Andrew Burnham: Lipstick On A Pig

Andrew Burnham was born to a working class family, in the Aintree district of Liverpool. Educated in the Catholic school system, he attended Cambridge where he gained a Bachelor’s degree in English in 1991. He met his wife, the Dutch Marie-France van Heel at Cambridge; she was also studying English. She was born in Pennsylvania, and travelled as a child with her family to the Philippines, the Netherlands and Belgium before Cambridge and then becoming a marketing executive. After Cambridge, Burnham worked as a journalist until 1993, and then as a researcher for Tessa Howell, the Labour opposition spokesperson on Health until 1997. After Labour was elected, he served in a number of government administrative and advisory positions until elected as an MP to a Labour safe seat in 2001; showing his strong connections within the ruling party.

He quickly moved up the ranks as the Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the Home Secretary and then the Health Secretary, followed by some other minor positions until appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2007 and then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in 2008. After initiating the Hillsborough Inquiry, he was promoted to Secretary of State for Health in 2009. He launched the inquiry in the high death rate at Stafford Hospital and also proposed a national care service which would be free at the point of delivery. Such a scheme sounds equitable, but when linked with Burnham’s statements that homeowners should not have to sell their houses to receive such free social care, becomes much more a protection of middle class and upper middle class wealth to be passed on to the next generation; no matter how much the home is worth. Extending the extensive tax privileges already enjoyed by home owners.

After labour lost the 2010 election he became the Shadow Health Secretary, and then was moved to be the Shadow Education Secretary later in 2010. A year later he was moved back to the position of Shadow Health Secretary until 2015, when he became Shadow Home Secretary within the Corbyn shadow front bench.

He voted for the Iraq War of Aggression (something that he expressed regret for in a 2024 book, just like so many other warmongers crying crocodile tears), and is very fully supportive of NATO and the proxy war against Ukraine. He also joined Labour Friends of Israel in 2015, checking off all the acceptable Blairite imperial bourgeois progressive boxes. He has a relatively soft stance with respect to China, with which he supports closer cooperation “in areas such as green development, electric buses, advanced manufacturing and life sciences”.

Burnham stood in the 2010 Labour Party leadership election with an “aspirational socialism” (i.e. bourgeois progressivism) platform, but came fourth. He was seen as the front runner in the 2015 leadership campaign, but was defeated by Corbyn. In 2016, he resigned from the Labour Shadow Cabinet to run for the position of Mayor of Manchester, which he was elected to in 2017 and re-elected in 2021 and 2024; at the end of his tenure he had a 65% approval rating. The position of being Mayor of Manchester kept him out of the internecine Labour Party warfare that resulted in the destruction of Corbyn and the hard right turn of the parliamentary Labour Party under Starmer. He has also escaped being associated with the now utterly discredited and reviled Starmer.

As mayor he played a relatively progressive role that did not include issues of foreign policy or state security. He renationalized the municipal bus service and clashed with the Conservative government over COVID-19 policies. As the Starmer administration imploded, Burnham was just about the only senior “safe pair of hands” for the Labour establishment that had not been sullied by association with Starmer. After 16 years of the increasingly autocratic, oligarch-serving and Zionist Conservative and Labour governments, what was needed was a nicer face to slap on the front of oligarch exploitation and warmongering. Burnham fit the bill and was allowed to stand successfully for parliament in a by-election and then quickly shooed in to Number 10.

He will implement some softening policies at the margins but will not touch the decades of colossal giveaways to the oligarchy (both domestic and foreign), the severe cuts in social spending (especially local council funding), the state profit troughs put in place for the oligarchy, the unconditional support for the Zionist genocidal regime (making purely performative public criticisms), nor the warmongering with respect to Russia (including continuing increases in the war making budget). He will tinker, but make no major changes; no rocking of the establishment boat.

He sees the Clinton-wannabe Labour right-wing Kinnock, who lost the 1992 general election, as an inspiration, and is fully LGBTQ+++ aligned; placing him very much in the US Democratic Party mainstream. By the end of his term he may be hated as much as Starmer given his British-establishment serving career, together with his Zionist and US vassal orientation. The increase in the war making budget will naturally lead to social service cuts given the dire state of the government finances and British economy, together with his reticence to claw back any of the massive tax cuts given to the rich and corporations and reverse the huge privatization and state contracting giveaways.

He has appointed John Healey as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who immediately focused on the classic right-wing Labour cudgel of “fiscal credibility”, limiting any deficits while never increasing taxes on the rich or corporations; a self imposed straight-jacket automatically limiting social spending and government investments. With fiscal control as Healey’s first priority. Of course, war spending and support to the Zionist regime will not be subject to fiscal controls; Healey has been an ongoing critic of “underspending” on war making.

The racist Home Secretary stays in place, the head of Work & Pensions is still in place to continue his attacks on social spending, and Ed Miliband appointed Foreign Secretary to continue with the same old imperial policies. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Lipstick on a pig, and the lipstick may start to come off quite quickly.