Burnham passionately defended Blair’s government in an address to the Cambridge Union in 2015. Not making those noises any more, is he…
Tony Blair has smarted at Burnham’s recent declaration that the North has been blighted by “40 years of neoliberalism” and has made criticisms of Burnham’s current platform in his push for the Labour leadership. The soon-to-be-mayor was making different noises in 2015:
“Britain was a divided place where the authorities held all the power. The 1980s was a decade when working-class culture and communities – football supporters, trade unionists – were demonised by parts of the press and the Conservative Party. That was the Britain that New Labour inherited, and it was to change that Britain that I went into politics… It was a Britain where the single biggest influence on your treatment and your life chances was the postcode of the bed you were born in.
Because when Labour came to government in May 1997, public sector debt as a share of GDP was 42.5%, and when we got to 2007, before the crash, it was 36.2%… But think of the other things: the national minimum wage, the trebling of overseas aid, the first ever Climate Change Act. We did so many things to change this country for the better.
In conclusion, I’ve never argued we got everything right. I thought at times we didn’t do enough to make Britain more equal – that we didn’t speak enough about the 50% of young people who weren’t going to university. But the question before you tonight is not whether the Blair and Brown governments got everything right. It is whether they ruined Britain. And I will put it to you that the Britain of 2010 was a better place than the Britain of my youth: fairer, less divided, more open-minded. Or, in the words of David Cameron on the steps of 10 Downing Street in May 2010 – and I quote – ‘compared with a decade ago, this country is more open at home and more compassionate abroad.’
But the clinching piece of evidence is not in anything that I’ve said tonight. It’s not in anything that I’ve said. The clinching piece of evidence is here, in the Conservative Party manifesto of 2010 – that kept those increases to the overseas budget, that kept the national minimum wage, that kept the benefits that cut pensioner poverty, that kept the investment in the National Health Service. That is the manifesto that Cameron and Osborne stood on in 2010, because they accepted that New Labour had changed Britain for the better – that they couldn’t undo the good things that had been done. That is the evidence that you need to think about tonight, that shows everything you’ve heard from those seats opposite is empty rhetoric. New Labour changed Britain for the better, and this is the proof of it.”
Doesn’t sound much like the pernicious ‘neoliberalism’ described by Burnham now…
The Makerfield candidate says he will set out a response to Blair tomorrow as it should be a “considered” one. You would hope so…
Speaking at his speech on how to achieve “progressive capitalism” Wes Streeting fired a dig and Andy Burnham:
“Bond markets are not bond villains and fiscal rules matter.”