Andy Burnham has swallowed the SNP’s case against Westminster

T here are certain things that may be expected from a prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and I do not think it is asking too much for one of these items to be a very simple one. Namely that, when visiting Scotland, the prime minister should at all costs avoid speaking as though he — or she — is in fact actually the leader of the Scottish National Party. This is a test that Andy Burnham failed last week. During a visit to Motherwell, the prime minister bemoaned the decline of heavy industry in Lanarkshire and elsewhere (we shall come to this in a moment) and suggested that although Scotland “has a proud manufacturing past” the country “has been let down by political choices made far away from her by people who have no clue” about anything that happens, or needs to happen, in Scotland. Stop dramas and help people’s lives, says Burnham in Scotland visit That is the SNP’s argument. It is, in fact, the core argument made for Scottish independence. It rests on the proposition that although mistakes will doubtless be made after independence, no government in London can ever offer Scotland the kind of care and attention that is mother’s milk to one based in Edinburgh. There will be blunders but they will at least be our honest blunders. Scotland newsletter Your weekend briefing from the Scotland edition of The Times and The Sunday Times. Sign up with one click You’ve successfully signed up to the Scotland newsletter Explore our newsletters An error occurred. Please use the link below. Scotland newsletter Explore our newsletters If you accept the proposition that Scottish people are not also British people then this argument is cogent and internally consistent. One does not, however, typically expect the British prime minister to talk like this. Advertisement But then Burnham is sloppy. He has form for this stuff. Earlier in the autumn he told the House of Commons that, sure, the process and triggers for constitutional change in Scotland are the same as those in place for Northern Ireland. This is not in fact the case and his office was hastily required to make it clear the prime minister was, for unknown reasons, freestyling. He should be better than that. Top stories 1 US inflation hotter than expected as Iran war stokes fuel costs Economics Top stories 1 Theo Paphitis: I bought a £100m business for £1 and two packs of Benson & Hedges Family Finances 2 Premium Bonds are fun – until you realise what they are costing you Saving & Investing 3 Will Lyons: my vintage wine tour of South Australia Inspiration One of the problems with Jeremy Corbyn was that it was always obvious that he would have voted Yes in 2014 if he’d had the chance of doing so. I don’t believe Burnham is a Corbyn but there is little avoiding the fact his diagnosis of what ails Britain is uncannily similar to the SNP’s own analysis. Most commented 1 Starlink deliberately slowed in Ukraine, says Zelensky Russia-Ukraine war 1,052 comments 2 Katie Zacharia departs as Trump’s press secretary after less than a week US politics 689 comments 3 Hundreds of British troops to rehearse Ukraine mission Politics 308 comments 4 Scotland plane crash: boy, 16, and man, 80, killed Scotland 48 comments 5 All Blacks leave Australia chasing shadows in dazzling first half Rugby union 26 comments In this world, Scotland is just a kind of Super-Northern version of The North. Burnham made his name in Manchester by blaming most misfortunes on “Westminster”. We’d do the job, he’d say, if only we were given the tools for it. Psychologically, then, the prime minister is closer to the SNP than any previous incumbent. This being so, it is perhaps little surprise he so often sounds like a nationalist. His worldview is not so very different even if he fails to appreciate that Scotland, thanks to its unique privileges within the United Kingdom, has never been starved of public spending or, as it is now known, “investment”. Andy Burnham has finally given Scotland a route out of the Union Burnham is a sentimental politician and that is always a dangerous thing. He talks of returning to some prelapsarian idyll from the time before “neoliberalism” — a term now so thoroughly abused it has ceased to have any significant meaning — ravaged Britain. But even if you think it desirable, the clock cannot in fact be wound back. Advertisement Over the past 40 years, global living standards have increased at an astonishing rate but it is certainly true that blue-collar workers in the developed world have, comparatively speaking, lost out. On a utilitarian basis this has been a price worth paying but in Britain, as in other western countries, it is also the cause of much of our contemporary unhappiness and political upheaval. Like other politicians nostalgic for a disappeared age, Burnham talks about “reindustrialising” Scotland and Britain. This is hooey. It is not going to happen. Even in 1970, services formed a larger part of the Scottish economy than manufacturing. Since then, of course, manufacturing has declined from forming about a third of the economy to about a tenth. Awkwardly for the “neoliberalism” critique, Britain’s manufacturing and industrial output is broadly comparable to France’s and no-one save a crackpot has ever suggested France is a poster-child for a neoliberal market economy. Even Germany, which started from something close to scratch 80 years ago, is not the industrial powerhouse it once was. Volkswagen recently announced plans to cut its workforce by 100,000 people because, as presently structured, it cannot compete with cheaper but entirely acceptable Chinese cars. The problem with competition is it creates losers. No-one buys British-made televisions for the same reason everyone buys Chinese solar panels: price. Manufacturing in this country is niche and high-end and likely to remain so. There is nothing shameful about this but no good comes from pretending otherwise. Tourism is a bigger part of the Scottish economy than manufacturing. So is financial services. Rather than celebrate these strengths, our political culture pretends these are not, in some vague sense, “real” jobs. Burnham was speaking in Motherwell last week and duly suggested that the steel works at Ravenscraig had never been satisfactorily replaced. Perhaps not, but not for a lack of effort. Hundreds of millions of pounds of public money have been pumped into the post-industrial regeneration of Lanarkshire. Far from ignoring Motherwell and places like it across Britain, successive governments have invested huge amounts of time and money in reviving places that, in some instances, have lost the primary reason for their existence. Advertisement Meanwhile, all our political parties have cheerfully supported policies that have accelerated Scottish and British industrial decline. Heavy industry is energy-intensive and Britain has chosen to make power extraordinarily expensive. The planet doesn’t care where carbon emissions come from but British policy encourages firms to relocate their businesses to places where energy is cheaper. We then boast about “world-leading” reductions in carbon emissions. This may be a bargain worth making but it takes real chutzpah to celebrate the latter while simultaneously complaining about the former. None of these are easy things to resolve and few of them are even unique to this country even if some of them exist in a particularly virulent or concentrated form here. Even so, some other matters are quite straightforward and asking the prime minister to cease reading from a script that might have been written by the SNP’s own army of spin doctors is surely one such elementary thing.