https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/burnhams-promise-change-will-be-judged-what-comes-next
Andy Burnham delivers a speech at the People’s History Museum, Manchester, to pledge to give Britain the “circuit-breaker it needs” whilst unveiling his plans for devolution and the economy, June 29, 2026…
The lack of detail justifies caution for the left. “Greater public control” stops short of renationalisation of core sectors, a minimum requirement to stop the fleecing of the British people, water pollution and the protection of vested interests in fossil fuels.
Reindustrialisation will not happen by osmosis, nor will it be possible to deliver without a national industrial strategy and substantial public investment.
Regeneration dependent on the “public/private partnership” redolent of the Blair/Brown governments is likely to deliver the same PFI rip-off currently impoverishing the NHS and education. The power that Burnham wishes to devolve will be largely in the hands of directly elected mayors who will have the power to over-rule local authorities with minimal scrutiny or accountability between elections. In turn these mayors will be vulnerable to corporate lobbying, especially from a construction sector which has driven large-scale council estate and town centre demolition and redevelopment in the face of huge community opposition.
While the implied devolution of the “Whitehall machine” to local government may be a good thing, what will it mean for civil servants and quango employees, thousands of whose jobs may be redeployed around the country?
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A new programme to build council homes at scale while welcomed needs to answer how it will be delivered given the lack of design and build expertise in local authorities and over-reliance on large-scale private developers who are entirely profit-driven. Will the emphasis shift from demolition to refurbishment and retrofitting the existing stock and empty homes to bring them back into use?
The trade union movement and wider left must now pile on the pressure to ensure the lack of detail is not some devilish portent, but a promise of an end to neoliberalism as the first step to socialist renewal.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/burnhams-promise-change-will-be-judged-what-comes-next