00:00Andy Burnham has now become Prime Minister. But who is he? He didn't have to fight a general election.
00:04He didn't even have to fight an election with his own party. He just emerged.
00:08But we do know two things. The first is that he wants to improve the general mood of the country.
00:14He wants to get the party behind him. He wants to build a good, enthusiastic team.
00:19He wants to tell a story. He could hardly be worse than his predecessor,
00:23who didn't build a good team and was a bit of a downer in everything that he did.
00:27But there are big problems here. One is that he's only really talking to the Labour Party.
00:31He's telling the Labour Party what it wants to hear, but the Labour Party is not the country.
00:35The second is that people are in a bad mood not just because they've had a glum Prime Minister.
00:41They're in a bad mood because things aren't working. Wages are stuck. The country is in the doldrums.
00:46The second thing we know is that he's a massive fan of devolution.
00:49He left a safe seat in Parliament in order to become Mayor of Manchester.
00:53And he's right to be a fan of devolution. Britain is much too centralised as a country.
00:59The power and the wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated in one small part of the country.
01:04And that is a big problem. Devolution is easier to talk about in theory than it is in practice.
01:10There are too many veto points in Britain that prevent houses from being built, problems from being solved.
01:16Devolution will increase the number of veto points.
01:19He talks about having a Downing Street in the north, but that is not really going to survive contact with
01:25reality.
01:26There's so much going on in modern government that you need to be in the centre of power,
01:31surrounded by people who know what they're doing, not on a train that quite often will break down and will
01:37almost always be late.
01:38The biggest problem with Burnham is he's not addressing the problem of productivity.
01:42D solamente writes that for Methévidoнем priesthood,yes will lead to productivity.
01:43D
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