PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, writes about Andy Burnham's first week as Prime Minister. 

It is obviously difficult – not to mention rather harsh – to pass an authoritative judgment on a new prime minister after only a few days in office.

Nevertheless, we can make some initial broad-brush guesses about how Andy Burnham is likely to act in the weeks and months ahead. The early signs are underwhelming – indeed it is fair to say they are rather alarming.

Back in the day, when the Soviet Union was a thing, there was a science called Kremlinology. Because the Communist Party was essentially incapable of making any announcements in a straightforward and clear manner, experts had to read the tea leaves in an attempt to discern the real intentions of Eastern Europe’s masters and overlords.

Seating plans at official events would be pored over to work out who was on the way up and who was on the way out. The order in which officials were listed on state communiqués or press releases was analysed in depth to derive any tiny shift in power between competing factions, however minor or obscure. Nuances of text – a missing adjective here, a superlative there – were forensically examined to try and determine if there were any implications for tractor production strategy.

I fear the same sort of approach is going to be needed to interpret the intentions of the Burnham administration.

The new prime minister uses identifiable English words and he is capable of constructing sentences and even full paragraphs. But working out what he actually means is an enormous challenge for the layman. “Change” and “hope” abound. Apparently, most of our country’s afflictions are down to something or other that Margaret Thatcher did over four decades ago – which, remarkably, seems to have gone uncorrected in all that time since (including an uninterrupted stretch of thirteen years of Labour government in which Burnham played a significant part).

In his first few days in office, Andy Burnham has displayed an impressive talent for unveiling “performative” policy announcements. By this I mean that the policy is designed to indicate an overarching intention rather than having much hope of changing the underlying fundamentals.

One such example was the proposed cut in business rates for pubs and live music venues. This was initially intended to be paid for by scrapping the widely unpopular and universally ridiculed digital ID scheme. It then turned out that the introduction of identity cards hadn’t been budgeted for anyway and therefore there are no savings to be had by scrapping them. Nevertheless, the money will now be found from somewhere else – possibly by finding some cunning new way to levy a tax on Amazon warehouses.

The modest tax break for pubs and clubs was obviously welcomed by the hospitality industry. For the Burnham regime, that probably amounts to “mission accomplished”. Obviously, the policy itself is a fiasco. Imagine you run a café (for which no business rates relief is currently proposed). Can you now get one of your baristas to sit in the corner and occasionally strum on a guitar and thereby claim you are a music venue? Might it be worth applying for an alcohol licence and recategorise yourself as a pub? Our impenetrably complex tax code is about to become even harder to decipher.

Then we have the cap on bus fares of £2. This again has achieved its PR aim – it supposedly shows Andy is very worried about the cost of living and that (because he did this in Manchester) he now wants all of us to share in his beneficence. Its actual impact on the economy will, of course, be microscopic.

So, I suspect that what we are in for is a wide range of eye-catching but small-ball retail policies that will fiddle a little bit here or slightly turn up a dial over there, but will do nothing at all to really deal with the underlying weaknesses of Britain’s economy or its increasingly fragile social fabric.

The real dividing line in British politics is between those who think the status quo is basically fine but needs to be tweaked a little and its merits communicated more compellingly and those who think the status quo is fundamentally broken and Britain needs a full-scale repair job.

Those in the latter camp (who are mainly on the right-of-centre) need to get their ducks in a row and fast, especially if there’s a fair chance that the next general election could come a lot earlier than 2029.

Keep the flag of freedom flying!