Wrack and ruin - Burnham becomes prime minister

Andrew Murray Burnham visits Buckingham Palace today to let the King know of his intention to form a government. Without a democratic mandate to govern, having been parachuted into the seat of Makerfield, having faced no contest in his coronation as Labour leader, nor having stood on any manifesto, he may be said to have 0.04% of the British vote and thus popular backing. This is bad enough, but it will soon become a French farce.

He plans to reverse the post-Thatcher consensus that market forces should shape public services, and wants to take us back to the 1970s. He would be “Authentically Labour”, he told the fawning Labour MPs and trade union representatives on his “election” as leader. Prolonged stormy applause for a return to the three-day-week, power cuts, prolonged strike action throughout the decade, prolonged massive inflation (reaching 26.9% in August 1975 under Harold Wilson), the Winter of Discontent and so on. People could not even bury their dead.

British manufacturing had by then gone into its death spiral and was not helped by the unions. Japan and Germany – who lost the War – were now far outperforming the UK. Japanese cars and consumer goods were taking over (look what is happening in turn with China). So it is unsurprising therefore that Burnham’s plans to scale down the government department that leads the UK’s AI strategy.

Such plans will fuel criticism that the new prime minister risks damaging the economy even more than Sir Keir Starmer and his spiteful sidekick Rachel Reeves have already, leading a further attack on business, enterprise and the fabric of society (taxing education and drawing up the ladder, for example. Difficult to find examples of any other country doing so). The potential new Health Secretary has decried Mrs Thatcher’s wicked policy of Right-to-Buy, yet she herself benefited from it handsomely. “One rule for us” is a well-established Labour principle…

Plans to abolish the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and spread its functions between other departments would undermine the country’s AI strategy at a key moment, and would be a further blow to British industry particularly in a sector that is growing by some accounts at 10% annually. Even the outgoing Science and Technology Secretary, Liz Kendall, recently warned the UK had just two years to cement a significant foothold in AI or risk having it “done to us” by other countries. Of course, as we all know, that means China, to which many of the country’s crown jewels have already been sold.

On Friday, stock markets were rattled by the launch of an advanced new Chinese AI model which has shaken assumptions about the US’s lead in the global race to develop the technology. The launch of Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model has highlighted how rapidly the sector is evolving, and abolishing the DSIT would just leave the UK even worse off than it already is, as it struggles to cope with and pay for uncontained mass immigration, a ballooning welfare bill to pay for existing citizens as well as the “New Arrivals” who are of course supposed to be welcomed with open arms (or be forced to by the Diversity Brigade), a massively inefficient NHS, existential threats from foreign powers (yet no commitment to properly funding the armed forces), and so it goes on.

The "white heat of technology"? Not many are holding their breath for a revival in Britain’s fortunes under Mayor Burnham.

Opinions are the writer's own.