Burnham has a pivotal chance to change the way we do politics - Alex Cole-Hamilton
As Andy Burnham was being sworn in as an MP, someone yelled from across the House of Commons that “he’s not the messiah”. To his credit, he took it with the humour it was meant and replied, “just a very naughty boy”.
Phonetically Burnham’s name evokes the prophetic wood in Shakespeare that disguised an army and unseated a king to restore order - or at least an appearance of it.
But whether you see him as a Monty Python sketch or the resolution to a dramatic tragedy, if Burnham is to succeed, he’s going to have to go beyond appearances.
What our country needs right now are solutions and for all that I find his this-or-that social media videos about his favourite albums mildly amusing (we are in lock step over our love of the Stone Roses), I’m more interested in the choices and decisions Burnham makes in government.
It looks inevitable that Andy Burnham will become Prime Minister at the start of next week. He will take up the job at a time when we seem to be constantly discussing the chaos of British politics. Perhaps that is because it is not just a few problems here and there. It’s the entire structure, the whole way of doing things.
It’s why the social care crisis gets ignored and the NHS suffers as a result. It’s why we can’t build the affordable homes we need, in the places we need them. It’s why our relationship with Europe is so badly broken.
Burnham has said he is serious about changing that. He has spoken about ending the performative antagonism and striving to work across parliament to meet the challenges we face. If he’s serious, Liberal Democrats will always be happy to help.
As a party, we believe the best way to go about political reform is to put real power in peoples’ hands, and to properly hold the powerful to account.
It’s why Liberal Democrats believe in fixing the broken electoral system and introducing proportional representation. It’s how we can give everyone an equal vote and an equal voice in our democracy, making sure no politician or political party can afford to take them for granted, offering an antidote to extremes and division.
We need to change the tone of the debate too, both at Westminster and in the Scottish Parliament. A big part of that is recognising what strong opposition means and what it does not.
It does not mean jumping on every bandwagon, picking fights for the sake of it and only ever sending out angry press releases.
It does mean intelligent, measured criticism and scrutiny. At times, it means thoughtful cooperation, finding common ground, so that we can actually get things done.
It says a lot about the state of our politics that an absurdist comedian dressed as an intergalactic bin is telling us where we’re going wrong. But so it was, during a recent Oxford Union debate, that Nigel Farage’s opponent in Clacton, Count Binface, railed against the politics of “fakery”. If we’re not careful, he said, our entire democracy “could go down the swanee”.
Burnham must seize the massive opportunity he has before him: change the way we do politics and restore faith in the democratic structures we hold dear.