Max Head💥 retweetledi
Ambition Before Accountability. The Pattern Burnham Hopes You've Forgotten
Andy Burnham is positioning himself as the man who will change Labour for the better. The outsider who understands working people. The mayor who got things done. Before Westminster accepts that narrative it should examine the one thing Burnham has been consistent about throughout his career. When institutional failure has required a reckoning, he has commissioned a review, expressed anger and moved on. The reckoning never comes.
Start with Mid Staffordshire. As Health Secretary from 2009 to 2010 Burnham personally recommended the trust for Foundation Trust status on the basis of four lines of information. Between 400 and 1,200 more patients died at Stafford Hospital than would have been expected. He and his predecessor Alan Johnson rejected 81 requests for a full public inquiry sitting in public across their combined tenures. The Francis Inquiry, which Burnham resisted, found systematic failures. David Nicholson, the NHS chief, told that inquiry that the level of detail Burnham required before recommending Foundation Trust status was surprising because usually ministers would expect much more. The HuffPost analysis published at the time concluded that looking at the witness statements it was difficult not to reach the conclusion that Burnham was guilty at best of incompetence, at worst of gross negligence. Burnham's response was to stand before Parliament and accuse the government of failing to respond adequately to the Francis Report. The report he never wanted. About the trust he had recommended.
Then comes the Augusta inquiry. Operation Augusta was a Greater Manchester Police investigation into a grooming gang of up to 100 members who abused at least 57 children, some as young as 12. It was closed before Burnham's mayoralty. But when MPs wrote to him challenging him on the failures documented in the subsequent review, his response was described in Hansard as supine. He accepted the lack of resources argument without challenge despite Greater Manchester Police having gained over 1,000 additional officers in the years the operation ran. There was, in the words of MPs who examined his reply, no sense of injustice. The minutes from the GMP meeting where the decision to close Augusta was taken had disappeared. The minutes from Manchester City Council had disappeared at the same time. The IOPC subsequently concluded it could not determine who took the decision or why because records were missing and former employees were unwilling to cooperate.
The Rochdale review he commissioned identified 96 men still deemed a potential risk to children who remained at large. Nobody has answered the question of what his mayoralty did to locate and prosecute them. Not Burnham. Not any of the MPs now championing him for Downing Street.
The pattern is not accidental. Mid Staffordshire. Augusta. Rochdale. In every case the same structure. Institutional failure. Review commissioned. Parliamentary challenge answered inadequately. Unanswered questions buried under the next announcement. The man presenting himself as the antidote to institutional evasion has spent his entire career practicing it.
Now he seeks to represent Makerfield. Reform is ahead in polling for the seat by 46 to 35 percent. Labour lost 20 councillors in Wigan last Thursday while Reform gained 23. The seat being handed to him is no longer the safe Labour fortress it once was. If he loses it his leadership bid ends before it begins. If he wins it the questions above will follow him to Westminster.
The political class preparing to crown him has not required him to answer those questions once. It will not start now. Changing the leader without changing the culture of institutional evasion reproduces the problem with a more popular face attached. Britain has been here before. It knows how it ends.
English
