Our Thoughts: The King of the North

When Andy Burnham, newly elected MP for Makerfield was sworn into parliament on the 12th of July, a bold voice piped from the backbenches ‘Rome is saved’. The heckler of the hour was the Conservative MP Desmond Swayne but Swayne’s words summed up a series of questions that occupy the minds of many frustrated Brits. Is Andy Burnham the saviour of the Labour Party? Is Andy Burnham the saviour of UK politics as we know it? Can Andy Burnham be a bastion against Reform? Political grifter or God’s gift to Britain, Burnham could be either, or perhaps both. 

On the 20th of July, a mere 8 days after his entry to Commons, Burnham emerged from the Luggage Door of Buckingham Palace, having met King Charles in the Chinese Dining Room. He officially accepted the King’s request that he take up the position of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It is perhaps apt that the door an incoming Prime Minister of the UK exits Buckingham Palace from is known as the Luggage Door. In the past ten years alone, 6 PMs have passed straight from the Luggage Door onto the revolving conveyor belt of politics, each packing their bags and bowing out sooner than was anticipated. 

With his Northern burr, Burnham purports to be different. He represents not just the RP voices that recently dominated political discourse in the UK but the country as a whole. With his proposal of Number 10 North, London’s hegemony might just be about to wane. 

But alongside his Northern orientation, will Burnham amplify other underrepresented voices also? One of which belongs to the young people of the UK who are more frustrated than ever. 

This debate brings together 5 young people working at Cutting Takes, coming from various backgrounds and who share their thoughts on the ‘King of the North’. The following remarks, organised by theme, have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Cutting Takes’ Debate

Jack Forshew: How much of the excitement is really about Burnham himself rather than relief that he’s just not Starmer?

Oliver Walsh: I think Starmer’s big problem was never really the individual policies, it was that there was no narrative encapsulating them. New Labour had one; with each individual policy people still felt like they were backing something. I think [Labour] have gone with Burnham because he’s popular, and uncontroversially liked, but I don’t feel a specific energy or drive that differentiates him. 

Some of it is just likability – how people personally feel about a leader is one of the biggest predictors of whether they’ll vote for them. Starmer tried to be online, but it ended up being cringeworthy. But I wouldn’t call Burnham’s style populist. Labour right now is about stability and consensus, and Burnham is the guy who can appease both wings of the party. That’s a different thing from having a story.

Lukas Seifert: I’ll be the pessimist. I’d vote Labour if I could but I’m not a British national. I have a gut feeling, though no real evidence to confirm it, that [Burnham] is going to become unpopular very quickly. It was the same with Boris as Mayor of London: everyone likes the quirky, funny version up until he’s actually got the job.

Ulla Gerhard: I’d push back on the pessimism a bit. I know Hungary is not the UK by any means, but Péter Magyar managed to beat Orbán in a relatively short span of time. He built his policies and popularity in around 2-3 years, and it was by actually spending time with the Hungarian people. That’s what Burnham attending the local park run in Wigan and staying in Manchester is reaching for. Whether it’s politically motivated doesn’t really matter if it’s the right instinct.

Jack Forshew: Is that actually different from what Starmer tried to do online – with TikTok edits and awkward attempts at humour?

Oliver Walsh: It’s different, and this is where I’d nuance my own point slightly. If you look at Zohran Mamdani, the temptation is to say his social media is what works. But the great content isn’t based on him performing for the feed – it’s him actually being with people, celebrating when the Knicks win, being visibly happy with his fellow New Yorkers. Furthering that, Mamdani has managed to balance the budget and is making public transport free. Real and tangible things. Yes, short form content matters, but that’s getting the focus wrong.

Diya Sengupta: I think there’s something that’s quite interesting in how Mamdani doesn’t use social media like a politician – he uses it like a young person. It feels very honest, which is what many people are hungry for. 

Jack Forshew: What’s one thing Burnham could realistically do that would actually improve your life on a day-to-day basis — something he could do really quickly?

Diya Sengupta: I think there’s a lot that Burnham can do in terms of the smaller things. Most people are talking about if potholes are being filled, lights staying on later at night. These smaller things that can actually have an effect on a physical day to day basis.

Ulla Gerhard: Student loan interest – why is it so high? The triple lock on pensions is untouchable yet student loans soar with inflation.

Lukas Seifert: I saw something that said the triple lock is one of the most popular things in the UK. Something like that is quite hard to get rid of once you’ve got a constituency attached to it. But on your point about things that actually make life easier: when I was living in the UK, the Renters’ Rights Act made my life so much easier. There are things like that which would be genuinely popular. I think for people in the North specifically, devolution of power could be a relatively big change that’s relatively easy to implement. Though you could counter-argue by saying it makes the UK less unified on things like economic growth and business investment and tends to add bureaucracy. On the flipside – places like Manchester and Newcastle might move faster precisely because they don’t need to check in with the rest of the country.

Ulla Gerhard: I think another thing to mention is transport. To give a comparison, in Vienna for the underground for a full year, I pay €300 as a student. I don’t think it’s doable in London right now, but that kind of thing, it makes such a massive impact to the quality of life for young people.

Oliver Walsh: It’s the same in Paris as well. It’s about €300. In London you get the TFL charge, you don’t even know how much it’s going to cost – then like the next day it can be £9.

Jack Forshew: Transport’s a good case to draw on, tied to devolution specifically. HS2 is often brought up as a case of the over-consultation and insane bureaucracy in the UK – with bat tunnels and such. In France, communes with over 10,000 people can put a tax on local employers to fund public transport – so small French towns end up with trams while a city like Leeds has nothing. I think devolution in tandem with well-managed schemes like that could be a huge boon. Though then you hit funding: everyone complains about councils being mismanaged, but the fact is they don’t have the money left, after years of cuts, to fulfil their existing obligations like social care, let alone anything new.

Lukas Seifert: That’s the issue with a lot of Burnham’s ideas generally. They’re nice, but nobody’s said where the money comes from. Underneath it all is the actual question of how you grow the economy enough to fund any of this. ‘Tax the rich’ is the easy answer, but there’s a real capital-flight risk. You need foreign investment, and Brexit made that structurally harder.

Diya Sengupta: I’d push on ‘not enough money’; a lot of this is structural, not just a funding gap. The NHS isn’t necessarily under-resourced, some of it is poorly organised. And that’s part of the frustration: with a new PM roughly every two years, nobody sticks around long enough to fix a structural problem, because the short-term unpopularity that reform causes always looks too costly.

Oliver Walsh: Fiscally speaking, we should also be looking at what other countries are doing right to try to stimulate growth in the British economy. For example, Germany has a higher effective corporate tax rate than the UK. I think the UK’s effective corporate tax rate (including local trade tax) is circa 25% and Germany is circa 30% right now. And yet Germany has a score of 68.9 on the international tax competitiveness index while the UK score 59.1. That is a lesson we can learn from. 

Ulla Gerhard: I think another thing to mention is that there’s a tendency amongst young people to shy away from talking about Welfare and other places where money is being wasted. I’m quite on the left and I worked at the Citizens Advice for a while, so I saw how the benefits system works on the micro-scale. There are places where vast sums of money are being wasted. That is the bottom line, and I think Labour is scared of touching benefits because it doesn’t go down well with left-wing voters. Mention the word Welfare and you’re as bad a Farage. 

Jack Forshew: Is it actually feasible for Burnham to do that, though? He’s positioned himself to Starmer’s left, and Starmer already tried to reform PIP and winter fuel allowance and ran into a backbench rebellion.

Ulla Gerhard: I think you’d have to frame it carefully. Say you called it an ‘upgrade’ to the benefits system rather than a cut, and then used that framing to actually restructure it, that might be a way through. 

Jack Forshew: Given how many parties now look like they have a shot at seats, are you in favour of a more proportional electoral system?

Ulla Gerhard: My gut says it just hands more seats to Reform.

Lukas Seifert: First-past-the-post clearly isn’t working well right now. It was designed specifically to keep extremism on the margins. The problem is that the extreme party has stopped being marginal and has become mainstream. The system’s original justification doesn’t really hold anymore either way.

Oliver Walsh: I’m pretty firmly in favour, on principle. I’m not a big fan of the Lib Dems but I think it’s pretty ridiculous that they’ve had a wildly disproportionate vote-share-to-seats ratio for years. I think that’s a sign of a badly functioning democracy. And the standard objections to PR — that you lose a majority, so nothing gets done — actually cuts the other way. A majority government can just push things through unilaterally, then years later there might be a swing back and it all gets undone anyway. Consensus politics forces parties to combine more than one perspective, which can produce something with a longer-term vision.

Diya Sengupta: I agree PR could work in theory. But I think the deeper problem is cultural, not structural. Parties are now behaving like they only want their own side to succeed. It’s only about their party, not the country. That didn’t always used to be the case. PR doesn’t obviously fix that on its own.

Thank you to all of the Cutting Takes Staff for their input and comments.

Our discussion took place on the 15th of July, 5 days ahead of Burnham’s so-called ‘coronation’. Though it is very early days, Burnham’s initial speech outside 10 Downing Street on the day of his appointment cast an interesting light on the direction that he and his government will be taking. It even directly evoked some of the very issues discussed during our debate. 

Burnham, in a deviation from tradition, chose not to speak from behind a lectern – meaning no notes. He seemed slightly nervous, as to be expected, but he directly addressed the revolving carousel of PMs that has predated his arrival, and how he intends to offer continuity to Britain through a ‘Ten Year Plan’.

In his own words, ‘Britain needs to show the world that we can regain our stability once again, and that is our challenge, to make politics work, to make it work better.’

He explicitly addressed several key areas he would be focussing on. His promise to ‘re-industrialis[e] Britain, using public procurement to back British industry’ speaks largely to his Northern neighbours, but he also spoke of giving ‘people some breathing space now, some help with the cost of living’. Other priorities included ending rough sleeping for once and all and helping more ‘young people’. He also pledged to ‘build more council homes’ in order to offer a ‘fair and sustainable way to bring the welfare bill down, to meet our fiscal rules, and to honour our commitments on defence to our international partners.’

Many things Burnham mentioned seem to have promise. Addressing the welfare bill head-on is a bold move, and framed well by the pledge to build council houses as an exchange. He continues to prioritise defence and collaboration with Britain’s ‘international partners’ which is likely a subtle continuation of the Eurocentrism that Starmer was pursuing. He also promised support with the cost of living crisis which touches every corner of society and could offer a sigh of relief to many across the country. This will allegedly be achieved by reducing the rate of VAT charged on energy bills in Great Britain from 5% to 0% for six months from October the 1st.

All of these promises seem golden. But as Lukas aptly mentioned during the Cutting Takes debate, talking about reform plans may be well and good but ‘nobody’s said where the money comes from’. Perhaps Burnham’s new appointment of the Labour veteran John Healey, Starmer’s Defence Minister, as Chancellor of the Exchequer is a move to balance the budget in a different way. The appointment certainly speaks to an impulse to move towards defence spending. Healey was previously quoted as saying ‘The Treasury still often sees defence as a drain on public spending and not the driver of economic growth that we’ve demonstrated in two years’. A drive in economic growth is certainly something the UK could benefit from right now.

As we are all young people at Cutting Takes who were involved in this debate, it is worth ending on Burnham’s promises for young people. According to the new PM, he is intent on helping ‘young people into work by changing the education system and giving them more support, more support with mental health.’ The fact that Burnham spoke directly to the youth of today, and the employment problems they face (unemployment is at a staggering 16.4% for young people) is already a step forward. Changing the education system, encouraging degree apprenticeships and work placements are all valid suggestions. However, unless Burnham addresses the structural inequalities that young people face when entering the work force, progress will remain excruciating slow. Fundamentally, it is of course important to support young people with their ‘mental health’, but it seems a strange note to tag on to the end of a pledge to help young people get jobs. Certainly, given the new social media ban for under 16s, and the difficulties young people face on and off-line, mental health support is a welcome bonus. But we should not be a generation defined only by our mental health – it is certainly not the primary reason unemployment levels are so high. And supporting our mental health will not prevent young people butting against the wall of age-based structural inequality that exists in the UK.

This is why it is so important that young people speak out about what matters to them, and the changes they want to see in their country. 

And if their voices are listened to, this is what will make them vote for Burnham come the 2029 elections. That is…if he survives the PM conveyor belt. 

Other Domestic Politics Articles written by Cutting Takes Writers: 

We Should Sing the Lovesong of K. Rodney Starmer 

Reform’s Nebulous Identity is Cunningly Constructed

We Should Give the Lib Dems a Break 

There is No Way Back for the Labour Party