Some interesting comments about the levers of power from former No 10 insiders - Burnham may find those levers have been softened to the consistency of noodles.
Will Andy Burnham spark an exodus of London’s middle classes?
Andy Burnham has had it easy, at least compared with what will hit him when he walks through the door of No 10.
“He’s going to get the shock of his life when he sees how degraded and different it is from what it was when he left,” says former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara. “People who haven’t been in government since 2016 are really clueless about how different it is. People feel powerless.”...
Yet Burnham has largely still to answer how he will pay for his radical reforms. Having broadly committed to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules, he has ruled out ramping up borrowing and has shown few signs of making significant welfare savings.
So that leaves a third possible option — tax rises. “If he does follow through on some of his tax and spend rumours, we might actually see an exodus of people... the middle class essentially starting to go,” says Cleo Watson, deputy chief-of-staff to Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister.
Andy Burnham has had it easy, at least compared with what will hit him when he walks through the door of No 10.
“He’s going to get the shock of his life when he sees how degraded and different it is from what it was when he left,” says former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara. “People who haven’t been in government since 2016 are really clueless about how different it is. People feel powerless.”...
Yet Burnham has largely still to answer how he will pay for his radical reforms. Having broadly committed to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules, he has ruled out ramping up borrowing and has shown few signs of making significant welfare savings.
So that leaves a third possible option — tax rises. “If he does follow through on some of his tax and spend rumours, we might actually see an exodus of people... the middle class essentially starting to go,” says Cleo Watson, deputy chief-of-staff to Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister.
But we already know this - so do the Labour MPs who shoved Burnham into No 10.
3 comments:
"has shown few signs of making significant welfare savings." Delicately put.
1976 was fifty years ago. Burnham is 56. So he doesn't know what he's talking about.
dearieme - yes, the word 'welfare' could be left out and it would still be too delicately put.
He still has a few years to learn what he's talking about but he seems to be like Corbyn - people who never seem to learn much after they learned everything in their teenage years.
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