THE longer Andy Burnham is in office, the more wise he makes Keir Starmer look.
, a convinced Remainer, spent much of his time in opposition demanding a second referendum.
Nevertheless, when he reached , he realised that reopening old wounds wouldn’t benefit anyone.
He attempted to negotiate a better trade deal with the EU — never easy given that the bloc still wants to punish Britain for daring to leave — but he ruled out rejoining the single market or customs union.
Burnham has no such qualms.
Already, he is trying to soften us up for a return to full membership of the EU, not least by digging up that old chestnut: That supposedly helped swing the result of the referendum in 2016.
He told a podcast at the weekend that one of the first questions he asked officials on entering was if there had been interference by Russia in the referendum, and was told, “yes, there was”.
He didn’t elaborate, such as by telling us what form this interference took, but his remarks were, needless to say, jumped upon by Remainers who, even now, refuse to believe that the British people could willingly have voted to leave their beloved EU without foul play being involved.
If the claimed that Russia had helped to power in 2024 by underhand means, they would, of course, be dismissed as nutty conspiracy theorists.
only ever gets accused of swinging elections which go in favour of nasty, right-wing causes.
That said, there is clear evidence that Russia does try to influence westerners in ways which it thinks would suit its own interests.
After the , for example, a tweet trying to make out that a Muslim woman photographed on a mobile phone was callously uninterested in the mayhem around her was traced to a bot factory in St Petersburg.
Many other tweets have been traced to the same source.
Paid trolls were apparently working 12 hours a day chucking out this rubbish.
But there is a very big difference between this kind of thing and actually influencing an election.
Most of the Russian tweets are seen by very few people.
The idea that it was these which made people’s minds up about Brexit rather than the TV debates, newspaper columns and millions of hours discussing it in the pub is preposterous.
Even own foreign office minister, , shot down the idea yesterday morning.
When asked if Russia’s meddling had actually had any effect, he replied: “Well, the security minister has spoken about this before, and he’s been very clear that they’ve attempted to [but] they haven’t succeeded.”
That denial was trotted out again a short while later at the morning lobby briefing by the PM’s spokesman.
He then suggested his master’s view on Brexit was simply that “the result is the result”, before eventually claiming more unequivocally that the PM “absolutely accepts the referendum result”.
Make of that what you will. But I think it’s pretty clear where Burnham’s head is on this.
Entitled Remainers seem to think they had a God-given right to win the argument.
The truth, of course, is that a majority of Britons sifted through the evidence of how important decisions were made in closed rooms in rather than through democratic debate in Britain.
They realised the European economy was failing and it might be smarter to seek alliances with faster-growing economies in North America and the Pacific Rim.
They saw that we would never be able to control migration so long as we stayed subject to EU free movement.
And they voted accordingly.
To think that Leave voters were instead swung by a few tweets fired off from Russia is to allege that they are stupid.
As we have seen many times before, this is exactly what some Remainers seem to believe.
Burnham is trying to make out that he is revealing something entirely new, through information which only he has been privileged to hear.
If he really was revealing state secrets, that would be extremely serious.
But he isn’t. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament published a report on the issue of Russian interference in UK elections in 2020.
It concluded: “The written evidence provided to us appeared to suggest that Her Majesty’s Government had not seen or sought evidence of successful interference in UK democratic processes or any activity that has had a material impact on an election, for example influencing results.”
The more credible evidence, it said, involved Russian interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum .
It would have been natural for Putin to want to break up the UK because we could have lost our seat on the UN Security Council, swinging UN leadership away from the West.
But, again, the committee evidently couldn’t find any evidence of successful interference by Russia.
As with Brexit, a few tweets from a bot factory in St Petersburg were a pretty feeble influence compared with the vast hours of debate among the Scottish people.
Is Burnham going to dredge up the Scottish independence referendum again?
I am sure the SNP would be delighted if he went around claiming the result was stolen by the Russians.
I am not sure that Scottish Labour would be so impressed.
If Burnham wants to reopen the Brexit debate, he can expect a pretty rough ride.
He might be able to cite opinion polls now which suggest a majority of the British people would favour rejoining.
But that would surely change once the implications of rejoining the EU became apparent.
The EU would certainly demand a return to free movement, with uncontrolled arrivals from Eastern Europe placing yet more pressure on public services.
would almost certainly demand we join the Euro, too. Some cherished Labour policies would have to go.
Only last week, Burnham took advantage of Brexit to remove VAT from heating bills.
would have to go — the EU does not allow it on education.
But we might well be forced to impose VAT on food at some point.
Burnham came to office saying he wanted to make a priority of the cost of living.
Now, he admits that he was no sooner over the threshold of No10 than he was instead plotting to reverse Brexit.
If this is the way he intends to carry on, he is going to be an even bigger failure than Starmer.
