Andy Burnham’s lazy copy-and-paste pitch to Scotland
by The “King of the North” can’t see past Berwick
We’ve seen some half-hearted pitches from Westminster politicians over the years, but Andy Burnham’s latest attempt to woo Scottish voters takes the Caramel Wafer.
Writing in The Scotsman, the presumed Prime Minister-in-waiting laid out his grand vision for the country. It was packed with poetic flourishes about bringing “hope to every heart” and creating “good growth in every postcode.”
There was just one glaring problem: almost the same article, with the same layout and promises, was also sent to the London Evening Standard and the Birmingham Mail.
It turns out Burnham’s deep, meaningful relationship with Scotland is nothing more than a lazy “find-and-replace” exercise as The National has more than adequately pointed out.
He read a map to pepper his text with local names like Easterhouse, Paisley, and Kilmarnock, but he completely failed to read the room.
By treating Scotland as just another English region to be managed from a new “No. 10 North” office down in Manchester, Burnham has shown exactly how little effort he puts into actually understanding Scotland is a nation.
If he had bothered to check the facts before hitting copy-and-paste, he might have avoided a series of embarrassing blunders that expose a profound ignorance of Scotland’s reality.
He thinks we need to nationalise services we already own
In his article, Burnham generously offers to let Scots “take greater public control of essential services such as water and transport.”
It’s a nice idea, Andy, but we beat you to it. Scottish Water is already – and has always been – safely in public hands, protected from the rampant privatisation that has plagued England. Meanwhile, the SNP government nationalised ScotRail back in 2022.
Offering to give Scotland powers it has successfully used for years doesn’t look like leadership – it looks like someone who hasn’t a clue what’s happening north of the border.
He is stuck in a housing time warp
Burnham spends a significant portion of his column rightfully bemoaning the loss of council housing since the 1980s, placing the blame squarely on Margaret Thatcher’s “Right-to-Buy” scheme.
What he fails to mention – or simply doesn’t know – is that the SNP abolished Thatcher’s “Right-to-Buy” scheme in Scotland a decade ago, back in 2016.
While Westminster spent the last ten years letting social housing slip away, Scotland was actively protecting up to 15,500 homes for future generations.
And if Burnham wants to point fingers over the housing shortage, he should look closer to home. It was actually Scottish Labour’s own Jackie Baillie who voted to extend the Right-to-Buy scheme in 2001, despite fierce opposition from the SNP at the time.
His plans would actually trample over devolution
Perhaps the most dangerous part of Burnham’s recycled pitch is his promise that his Manchester-based “No. 10 North” will directly oversee a massive council house building programme across the UK, explicitly naming towns like Stirling, Greenock, and Livingston.
Housing is completely devolved to the Scottish Parliament and has been since 1999. Since the SNP came to office 141,000 affordable homes have been built including thousands of council houses.
Compare that to the last time Labour were in government in Scotland when they only built six council homes in their last term.
For a politician who brands himself as a champion of devolution, proposing that a Westminster government office in Manchester reach past Holyrood to dictate local housing policy is not just a direct threat to the devolution settlement but the delivery of affordable homes.
He’ll keep the status quo of ultimate Westminster power
Whether it’s the Tories or Labour, the song remains the same.
Westminster politicians love to arrive in Scotland with warm words, but they consistently treat our nation as an afterthought.
Andy Burnham’s car-crash op-ed proves that he wants to keep Scotland on a tight constitutional leash controlled by a rebalanced England. It’s less about devolving power and more about re-reserving and centralising power.
We don’t need a politician from Manchester telling us what’s best for our communities based on an English policy template.
If Burnham truly wants to be a radical reformer, he should respect the mandate of the people of Scotland and hand over the powers to hold an independence referendum.
Until then, his “tartanised” promises aren’t worth the pixels they’re printed with.