‘Burnhamomics’ already lies in tatters.
It is one thing to throw out a sinking, lacklustre PM. It is entirely another to bet the house on a Leftist with a reckless economic agenda.
Sherelle Jacobs
26 September 2025 2:48pm BST
Sir Keir Starmer is right about one thing: Andy Burnham, the Left’s last great hope, is living in an economic fantasyland.
True, the King of the North has amassed an impressive army of Labour followers who hope he can win back working class voters. The former Blairite, then Brownite, and now reborn as a committed socialist, somehow exudes authenticity, with his love of Madchester music and boxer’s brow.
He has made a virtue of his two failed leadership bids. Time away from the Westminster bubble means voters don’t associate him with the disliked and discredited “uniparty”. His mix of cultural nationalism and economic socialism will appeal to former Labour voters dismayed by two-tier Keir’s directionless. It’s possible his policies could even destabilise Nigel Farage’s party, splitting the working class vote. Like Boris Johnson before him, he will sell himself as a People’s Mayor, albeit from the North.
But scepticism is building, doubts are setting in. One poll showed that Labour won’t overtake Reform were he to be crowned leader. Even more importantly, his plan to win back the Red Wall with an even more high-spend agenda – and his apparent nonchalance towards the risk of a market backlash – has sent a wave of panic through Labour that the party is walking straight into the “Truss trap”. It’s enough to give even some of Burnham’s backers second thoughts.
This won’t have been helped by Starmer’s suggestion that Burnham in No 10 would be a “disaster for working people”. In an extraordinary intervention this week, the PM drew parallels between his Labour colleague and Liz Truss, arguing that any attempt to abandon fiscal rules in favour of spending would end in financial implosion. This might reek of desperation, but Starmer is right.
The Manchester Mayor’s economic prospectus denies our fiscal reality. Britain is on the brink: the debt is colossal, taxes have soared, our inflation is the highest in the G7, the markets are extremely nervous. The cure to Britain’s economic torpor cannot be a dose of analgesic.
The scale of his spending commitments, including on council housing, border on lunacy. The tax hikes he advances could trigger a property market crash that would plunge the financial sector into turmoil. His plans to raise the top rate of income tax to 50p would risk a consumer spending slump and chase away what is left of our entrepreneurial class. His nationalisation plans – even more ambitious than entertained by Jeremy Corbyn – would surely lead to failed auctions on the debt markets.
Mere talk of Burnham in No 10 has coincided with a rise in UK bond yields, and warnings from investors that the gilt markets would be “spooked”. Even some Burnham supporters are rattled. “It’s just plain economically illiterate. You don’t go to the bank and tell the manager you want to borrow a load of money but don’t really respect the terms of the agreement,” one says.
Markets provide the ultimate safeguard against folly, administering their own inescapable form of rough justice. Even the US President has been forced to act within market strictures: when 30 year US Treasury yields touched 5 per cent earlier this year, Donald Trump paused his tariff war.
Yet Burnham is insistent we need to “get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets”. As the economist Paul Johnson brusquely pointed out, the best way to do this is to reduce borrowing, which is already much too high under Rachel Reeves.
The Telegraph has now revealed that Starmer’s allies are planning to block Burnham’s return to Parliament by ensuring that Labour’s National Executive Committee – stuffed with TTK loyalists – would not approve his application to run for a Parliamentary seat. And that is assuming Burnham would be able to find a seat in the first place. The backbenchers in safe constituencies who had been identified as possible candidates to make way for the King of the North are now hesitating to cooperate.
Those who have been in Parliament long enough to remember the rise and fall of Gordon Brown – a bunker chancellor answerable to nobody who was elevated into a bunker PM answerable to nobody – favour a contest over a coronation for the King of the North. This would at least allow them, and the British public, to challenge and test Burnham’s ideas.
Labour is facing a historic test. It is one thing to throw out a sinking, lacklustre PM; it is entirely another to bet the house on a radical Leftist with a doomed economic agenda.
