“A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a bar. The barman says, ‘What are you having, Andy?’”
OK—it’s an old joke dating from Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s past (failed) Labour leadership campaigns. He has long been accused of telling people what they want to hear, of being a political chameleon. But no one expected him to elevate it into a principle of government. On tax, nationalization, infrastructure and the European Union, Burnham is, as they say in Manchester, all over the shop.
His predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer, became renowned for policy reversals on issues such as the winter fuel payment for pensioners and attempts to cut the welfare bill. But at least Starmer waited until there was a rebellion in his party before abandoning the policy in question. Andy Burnham has been performing dizzying U-turns even before MPs return from their summer break.
This week alone we learned of two significant policy “amendments". Before he entered Number 10, Burnham promised “the biggest council-house building programme since the postwar period.” This week it emerged that his multibillion-pound house-building program will not be led by councils after all. Instead, councils will be funded along with housing associations, construction companies, and other “strategic partners”—the same bodies that have been building housing in recent years, or failing to.
Burnham’s people insist that many of the first tranche of 70,000 new homes will be for social rent—a little more than half of them, in fact. But the whole point of his council-house promise was that elected local authorities would be in charge of this building bonanza, as they were after the Second World War. They clearly will not.
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