The climate catastrophe that is engulfing the world and killing thousands daily is a litmus test for all politicians. And so far, after less than a month as Prime Minister, a month in which extreme temperatures and unprecedented wildfires have wreaked destruction and deadly danger across the UK, Andy Burnham has failed that test spectacularly. Incredibly he has not said one word in public about it.
This week he chaired a Cabinet Office meeting to discuss the record-breaking heat, the severe drought and the terrifying wildfires. But afterwards made no public statement whatsoever about what is causing this crisis or the measures that must be urgently implemented to bring it to an end and stop it happening in future. Yet he regularly finds time to give us the benefit of his opinions on trivial matters like, for instance, his recent intervention in Westminster Council’s silly plan to organise drinking procedures in Soho pubs.
His deafening silence on the issue that is overwhelmingly the most important any Prime Minister has ever had to confront can only be explained as profound cowardice. Yes, all that smiley ‘man of the people’ earnestness is just empty marketing to massage his public image. It turns out that he is just as beholden to the far-right media barons, tech billionaires and fossil fuel apologists as his predecessor. This dereliction of duty will only be a surprise to those who haven’t been paying attention to the Labour Party’s systematic abandonment of all its founding principles and relentless lurch to the right over the last 40 years.
Listen Burnham: as Harry Truman (1884-1972) put it, if you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen…
Agreed. I have feared from the beginning that Andy Burnham wouldn’t really be up to it. I don’t want to be proved right; I want him to succeed and make the populist right irrelevant again. But his avoidance of the climate issue, and the environment in general, coupled with his openness to drilling for oil, make me fear that my instinct might be correct.