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, whatever party we support.”

It reeked, of course, of the genially authoritarian assumption that there is a place “we all want Britain to be”, a certainty that his vision is so universal and benevolent that it must be the ambition of every voter. The Prime Minister might want to reflect on whether “we all” want the United Kingdom to be a member of the European Union, for example. Still, politicians are often criticised for short-termism, so there is something refreshing about a leader crafting a “10-year plan”, even if it does invoke the language of tractor production and grain harvests.

A 10-year plan already delayed

Last week, however, talking to The New Statesman, Burnham admitted the plan was behind schedule: “We may go into the new year, to be honest … December or January, I think we will need to leave that open.”

You might question why a 10-year plan could take six months merely to draft, and roll your eyes at Burnham’s casual “we will need to leave that open”. Just as Starmer’s administration seemed incapable of producing any major policy document on time – the Industrial Strategy, the National Security Strategy, the Defence Investment Plan – so too the Burnham government seems to have staked out a position for long-term residence on the back foot.

With the 10-year plan, though, there are additional factors of timing. Let us assume, for the purposes of argument, that it is published at the very beginning of 2027. The next general election must be held on or before 15 August 2029. So what Burnham will be offering is not so much a 10-year plan as a 2½-year plan with IOUs. It is a constitutional maxim that Parliament cannot bind its successors: no law can be made which is irrevocable. One of the elements of parliamentary sovereignty is that parliament may do as it wishes – it could legislate tomorrow to say that fair is foul, and foul is fair – but the next parliament could enshrine the opposite in statute.

Burnham’s boldness should be praised

It would be absurdly restrictive to say that no politician could talk about his or her intentions or objectives beyond the last theoretical date for the next general election. But anything after that is contingent, and when three-quarters of Burnham’s 10-year plan could fall within that category of contingency, it prompts questions about the usefulness of the whole affair.

It is not as if Burnham lacks ambition. Like Sir Keir Starmer, he wants to “rewire” the British state. He promised to “make this moment a circuit breaker for Britain, bringing forward the biggest changes in the last 40 years” and spoke of “a new political model and a new economic model”. This includes “put[ting] life’s essentials back under stronger public control to make them affordable”, which seems to be a slightly milquetoast formulation for “nationalisation”, and “re-industrialising Britain, using public procurement to back British industry”.

These are major changes in policy and, while they may horrify anyone with any attachment to free markets and the dynamism and innovation of the private sector, voters are entitled to know more about the government’s plans. With so much of its strategy likely to be in effect a promissory note, and facing an electorate which now no longer just suspects but assumes that politicians are lying, the government runs the risk of its plan echoing St Augustine’s plea for chastity: re-industralise me, o Lord, but not yet.

How a 10-year plan could work

One of (at least) two courses of action could have ameliorated this problem. The first would have been an early general election: there is absolutely no constitutional requirement for a new prime minister to go to the polls immediately, there is no personal mandate, and in post-War history only Sir Anthony Eden in 1955 and Boris Johnson in 2019 have done so. But the option was there, if Burnham had wanted a sense of public endorsement for a change of direction. He seems to have chosen not to, and choices have consequences.

The alternative would have been producing perhaps a shorter, higher level document in a much shorter timeframe. Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July; if some kind of plan or mission statement had been ready for Parliament returning from the summer adjournment on 1 September, that could have bought him some breathing space and a sense of engagement. It would not have given him much time to prepare, but no-one imagines he had not considered the premiership for some time before. The American Declaration of Independence was drafted over about 17 days, while the modern Constitution of Japan took nine.

Trust is a vital part of the political process and currently in very short supply. Burnham’s leisurely amble towards a 10-year plan risks making a potentially pointless document misleading or malign. It is good that politicians think over the longer term to produce more coherent policy, but that should not expand the thinking time in proportion. Across the board, the government needs to speed up.

Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian. He is a senior fellow for national security at the Coalition for Global Prosperity and a contributing editor at Defence on the Brink