Burnham IndyRef blunders expose his own fear & hypocrisy

If there’s one thing Westminster Prime Ministers excel at, it is declaring that the debate over Scotland’s future is firmly closed while repeatedly checking the locks on the door.

In his recent conference keynote speech, Andy Burnham mounted a defence of Westminster control of Scotland, boasting that he is determined to prove First Minister John Swinney wrong by not being the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

But by making such a challenge he exposed his own weakness, fear and hypocrisy.

As John Swinney quickly pointed out in response: If Andy Burnham is so supremely confident in the strength of his position, why won’t he test it in a referendum?

The First Minister’s challenge was simple and democratically undeniable: Let’s have a referendum, let the people of Scotland decide, and see who is right.

Burnham’s reluctance to support the Scottish public’s right to a vote isn’t based on constitutional high ground or democratic principle; it is born of solely of fear. Fear that he will lose.

It’s classic “it’s ma baw” territory. It’s like boasting you can’t be beaten at football by refusing to play football.

For all his swagger, Andy Burnham is acutely aware that if he actually steps into the Scottish democratic arena, he risks losing. Claiming you can win a match while refusing to step onto the pitch doesn’t make you a champion – it just makes you a spectator.

If this refusal to face the voters weren’t telling enough, Burnham managed to completely unravel his own constitutional logic just 24 hours later.

Speaking to the press the very next day, he casually suggested that a move to rejoin the European Union was “among the options” for the UK.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Here we have a Prime Minister who believes that reopening the debate on a 2016 referendum result – revisiting a ten-year-old decision without a specific, explicitly won electoral mandate in his manifesto – is “on the table.”

Yet, from the very same breath, he insists that revisiting Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum – a twelve-year-old decision where the Scottish Parliament has repeatedly secured clear, democratic mandates from the voters – is strictly “off the table.”

It is a feat of mental gymnastics so convoluted it would make the Gordian knot look like a shoe’s bowknot.

To Burnham, a decade-old referendum down south is ready for a rethink on a whim, but a twelve-year-old referendum up north is etched in stone for all eternity.

It is the politically hypocritical equivalent of insisting that your opponent’s goals don’t count because you didn’t like the weather when they scored.

This rank hypocrisy and breathless double standards demonstrate everything that is fundamentally broken about Westminster.

Westminster views democracy not as an enduring principle, but as a light switch to be flipped on or off depending on whether it suits its interests.

Scotland cannot remain tethered to a system where our national self-determination is treated as a treat to be dispensed only when Westminster feels benevolent.

Andy Burnham can posture all he likes but a system maintained through democratic denial and staggering hypocrisy is built on sand.

If Westminster PMs are genuinely so certain that Scots want to stay in this one-sided arrangement, they should put their money where their mouth is.

Until they do, their fear speaks far louder than their speeches – and that arrogant hypocrisy and double standards by Westminster leaders is one of the single strongest arguments for why Scotland should take its future into its own hands.