On July 20, Andy Burnham became Britain’s seventh prime minister in the last 10 years, its fourth in the last five years, and its second since the Labour Party won the 2024 general elections. He inherits an 80-seat parliamentary majority. The opposition is divided. The media are largely sympathetic. Burnham is the only party leader with a net-positive poll rating. In normal times, these advantages would allow a prime minister to reshape the British state and set a new course. But these are not normal times.

Mamdani’s bait-and-switch underscores perils of socialism’s promises

Inside Scoop: Genuinely un-American, fight for female sports, California chooses failure

Inside Scoop: Data center debate, empathy gone wild, Talarico’s woke past

Burnham also inherits a flatlining economy, explosive public debt, overcrowded prisons, backlogged courts, failing hospitals, rising crime, a border and illegal migration crisis, a domestic terrorism problem with roots in the radical Left, and a social chasm between Britain’s Muslims and everyone else. The state created all of these problems in concert with elected politicians, both Conservative and Labour. The state now fails to correct them. The politicians blame each other.

Burnham blames Margaret Thatcher. She left office in 1990 and has been dead for 13 years. Britain, Burnham said on July 20, took “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s.” A divided society and a stagnant economy are the wages of “neoliberalism.” Burnham, who calls himself both a socialist and “pro-business,” proposes a total economic and social reset. He has not yet informed Britons how he will lead them back to the 1970s, which everyone who was there remembers as a decade of disaster, and undo the 1980s, which many who were there remember as a decade of revival, or the 1990s, which even young people who weren’t alive at the time now call an age of hope and plenty.

If Burnham has a comprehensive plan, he’s keeping it from the public. Burnham did not run for a seat in the 2024 elections. The mayor of Greater Manchester since 2017, he unseated Keir Starmer by intrigue. He obtained a parliamentary seat by skullduggery in June as a prelude to entering 10 Downing Street without a contested leadership election. Burnham seemed to think that Manchester is to British politics as the Omphalos of Delphi was to ancient Greece, the navel of the world, but most British people had no idea who he was. Nor is Burnham in a hurry to tell them.

Instead of policy statements, he issues social media clips. Instead of citing economic theorists, as Thatcher cited Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Burnham quotes The Smiths’ lyrics. Instead of wearing a collared shirt, he wears a black T-shirt. Instead of talking policy, he talks about “getting the whole country to face the same way and then pulling in the same direction,” to defeat the “far Right.” Instead of talking about immigration and Islam, he talks of breaking London’s power and redistributing prestige and funding by creating a “No. 10 North” in Manchester.

Burnham has not explained how he will pay for this, though he has hinted that taxes may have to rise. He will not have to explain himself in the House of Commons until Parliament returns from its summer recess on Sept. 1. Until then, Britain’s political vacuum is Burnham’s honeymoon, a long, hot summer of government by good vibes. After the distant manner and iron glove of Starmer, there is a certain freshness to Burnham’s glad-handing warmth. The media applaud the professionalism of his communications and talk up a “Burnham bounce.”

No one wants to admit the truth: Britain has no money.

Burnham’s predecessor, Starmer, won the 2024 elections with a promise to “stop the Tory chaos.” He did, in his way. The chaos is now Labour chaos. The last years of the Conservatives’ 14-year run were a catalog of sleaze. But none of it threatened national security and Britain’s most........

© Washington Examiner