Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham has criticised the Government in a speech in what some are saying is a bid to be the next Labour leader
In the speech at the Compass’ gathering at London’s Ministry of Sound nightclub on Saturday, the Mayor warned Kier Starmer’s party of its “reluctance to show courage or conviction”
Compass’s director Neal Lawson opened the day by hailing Burnham as “by far and away the most popular person to be the next leader of the Labour Party”
Burnham set out a number of proposals for policy during the speech including asking Starmer’s Government to look to “get fairness” by cutting benefits or pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, with a need to “think again” on disability benefits and not make cuts.
He said the party should work on a “substantially new offer for the public”, with a “new story that redefines who we are, who we stand for, and what we are going to achieve” and spending review announcements that “speaks to the ambition of all of those people, all of those places that have felt modern politics has ignored them”.
The Labour Party should be be the “unifying, popular left” in opposition to a “divisive populist right”, fighting the right “not by aping their rhetoric” but painting them as a “coalition of the arch-Thatcherites and the ‘Maggie-didn’t-go-far-enough’ brigade”.
He urged the Government to launch the “biggest and quickest” council and social housebuilding programme Britain has ever seen, calling it the “singlest smartest investment” Labour could make to tap working-class “ambition” and save billions on benefits and public services.
He added that Labour should set a new overriding national target on housing, which is to “hit a new tipping point in this Parliament, when we are building more council and social homes than we are losing”.
The Mayor also called for free transport for teenagers in England and to introduce proportional representation, to bring in a “new politics”.
