Is Andy Burnham simply Labour's Boris Johnson?

Hailed as the saviour of a party that’s having a collective breakdown? Double tick.

Trading on the utterly daft notion that he’s the kind of guy you’d like to hang out with? Big double tick (though the thought of having a pint with either would put me off drink for life).

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Cresting on vibes, flim-flam and low-grade rhetoric, rather than policy? Big fat double tick.

Using image to obscure vacuity? Super big fat double tick.

Knows absolutely sod all about Scotland but mouths off a lot? A tick so big it obscures the sun.

Burnham’s approach to Scotland is both disastrous – for him, Labour and Scotland – and thoroughly idiotic.

You can take it to pieces as easily as a Lego toy car. First – and most stupidly – of all, Burnham is using the same arguments that the Yes movement uses.

The central tenet of the Yes movement is that “Westminster is broken”, and Scotland must go its own way to escape the dysfunction.

Folk who read my columns in The Herald will know that’s fundamentally my principal reason for supporting independence.

I don’t do flags and nationalism or all that “wha’s like us” Little Scotlander nonsense. You can stick that.

I’ve simply been alive long enough to see that Westminster hasn’t worked for the people for decades. Indeed, Westminster has been broken since around the time I was born.

If I saw a way to fix Westminster – or even believed it could be fixed – then I’d have little interest in independence.

But Westminster is not fixable. And even if it was, Burnham isn’t the politician to fix it, being a Blairite to the bone masquerading as a man of the people.

So, for half of Scotland, when Burnham says Westminster “is broken” and hasn’t worked for people for a “very long time”, it resonates. It confirms what we’ve been saying.

Next, we come to Burnham and devolution. It’s almost too absurd to call his comments on devolution a “policy”. It’s not just a dog’s breakfast; it’s like a dog actually cooked you breakfast.

'Westminster isn’t fixable. And even if it was, Burnham isn’t the politician to fix it' (Image: PA)

It’s so convoluted it reminds me of those images of the webs spiders build after some demented scientist has fed them LSD – spirals of garbled vapidity without any discernible pattern or purpose.

Given how scrambled and nonsensical his devolution “policy” is, we need to unravel it – like the web of one of those acid-riddled arachnids.

First, he says he wants to decentralise power in Scotland.

Is that a good idea? Absolutely.

However, Burnham intends to do so by taking power away from Holyrood.

Is that a stupid idea? Absolutely.

He could – if he’d an ounce of sense – simply begin a conversation about the decentralisation of power in Scotland and box the SNP in with the force of his argument and the fact that right is on his side.

He could say that the SNP has hoarded power – which it has. He could say that the SNP has emasculated councils – which it has.

By doing so, he’d appeal over the head of John Swinney to voters who know all of this to be true.

That would compel the SNP to either fight a losing battle against him or start the decentralising process Burnham claims to desire.

But no. Labour to the core, Burnham has chosen to pick a fight with the SNP on the constitution and attack devolution.

He’ll allow the SNP to claim that this is yet another case of Westminster trying to humiliate and disempower Scotland.

When the SNP is able to claim victimhood and fight on constitutional issues, it’s happy. Burnham does the SNP’s work.

It’s idiotic. Even the example Burnham gave of the kind of place he believes should have more power was daft.

He picked Dundee as a case study for Holyrood failure – even though Dundee is known as “the Yes City”. It’s represented by two SNP MPs and two SNP MSPs, and has an SNP council.

He’s preaching to the wrong audience. It’s a sign he knows sweet FA about Scotland.

Burnham talks of giving “greater public control” in Scotland over areas like transport, housing and water – all issues that are devolved.

Would it be a good idea for local areas in Scotland to have more power over transport, housing and water? Absolutely.

But that’s for the people of Scotland to decide in an election of our devolved parliament. If we want more control, we will vote for it.

The Scottish Labour Party or any other party can stand on that platform and we will weigh it democratically.

It cannot be imposed top-down by a London politician who thinks he’s the King in the North.

Well, he’s not King of Scotland; that’s one lesson Burnham needs to learn – both hard and fast.

The notion that you’re empowering people by taking power from their parliament without their say-so is ridiculous. Burnham appears to be both a fool and a charlatan.

Right now, the SNP could be under enormous pressure if Burnham had played it right. If he’d said in his speech: “The SNP has done you bad, Scotland. They’ve stored up power for themselves and stolen your autonomy, that needs to change”, then people would have sat up and listened.

He could then have said: “I’m going to invite John Swinney to London and ask him to start devolving power down to local councils, and I’m going to help him do it in a way that means we all work together.”

If he’d done that, he’d have won the argument and badly wounded the SNP.

But he didn’t. The abject stupidity is astounding. Burnham said he was going to bring in a new way of doing politics – of place first, not party first; and of problem-solving not finger-pointing.

Well, he’s done the opposite: put party before place – the place being Scotland – and he’s about to start a whole bout of finger-pointing – by the SNP at Westminster. And not one damn problem will be solved.

Welcome to Boris Johnson World, Mark II.

Neil Mackay is The Herald’s writer-at-large. He’s a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, extremism, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics.