Andy Burnham Has Three Years to Fix Britain

Andy Burnham will soon have a monumental task. If, as expected, he replaces Keir Starmer as Britain’s prime minister, he will not just be taking up an office that has chewed through six occupants in merely 10 years. He will also probably be the British establishment’s last chance to stave off a government controlled by Nigel Farage, the Brexit architect whose nationalist party, Reform UK, is currently leading in the polls. Under British law, the ruling Labour Party can keep its current parliamentary majority without calling an election until 2029. That gives Burnham roughly three years to revive the moribund British economy before frustrated voters turn away from mainstream parties and opt for the radicals instead.Before Burnham rode to Labour’s rescue late last week by winning a special election for Parliament, he was mayor of Greater Manchester, a place that has grown in defiance of Britain’s economic malaise. Relative to his unpopular Labour colleagues in London, Burnham can credibly argue that he knows better how to conjure up prosperity. “You can’t order growth from the top down,” he told me a few months ago in Manchester. “The U.K., for most of our lives, has been an overly centralized country.”When we spoke, I was reporting on why Britain had economically stagnated since the global financial crisis almost 20 years ago, and I had come to Manchester because its growth had consistently been double the national average. From 2017 to 2023, cumulative productivity in Greater Manchester increased by 12.6 percent—whereas inner London saw no productivity increase whatsoever. The hope implicit in Burnham’s seemingly sudden rise is that his city’s experience can now be scaled across Britain.[Helen Lewis: The man who couldn’t do it]Burnham’s odyssey has actually been longer than Ulysses’s. He had been a well-liked and prominent Labour member of Parliament from 2001 to 2017. But after running twice to be Labour leader in 2010 and 2015, and losing badly both times, Burnham