Blain’s Morning Porridge June 30th, 2026: Andy Burnham’s big vision – will it be more than smiles and eyebrows?
“He can even quote “The Life of Brian” without sounding like a dalek. How bad can it be?”
Andy Burnham, the UK Premier in waiting, has laid out his vision and plan for the UK. It didn’t scare the horses and contains some interesting ideas. What it didn’t answer about some of the big issues and “courageous” spending decisions is worrying. But the idea of moving the centre of UK political gravity out of London is inspired. Who knows… it might even work!
Andy Burnham talked well. He presented well. He smiled. He sounded like he believes in what he is saying. His eyebrows worked overtime as they screamed charisma and engagement. Yesterday was all about Burnham – the real-world Mr Deeds from Manchester who is going to roll up his sleeves, fix Broken Britain and save the Labour Party.
No wonder Nigel Farage looks like he is chewing a wasp! Burnham is the new kid in town everyone is talking about. He looks like a bloke who is even blokeier than Farago and attractive with it. Burnham isn’t carrying around £5mm of unexplained baggage either! And Burnham, the new messiah/naughty boy (delete as applicable), arrives just as it looks like the Reform tide is peaking. Nigel’s brand of Reform populism is beginning to reek of stale cigarettes, spilt beer and things left better unsaid and undone. What the UK needs is forward looking politics of the future, rather than the politics of yesterday’s hangover!
The Morning Porridge isn’t about politics – although I often write about it – it’s about markets. Burnham’s speech yesterday had one eye on the Gilts market; he promised to stick to Rachel Reeve’s fiscal rules on constrained borrowing to get down the UK’s debt to GDP level. (I have an idea for him to shift the quantum of debt substantially lower using liability management, a slight of financial hand called Zonk Theory (look it up with Morning Porridge search function) involving The Bank and the UK Treasury).
Ask how the markets will react in 3-years’ time to the probability of a Reform government trying to further unravel from European markets while promising all kinds of spending policies to restore 1970’s Britain. Ask yourself how the price of Gilts will move, and what international gilts buyers will do? I was trying to explain the relationship between Gilts and politics last night – how the market has rewarded Rachel Reeves for basic credibility and competency. That didn’t compute for everyone – they know (but could not say why except that it’s in the Torygraph) Reeves is the worst chancellor ever, so it must be the Bank of England that is keeping Gilt yields stable. Or did we quietly get a loan from the IMF?
Burnham’s speech was full of ideas, but it was not quite a plan.
I’d give Burnham full marks for raising the national crisis that is accommodation security. He’s declared a massive programme of social housing. Starmer promised to build 1.5 mm new houses but didn’t say how except to ease planning to drive the market. Planning is not the problem. The UK Housebuilder firms have planning permission to build almost that exact number of homes Starmer wanted but aren’t because that would cause home prices to fall, reducing their profits.
The homebuilders aren’t really builders at all. They are landbanks – buying land on which they “improve” the valuation by gaming the broken planning system to get planning permission, then using that increased value land to secure further borrowing to buy more land to repeat. If it sounds like a reverse Ponzi – it is. If Burnham taxes the landbanks it will force them to sell – and that will get “interesting” (in the Chinese sense of the word) with a host of consequences.
Unaffordable executive rabbit hutches in new towns or greenspace site are not what the UK needs. The crisis is in the affordable and rental homes that never got built after the “right to buy scheme” effectively sold off the nation’s rental housing stock back in the 1980s. That’s left today’s tiny stock of rental and affordable homes being unaffordable. Solving it is a long overdue project. It means building hundreds of thousands of 2-bed apartments to rent to young workers in the inner cities. It will get them into work, close to jobs, and enable them to start family formation.
However, it’s what I didn’t hear from Burnham that worries me.
We didn’t hear a national strategy for the integration of AI into the economy. If the US firms get their way, AI will become a modern commodity which American tech giants will sell/rent us at enormous cost. The UK either prioritises our control of AI now by building future AI security, or we’ll be paying long term rent for AI processing till eternity. Tech (especially maturing tech as AI is becoming) should be something the UK can do for itself.
In tech there is hope. The UK has played a massive part in the historic development of computing. The next tech revolution will be in Quantum. China dominates in quantum computing patents – but the UK is in third place, and some say leads in terms of the difficult stuff like correcting Qubits. (Don’t ask – but it’s a switch that can be on/off or both…) Oxford and the other University towns could be the leading global centre of the next tech age if we have a government that is able to decentralise from our current London centric approach (more on this below).
Aside for a nod at defence spending remaining subject to spending rules, there was little about how the UK will rebuild security. That could be interesting – the former Armed Forces Minister Al Carns (former Marine and now a newbie MP who is saying all the right things well about defence after his resignation earlier this month) could threaten to stand for the leadership, delaying Burnham’s coronation. He might do a deal that sees him handed the Defence portfolio and the money for a properly funded plan to upgrade UK security. That would be politics in action. It probably won’t happen because the left-wing of Labour activists hate the idea a moderate from the Army might take money from welfare budgets… Carn’s would be lucky to get enough Labour MPs to sign his nomination – and Burnham knows that. But having Carns on side could be useful.
Nor was there anything of note in Burnham’s speech on the ravening maw of the NHS which now consumes £250 bln per annum! Or on how to cut the £325 bln Welfare bill – half of that is pensions and the rest is benefits. Some of things might fix themselves; building affordable social housing will cut the £35 bln housing benefits bill and get more people into work. Rationalising the soaring cost of government pensions is a crisis still on its way.
The thing that most people are worrying about with the Burnham plan is the concept of devolution and “No 10 North” in Madchester, the idea the centre of UK political gravity can be shifted outside of the London bubble.
That’s a brilliant concept. Reform bureaucracy by chucking it out of the corridors of power!
One of the things I came to understand writing my recent book, The Battle for Hamble, is the real reason for the failure of grand political objectives announced in Westminster is the delivery path. Government policy is handed to London based bureaucrats to enact and oversee. They expect it all to be executed at the local level – but by whom, and what with? Despite the introduction of Mayors for the major conurbations and devolution in Scotland and Wales, 90% plus of government process spend is done from London.
Local government gets a fraction of the money but is responsible for spending on major issues including care. As a result, most local authorities are bust and there is absolutely no money to ensure decisions and policy is well delivered. Planning is an excellent example of why and how our London centric economy goes wrong.
Big policy choices are made about supporting resilient communities in Parliament, but when it comes down to an understaffed, under-resourced planning department in an English County asked to approve an application by a well resourced corporate to dig a disruptive quarry in a prosperous village, the planners know they don’t have the resources to investigate it, fight it, or even opine if it makes economic sense or not. Instead, they check the rules and regulations – which say quarries are a strategic resource. Tick. Even though it will blight thousands of lives.
The result is everything policy should have ensured did not happen, did. Corporate shareholders will make loads of money, while the residents, the stakeholders in the community, will be suffer massive economic and environmental damage. The local economy will move from prosperous to poverty. Rapacious capitalism in action.
The Battle For Hamble is about the how and why of Government failing to deliver good outcomes. Using the Hamble Quarry as a case study, it describes a culture of arse-covering to avoid responsibility, a lack of government accountability, multiple failings in the planning process, institutional failure to understand the wealth of local economies, bureaucratic treacle where rules and regulations that are obsolete take precedence to prosperity, an exploitative and wasteful legal system that’s emerged to exploit these failures (making planning lawyers obscenely rich), a culture of process trumping economic literacy, rules which favour big business and shareholders over stakeholders, all of which is then successfully gamed by greedy corporates that seek to exploit and game the broken system!
Writing the book made me quite angry when I came to understand just how broken and stupid the system is.
Shifting the nexus of politics outside London might be part of the answer. It could trigger all kinds of effects. At present the UK is a service economy dominated by the London based City and finance. Imagine if the creativity and technological smarts of our University Towns could be harnessed to the same degree? That’s the real issue about making the UK a multi-centre economy.
We will have to hear how Burnham intends to execute his new vision, who he intends to put in place to make it happen, and discover if he can discipline Labour MPs and the grassroots to give his plans the space to happen without hidden Corbynista’s undermining it. (Ah, Corbyn the Goldstein of the modern age!)
Author of the Morning Porridge
CEO Windshift Capital
Advisor – Spitfire Strategic Capital
Meanwhile, don’t forget about my new book:
The Battle For Hamble is a proper grown-up examination of how bureaucracy has failed: a tale of Greedy Corporates, Bad Planning and Economic Illiteracy. It explains how a wholly unnecessary Gravel Quarry will be dug in middle of a prosperous village – putting 6000 jobs at risk. The truth is no one wants gravel, and the quarry company understands it’s not what you dig out, but what you stuff back into a hole in the ground that matters. Gravel sells for £30 a tonne – Landfill earns £150 a tonne to bury. Go figure.
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