Of all the many prime ministers who have walked through the doors of 10 Downing Street in the past decade, the one Andy Burnham resembles most is Liz Truss. Both had a view of what was going wrong with the economy. Both wanted to break with the politics of managed decline. Both had ambitious ideas for what needed to be done.

Truss, of course, came to grief within weeks of becoming prime minister, after her tax-cutting mini-budget was brutally rejected by the financial markets. The big question for Burnham is whether he can deliver on his agenda without suffering the same fate. He can, but it won’t be easy.

Burnham’s analysis of what’s gone wrong is spot on. Over the past 40 or so years, the economy has become ever-more dominated by the City of London. Manufacturing’s share of Britain’s output has shrunk, resulting in a permanent trade deficit. Living standards are barely any higher than they were before the banking crisis of 2008. The new owners of sold-off state assets have put profits before investment. Increasingly, Britain is a country of gig-economy workers run by a cabal of rentier capitalists.

So, yes, the neoliberal policies introduced by Margaret Thatcher have failed, and they have failed most spectacularly in what were once Britain’s industrial heartlands: Scotland, Wales and the northern regions of England. Burnham says there is a need to remedy the geographical bias in the economy and he will not be the first prime minister to come to this........

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