BS Summary: This article contains 40 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Overconfidence Bias, and Confirmation Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 77.3% saturation with 1,253 hits. Analysis detected 5,621 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,622 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 81.2% and a BS Rank of 88% (2,382 of 19,025 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 87.50% of the article peer group.
By the late afternoon, the announcements came with metronomic regularity, the great and the good of the last Cabinet eliminated.
Rachel Reeves, gone.
David Lammy, gone.
Liz Kendall, Darren Jones, Steve Reed, Peter Kyle, Richard Hermer — all dispatched in quick succession, with Hermer appropriately announcing his removal on Bluesky.
The last Blairite standing from the Starmer experiment is Pat McFadden, who remains at work and pensions.
Yvette Cooper is also still in the Cabinet, though she’s now health secretary.
Shabana Mahmood, for all the talk of a promotion to No. 11, remains at the Home Office.
Given she reputedly didn’t even want to be chancellor, perhaps that’s not so surprising.
This, then, was the Downing Street clear-out of the decade, less a reshuffle than a political detonation of much of the Labour Right.
And while the extent of the change is extraordinary, so too is the fact Burnham’s retinue kept the purge concealed.
We should now recognize the endless briefings in recent weeks, from Mahmood being the next chancellor to Bridget Phillipson keeping a major role (she’s now equalities minister), for what they were: the Labour Right stirring the pot and hoping for a reaction.
It never came.
If nothing else, this has been the slickest announcement of a Cabinet by a Labour PM since Blair.
It’s early days, but the narrative has been exceptionally clean — much to the chagrin of those now powerless on the backbenches.
For decades, the default of Labour’s “soft Left” — of which Andy Burnham has, in recent years, been a standard bearer — was to wax lyrical about “broad churches” and bringing people together.
As leader, Ed Miliband’s two shadow chancellors were Alan Johnson and Ed Balls.
Peter Mandelson was arguably the second-most-powerful person in Gordon Brown’s government.
And even Jeremy Corbyn, before the attempted coup against him in 2016, had the likes of Heidi Alexander and Ian Murray in key positions.
This tendency, of trying to fit people who detest one another into the same project, even when they violently disagree, is a major structural deficiency for Labour.
Good strategy is the result of saying no, and sticking relentlessly to a plan.
For the present party of government, however, the opposite often applies, the general feeling being that giving out influence, and doling out concessions to almost everyone, is the foundation of political success.
As should surely be clear by now, the opposite is true.
That’s certainly a lesson our new Prime Minister has seemingly learned.
Even before he returned to Parliament, I said Burnham would need to be ruthless with high-profile Starmer supporters.
In truth, though, I couldn’t see it happening, partly because of the institutional strength of the Labour Right within the party machine (though not its membership), and partly because Burnham seems like a people-pleaser.
On that second count, I may have misjudged him.
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That’s not to say there aren’t disappointments for the party’s Left.
Ed Miliband has been moved to the Foreign Office, a shift which may help the PM’s office dump certain aspects of his Net Zero agenda while giving the Doncaster MP what looks like a promotion.
It also doesn’t hurt, as Labour tries to win voters back from the Greens, that alongside acknowledging mistakes on Gaza, Burnham has chosen someone to lead on foreign policy who’s trusted by center-left voters.
There’s also the fact that Miliband has bags of experience and a sizable personal profile, all useful assets on the global stage.
The biggest shock, though, was surely the appointment of John Healey as Chancellor.
While it’s true Healey was at the Treasury more than two decades ago, he’s not especially known for harboring a distinctive vision on the economy.
Nor does he have experience in financial services, or even the private sector.
But perhaps that’s the point, because rather than an ideologue, or a figure who wants to chart their own path, Healey will be a relatively loyal factotum at the Treasury, as Burnham seeks to re-configure large parts of the British state — not least by moving part of No. 10 out of London.
Additionally there’s the fact that John Healey’s greyness — his political brand brings to mind the title of Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities — is something of a balm for bond markets while Burnham ponders further tax rises and higher public spending.
Perhaps, if your prime minister is most comfortable waxing Mancunian about football and the Hacienda nightclub, you need a number two who resembles a bank manager from Wiltshire.
“If your prime minister is most comfortable waxing Mancunian about football, you need a number two who resembles a bank manager from Wiltshire.”
There’s a third aspect to Healey’s elevation though, and perhaps it’s the most important.
Because while Burnham has ideas of his own, the economic agenda of his government will be, for the most part, designed by Lord Jim O’Neill (formerly of Goldman Sachs) and former Bank of England chief economist Andrew Haldane .
So when Healey delivers his first budget in October, the words he’ll be saying, and the policies he’ll be proposing, won’t really be his.
But what are those policies, and why would a former executive at Goldman Sachs be advising Britain’s most Left-wing leader since Harold Wilson?
The answer is that Burnham’s agenda is based on squeezing rentierism in the economy — from outsourcing and privatized utilities to buy-to-let landlords — and in its place investing in the core foundations of success from skills and housing to cheap energy.
The two agree on a great deal, not least because Manchester has been the place they’ve most closely examined what works, and what doesn’t.
They concur that the state needs to be more active, a critical partner to the market rather than its nemesis.
Still, it’s also true that Healey and Burnham are politically aligned, with the former supporting social housing in a way that was unthinkable for someone like Rachel Reeves.
Besides, from his perspective Healey almost certainly accepted the job, with all the unique constraints it will entail, in exchange for more money for defense: the very issue that led to his resignation a month ago and which essentially ended Starmer’s premiership.
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Which leads to the most important question of all.
If Burnham intends to end rough sleeping as a matter of urgency — something he said in his maiden speech as PM, and a priority I agree with — and he wants to retain the pensions triple lock, increase defense spending, build council homes and bring utilities back into public ownership — then how, exactly, will he pay for it all?
The Prime Minister insists he won’t break the fiscal rules, which means borrowing can’t finance day-to-day spending, and also that the national debt will fall over the lifetime of this Parliament.
But that second part, of a falling national debt before 2030, simply doesn’t seem possible given the scale of the commitments Burnham is endorsing.
In any case, there won’t be flesh on the bone until later this year — when Burnham aims to put forward a “10-year plan” for the country that lays “a path from where we are now to where I believe we all want Britain to be”.
I’m expecting massive commitments on elderly care, housing, industry and apprenticeships.
All important, but the money will have to come from somewhere.
Before then, though, the new government will turn to the cost of living, an issue that Burnham will address in a set-piece speech today.
Expect a lower cap on bus fares , and perhaps even a return to the £2 fares scrapped by Starmer and Reeves when they entered government, but which Burnham wisely retained in Manchester.
Rent caps and help with energy bills have also been touted, but both would surprise me, not least because they aren’t long-term solutions.
For Burnham, Haldane and Jim O’Neill, not to mention voices on the Left such as Matthew Lawrence, the aim must be supply-side interventions that make housing and energy cheaper, rather than government intervention to prop up demand.
Rent caps, before building more homes, could well prove counter-productive.
Regardless, Burnham is trying to be the bearer of good news right from the start of his premiership, lightening the load of the median voter.
It’s a stark contrast to the gloomy naysaying of the opening months of the Starmer government, when he and Reeves either delivered bad news, raised the prospect of worse to come, or else made headlines for freebies, inaccurate details on their CV and Taylor Swift tickets.
Burnham will benefit from having just fought a by-election in a constituency where Reform romped home in the May elections.
He would do well to trust his instincts as a result.
Yesterday that meant eviscerating almost the entirety of the Starmer project.
A memorable aphorism attributed to Teddy Roosevelt is that you should speak softly while carrying a big stick.
Add to that dad-dancing , and wearing retro Everton tops, and you have the political management style of our latest PM.
Where Starmer’s nastiness was often performative, perhaps the result of deep-seated insecurity, Burnham’s ruthlessness might be tethered to a modicum of humanity.
Whatever the differences between the two men, his colleagues better hope it works.
That itself adds another layer to proceedings.
Will the likes of Reeves and Lammy cause No. 10 problems from the outside?
That is what would typically happen next.
Only they all need Burnham to succeed — otherwise they’ll be looking for new jobs before the decade is out.
The PM’s internal rivals will want him to succeed as well.
Just not too much.
Analysis
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