sense of the fragility of his mandate, for someone who wasn’t even an MP at the last general election and now is about to take office in a move that has all the appearances of a bloodless coup.

What raises the hackles is the high-octane hubris, where the man proposes to set up a new Downing Street team based in Manchester and labelled “No 10 North” which will, he asserts: “oversee the biggest rebalancing of power our country has ever seen”.

Given that Starmer’s regime was elected in the 2024 general election on the thinnest of mandates, with the votes of only 20 percent of the registered electorate, Burnham – now one stage removed from that election – cannot even begin to claim that he has any democratic authority to undertake anything so grand as “the biggest rebalancing of power our country has ever seen”.

His “key message” in this contest is a commitment to what he calls “devolving power to local communities” away from senior civil servants in Whitehall, which Burnham claims, had “blocked” progress in Manchester. By this means, he pledges to redistribute power across the UK in an effort to “drive good growth in every postcode”.

“It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down – it can only be nurtured from the bottom up”, he told his selected audience in Manchester, although – true to form – did not spell out his plan in any detail.

Thus, we do not know what powers will be given to different areas, but Burnham suggests that regions would see “greater public control of essential services” such as water, energy and transport, while London could have more say over education and housing.

With that, it seems, we are back on the regionalisation schtick, covered briefly in Labour’s 2024 election manifesto and given form by Angela Rayner’s English Devolution White Paper, published on 16 December 2024.

But, as I wrote at the time, Labour’s plans were built on a longstanding process which went back to the Blair regime and John Prescott’s abortive regionalisation programme.

This had more than a tinge of EU influence in it but was abandoned after North-east voters rejected the idea of a regional assembly in a referendum in November 2004.

However, the fact that the idea was so roundly rejected by a popular vote, I wrote, has not meant that successive governments have abandoned it. Progressively, we have seen the imposition of a series of combined authorities, each with an elected mayor planted at the apex, in a grotesque parody of democracy, sold to a largely indifferent electorate under the pretence of devolution.

Yet this form of regionalisation by the back door has been piecemeal and is inevitably slow. But, by the end of 2024, we got to the stage where Starmer’s Regime was declaring its hand and planning for a rapid completion of the process, part of what it called euphemistically “devolution by default”, to disguise the compulsion built into the plan.

With the fall of Angela Rayner, we haven’t heard much more about her White Paper, although the steady march of back-door regionalisation continues apace, with the formation of combined authorities. Burnham, it would appear, wants to go further, arguing yesterday that distributing power across the country would “give Britain the circuit-breaker it needs”.

The new No 10 North unit would, he said, be the tool to achieve this, making “power flow” across the country and supporting regions in three tasks – reform of essential utilities, reindustrialisation and regeneration.

Elsewhere, we have the Telegraph pick up on a different aspect of the speech which is published in full in the Manchester Evening News.

This is Burnham’s reference to No 10 North being the nerve centre for “a rewired Britain”, which has Gordon Raynor writing under the headline: “Burnham’s plan to ‘rewire’ Britain could short-circuit the economy”, adding in his sub-head: “PM-in-waiting asks for blank cheque to deliver ‘biggest change in our lifetimes’ without explaining how much it will cost”.

Burnham’s “nerve centre”, he says, “will be the conduit through which we redistribute power and resources across the UK”. He will have it coordinating “all parts of government, at national and local level, to agree a long-term economic strategy and help all places set new growth ambitions”.

The promise to “rewire Britain”, writes Raynor, “was written to catch the eye of headline writers” but, he observes, “anyone who has had their house rewired knows what an expensive business that is”.

Extending the analogy, he argues that before you get an electrician to start work, you make sure you know how much it is going to cost, then noting that Burnham is asking to be put in charge of the country without even quoting for the job.

Nowhere in his “economic” speech, Raynor says, did he explain how he will run the economy. Will taxes go up to pay for the rewire? Will he increase borrowing? Will he cut spending on welfare to pay for it all? We are none the wiser.

Effectively, therefore Burnham wants us to give him a blank cheque to set about “the biggest change in our lifetimes to the way the country is run” and then give him 10 years to do it, the latter figure plucked from the speech.

“I have had 10 years of fighting the Whitehall machine – blocking this place’s progress – the progress of people here, and I am simply not prepared to accept the same for any area coming after Greater Manchester”, says Burnham.

He adds: “The whole of Whitehall will now be required to get behind our places and work together with them to make quicker, more joined-up decisions. Ours will be a 10-year mission to raise living standards across the land”.

And that is the ultimate in high octane hubris. Burnham is assuming that Labour, under his leadership, will win at least the next two general elections. As it stands, though – given the current longevity of prime ministers – he will be lucky to last 10 months, much less 10 years.

To add to what little he did tell us, Burnham could have elaborated under questioning from the journalists attending the speech. Unusually for such a major political speech, though, Burnham refused questions, bolting out of the side door of the museum to a waiting car, as soon as he had finished his speech.

Unsurprisingly, Pete observes. “I’ve yet to come across anyone who isn’t a Labour activist who seriously thinks Burnham has any answers”.

“I strongly suspect”, he moots, “that his already tanking popularity will tank even further in the coming weeks, and could easily end up as unpopular as Starmer”.

“People”, he concludes, “may even come to regard a bland ideas-free bureaucrat as preferable to an incompetent left-wing populist. I’d say that was a safe bet. While we cannot say for certain what Burnhamism is, we can be certain that we don’t want it”.

But not only don’t we want it, Burnham has no right to deliver it. As an imposter in the office of prime minister, he has shattered the democratic process and with it the social contract.

Burnham’s plans, such as they are, are so lacking in legitimacy that we will owe his parasitic government – when it is formed – absolutely nothing, We will owe it neither loyalty nor obedience.