On July 20, Andy Burnham became Britain’s seventh prime minister in the last 10 years, its fourth in the last five years, and its second since the Labour Party won the 2024 general elections. He inherits an 80-seat parliamentary majority. The opposition is divided. The media are largely sympathetic. Burnham is the only party leader with a net-positive poll rating. In normal times, these advantages would allow a prime minister to reshape the British state and set a new course. But these are not normal times.
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Burnham also inherits a flatlining economy, explosive public debt, overcrowded prisons, backlogged courts, failing hospitals, rising crime, a border and illegal migration crisis, a domestic terrorism problem with roots in the radical Left, and a social chasm between Britain’s Muslims and everyone else. The state created all of these problems in concert with elected politicians, both Conservative and Labour. The state now fails to correct them. The politicians blame each other.
Burnham blames Margaret Thatcher. She left office in 1990 and has been dead for 13 years. Britain, Burnham said on July 20, took “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s.” A divided society and a stagnant economy are the wages of “neoliberalism.” Burnham, who calls himself both a socialist and “pro-business,” proposes a total economic and social reset. He has not yet informed Britons how he will lead them back to the 1970s, which everyone who was there remembers as a decade of disaster, and undo the 1980s, which many who were there remember as a decade of revival, or the 1990s, which even young people who weren’t alive at the time now call an age of hope and plenty.
If Burnham has a comprehensive plan, he’s keeping it from the public. Burnham did not run for a seat in the 2024 elections. The mayor of Greater Manchester since 2017, he unseated Keir Starmer by intrigue. He obtained a parliamentary seat by skullduggery in June as a prelude to entering 10 Downing Street without a contested leadership election. Burnham seemed to think that Manchester is to British politics as the Omphalos of Delphi was to ancient Greece, the navel of the world, but most British people had no idea who he was. Nor is Burnham in a hurry to tell them.
Instead of policy statements, he issues social media clips. Instead of citing economic theorists, as Thatcher cited Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Burnham quotes The Smiths’ lyrics. Instead of wearing a collared shirt, he wears a black T-shirt. Instead of talking policy, he talks about “getting the whole country to face the same way and then pulling in the same direction,” to defeat the “far Right.” Instead of talking about immigration and Islam, he talks of breaking London’s power and redistributing prestige and funding by creating a “No. 10 North” in Manchester.
Burnham has not explained how he will pay for this, though he has hinted that taxes may have to rise. He will not have to explain himself in the House of Commons until Parliament returns from its summer recess on Sept. 1. Until then, Britain’s political vacuum is Burnham’s honeymoon, a long, hot summer of government by good vibes. After the distant manner and iron glove of Starmer, there is a certain freshness to Burnham’s glad-handing warmth. The media applaud the professionalism of his communications and talk up a “Burnham bounce.”
No one wants to admit the truth: Britain has no money.
Labour pains
Burnham’s predecessor, Starmer, won the 2024 elections with a promise to “stop the Tory chaos.” He did, in his way. The chaos is now Labour chaos. The last years of the Conservatives’ 14-year run were a catalog of sleaze. But none of it threatened national security and Britain’s most important alliance in the way that Starmer did by choosing the disgraced Labour fixer Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the United States. Starmer insisted that he had not known that Mandelson had remained close to Jeffrey Epstein for years after the financier’s conviction as a pedophile and that he had not known about the security services’ concern about Mandelson’s unsuitability. But Mandelson’s personal friendship with Epstein and his business ties to China were public knowledge.
Starmer posed as a white knight, but he was unseated by his own dirty dealing. His failure, like the failure he imputed to his Conservative predecessors, was a weakness of character. As with the Conservatives, he looked like one crook among many. The Conservatives took a few years to lose their morals. Labour arrived fresh from 14 years in exile, but Starmer’s appointees soon bested the Tories. His transport secretary and key ally, Louise Haigh, resigned only weeks into his government when it emerged that she had admitted to deceiving the police about the theft of her cellphone in 2013. Angela Rayner, Starmer’s deputy prime minister and housing minister, resigned when it emerged that she had failed to pay taxes on the purchase of a second home.
Tulip Siddiq, Starmer’s anti-corruption minister and close friend, resigned after multiple claims of corruption linked to her aunt Sheikh Hasina, the ex-prime minister of Bangladesh, and Hasina’s party, the Awami League, for which Siddiq previously worked as a British and European lobbyist and spokeswoman. Starmer’s government did not comply when a Bangladeshi anti-corruption court requested Siddiq’s extradition to face charges of embezzlement. In December 2025, she was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in absentia.
Nothing became Starmer’s style of office like the leaving of it. Petty and power-grasping to the last, he exploited procedure in an attempt to drag out his departure and stop Burnham’s run. He failed at that, too. It was fascinating to see the deep flaws of a small man projected at a national scale by digital media, and even more fascinating to see Starmer’s puce-faced writhing as he protested his innocence. As a spectacle, it was the modern equivalent of the old punishment of flaying and disemboweling a felon for the mob. In the excitement, no one dwelled too much on the deeper failures that, sooner or later, and probably sooner, would have brought him down anyway.
Starmer’s government failed to fulfill the economic promises in his 2024 manifesto. Starmer pledged to boost economic growth to the highest in the G7, but at no point in his two-year rule did quarterly GDP growth exceed 0.6%, the near-stagnant rate he inherited in July 2024, when the annual rate of inflation was 2.2%, just above the Conservatives’ target of 2%. After spiking due to the Iran war, the annual rate is now 2.8%. The unemployment rate has risen from 3.6% to just under 5%. The International Monetary Fund forecasts that Britain’s GDP growth rate for 2026 will slow to 1% from 1.4% in 2025.
In 24 months, Starmer logged between 13 and 16 U-turns on major policies. He pledged to cut university tuition fees but reversed course because, he said, there wasn’t enough money. He pledged to cancel winter fuel subsidies for retirees but reversed after the public became inexplicably angry at the prospect of old people freezing to death. He pledged to introduce mandatory digital ID cards on grounds of national security and tax transparency, then made them voluntary after public and media criticism. He pledged to legislate for workers’ rights but failed to get the program through Parliament, despite his majority.
Stamer inherited the consequences of the COVID-19 blowout in public spending. Taxes are already higher than at any time since 1948, when Britain’s leaders had to pay off the debts of World War II. Starmer pledged not to raise taxes, but Rachel Reeves, his chancellor of the exchequer, raised taxes by $53.6 billion only three months into his rule. Reeves raised a further $34.8 billion in November 2025, mostly by freezing the tax thresholds that Starmer had previously promised to raise. She tried to raise taxes on farmers, who are already hard-pressed, but backtracked after mass protests, including tractors rolling up to Downing Street.
Starmer promised to stop illegal immigration, especially the small boats that cross the English Channel from France, by “smashing the gangs” who run the trade and paying the French to intercept their customers. On his first day in office, he ended the Conservatives’ outsourcing solution, deporting illegal immigrants to Rwanda as a third-party territory. Within a year, the number of cross-channel trespassers was at a record high. The government ran out of hotels in which to keep the asylum claimants and started stashing them in military camps.
“I am clear: we will not reward illegal entry,” Starmer said in August 2025. “If you cross the channel unlawfully, you will be detained and sent back.” As a human rights lawyer, Starmer knew perfectly well that so long as Britain subscribes to the European Convention on Human Rights, it cannot send anyone back. The alternative, an exchange program in which Britain would accept a legal asylum-seeker from France in return for sending back an illegal one, collapsed almost immediately. Undercover journalists obtained footage showing French police escorting migrants onto the beaches. Mass protests broke out in towns across Britain after asylum-seekers were accused of sex attacks on young girls.
Nearly 900 cross-channel migrants arrived in Burnham’s first week in office. Some came on giant inflatables, now nicknamed “Burnham boats.” On July 28, Chris Philp, the Conservatives’ shadow home secretary, was monitoring cross-channel traffic on a fishing boat and being interviewed by the BBC when 17 live pistol rounds were fired from a French naval vessel only 300 meters away. The French authorities said it was a training exercise. The French vessel gave no warnings. Philp claimed the fire was “deliberate intimidation” to “stop us from covering migrant crossings.”
Burnham’s burden
At the time of the 2008 crash, the IMF assessed Britain’s public debt as equivalent to 50.8% of its GDP. In 2019, on the cusp of the COVID-19 splurge, Britain’s debt was 85.66% of its GDP. In 2025, it reached 101.29%. The self-assessment of Britain’s Office for National Statistics excludes state-owned banks and unfunded public pensions from these figures. It claims that the public debt has fallen from its 2020 peak of 98.1% to 94.9%.
In the 2024-25 fiscal year, interest payments on Britain’s debts consumed $141 billion of the government’s $1.72 trillion budget. In 2023, interest payments on the national debt took up 2% of Germany’s budget and 3.2% of France’s. In Italy, where debt is over 135% of GDP, interest payments comprised 7% of government spending. But in Britain, interest payments consumed 8.2% of the 2024-25 budget. In the same year, the government spent 2.9% of its budget on defense and 6.9% on education. Its expenditure on debt interest was equivalent to nearly half of the $276 billion it spent on the National Health Service.
Burnham has made no public statement on how he proposes to maintain Britain’s welfare state, especially the National Health Service, while paying a ruinous tab for the public debt and honoring Starmer’s commitments to raise defense spending to 2.7% of GDP by the end of 2029 and meet NATO’s new target of 3.5% by 2035. Tax rises are electoral poison, and they may not be enough. The leading indicator of the Laffer curve has already arrived. Starmer’s tax policies have reduced Britain’s number of millionaires by 7% in the last year. Tax rises will intensify capital flight among the rich who can take their money elsewhere and disincentivize the taxpayers who can’t escape.
In September 2022, a Conservative prime minister, Liz Truss, tried to break Britain’s low-growth, high-tax, high-debt doom loop. Her “race for growth” plans rested on deregulation; tax cuts; reviving carbon energy extraction, especially North Sea oil and gas; and $60.2 billion of unfunded tax cuts. The British pound fell immediately to a near-record low against the U.S. dollar. Yields on Britain’s 30-year government bonds, or “gilts,” spiked to 5.8%. To avoid the collapse of British pension funds, the Bank of England went on a bond-buying spree. Truss lasted 49 days in office. Mayor Burnham of Manchester said the Conservatives had “forfeited the right to govern” and called for a general election.
In mid-May, yields on 30-year gilts reached 5.868%. This was their highest level since 1998, and above the crisis level of 2022. Ten-year gilt yields reached 5.19%, their highest since 2008. Burnham studied English literature at the University of Cambridge. He ran a budget deficit as mayor of Manchester, a city subsidized by the taxpayers of southern England. His signature policies in Manchester were engineering a local property boom and the Pete Buttigieg-like feat of getting the buses to run on time.
Burnham’s only previous declaration on the public debt, that Britain should get beyond “this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,” suggests that he does not understand how the bond markets work. But he does understand how electoral politics works. In his first days as prime minister, Burnham temporarily cut sales tax on fuel bills, capped bus fares, and cut business taxes on pubs and clubs. He did not give details on how the government would cover the lost income, beyond talking about “growth.”
Without structural reform, Burnham’s rhetoric contradicts the economic facts. Either he knows that the bond markets are losing patience but is deliberately misleading the public for political gain, or he doesn’t understand the economic basics and is a fiscal pied piper hurrying Britain’s drift to the cliff. Britain is one external shock from a bond crisis and a run on the currency. If that happens, Burnham will be back in the pre-Thatcher idyll where he wants to be. The last time a Labour government was forced to go to the IMF for a loan was in 1976.
When the numbers no longer add up, a black T-shirt and matey banter are no defense. Burnham could avert economic and social disaster with a dose of Javier Milei-style tough love: cutting welfare spending, taxes, and regulation; dropping “net-zero” green energy policies; and deporting immigration fraudsters. But Labour members of Parliament will rebel and accuse Burnham of turning Thatcherite. Still, if Burnham cannot take Labour forward, he can send his opponents backward.
Britain does not have to hold a general election until late 2029. But Burnham has reasons to call one sooner. The voters still distrust the Conservatives. The personal finances of Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, are under scrutiny, and Farage has been forced to resign his seat and run again in a farcical by-election. Labour’s support has cratered — since 2024, the left-wing vote has splintered along class and sectarian lines. But the right-wing vote is also split.
So long as Reform and the Conservatives refuse to work together, it is not impossible that Burnham could cobble together a left-wing alliance with the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists. The critical economic issue for politicians isn’t the numbers. It’s the dates. Burnham has a choice: call a general election before Britain goes bankrupt, or call it after the crash.
In late July, a More in Common poll found that Labour was ahead of Reform UK for the first time since March 2025. The data company GfK reported that consumer confidence had risen at the fastest monthly pace in three years. If this is the “Burnham bounce,” it will have a hard landing.
Dominic Green (@drdominicgreen) is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
