Should Americans care who Britain’s prime minister is? The answer is yes, and I’ll get to the reason why shortly.
I ask the question now, however, not out of the blue, but because we woke up this week to the sight of yet another new British prime minister taking office — that’s seven in the past 10 years.
Andy Burnham, the so-called King of the North, met the actual king, Charles III, and accepted the monarch’s request that he form a new government in place of the burnt-out ministry of his hapless predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer.
This change of leaders came about through nothing so tumultuous as a general election. Voters weren’t consulted, just as they weren’t consulted when four of the last seven — Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak — first “kissed hands” to become the nation’s leader. New PMs don’t actually kiss the monarch’s hands anymore, by the way, but merely bow or curtsey.
I mention these details of an antiquated ceremony to nod to just a little of the ancient constitutional process by which Britain gets a new leader. The fact that there is no election seems odd and wrong to many people, especially foreigners.
In Britain’s parliamentary system, the executive is embedded in the legislature, not separated from it as in the United States. So it is as natural as it has always been customary that the man or woman who can command a majority in the House of Commons should take charge. Starmer had lost this ability — more than 100 of his own MPs demanded months ago that he step down. But when the British vote in a general election, they are choosing their representatives, their members of Parliament, and it is up to MPs to say who they’ll support at the top.
Nevertheless, Burnham, in his first speech as PM standing outside 10 Downing Street, acknowledged his acute awareness that so many occupants of that residence and office had come and gone with unseemly frequency in the past decade. He said this was a failure, adding: “It requires my generation of politicians to raise our game and rise to the new challenge. Britain needs to show the world that we can regain our stability once again, and that is our challenge, to make politics work, to make it work better.”
But will he do better? It seems unlikely, although it should be conceded that he has two advantages over Starmer. One is that Burnham does not have the look of a frightened deer in the headlights of an oncoming car, nor the weak, wooden rhetorical delivery of a man who does not believe what he is saying and so cannot make anyone else believe it either. Burnham has also suggested he will not continue Starmer’s lunatic climate policies, which produced the preposterous situation in which Britain left its oil and gas wealth untapped under the North Sea and yet bought its energy from Norway, which was pumping it up from under, yes, the same North Sea. Britain made itself pay the highest energy costs in Europe by not pumping its own energy wealth, yet it still burns as much oil and gas as ever while doing nothing to address the ersatz climate catastrophe.
But in other ways, Burnham is even more left-wing than Starmer and, as if to prove it, he promises to head in the opposite direction of the one post-war prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who demonstrated how to revive national pride and economic growth, who pulled Britain, the “sick man of Europe,” out of decline 40 years ago.
Thatcher cut taxes by more than half, reduced inflation by 90%, and made Britain the fourth-largest economy in the world within five years of first taking office. She did this by freeing businesses from state control — she sold the nationalized railways, utility companies, British Airways, and much more — and turning the British people into shareholders with a stake in success.
But Burnham now repeats again and again his opinion that it’s time for more state control on behalf of — by which he means instead of — control by ordinary people not in government. Does he intend to expropriate British Airways from its current owners, plus electricity companies and all the other once sclerotic industries that the government in Westminster made such a hash of running? It’s not known. Details from Burnham are in short supply, so we’ll have to wait and see. But the new angel of the Labor Party promises to rush in with more government intervention and interference in areas where governments should fear to tread.
He is also going to do nothing to change culturally suicidal leftist immigration policies, which make it plain to the indigenous population that their masters care more about foreigners than they do about their own people. Thatcher, by contrast, always made it clear that the sovereignty of the British people was her top priority.
In these respects, Burnham is showing he is a close ideological relation to the socialists who are suddenly making headway here in America, not their ideological antithesis, as Thatcher was. The socialists see economic distress and blame it on the excesses of capitalism and neoliberal free enterprise. The reverse is true. They mistake the cure for the disease. Where the economy is failing to deliver affordability, it is because there is too much interference in the form of regulation, red tape, and government-encouraged litigation. These push the cost of doing business higher, and those costs are passed on to all of us. Socialists in America, who are taking over the Democratic Party, are promising to fix the problem by doing more of the things that created the problems in the first place.
That’s also what Burnham is promising in Britain. If one can say anything with complete assurance about Britain, it is that its suffering is not due to too little central control and too much laissez-faire economics. Yet Burnham is promising to make everything better by doing more of the very things that have brought failure and dismay since Thatcher left office.
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He is thus part of an international trend among political activists to say that we are in “late-stage capitalism,” and that the solution, as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani put it, is to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Burnham does not use the word “collectivism,” but he comes close when he refers to an economy and politics based on “collaboration.”
Americans should care about this because instead of a strong and confident ally, Britain is far more likely to become more regulated, more incapable, and more ineffective. Burnham’s Labor Party shed its official socialism when Tony Blair was its leader a generation ago. But it is re-adopting socialism now. It is going back to its roots. But these roots are merely buried and have never grown anything good.