Andy Burnham has arrived in Downing Street promising a new economic model and vowing to be a circuit breaker for Britain. But behind his promise lies another old Labour scheme of more intervention, more control and more trust in the state than in the market.
Burnham says he wants to “combat the bad turns of the 1980s”, but the decades following Margaret Thatcher’s essential pro-market reforms were the last time Britain saw real, sustained growth. His words reflect the familiar Labour belief that the country can be made better from the top down, if only the right people are in charge. They point to plans for a bigger state and meddling in the market – a recipe for disaster. Having grown up in the Eastern bloc, I can tell you that this kind of statism is a discarded government model that has never worked anywhere, never will work anywhere and has taken several big and small countries down with it while causing untold suffering to hundreds of millions.
Just like all the exceptionalist socialists before, Burnham promises to “put life’s essentials back under stronger public control” and use them to give families “breathing space”. This doesn’t sound reassuring. This is the language of socialism, demonstrating Burham’s government will be no different to previous Labour governments that thought they knew better than the market. If we look back, no Labour government has ever created growth and prosperity for our country.
Its turns in government can be summarized by the note left by Liam Byrne, Labour’s outgoing Chief Secretary of the Treasury under Gordon Brown to his successor David Laws in May 2010. It read: “Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck!” Thus, this Government has nothing to point to from its party’s history to make anyone trust its competence. Elected on a protest vote two years ago by around 34% of the electorate, the lowest national vote share cast for any party that has gone to form a majority government in the post-war era, it has now installed a Leader that was elected by a majority of 9,231votes in Makerfield where they had a hard time deciding between Burnham and Rob Kenyon of Reform.
One would think that with such wobbly credibility, the new Prime Minister would appoint a cabinet of competence, trust and proven track record. Instead, he appoints Angela Rayner as Housing Secretary, a position she had to resign in September 2025 for failing to pay stamp duty on her second home. And there is more. Louise Haigh, resigned from Starmer’s Government when it became known in September 2024 that she had pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation in 2014. Now she is back as First Secretary of State and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. A convicted fraudster will be one the Prime Ministers principal coordinators of Cabinet Office policy, national security policy, Civil Service and state reform among other duties, and most fascinatingly she will be responsible for propriety, ethics and public appointments.
In May 2025, during a BBC Radio 4 program. Lucy Powell referred to discussing grooming gangs as “…getting that dog whistle out”. She is now Burnham’s Education Secretary. But the Prime Minister was just getting started. Jonathan Reynolds exaggerated for years about being a solicitor, including in a speech in Parliament in 2014, and only corrected that description of himself in public media lasty year when a scandal erupted over the claim. Now he is our Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade. These choices point to a government appointed to appease disjointed interests in the parliamentary Labour Party, to generate loyalty to the Prime Minister and not to truly return Britain to growth and prosperity.
What Burnham seems to not be able to comprehend is that Britain is in a tough economic situation precisely because the previous governments went too far left. So, overregulating the markets won’t improve Britain, it will weaken it further. Take housing as the perfect example. Prices are rising because we don’t have enough of them. But what does the Government do? It chokes off new buildings with ridiculous planning restrictions, high taxes, a thicket of red tape and economic expulsion of the very people who build new homes and give jobs to those who buy them. The more Government has intervened in recent years, the worse the situation has gotten.
His dusty Marxist ideas of price controls send jitters to the markets. The FTSE 250 has taken a nosedive over the last 5 days and the yields on UK government bonds are rising with the 10 Year yield at its highest in 5 years.
The Prime Minister’s plans to abolish council tax and stamp duty is also a mixed bag of sweet and sour. While abolishing the stamp duty will release the choke hold on the secondary real estate market, the idea of taxing non-income producing capital, such as people’s homes, is a poison pill that will collapse that very same market and cause further capital flight. On the face of it, a council tax on a larger home within the same band as a smaller home may seem unfair, but it is not. Council tax is the main source of funding for local councils. It is spent on waste collection and recycling, planning, fire and rescue services and police. These are the services that everyone in the council area benefit from equally, but this is only 5%-15% of the expenditure. A lion’s share of 85% of the council taxes are to the larger benefit of those in the “smaller houses’, i.e. social care and housing, education and children support services. The issue is where the councils will get the money now and whether the central government will use money transfer as a whip of compliance. This is quite contrary to the devolution and decentralization that Burnham has been speaking about.
As part of the same de-facto centralisation, planning powers are being taken away from councils and given to relevant Mayors. This looks like a direct hit on the Conservative and Reform voting countryside, where a Labour mayor of an urban conglomerate will dictate planning policy without any consideration to the AONBs or preservation of the unique fabric of the British countryside.
So, instead of loosening control and deregulating, Burnham is making central government present everywhere, in local councils and local business. He doesn’t understand how the property market actually works. Britain does not need another tax raid on wealth or homes. It needs more mobility, more confidence and more transactions. That means scrapping stamp duty, not inventing new levies. That means giving councils more freedom in planning and spending choices.
Britain does not need another major nationalisation experiment. It needs markets which are given freedom and confidence so it can compete and get the direct foreign investment and capital it desperately needs. As it stands today, in this competition, we are at the back of the line.
Burnham’s language points to a dangerous path ahead. A government that calls old socialist dogma a “new economic model” and calls for “stronger public control” is one that wants to control society, not trust it. It is Democratic Socialism. Don’t be fooled into this. The Prime Minister’s words may be painted as renewal, but Britain has seen enough Labour governments to know that promises of greater centralisation and control do not deliver better outcomes. The world has seen enough Marxists to recoil away from this rhetoric and thus from Britain.
It looks like the only way Britan will be able to tack in the right direction is a new general election as soon as possible, to elect a government, whether of one party or a coalition, that will adapt the winning Thatcherite formulas to the 21st century world.