I keep getting struck by disturbing similarities between myself and Andy Burnham. I don’t mean this in a positive way - for either of us. You wouldn’t want me anywhere near Downing Street. We’re the same age, and we both seem to suffer from our generation’s principle sickness: the desire to be cool. It’s a vain, pointless, embarrassing affliction. But at least I admit it.
Gen X has spent its time on Earth labouring to be hip. When we should have been sandbagging our lives for a stormy future, we were dropping ecstasy - paid for by unlimited credit - during the great holiday from history that was the 1990s. Many of us are still footing the bill, in more ways than one.
We let time slip through our fingers. Now the world is falling down around our ears and we’re panicking because somehow we’re finally in charge. Burnham’s response is to promise a great ‘rewiring’ of Britain.
To rewire, however, you must have a talent for DIY - you need to know how pipes and plumbing work, what goes where, how to avoid electrocuting yourself and blowing your home to smithereens.
Read more Neil Mackay
- Prince George at Eton: what kind of parent abandons their child at boarding school?
- With one stupid picture, Sturgeon has blown her feminist credentials
- Champagne, oysters and billionaire bucks: what fool votes for Farage?
When it comes to Burnham, he’s about as capable at the DIY of statecraft as I am at the DIY of plain old home-improvement. I’m banned, by my wife, from using anything more complicated than a hammer - even then she supervises me. I’ve been known to collapse walls, explode plugs, start fires, open veins and fall through windows.
I’m the Frank Spencer of DIY. Fundamentally, it’s because I’m just not interested. There are more exciting things to do, like sleeping or reading books.
I haven’t applied myself and learned the rudiments - so I’m rubbish and without skill. I can visualise a wonderfully redesigned room, but I’ve so little understanding of the basics that my dreams become stygian nightmares. The Mad Men-style study I imagined ends up as Ed Gein’s basement. Likewise, Burnham, it’s clear, has no concept of how the pipes and plumbing of British democracy work. He imagines that simply because he could zhoozh up a city that he can refashion a country. Well, he can’t. He hasn’t got the hinterland and he hasn’t done his homework.
He has neither interest nor knowledge. He is, unfortunately, too busy trying to be cool. In late August, for example, Burnham dropped his support for capping political donations. That would, you’d imagine, be key to the great rewiring of Britain.
Fast forward to today and Nigel Farage could fill his mansion with the money he’s made from billionaire crypto-tycoons. Burnham had the chance to act in the public interest. He failed. Now he’s desperately playing catch-up, and Reform is on course to sell Britain to the highest bidder. But at least Andy looks snazzy in a T-shirt.
Understanding the union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should surely be the core skill of any Prime Minister with ambitions to reshape the UK.
Yet Burnham hasn’t a bloody clue. He seems to have no idea how the union actually works. He’s blundering around, power tool in hand, drilling holes in the furniture.
First, he said another referendum was simply off limits. Then matters changed last week, when he compared Scotland to Northern Ireland and said another independence referendum could be held if there was a clear consensus in support. In Northern Ireland, the secretary of state is legally obliged to call a vote if it appears likely a majority would back a United Ireland.
While the precise wording is opaque, it’s broadly accepted that evidence of majority support would be taken as a sustained lead for a United Ireland in opinion polling over a prolonged period of time, say six months. Not perfect, rather unclear, but at least there’s something to work with.
One day later, though, Burnham changed his mind again. Now, he was back to saying there would be no referendum. Frankly, he’s coming across as a gibbering idiot, with no guts and fewer beliefs. It was almost better when Boris Johnson was in charge. At least, there was a comprehensible policy: No.
Burnham - again Gen X to his bones - wants to be everybody’s best pal. He’s fundamentally a decent guy, it seems, so he wants to people-please. And he probably knows deep down that just saying no to another referendum is anti-democratic. So he shifted ground. Then he had to shift back. He simply ends up looking weak, stupid and incapable.
What’s more troubling about Burnham’s position is that he gave as his principle reason for rejecting another referendum the fact that “Northern Ireland and Scotland have different historical experiences and therefore distinct constitutional arrangements”.
If you subject Burnham’s position to a little socratic thinking the logic is rather terrifying. He's saying - albeit completely unwittingly as he’s too busy thinking about The Fall to realise the import of his words - that a history of violence guarantees an agreed mechanism for leaving the union.
Read more
- Radio 2 Stirling bash is proof BBC can get things right - whatever its critics say
- What has the BBC ever done for us? Quite a lot actually
- ‘This has been absolute hell’: The roadworks bringing a village to its knees
Northern Ireland is the only home nation with the right to a referendum enshrined in law. That right arose from 30 years of murder. The rational conclusion to Burnham’s thoroughly irrational position is that if Scottish people start shooting each other and go on shooting for three decades, then we too can have our referendum.
I’m deliberately engaging in a little reductio ad absurdum here to make the point that Burnham is absurd.
He could have got ahead of this and stuck to the position that as part of his great rewiring he’d put the home nations on the same footing. So when Scotland or Wales show sustained majority support, it’s referendum-time. That would have kicked the ball back to the SNP who would then have to work their lazy asses off to build support.
Burnham didn’t do that, though, he fed expectation and then fostered resentment. The result? The SNP, Sinn Fein and Plaid Cymru have just signed a pact. Now the pressure is on him.
The only possible, intelligent solution is setting up a constitutional convention to hammer out the rules around the union - including how to leave. Burnham is simply out of his depth. Someone should take the power tools away before he does himself an injury.
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
Share