Dr Eric Crampton: What New Zealand can learn from Andy Burnham’s UK plan

Election 2023 brought us a new government committed to localist approaches. National had campaigned on greater localism as an alternative to the prior Labour government’s more centralising tendencies across water services, polytechnics, housing and farming regulation.

In his Waitangi speech in 2024, the Prime Minister said that, “We, like you, believe in localism and devolution, not centralisation and control. No one understands your iwi like your iwi does.”

Hannah Bunting: Andy Burnham becomes prime minister.......

Andy Burnham becomes prime minister after Keir Starmer leaves Downing Street for the last time

After being named leader of the Labour party, Andy Burnham has officially become prime minister of the UK. That many people considered this day an inevitability doesn’t make it any less momentous.

Brendan O'Neill: Andy Burnham’s shameful pandering to anti-Israel bigots

His pompous, fact-lite sermon on Gaza is a transparent effort to win back Muslim voters and the keffiyeh classes.

Here he comes, pandering Andy Burnham. The King of the North throwing out the red meat of Israelophobia to keep certain voters sweet. The incoming PM yapping piously about Israel’s possible ‘war crimes’ in a bid to win back restive Muslim voters and the keffiyeh classes who’ve abandoned Labour for the crackpot Greens. That’s what I saw in Burnham’s staggeringly pompous digital sermon on Gaza – not an act of geopolitical conviction but a masterclass in demographic toadying.

Melanie Phillips: Amoral Andy sticks it to the Jews

Who cares that no-one knows how he'll govern Britain? He's passionate about Gaza

Well that didn’t take long, did it?

On the day that 322 politically bankrupt and panicky Labour MPs made it all but certain through their backing that Andy Burnham’s coup against Sir Keir Starmer had succeeded and he would replace him as prime minister, Burnham — whose only claim to fame is the common touch he brought to his role as mayor of Manchester — chose to celebrate by sticking it to the Jews.

Roger Partridge: Britain's Labour government can be a party of growth – but not like this

This column was first published by CapX, the online newspaper of London’s Centre for Policy Studies. It was written for a British audience, but its central argument comes from this side of the world. New Zealand's Fourth Labour Government and Australia's Hawke-Keating Labor government showed that centre-left parties can use market reform to achieve progressive ends. This piece suggests Britain's Labour Party should borrow that tradition.

“It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down,” Andy Burnham said in his first major speech since returning to Parliament. “Instead, it can only be nurtured from the bottom up.”

He is right. The man about to enter Downing Street has seen what much of his party denies: prosperity is grown, not decreed, and the hand that tries to direct it from the centre usually throttles it instead. But the premise has a second half Burnham flinches from.