ANDY BURNHAM is far more likeable that the previous occupant of Number 10.
He has cultivated an image as someone who listens and who desperately wants to please us all as much as he possibly can.
But that is the problem, and the reason why his premiership is already descending into disaster for Britain.
has signalled to the world that he is a pushover — and the world has noticed.
In the space of just three days, Burnham has backtracked on promise to tighten migration, he has committed Britain to pay £40million to governments which have been pressing for , and he has offered to pay £450million to subsidise the UK tuition fees of students from the EU.
Combined with last week’s dithering , which failed to cut a single penny from the soaring benefits bill, Burnham has set Britain on a path to rapid fiscal destruction.
And one thing is certain: Britain cannot afford Andy Burnham.
Take the issue of .
A few days ago, when arrived for his , Burnham seemed to be resolute.
Britain would not be making an apology for historic slavery, and neither would it countenance paying reparations.
If the Commonwealth insisted on putting the issue high on the agenda of its Heads of Government meeting, it was hinted that the PM might not even turn up.
There are very good reasons why this has been the established position of UK governments ever since the subject of reparations was first raised.
Apologising for things that other governments did many years ago is insincere and means nothing.
It was a favourite political ruse of — make official apologies for things that previous did, then his government could try to clamber on to the moral high ground.
As for reparations, what kind of justice is it when UK citizens, many of whom are themselves descended from slaves, have to shell out punitive taxes in order to hand it over to Caribbean countries which have large numbers of British tax exiles living there?
Governments in developing countries have turned to campaigning on reparations because they think it will hide their own economic failures.
The King — who, in a constitutional monarchy, represents the elected government — duly made expressions of “sorrow” over slavery and left it at that.
How outrageous that his PM — who jetted out to see him on a £20,000 taxpayer-funded jet — has now hung him out to dry by suggesting that the Government might, after all, offer an apology.
Even worse, Burnham has folded in the face of demands over reparations, agreeing to hand over £40million to Commonwealth governments for green energy schemes.
If he thinks that is going to satisfy them, he is going to be deeply disappointed.
Don’t forget, the reparations movement has already put out a report claiming that Britain owes £18TRILLION (six times the size of the UK economy) — a figure which one of its authors suggested was an “under-estimate”.
Burnham’s weakness has ensured that these people are going to come back for more and more.
They will not be satisfied until the last hospital has to be sold off to pay this so-called “debt”.
, too, has sniffed Burnham’s weakness. No sooner had the Prime Minister suggested he might agree to in return for an agreement on a “reset” in cross-Channel relations than the EU has come up with another demand.
It wants Britain to change the law to stop foreign offenders being sent back to their home countries.
In other words, the EU wants to dump its very worst citizens on us.
As for watering down proposed reforms to , that is another multi-billion-pound commitment which Burnham, in his rush to please left-wing backbenchers, has failed to register.
Until Monday it seemed that the Government understood a very deep problem: Many of the hundreds of thousands of care workers who came to Britain during the migration “Boriswave” are fast approaching the five-year mark, at which they can apply for indefinite leave to remain in Britain.
That means they will be eligible to claim benefits and a .
Mahmood had proposed that the five-year qualifying period be put back to 15 years for low-paid workers. But now she has agreed to exempt 282,000 of them.
Given that the OBR calculates a worker on the minimum wage will cost the taxpayer a net £150,000 by the time they reach retirement age, and £582,000 if they go on to live until the age of 80, you can see just how dramatic an effect this will have on the public finances.
Britain is already straining beneath the yoke of a bloated state.
Last year, taxpayers had to fork out £109billion just to pay the interest on the Government’s debts.
Burnham has just condemned us to an even bigger bill, and quite possibly the total collapse of the public finances if bond markets lose all confidence in the Government’s ability to manage its finances.
That would mean very deep cuts being forced on public services, whether Labour MPs liked it or not.
Burnham is going to find out the hard way that a Prime Minister who sets out trying to please everyone is doomed to end up pleasing no one.
If he wants to save himself — and Britain — he is going to have to discover some backbone pretty quickly.
