THE ASIAN INDEPENDENT UK
Bal Ram Sampla
Geopolitics
A Political Analysis
The Labour PR machine wants you to believe Andy Burnham is Britain’s saviour, the King of the North riding to the rescue. Don’t believe the hype. The reality is very different.
This is a man who has spent his entire career losing, running away, and then positioning himself to take credit for other people’s hard work.
He is a loser at the top level. In 2010 he ran for Labour leader and came fourth out of five candidates, winning barely 10% of the vote. Ed Millband became leader.
In 2015 he ran again, was the clear favourite, and was humiliated and crushed by Jeremy Corbyn, a backbench outsider nobody took seriously. That’s not near-miss territory. That’s repeated rejection by his own party.
He voted for the Iraq War. Every single time. Not reluctantly, not with reservations buy 100% of the vote, every division. Hundreds of thousands died. And when Parliament debated investigating what went wrong, he voted against that too. He has since said he regrets it. Politicians always do, once it becomes convenient.
He was part of the government that raided your pension. Gordon Brown’s administration abolished the dividend tax credit on pension funds, quietly draining billions from private retirement savings year after year. Burnham was a fully paid-up member of that government, eventually rising to Health Secretary. When they left office in 2010, his colleague Liam Byrne left a note for his successor that read simply: “I’m afraid there is no money.”
That was Labour’s economic legacy. Burnham owned it then, and he owns it now.
When the going got tough, he ran. After losing to Corbyn in 2015, the Labour Party entered its most brutal internal crisis in decades. Moderates like Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and others stayed, fought, faced abuse, threats of deselection and accusations of treachery and eventually saved the party from the hard left.
What did Burnham do? He left. He packed his bags, headed to Manchester, and let others do the dirty work. He sat on the sidelines of the civil war while better people bled for the cause.
Then he sniped from a safe distance. As Mayor of Manchester he spent years criticising Starmer’s government while bearing zero responsibility for the consequences. He set up a network called “Mainstream” — widely seen as a personal vehicle to undermine the sitting Prime Minister of his own party.
All the attacks, none of the accountability.
And now he wants the prize. Starmer won Labour a landslide in 2024 , something Burnham never came close to achieving. Others fought the Corbyn wars so Labour could be electable again. Burnham contributed nothing to either achievement. Yet here he is, the beneficiary of everyone else’s sacrifice, being crowned without even winning a proper contest.
Burnham has been whatever the moment required , Blair loyalist, soft left challenger, northern populist. The ideology shifts. The ambition never does.
This is not a saviour. This is a careerist who fled every battle, sniped from the sidelines, and is now walking through a door that others broke down for him.
