As Labour careerists and sycophants rush to nail their colours to Andy Burnham's mast, what ARE his plans for Britain?

Published: 20:18, 9 July 2026 | Updated: 20:18, 9 July 2026 IF the stakes weren’t so high, there would be something faintly amusing about the stampede of Labour careerists and sycophants nailing their colours to Andy Burnham’s mast. Just like everyone else, virtually none of these parliamentarians has the faintest clue what Mr Burnham intends to do when he gets his hands on the keys to No10. In one of his few public pronouncements since returning to Westminster, the self-styled King of the North wrote in yesterday’s Times about bolstering Britain’s depleted defences. But like practically every declaration we heard from him in the run-up to the Makerfield by-election, it was heavy on rhetoric but woefully lacking in detail. Of course, there are many issues of concern about Mr Burnham’s coming elevation. Perhaps the principal one is that the only real mandate he has comes from the 25,000 people who voted for him in Makerfield. By being spared the rigorous debate he would have faced in a leadership contest, he has also managed to avoid spelling out his position on the big issues facing the nation. The little we do know sounds distinctly unpromising. With Mr Burnham ruling out ‘crude’ cuts to welfare, reducing the bloated benefits bill appears to be low on his to-do list. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen if the frankly horrifying warnings from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) about the state of the public finances will go unheeded. Yet even if he isn’t inclined to share it just yet, Mr Burnham clearly has a detailed plan. It emerged yesterday that he has spent the last year – when he was supposedly in full-time employment as mayor of Greater Manchester - plotting a road map for his first 100 days in Downing Street. No doubt he used that time to fine-tune his policies, priorities and key Cabinet appointments. The longer he keeps it all secret, the more ominous it starts to look for Britain – and for all of our futures. There are many issues of concern about Andy Burnham’s coming elevation. Perhaps the principal one is that the only real mandate he has comes from the 25,000 people who voted for him in Makerfield IT IS just three years since Labour targeted Rishi Sunak - then serving as prime minister - in a mendacious and thoroughly discreditable campaign about his record on crime. In one advertisement plastered across social media, the party alleged: ‘Under the Tories, rapists and burglars will be spared jail.’ Another advert claimed: ‘Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.’ Of course, no sooner had Keir Starmer landed in Downing Street than a soft-justice regime was introduced. With more than 60,000 prisoners of various stripes already freed early under Labour, the next phase will see killers and sex offenders back on the streets before serving their sentences in full. If that wasn’t enough to cause alarm, now a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) reveals that the public is being put at further risk due to the ‘inefficient’ system of electronic tagging. NAO investigators also discovered that security breaches involving tagged offenders don’t have to be reported to the authorities for up to 53 hours. It hardly needs to be spelt out in block capitals that this is no way to run a criminal justice system. Not for the first time, Labour’s cynicism has been matched only by its brazen hypocrisy. ALMOST three decades after setting out on a round-the-world odyssey, Karl Bushby is finally returning to Britain. But his plans to swim the Channel on the last leg of his journey home have been scuppered by French bureaucrats. Pity they’re not nearly so vigilant when it comes to the endless boatloads of illegal migrants heading this way.