Nowhere left to go

For a little while there, I was worried that this might have to be the third consecutive instalment of “Andy Burnham doesn’t add up” after he indicated that he would sign off compensation for the WASPI women if he became prime minister.

But despite piously telling a hustings event on Wednesday that he would “stick by the Waspi women because they deserve some recompense for the unfairness”, the world’s most flexible man almost immediately rowed back on any suggestion of an actual cash payout after a backlash (for once entirely merited) from inside the Labour Party. Instead, courtesy of the FT, we have this:

He accepts the final decision has been made in relation to financial compensation but has indicated an openness to considering similar schemes on the Greater Manchester model,” the spokesperson said on Thursday.

The Greater Manchester model is a reference to non-financial compensation. Cut-price travel tickets could be considered, Burnham’s team added, pointing out that as mayor he has “supported Waspi women in the city-region with early access to concessionary travel, providing some recompense to them within affordability limits”.

Now we talked about this plan for cut-price public transport in the last column and there are a few potential problems with it. But you know what, I’m inclined to forgive absolutely all of them if this is how he ends up using it. The WASPI campaign is amongst the most entitled and undeserving in all of British politics – and that is quite the bar. Hinting at compensation and then giving them a bus pass is just Picasso-level trolling.

On a more serious note, however, the fact that Burnham has been forced into yet another immediate u-turn after yet another un-thought-out promise bodes very poorly for his premiership, if it ends up happening. He seems to share Boris Johnson’s defining flaw: needing everyone to like him and not being able to say ‘no’; it’s hard to demur from the Labour source who describes Burnham’s wobbling to the FT as “pathetic”.

But if the Mayor of Manchester is an unserious politician, are we supposed to think Sir Keir Starmer a serious one? Because there is scant evidence of that either. He’s already in the morbid stage of flailing around for a legacy – a stage from which nothing good ever came – and has now so little room for manoeuvre that he can’t even do that.

John Healey’s resignation as Defence Secretary is extraordinary

John Healey’s resignation as Defence Secretary is extraordinary. I can’t immediately think of one of his predecessors who resigned over the issue of defence spending. Moreover, Healey is hardly the rebellious type; the point where you can’t keep a loyalist like him inside the government with a serious portfolio is truly the end of the line.

Again, though, it’s difficult to expand on this too much without getting repetitive. We know what the basic problem is: the public finances are being hollowed out by runaway expenditure on welfare (defined to include things such as pensions, social care, and the NHS) driven by a toxic combination of generous policy and unpromising demography, but Labour MPs weren’t elected to do mean things like cut spending and so are utterly unprepared to do it.

As Rachel Reeves has already put taxes up several times, this leaves the Government nowhere to go in fiscal terms and no way to arrest its trajectory. Not only are most capital projects being endlessly salami-sliced and delayed, but even headline commitments by the Prime Minister himself, such as on defence spending, can’t actually be financed.

The results, especially on defence, are crushingly embarrassing and are doing real damage to Britain’s global reputation. Because remember, the tangible failure of British defence in the past couple of years – most recently being unable to deploy a ship to Cyprus – has been accompanied by ever-wilder and more delusional rhetoric. Not only has Starmer previously said that he’s putting the UK on a “war footing”, but the now-departed Healey last year said that we would fight China to defend Taiwan. Not only is the very idea of that laughable given the present condition of the Royal Navy, but even the United States (which could actually defend Taiwan) hasn’t made that explicit commitment.

None of this is going to change, whatever happens in Makerfield. Ask Labour MPs what mistakes Starmer has made to justify getting rid of him, and they’ll list his paltry efforts to control public spending; his authority is broken and isn’t coming back. If Burnham replaces him, he’ll have no mandate to do anything differently and apparently a crippling need for his MPs to like him – one failing, at least, that Starmer does not share.