LABOUR’S Andy Burnham, who is set to replace Keir Starmer as Prime Minister in three weeks, pledged to cut welfare and boost military spending, as he delivered his first ‘speech to the nation’ in a Manchester library yesterday.
Burnham said he intends to bring down welfare spending, but did not outline cuts to specific benefits.
Instead, he said expenditure will be reduced in a ‘fair and lasting’ way by giving regional mayors more power to force unemployed youth and the mentally ill onto ‘employment support schemes’, with ‘in-work mental health support’.
He also said he wants to change the political culture at Westminster by ending the ‘whipping’ system of party management, which he claimed has been used to ‘create fear’.
‘I am going to do things differently,’ he said, adding that he is going to break with ‘more of the same’.
Burnham said: ‘After 10 years of political turbulence since Brexit’ and 20 years ‘of falling living standards’ since the financial crash, ‘Westminster hasn’t been working for people, and it hasn’t been working for a very long time’.
He said the country is ‘in a housing trap’ that is having a ‘ruinous’ impact on the UK’s public finances.
He also said there needs to be ‘a rethink’ in education. ‘The days of a school system configured entirely around the university route will be brought to an end.
‘We will answer the call for devolution of employment support,’ he said, adding ‘this is the difference mayors can make.
‘In doing that, we will reduce the welfare bill in a way which is fair and lasting. The whole of Whitehall will now be required to get behind our places – it’s a ten-year mission’.
‘No 10 North will be the nerve centre of a rewired Britain’.
Burnham said the job of his so-called ‘No 10 North’ will be to make power flow into different regions across the country. ‘It will be the conduit through which power and resources are redistributed across the UK.’
He added: ‘No 10 North’ will be given a mission to deliver equivalent living conditions in all parts of Britain and make place-based collaboration the ‘new operating principle’.
Burnham also said that he would encourage the UK arms industry ‘to buy British’.
He ended without taking questions.