One must admire the British public’s capacity for self-harm; it has the serene inevitability of a man who, having survived a heart attack, immediately lights a celebratory cigarette. We had grown weary of the last lot, as one does. Promises unkept, delivery vans circling the M25 like vultures over a dying ox, and that peculiar modern habit of apologising for existing while simultaneously raising your taxes to fund the apology. So, with the grim determination of a man choosing between lukewarm tea and no tea at all, the electorate reached for something different. And lo, they have given us Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, now apparently Premier of these sceptered isles.
One pictures the new regime’s first great triumph: shaving a heroic five percent off one corner of the average energy bill. Cue the bunting and Burnham’s expression of a man who has just split the Red Sea rather than trimmed a standing charge. It is the politics of the participation trophy elevated to governance—declare victory over a fraction of the problem you helped inflate, then bask in the applause of those who have forgotten what relief feels like. The remaining ninety-five percent will march on, fuelled by net-zero zealotry and the belief that British households should subsidise global virtue while wearing extra jumpers. Winter is still coming, the meters will still click, but the press releases will already have moved on to the next five-percent miracle.
The irony is almost too exquisite to bear. For years the polling booths have whispered, in their quiet, embarrassed way, that the British people rather fancied a spot more competence, a touch less ideology, and perhaps a government that did not treat the concepts of 'border' and 'budget' as colonialist constructs best deconstructed over a flat white. Yet here we are, lurching leftward with the grace of a shopping trolley whose wheel has fallen off in a disabled parking bay. Burnham, that smooth-faced apostle of the municipal left, arrives not as a radical firebrand—God forbid, the man has the rhetorical temperature of a dishcloth—but as the acceptable face of a drift that feels increasingly compulsory. The public wanted right-leaning pragmatism; instead, they have been offered the politics of the focus group and the transport committee, now elevated to the national stage. It is rather like asking for steak and being served a lentil bake “in the spirit of the request.”
One shudders at the prospect of the Second Winter of Discontent, that inevitable sequel nobody asked for. The first one, you will recall, gave us rubbish piling up in Leicester Square and the dead unburied, a spectacle so grim it made even the trade unions nostalgic for moderation. This time the bins will be ideological. Expect the strikes to come dressed in the language of 'social justice,' the power cuts explained as necessary decarbonisation, and the inevitable bread queues rebranded as community fridges. Burnham, being a decent sort in the old Labour mould, will no doubt look pained on the evening news, furrowing that dependable brow while explaining that the lights are going out because of Tory weather or global capitalism or insufficiently enthusiastic clapping for the NHS. The man has form: Greater Manchester under his watch became a byword for ambitious announcements and quietly deferred problems. Now the entire country gets the extended cut.
The erosion of freedom of speech proceeds, as it always does on the modern left, not with jackboots but with polite emails from human resources. One can already hear the soft, managerial language: 'vibrant communities,' 'safe spaces,' 'evidence-based dialogue' (by which they mean dialogue that reaches the correct evidence). Comedians will be warned, academics sidelined, and the casual pub conversation about immigration or net zero costs will carry the faint whiff of professional risk. Burnham himself is no Robespierre; he is far too polished for that. But he rides a tide that views dissent less as a democratic feature and more as a behavioural issue requiring training. In the new Britain, you will be free to say whatever you like, provided it has first been approved by a diversity officer with a degree in decolonising the kettle.
And then, of course, the cycle. Britain specialises in these political washing machines: centre-right government elected in a fit of exhaustion, promptly blamed for failing to fix in eighteen months what accumulated over decades, followed by the tearful return of the centre-left promising kindness and investment (i.e., more spending and more lectures). The right is punished for not delivering miracles; the left is rewarded for delivering the problems that required the miracles in the first place. It is the political equivalent of breaking your leg, going to hospital, and then voting for the drunk driver who hit you because the surgeon was insufficiently empathetic about your pain.
Under Burnham, one fears the cycle will simply accelerate. The centre-right, when it eventually returns—as it always does, like a particularly stubborn case of athlete’s foot—will inherit a larger state, higher debts, more entrenched bureaucracies, and a cultural climate in which suggesting that perhaps we should have fewer people on benefits and more people in work is treated as a hate crime. They will tinker, cut here and there, make the usual noises about enterprise, and be turfed out the moment winter bites or a train is late. Then back we go to the warm bath of leftish governance, where outcomes matter less than intentions and 'investment' is the polite term for mortgaging your children’s taxes.
It is all so wearisomely familiar. The British electorate behaves like a man who marries the same sort of woman repeatedly, each time convinced that this time she won’t redecorate the house in beige and lecture him about his emotional availability. Andy Burnham is perfectly cast: competent enough to be plausible, left-wing enough to satisfy the party, and sufficiently media-savvy to look statesmanlike while the country quietly slides into the sort of genteel decline we have perfected over the past half-century. One can imagine the victory speech already—measured, decent, heavy on 'working people,' light on measurable deliverables. The lights will dim a little more slowly than under a genuine radical, which is what passes for consolation these days.
Perhaps I am being uncharitable. Perhaps Burnham will surprise us all and govern like a man who has read his Hayek as well as his Bevan. Stranger things have happened, though mostly in fiction. More likely, we shall muddle through in that uniquely British way: complaining bitterly, voting against our previous choices, and maintaining the polite fiction that the next lot will be different. The bin bags will pile up, the rhetoric will soothe, and the long retreat from vigour will continue, draped in the language of progress. God help us all. We shall need it, and perhaps a decent overcoat for the winter that is coming. Again.