Andy Burnham to propose devolution plan in first major policy speech since launching bid for No 10
Good morning. When Keir Starmer became PM, he had published his missions and his first steps, Labour was awash with policy, but some people still felt it was hard to know what his driving motivation was, what was the single big goal he wanted to achieve in politics. Andy Burnham is set to become PM three weeks today and in his case it is easy to answer this question because he published a book about it in early 2024 with Steve Rotheram, the Liverpool city region mayor, called Head North. They argue that the north of England has lost out because power in the UK is hoarded in the south and they propose a huge rebalancing, achieved by the devolution of decision making and spending away from London, building on some of the work they had been able to achieve as metro mayors.
Anyone curious as to what Burnham will do in Downing Street has to start here. The book even includes a 10 point plan, some elements of which will almost certainly be dropped but some of which will be at the core of the Burnham project.
A “Basic Law” refers to a version of a law passed by Germany after West Germany and East Germany were reunified, saying all states in the country should have “equivalent living standards”.
Burnham and Rotheram ended their book with an “Epilogue to our Grandchildren”. In it they said they hoped their ideas would “help build a movement of people over the next 25 years which will eventually change Westminster from the outside”. They said they would like to think that by the middle of this century, “the end of our lives and the start of yours”, that movement would be “so big that real change would then be imminent”.
At the time they were writing Labour was expected to win the 2024 general election, but most observers expected Keir Starmer to be reasonably secure for another 10 years. Burnham clearly did not think he would be the person implementing this agenda. Now, just over two years later, he does not have to leave it up to his grandchildren; he will be able to do it himself.
That is the background to today’s speech by Burnham in Manchester. As Pippa Crerar reports, he will pledge to deliver “good growth in every postcode” by overseeing a significant transfer of power out of Whitehall to local communities.
It is Burnham’s first big speech as the presumptive next PM. Apparently he won’t be taking questions from reporters because he wants the coverage to focus on the speech. It may turn out to be the most important political event of the week, and of course I will be covering it in detail.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Keir Starmer host a roundtable at Downing Street with the hospitality industry.
10am: Kemi Badenoch gives a speech in London,
11.30am: Andy Burnham gives his devolution speech in Manchester.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Afternoon: Starmer is meeting Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, in Downing Street.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Asked if it was a mistake for the last Conservative government to impose a de facto ban on new onshore windfarms, Badenoch said that was a question Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretetary, could answer.
Q: What do you make of the revelation in the Spectator that some Labour people are arguing that Andy Burnham would be the party’s first female leader?
Badenoch replied:
I don’t know what to say. The idea that Andy Burnham is Labour’s first female prime minister shows that that party still doesn’t know what a woman is.
Badenoch claims Burnham backs devolution because he does not have answers and ‘wants to pass problem somewhere else’
Q: Are you opposed to devolution in principle?
Badenoch replied:
Devolution is not a silver bullet. It is not an answer. It is a process. If you devolve to people who can’t do the job, you just recreate the problem elsewhere and make it harder for central government to fix it.
How do we go about picking our mayors? If you are picking people who think is just a popularity contest or I’m a Celebrity, they’re not actually going to be able to do that job.
I think a lot of politicians hide behind devolution because they don’t have any answers. So they said, ‘Well, why don’t we let local people sort it out?’ But they don’t give them the real tools, the power.
What’s wrong with our country? We have, extremely high energy costs. What’s a local mayor going to do about that?
We have seen so much go wrong because politicians have been outsourcing decisions, outsourcing responsibility to councils, to quangos, [to the] OBR. No one is making decisions.
And what I hear when Andy Burnham talks about more devolution is that he doesn’t actually know what he wants to do, and so he wants to pass the problem somewhere else. We know what we want to do ….
I think Andy Burnham is afraid of taking difficult decisions. He wants to be liked. He wants to be popular. But politicians who want popularity always end up running away from tough decisions. I’m not scared of taking tough decisions.
Badenoch says Tory mayors and councils won’t be using new powers to impose overnight visitor levy on tourists
Q: Can you guarantee that Tory mayors and Tory councils won’t be using the new powers they have to impose an overnight visitor levy on tourists?
Badenoch replied:
This is not a policy that we support. If you can find a Conservative leader of a council who’s doing that, send them my way and I will have a word.
Asked what she thought of Andy Burnham not taking questions this morning, Badenoch said:
Andy Burnham doesn’t like questions. Nigel Farage doesn’t like questions. Even Keir Starmer in parliament, he doesn’t like questions here.
If you want somebody who can answer questions, please come to me. I will answer all of your questions.
Asked who Andy Burnham should pick as his chancellor, Badenoch replied:
I know that it should not be Ed Miliband. He is the single person who has done the most to deindustrialise our country and make us poorer. He should not be rewarded with an even more powerful job where he can completely bankrupt the country.
Asked about Burnham’s plan to put part of the No 10 operation in Manchester, Badenoch said she did not think that was a good idea. She explained:
As a secretary of state, there were many times that I had to go to No 10 and then go into parliament. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I had to go up and down to Manchester at the same time.
We did have a second Treasury campus in the north. That was for civil servants. It was for other ministers. It was not for the prime minister.
Badenoch calls for Commons recess to be delayed so Burnham can address MPs as PM before September
Currently the Commons is due to rise for the summer recess on Thursday 16 July. Andy Burnham is due to be named as Labour leader the following day, and he is due to become PM on the following Monday.
Badenoch said the recess should be delayed to allow Burnham to tell the Commons what he plans to do. She said:
Andy Burnham should delay the summer’s parliamentary recess by just a day or two – just a day or two – come to the house and tell us his plan for this country.
This is not a game. It should not be a soap opera. If he wants to be the leader of our country, it is time to start acting like it.
MPs are due to return to the Commons after the summer recess on 1 September.
Badenoch dismisses Burnham’s devolution agenda, saying it’s just ‘more public control, more regulation, more taxes’
Badenoch also claimed that Andy Burnham’s devolution plans were not “some radical new agenda”, but just “old hat”.
She said Boris Johnson was also a former mayor who had a devolution agenda. Just as Andy Burnham wants to set up a No 10 in Manchester, under Johnson the Treasury opened a campus at Darlington, she said. She went on:
But Burnham’s devolution agenda, unlike ours, is stripped of private enterprise and ownership. It is loaded with Labour’s instincts – more public control, more regulation, more taxes, all of the very things which have caused the problems we have today.
They will mean more power taken away from parliament, but more and more government created all over the country, more politicians, more outsourcing of decisions to bodies with even less scrutiny and accountability.
If you look under the hood of Andy Burnham’s proposals, you will find at their core, a mistaken belief, the belief that it is government that creates growth. It is not. It is business that creates growth.
Badenoch claims Britain heading for ‘summer of chaos’ because of power vacuum in Downing Street
Kemi Badenoch has claimed that Britain is heading for a “summer of chaos” because there is a power vacuum in No 10.
In a speech this morning about Andy Burnham, the Conservative leader said:
Britain is heading for a summer of chaos. We have a caretaker prime minister, barely in office, definitely not in power. All major policy and spending decisions have been put on hold. The last defence secretary resigned because the money needed to keep Britain safe has not been found ….
Ministers of the Home Office are fighting each other. In fact, the immigration minister has been banned from seeing government documents. Rachel Reeves is ringing round businesses trying to get them to say that sacking her would risk destabilising the economy, as if that hasn’t happened already. She should have had was the good grace to resign alongside Keir Starmer.
Meanwhile, trade unions are arguing about their favoured candidates to be the next chancellor.
The government is descending into chaos and no one is dealing with the serious and urgent threats that this country faces.
Badenoch claimed that Burnham would become PM last this month, but would then need the summer holiday to work out what he thinks. She went on:
Andy Burnham is already the prime minister in everything but name. He needs to act like a leader, put an end to speculation, walk into No 10, name his cabinet and come to parliament to tell the country what he plans to do.
Starmer
For an alternative view on whether Andy Burnham should take questions from the media after his speech this morning, this is from Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former communications chief who now co-hosts the Rest is Politics podcast.
If true that @andyburnham not taking media questions after speech today then good move. Speeches matter and when important should speak for themselves. A problem with Keir S communications was that he would make a speech, then take Qs and the broadcast journalists in particular would make it more about them and their “take” than him. If and when he becomes PM Burnham will be answerable to Parliament, not the showbiz style media coverage of politics. The blah factory will go into overdrive today with journalists interviewing each other about how they ought to be allowed to ask Qs. The speech itself is more important than anything they say before during or after. Setting the agenda vital from the off.
Burnham accused of ‘power without accountability’ over proposals not to take reporters’ questions after today’s speech
Journalists have been told that Andy Burnham will not be taking questions after his speech today. Richard Tice, the Reform UK deputy leader, has described that in a post on social media as “power without accountability”. He says:
Burnham’s coup is well underway.
Big speech today with no questions from journalists. No debate in Parliament. No scrutiny from MPs until September.
Power without accountability. Funny how Burnham demanded a General Election in 2022, but not now.
We need a General Election.
Reform UK tend to be pretty good at taking a large number of questions from journalists when they hold press conferences – although Nigel Farage’s enthusiasm for events of this kind seems to have mysteriously disappeared following the revelation about his undisclosed £5m donation. That is one topic on which questions are not welcome.
Andy Burnham to propose devolution plan in first major policy speech since launching bid for No 10
Good morning. When Keir Starmer became PM, he had published his missions and his first steps, Labour was awash with policy, but some people still felt it was hard to know what his driving motivation was, what was the single big goal he wanted to achieve in politics. Andy Burnham is set to become PM three weeks today and in his case it is easy to answer this question because he published a book about it in early 2024 with Steve Rotheram, the Liverpool city region mayor, called Head North. They argue that the north of England has lost out because power in the UK is hoarded in the south and they propose a huge rebalancing, achieved by the devolution of decision making and spending away from London, building on some of the work they had been able to achieve as metro mayors.
Anyone curious as to what Burnham will do in Downing Street has to start here. The book even includes a 10 point plan, some elements of which will almost certainly be dropped but some of which will be at the core of the Burnham project.
A “Basic Law” refers to a version of a law passed by Germany after West Germany and East Germany were reunified, saying all states in the country should have “equivalent living standards”.
Burnham and Rotheram ended their book with an “Epilogue to our Grandchildren”. In it they said they hoped their ideas would “help build a movement of people over the next 25 years which will eventually change Westminster from the outside”. They said they would like to think that by the middle of this century, “the end of our lives and the start of yours”, that movement would be “so big that real change would then be imminent”.
At the time they were writing Labour was expected to win the 2024 general election, but most observers expected Keir Starmer to be reasonably secure for another 10 years. Burnham clearly did not think he would be the person implementing this agenda. Now, just over two years later, he does not have to leave it up to his grandchildren; he will be able to do it himself.
That is the background to today’s speech by Burnham in Manchester. As Pippa Crerar reports, he will pledge to deliver “good growth in every postcode” by overseeing a significant transfer of power out of Whitehall to local communities.
It is Burnham’s first big speech as the presumptive next PM. Apparently he won’t be taking questions from reporters because he wants the coverage to focus on the speech. It may turn out to be the most important political event of the week, and of course I will be covering it in detail.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Keir Starmer host a roundtable at Downing Street with the hospitality industry.
10am: Kemi Badenoch gives a speech in London,
11.30am: Andy Burnham gives his devolution speech in Manchester.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Afternoon: Starmer is meeting Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, in Downing Street.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
