ANDY Burnham has promised change, but if his first 24 hours as Prime Minister are anything to go by, that doesn’t stretch quite as far north as Scotland.
Despite pledging to extend devolution ahead of entering Number 10, Burnham, in his very first phone call with devolved leaders, said that he was focused on "practical measures not constitutional changes" and ruled out any “future referendums”.
It was well trailed that the Makerfield MP, before being swept into the highest office in the land uncontested in the space of just six weeks, was not going to let a referendum on Scottish independence go ahead.
But this was the first time that the Prime Minister had made such assertions publicly, the previously aforementioned trail coming from sources present at a meeting he had with Scottish Labour MPs.
It isn’t just independence, despite clearing house of any perceived Keir Starmer loyalists in his Cabinet, and installing new Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland and Wales, Douglas Alexander has managed to cling on to his job in the Scotland Office.
Alexander presided over Scottish Labour’s disastrous Holyrood campaign earlier this year, which saw the party drop to a record low number of seats in the Scottish Parliament and tied with Reform UK for official opposition.
He has even been embroiled in the Peter Mandelson scandal, after files released by the UK Government showed that the disgraced peer helped to arrange a meeting with Alexander and the lobbying firm Global Counsel as soon as he entered Government as trade minister.
It was Alexander’s first meeting, and it wasn’t added to transparency logs until months after the fact.
Then there’s the quite obvious public animosity between the Scottish Secretary and the Scottish Government.
Since Alexander took over the reins at Dover House from Ian Murray in September last year, First Minister John Swinney has made no secret of the fact that under his tenure, intergovernmental relations have not been at their best, to say the least.
In the tit-for-tat between the Scottish and UK Government over who would be taking the credit for Donald Trump removing tariffs on Scotch whisky, in the final throws of the Holyrood election campaign earlier this year, Swinney was asked if relations with the UK Government had deteriorated.
"Yes, it has and I can trace it back to the appointment of Douglas Alexander as Secretary of State for Scotland,” he said.
So why has Alexander managed to cling on to his job? There are a couple of possibilities.
One, that Burnham knows Alexander wants a better job – the Sunday Times this week had a transparent lobbying attempt on the Scottish Secretary’s behalf – and decided that keeping him in the Scotland Office, where he has little power and is essentially a PR outfit for the UK Government in Scotland, is a way for him to keep notoriously ambitious Alexander in his place.
It could be that Burnham is simply using him as a stop gap while he works out what to do with Scottish Labour, who themselves are embroiled in bitter infighting about whether or not they should break away from the UK Labour Party in a bid to salvage their electoral misfortunes in Scotland.
Anas Sarwar, who was pictured smiling beside Burnham this week, is probably hoping and praying that the Prime Minister doesn’t do to him what Keir Starmer did to his predecessor Richard Leonard.
Or, the last possibility, is that Burnham just doesn’t actually care.
Rather than put a fresh face in the Scotland Office, perhaps a female Scottish Labour MP for only the second time in 320 years (they do exist, Andy!), Burnham has chosen to go with more of the same.
Whatever the reason, it isn’t going to go down too well with the Scottish Labour MPs, who have not exactly been quiet about their unhappiness with Alexander in recent weeks.
The Alexander conundrum is reflective of Burnham’s Cabinet appointments as a whole. While there has been a lot of moving about, and certainly some purging of Starmerites, it is quite a lot of the same faces, and we still don’t know a lot about his policies.
While it has been suggested that Burnham would have women around him and break up the notorious Old Boys Club in Westminster, his first move was to sack Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Yvette Cooper and Home Secretary, and replace them with male counterparts; John Healey and Ed Miliband respectively.
Shabana Mahmood, who kept her job as Home Secretary, is now the only woman in the top four most senior Cabinet jobs.
And while he has appointed a record number of women to the Cabinet – 12 women to 11 men – there are fewer women in the most senior jobs than at any point since Labour came to power.
The Cabinet is now less ethnically diverse than during some Conservative governments over the past decade.
What looks like change in Burnham’s Government, from Scotland, appears to be more of the same.
