Andy Burnham says 'Holyrood is as distant as Westminster'. The data shows he's wrong

Andy Burnham, now the MP for Makerfield, had pledged more devolution for Scotland (Image: PA)

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“THE people of Dundee and Bangor feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster.”

Those were the words of prime-minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham when he on Monday pledged that a Labour government he leads will offer “new opportunities to extend devolution in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland”.

Curious, then, that Burnham’s “pitch to Scotland” published in The Scotsman the following day failed to even acknowledge that promise, let alone provide any details of what it meant.

Andy Burnham made a pledge to Scotland on Monday, but did not mention it on Tuesday (Image: Peter Byrne)

Instead, Scots were left to try and decode vague platitudes such as putting “place first, not party first” and “problem-solving, not scoring”.

Whatever “problem scoring” might be – Brazil’s third against Scotland? – Burnham added: “The whole of Whitehall will be required to get behind our places and work together with them to make quicker, more joined-up decisions.”

Reading between the lines, it sounds a lot like Labour’s almost-leader is plotting to bypass the devolved Scottish Parliament and have his UK Government deal directly with local authorities – or perhaps beefed up regional “mayors”, as Scottish Labour floated in their rejected 2026 election manifesto.

Burnham’s justification, to loop back to where we started, is that Scottish and Welsh people “feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster”.

The study which undercuts Andy Burnham

The problem is that the diagnosis of the issue misses the mark, as a new study underlines.

Fortuitously, on Wednesday morning the University of Edinburgh sent out a press release about the publication of new research into how Scottish and Welsh voters perceive the UK and devolved governments.

Based on a representative survey of 1756 people (1028 in Scotland and 728 in Wales), the study found that 82.4% of Scots think the UK Government is biased in favour of richer areas. This was almost exactly mirrored by the 82.3% in Wales who said the same.

In Scotland, 7.4% of voters said the UK Government was unbiased, while 4.4% thought its favoured poorer people over wealthy ones.

People were much more likely to think that John Swinney's Scottish Government had no bias or favoured poorer people than for the UK Government (Image: PA)

The difference compared to perceptions of the Scottish Government was stark.

In total, 42.9% said the Scottish Government favours richer areas – around half the rate who said the same of Westminster – while 22.1% said it is unbiased and 23.9% said it favours poorer people over wealthy ones.

The same pattern emerged when voters were asked about perceptions of a centre vs periphery bias. In total, 77.8% of Scots thought the UK was biased towards the centre (read: London) while 52.7% said the same about the Scottish Government and Edinburgh.

Just 6.3% of Scots don’t think the UK Government is biased against either side, while 22.6% said the same of the Scottish Government. And while 8.2% think the UK Government is biased in favour of peripheral areas, 11.8% said the same for its Scottish counterpart.

The story told by the data is clear: Scots do not “feel just as distant” from Holyrood as from Westminster, despite what Burnham might claim.

And ironically, people who believe Westminster is biased were found to be more likely to support further devolution. If Labour's answer is to bypass rather than strengthen Holyrood, it risks doing the opposite of what those voters want.

It appears that the now-former Manchester mayor has diagnosed a problem with English politics, and then assumed that it will be the same in Scotland and Wales.

Having a mayor worked for Manchester – it even got him to No 10 – so surely it would work for Dundee?

This is simplistic thinking, as we have seen from Burnham so far, and ignores some key facts – including the urban-rural split.

That University of Edinburgh study also found that Scots are most closely agreed on whether the UK and Scottish parliaments are biased in favour of urban constituencies. In total, 60.9% of Scottish voters said Westminster had this bias, while 54.9% said Holyrood did.

Former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham looks set to become prime minister (Image: Agency)

It is hard to see how Burnham’s pledge to “make power flow into places like Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Paisley, and Easterhouse” – all distinctly urban spaces – will do anything at all to address this.

Instead, it seems likely that the newly created politicians will just face the same issues again – or even make them worse.

A mayor of Dundee could be seen as biased against Tayport, for example, while the people of Orkney are left wondering where they fit into all this.

Ultimately, Burnham’s solution seems to assume there is always another layer of government waiting to solve the failures of the one above it.

Westminster disappoints? Create Holyrood. Holyrood disappoints? Create mayors. If mayors disappoint, what next?

At some point Labour must admit that the problem isn't the number of politicians, it's how they govern.