The usual challenge facing a new prime minister usurping a predecessor mid-term is how to make the “change” they promise without entirely trashing the work of the previous administration, ie, their own party.
If they more or less stick to the same policies but with a different “style”, then people might wonder what the point was in replacing the old leader. If they opt for a more radical approach, then they risk breaking solemn manifesto commitments, alienating old regime loyalists and confusing the general public.
Such a regicide can create conditions of almost permanent civil war in any political movement, as the Conservatives have discovered time and again in recent decades.
Having won the general election in part on a pledge to “end the chaos and confusion”, move on from the psychodramas and “tread more lightly” on people’s lives, now it is Labour’s turn to manoeuvre itself through a difficult metamorphosis.
On the early evidence of his intentions, Andy Burnham proposes to solve this dilemma by ignoring it.
He is emerging from his Greater Manchester chrysalis with little care for what passed before. In fact, he condemns the previous four decades of British governance for its neglect of the people – and that includes the Blair, Brown and Starmer administrations. He admits his own culpability in adopting the neoliberal mindset. That’s bold.
So the new occupant in No 10 is seemingly unbothered about continuity, let alone consistency, manifesto promises or, indeed, the feelings of his predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer.
This is already happening with a rumoured restoration of cuts to international aid, albeit on a long timescale. There is believed to be a course correction on oil and gas extraction in the North Sea, or at least as far as legal challenges permit.
This, in garbled form, has attracted the attention of Donald Trump, who has warmly greeted an exaggerated version of the news on fossil fuels and, likely, is more mischievously announcing that the “horrible looking windmills" that loom over Aberdeen (and the nearby Trump International Golf Links) will soon be moved.
On his first trip to the Oval Office, whether in a suit and tie or navy T-shirt, Mr Burnham will have to find a way gently to disabuse his host of such wishful assumptions.
But nowhere, thus far, is the Burnham effect on the policy agenda more obvious and more personal than in the clear indications that the new prime minister will scrap the Digital ID programme.
It was a policy that had been pursued with some zeal under governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, before being cancelled by the Cameron-Clegg coalition in 2010.
Resurrected and adopted by Sir Keir as one of his “missions”, compulsory digital ID was originally presented as his “big idea” – modernising government. It was an intended tough measure to curb irregular immigration – stopping asylum seekers from working illegally.
Typically for a Starmer policy, it was soon dropped after a hostile reception, only to be revived in another U-turn as a new voluntary citizen-friendly programme.
Digital ID would “cut the faff”, as Sir Keir put it, of rummaging in drawers for old electricity bills and the like in order to, say, renew a passport, send money to someone in prison or obtain probate.
The ambitious project was given to the newly minted “chief secretary to the prime minister”, Darren Jones, to promote to a sceptical nation. It was to be “Useful. Inclusive. Trusted”; and “unlock entirely new ways to offer goods and services, and be key to making people’s interactions with the state as efficient and useful as those they are accustomed to in the private sector, like online banking”.
No more paperwork: no more endless phone calls on hold. Public services and benefits would be less vulnerable to fraud, and the government machine converted to AI and made more productive, yielding savings. Nirvana beckoned.
Now the whole thing is to be scrapped. The £2bn budgeted will be redirected towards ameliorating the cost of living crisis (though the decision isn’t supposed to be about the money).
In truth, the British digital ID scheme was an admirable thing in principle, but, especially once it lost its mandatory status, was bound to be superfluous in practice.
Many secure forms of ID are available to prevent illegal working, and it was always naive to suppose that the kind of casual employers who’d take on people for tax-free cash payments below the minimum wage would be troubled by a digital ID requirement.
Much of the British state is already strongly digitised – the NHS being the notable laggard – and the gov.uk website works extremely smoothly. This is one of the few aspects of national life not routinely cited as an example of “Broken Britain”.
There are also downsides to digital citizenship. Hacking by a malign power of the entire population’s details would at least be a remote possibility, but with devastating consequences, as would a statewide shutdown of services. This fate has already befallen the NHS, some local councils, and has happened several times across the private sector.
The more comprehensive and unified a system is, the heavier the risks and costs of failure. The UK also has an unenviable record for cost overruns in building IT systems, including the more than £12bn squandered on the National Programme for IT in the NHS some years ago.
More broadly, it would be unwise to draw much from these early signals of how the Burnham administration will work, but he does seem more prone to populism than his predecessor.
Sometimes that is aimed at the electorate (the transfer of power to regions, North Sea drilling, digital ID) or in appeasing key rivals and elements of his internal soft left party base, as with boosting development spending in a reformed net-zero-focused foreign office under Ed Miliband.
Mr Burnham has always been temperamentally a bit of a chameleon and a crowd pleaser, and, by the same token, a sharper, more instinctive politician than Sir Keir.
He’s clearly better at responding to the public mood and managing the backbenchers and Labour’s factions. But, as the Tories point out, changing leader is not a magic bullet, and Mr Burnham will have no more resources at his disposal.
He will inevitably also have some newly dispossessed and disappointed parliamentary enemies to deal with, the types of disgruntled MPs Sir John Major termed “the bastards”. Mr Burnham mustn’t let them get him down.
