So that’s it. Keir Starmer read the room, found it on fire, and let himself out the back door.
Andy Burnham, the man who spent years doing his best impression of the Prime Minister waiting at a tram stop in Greater Manchester, is now the hot favorite to hold the keys to No.10. And the question I keep asking, about founders who have built something real with their sweat and overdraft, is simple: is it on our side or not?
I have to declare an interest. I advised David Cameron’s government on business, and I sat alongside the late, magnificent Lord Young of Graffham, a business genius sharp enough to navigate the corridors of Whitehall for a generation. Young understands something that most politicians never do, which is that you can’t compile growth from a spreadsheet or press release. Find out by listening to people who have actually met payroll on Friday when the bank is quiet. His reports on small business weren’t poetic, but they were honest, and they moved the needle. We need that voice in the room again.
Now, Burnham is no fool, and he’s not anti-business in a stinging, placard-waving sense. You talk a good game about “socialism-friendly friendlyism,” whatever that turns out to mean when civil servants catch you. He wants to reduce the business prices of the corner cafe and the struggling pub, which is great, and I will buy the first round. But the music of emotions among the elderly and job opportunities is by no means dry oil. A recent survey found that eight out of ten SME owners are nervous about what Burnham Premier means for their business, and you don’t get a number like that by accident.
Here’s what Burnham needs to understand, and understand it quickly. The wisdom of a healthy economy is not wealth that is created. That’s what happens to that wealth later. A founder who sells his software company for forty million doesn’t put it under the mattress. You become an angel investor. He supports three other founders, mentors a dozen, and is founding a fund. That is the flywheel, and it is the single most powerful engine of prosperity that we have. The Tony Blair Institute, not a nest of hawkish capitalists, has written about exactly this, how startup success can be leveraged into the next generation of growth. Nine out of ten angels reinvest their exit money. That is not greed. That’s the machine that works.
And here is my concern. You can’t, on the one hand, ask businessmen to take crazy risks, restore the house, miss the children’s bedtimes for ten years, and, on the other hand, show that the moment they succeed you intend to exempt them from the reward of wealth tax, land tax, or whatever the focus group christened it this week. Burnham was vague on this, which is his own kind of answer. Ambiguity is what scares innovators. They can arrange bad news. They can’t arrange to shrug.
The thing is, the money is sitting there, ready to be spent. The challenge for whoever will be the next PM is not to create wealth first. We are working well on that, thank you. The challenge is to get it recycled in the real economy instead of fleeing to Lisbon and Dubai, where the reception is warm and the tax credits generous. That’s a problem that can be solved, but only if Burnham does the one thing this government doesn’t agree with, actually listening to entrepreneurs about how to unlock funding rather than unfairly lecturing them.
So can he win? Yes, he can, and I would like him to. But it requires a leap that does not come naturally to a man whose instincts are formed in the Labor movement. He needs his own Little King, a proper businessman with strong hands and scar tissue, sitting in the heart of Downing Street, not a special adviser who has read a book about a train crash to Manchester. You need to treat the founders not as a money machine to be taken but as the goose that lays the golden egg, and you are not, if you are sensible, threatening the goose.
Burnham has charisma, northern soul, and a real knack for sounding like he means it. What they lack, so far, is a credible promise to wealth creators that their success will be celebrated rather than taken for granted. Make that promise, and keep it, and he could be the sweetest surprise this country has had in years. Break it, and the flywheel stops, the money goes, and we’re all the poorer for it. Thank you, Andy. The kettle is on.
