Ever since former British Prime Minister Liz Truss’ tenure was derisively referred to as “the shelf-life of the lettuce” by her critics, others have come and gone too, in quick succession, the latest being that of the seemingly harmless London Lawyer, Keir Starmer.
His successor, Andy Burnham, entered 10 Downing Street on Monday, full of pledges but dodgy with timelines. He must have learned one or two quick lessons and determined not to slip on a banana peel in a jiffy.
Politics, especially the conservative English type, is mostly all about perception. But sometimes, perception has a short lifespan when the people are “impatient” and in a hurry to get the job done. This was former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s albatross, such that despite his clean pedigree and “Asian audacity”, before you could call his name, he was gone.
Apart from Andy Burnham’s promise of welfare reform and devolution of power, his urgency to cut down the bus fare has been poo-pooed as a petulant ambition, too unserious to make any meaningful changes in the lives of the citizens, by no less an individual than Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the conservative Party.
Mrs Badenoch has argued intelligently that the so-called cut in the bus fare will translate to a burden on the people in another way, making the policy jejune and laughable.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham sure has some guts: even though more than 4,600 people in England experience sleep rough every night according to homeless charity, the new Prime Minister is not ready to shy away from such an audacious policy to change the tide, not minding whether or not it is realisable, even though reports had it that he did averagely well in Manchester with the same policy when he was the city’s mayor in 2017.
His popular argument that “political power was centralised while economic power was privatised” was, according to him, a wrong move in the 80s; the reason he’s seeking power devolution. But this, too, is equally a tall ambition.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham, too, did not refuse to follow the traditional alignment with America, declaring that ensuring the security of the UK and his allies is a top priority. This drew the attention of US President Donald Trump, who promised to meet with him to discuss topics of mutual interest “in the not too distant future”.
With an ambitious leader like Burnham, the United Kingdom is again poised to witness what seems to be a more directional leadership, devoid of the back-and-forth movements associated with Starmer’s days.
