Andy Burnham says he will go ‘faster’ than Starmer. Why is that so hard?

Illustration: Guardian Design/Anaïs Mims/Getty View image in fullscreen Illustration: Guardian Design/Anaïs Mims/Getty Andy Burnham says he will go ‘faster’ than Starmer. Why is that so hard? Is the machinery of state jammed, or is the reason for the slow pace of change more personal than institutional? E ighteen months into the 24 it turned out he would last in No 10, Keir Starmer was a man in a hurry. The biggest frustration with the job, he told MPs , concerned “speed and the ability to get things done”. The underlying problem, he thought, was that every time something had gone wrong in the past, “successive governments have put in place another procedure or another body or another consultation to try to stop ourselves ever making a mistake again”. In airing his impatience, if little else, Starmer is in tune with the country he has become too unpopular to lead. Julian Gallie, a pollster at Merlin Strategy, says voters have been “crying out for change for a decade”, even if they have sent inconsistent signs about what sort of change it should be. The Brexit vote, the Corbyn surge of 2017, the Johnson majority of 2019 and the Tory rout of 2024 can all be seen as “a desperate roll of the dice against a status quo” that somehow feels impossible to shift. History suggests that the single most useful tool in shaking off stupor is something Andy Burnham doesn’t obviously have – an emergency. The classic case is Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days. It wasn’t just eloquence but the ubiquitous bankruptcies, redundancies and collapsing banks of America in 1933 that enabled him to bulldoze 15 major laws through a rancorous Congress. View image in fullscreen Lisa Nandy predicts that Andy Burnham’s administration will immediately be ‘faster and bolder’ than Starmer’s. Photograph: WPA/Getty The British war cabinet’s sudden embrace of full political union with France in June 1940 is less remembered, only because the speed of the emergency overtook that plan. When faced in 2008 with the cashpoints running dry within hours, a UK government that had just spent months dithering over little Northern Rock suddenly summoned the resolve to nationalise half the banking system. In the pandemic, a blitzkrieg of new laws locked citizens in their homes while slumbering bureaucracies awoke and improvised ways to pay for people to stay off work. Previously unbendable protocols about everything from data governance to public procurement were summarily swept aside. Absent the threat of mass death or ruin, has the British machinery of state – as Starmer implied – simply got too gummed-up to move? The outgoing prime minister’s colleagues are hoping that the real reason Labour has so often seemed marooned in power is more personal than institutional. Lisa Nandy is one voice around the top table predicting that Andy Burnham’s administration will immediately be “ faster and bolder ”. It’s not a daft hope. Starmer is, despite his protestations, the embodiment of what Francis Fukuya