Burnham’s 10-year plan is already running out of time

Burnham should be praised for his longer-term thinking, but how much use is a 10-year plan with only 2½ years to execute it, asks Eliot Wilson From the time of his election as Leader of the Labour Party, Andy Burnham has shown himself comfortable in thinking about public policy in broad terms and over a long time frame. When he accepted the leadership, he referred to “four decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s”; as a lifelong politician, unlike his predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer, he can reach back to his teens to place himself in the Labour tribe. When he made his first speech as Prime Minister in July, outside 10 Downing Street, it reflected this sense of the longue durée, a desire to think strategically rather than a Starmerite desperation to reach the weekend unscathed: “Later this year, I will bring forward a new plan for Britain, a 10-year plan, laying out a path from where we are now to where I believe we all want Britain to be, wherever we’re coming from, wha